The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  Gwendoline made no answer to this. After a short interval Moss reappeared, carrying the tea-things, a big plate of sandwiches, and a smaller one of biscuits on a round copper tray.

  ‘This is the stuff to give the troops,’ said Foley, adopting an expression of keen anticipation. ‘This sea air gives one an appetite.’

  ‘I expect he has a good enough appetite, anyway?’ Gwendoline said indulgently to Moss.

  ‘He has indeed,’ Moss said, actually smiling.

  They got on with the business of having tea; setting up the cups and saucers, discussing tastes.

  ‘Strong, weak or middling?’ asked Moss.

  ‘No milk for me, please,’ Gwendoline said.

  ‘Ah, no milk,’ said Moss. ‘Ronald has a little milk and no sugar. I like mine very milky.’

  ‘It’s rather unusual for a man not to have sugar. Men usually do have sugar,’ Gwendoline said.

  ‘Help yourself to sandwiches, Miss Rogers,’ said Moss. ‘Cheese and tomato this side, cucumber the other side.’

  ‘Delicious,’ said Gwendoline. ‘However did you manage to cut the bread so thin?’

  ‘We buy it already sliced. They have one thickness for toasting, another for sandwiches.’

  ‘Oh, that sliced loaf, you mean, wrapped up in paper? A lot of the goodness is lost, they say.’

  ‘We have found,’ Moss said, ‘that it has answered well enough, in the past.’

  ‘That toad!’ exclaimed Foley. ‘I never did ask you what became of that toad. Do you know,’ he went on, turning to Moss before Gwendoline had time to reply, ‘that Gwendoline actually had a toad in her room?’

  ‘Why did you have a toad in your room?’ Moss asked.

  Gwendoline said: ‘I was going to draw it. For a book, you know. But I found I couldn’t, and then the toad escaped. Somebody else has got the job now.’

  ‘Did you say for a book?’ enquired Moss. He was always impressed by literary references and by people who had anything to do with books.

  ‘Yes, you know the sort of thing.’ Gwendoline adopted a shrill, over-refined, declamatory note. ‘I am a toad. My real name is Bufo, Bufo, Bufo and I live in a chamber-pot at the bottom of the garden …’

  Moss’s slightly puzzled expression did not change. ‘You mean it’s written from the toad’s point of view?’ he said.

  ‘You could put it that way,’ Gwendoline said.

  Foley noticed that she had flushed slightly at the failure of her mimicry, and he felt an upsurge of irritation with Moss, for his inability to adapt himself, his obtuseness to other people’s tones. ‘Have a sandwich,’ he said to Gwendoline.

  ‘Thank you, no more sandwiches,’ Gwendoline said. ‘They’re lovely, but I just couldn’t.’

  ‘A biscuit then?’

  ‘What sort are they?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ Foley said, looking more closely at them.

  ‘You know perfectly well,’ Moss said, ‘that we always have the same sort of biscuit. I always get shortbread biscuits,’ he said to Gwendoline. ‘They’re Ronald’s favourites. Are you an artist then?’

  ‘Not really. I used to think I was. I went to art school but left after only a year. I’m more interested in fabrics, really. Do you always consider Ronald’s tastes so carefully?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, supposing you couldn’t bear shortbread biscuits, surely you’d buy some other kind?’

  ‘Michael does all the cooking, you know,’ Foley interposed. ‘He sees to everything in the kitchen, it’s his department. Michael is a wonderful cook. I suppose it comes from being so practical. I’m not practical at all, you see, and I’m sure that must make an enormous difference, in cooking. Timing, that sort of thing. It’s organisation, really.’

  ‘I generally find,’ said Moss, looking at Gwendoline steadily, ‘that we like the same sort of things.’

  ‘That is very fortunate, for both of you. Personally, I’m afraid I should tend to concentrate a bit less exclusively on Ronald’s tastes and a bit more on my own. Speaking personally.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Foley. ‘Would you indeed?’ He saw that Gwendoline no longer had the appearance of a young lady being interviewed. She seemed to have settled in rather, and the usual slightly insolent composure had returned to her. He also realised that for better or worse a certain relationship had been established between Gwendoline and Moss during these exchanges, one that would not now easily be changed. He sensed that Gwendoline was secretly outraged by the very thing that Moss took pride in: that their ménage, womanless and therefore rudderless, should nevertheless run so well.

  ‘It’s organisation, really,’ he repeated uneasily.

  ‘Things must be difficult here at times,’ Gwendoline said to Moss. ‘The shopping and that. You are rather cut off here, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, one has to plan in advance, you know, everything. If you forget something you can’t just pop round the corner for it.’

  Moss looked briefly across at Foley, then returned his gaze to Gwendoline. ‘He doesn’t realise it, of course,’ he said. He gave her a look of solemn indulgence. ‘He doesn’t see these things.’

  Foley immediately pouted slightly and turned up his eyes in a look of humorous resignation. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said. ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘That sounds to me like a rather convenient blindness,’ Gwendoline said, without looking at Foley.

  ‘I don’t mean he dodges work,’ said Moss. ‘Did you think I meant that?’ He paused judiciously, with eyes lowered. ‘The thing about Ronald,’ he said at last, ‘is that he is at a further remove, if you see what I mean.’ He paused again, this time perhaps with an intention of apology for having included Gwendoline in the number of the earthbound; but he did not qualify it and after a moment went on again with her inclusion established. ‘He’s very difficult to live with,’ he said, and now Gwendoline and he were linked, people of good sense, but gross, looking with a sort of humble remonstrance at high-flying Foley. It was not a position that Gwendoline cared for.

  ‘I suppose it’s the Artistic Temperament,’ went on Moss. ‘The girl who married him would have her work cut out. She’d have to know all this beforehand, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise.’

  ‘Know all what beforehand?’

  Moss looked pained. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the sort of person he is.’

  ‘We’ve had our ups and downs, though, since we came here, haven’t we, Michael?’ Foley said. Why on earth had Moss brought marriage up? he wondered. ‘Do you remember that time when –’

  ‘Is he so different?’ said Gwendoline. ‘She would have to find it all out for herself anyway, surely? No one else could possibly tell her, least of all another man.’

  ‘You don’t think, then,’ said Moss ponderously, ‘that a man can understand another man?’

  ‘But surely,’ Gwendoline said, with a little laugh at the obviousness of it all, ‘a woman can understand a man in a more complete way than another man, in a positive, I don’t mean an analytical, way – that sort of way isn’t much use really, is it? Her nature is designed to supply deficiencies in his. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I suppose it’s this business of intuition you mean, a woman’s intuition,’ Moss said.

  ‘And what is so remarkable about Ronald? I mean, this hasn’t emerged yet, has it?’

  Moss regarded her for some time in silence. His face bore an expression of genuine surprise.

  ‘Its high time we stopped talking about me,’ said Foley heartily and much too late. ‘Michael, why don’t you tell Gwendoline about Royle’s latest? Royle is our landlord, you know, he’s absolutely mad, isn’t he, Michael?’ Neither of them seemed to hear this. They were looking closely at each other.

  ‘He’s absolutely mad,’ Foley said. ‘He believes that everything has a soul. He does, he really does. He’s got this old tractor, ancient it is, from before the Flood. Everything on this farm is … antediluvian, as a matter of fact. Well, of course, it
never starts on cold mornings. You can hear him in the winter round about seven o’clock in the morning. He talks to it. He calls it his brave girl. That’s to get on the right side of it, you know. Then you hear ah— ah—ah stop.’ Foley pressed an imaginary starting button and made a series of staccato noises trying at the same time to imitate Royle’s expression of wrathful conciliation. ‘Royle mutters a bit, but not too loud, for fear of offending it. Then he tries again, ah–ah–ah–aaah–stop again. Same thing happens five or six times. Then you suddenly hear this great bellow of rage. “You buggering bastard! I’ll teach you!” And off he goes raving and cursing and gets this length of chain that he keeps specially for the purpose. Would you believe it, he actually …’

  Convulsing his features with laughter and leaning forward slightly he looked from Gwendoline to Moss: neither of them appeared to be more than moderately amused by the recital. ‘He gives it a good hiding with the chain,’ he said, ‘every morning, all the winter, doesn’t he, Michael? And do you remember that other time when he ate all those snails out of the garden? Someone in Lanruan told him you could eat snails and he went and got a great plateful out of the garden, ordinary garden snails, and ate them all. I’ve got some photos of him upstairs, doing it, eating raw snails and smiling. I could get them for you now, if you like. I’ll go up and get them for you now.’

  Foley went up to his bedroom as quickly as possible, not wishing to leave Moss and Gwendoline alone together for too long. He was hoping that the photographs would ease the situation, which was turning out to be even stickier than he had feared. How did Moss always manage to get on the wrong side of people? It almost amounted to genius. The album did not seem to be anywhere in his room, although he looked in all the drawers. After some minutes he remembered that he had been looking at it a few days before and had left it in the bookcase in the sitting-room. He descended the stairs rapidly and returned to the sitting-room, to find Moss on his own there and Gwendoline nowhere to be seen. His first assumption was that she had gone to the lavatory, which was on the ground floor at the back of the cottage; but time passed and she did not reappear. Finally, he said casually, ‘Where is Gwendoline?’

  Moss seemed to be lost in thought and did not answer.

  ‘Michael, where is Gwendoline?’ Foley asked again.

  ‘She left,’ Moss said in a non-committal tone.

  ‘Left?’ Foley was bewildered, and his confusion was increased by a noise from outside in the farmyard of trampling and bellowing mingled with shouted oaths and the excited barking of several dogs. ‘Do you mean she just got up and went away?’ he demanded, raising his voice to make himself heard above the din, which seemed to be increasing steadily. ‘Didn’t she give any reason?’

  ‘Not really,’ Moss said. ‘She said she had to go.’

  ‘Not madly polite, I must say,’ muttered Foley. He felt completely stunned by this development.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ said Moss. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What the hell is going on out there? You can’t see anything for dust.’

  ‘It’s Royle, trying to get his bullocks into the big field.’

  ‘But she must have only just gone, this very minute,’ Foley said. ‘Perhaps I can catch her up. There was something I particularly wanted to say to her.’

  ‘She’ll be a long way off by now,’ Moss said, with sudden distinctness. But Foley was already through the door.

  He had intended to run down the lane and catch Gwendoline before she got to the road; but once outside the cottage he found himself unable to proceed and even in some danger of being knocked down and trampled underfoot, because of a sort of stampede that was taking place there. Pressing himself back against the wall he peered through the swirling dust in an effort to make out what was happening. Royle’s bullocks appeared to be completely out of control and Royle himself was shouting in the midst of them. This in itself was not unusual. It was a scene of almost daily occurrence, since very few farm operations, even of a routine sort, were carried out smoothly by Royle.

  What seemed to have happened on this occasion was that as the bullocks were on the point of passing through the gate into the field appointed, a small but determined group at the head of them had suddenly become disaffected, turned in their tracks and began battling their way back down the farmyard, apparently to return to the original field, though some of them were already seeking by way of gaps in the fence for new and unauthorised pastures. Losing his temper immediately Royle had begun beating and berating the bullock nearest him which had not been doing anything wrong, merely pressing on towards the new field, but which now, surprised by the blows, was jostling and butting and causing resentment and alarm to spread in the ranks of the still well-disposed members of the herd, some of whom were clearly wavering in their allegiance. The rebel bullocks, led by a robust and evil-looking black with a swishing tail, were at some points meeting the conformists head on, and brisk battles were developing here and there; while the congestion was so great, and the opposing forces now so evenly balanced, that the bullocks in the very middle rotated unceasingly as though trapped in a vortex. Dust rose around the frantically active figure of Royle, now striking out indiscriminately.

  ‘Get they bullocks!’ shouted Royle to his three skinny black dogs, but they were already over-excited, then lost their heads completely: two of them fell to fighting savagely, while the third harried the heels of the bullocks at the back, scattering them in all directions.

  ‘Get they buggering bullocks!’ screamed Royle. Without pausing in his efforts with the stick, he landed a series of heavy kicks on the two dogs that were fighting, but they merely retreated, still snapping and yelping, under the plunging feet of the bullocks. Surrounded now by the dazed, completely disorientated animals, Royle began to jump up and down, holding the stick in both hands and bringing it down with all his strength each time his feet touched the ground. His swearing reached a rather splendid high-pitched fluency, broken only by occasional choking fits caused by the dust.

  Foley edged his way back along the wall and got through the door which he carefully secured behind him. Moss was sitting in the same position, looking just the same.

  ‘Royle will have a stroke one of these days if he goes on like this,’ Foley said. ‘I couldn’t reach Gwendoline because of all those bloody animals.’

  ‘No,’ Moss said, ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to catch her up.’ He spoke as if he had known all the time that the bullocks, or something, would get in the way.

  6

  It was from the day of the tea-party and Gwendoline’s strangely abrupt departure that Foley dated Moss’s loquacious phase. Up to that time Moss had been pre-eminently a man who could keep his own counsel, not boring other people with the quavers and semiquavers of his psyche. This reticence, with his predictability and conscientiousness, had been his chief virtue in Foley’s eyes. The heavens might sooner fall, he had felt, than that Moss should fail to put in his eight hours a day on the pixies, or forego his Sunday-afternoon walk, or start relating dreams and the remote experiences of childhood.

  It began that same evening. Foley had been brooding about Gwendoline. He could not understand why she had left so unceremoniously, and he was also displeased with himself for having betrayed to Moss his perturbation at the time. He was extremely reluctant to allow Moss any insight into the ignominies he was experiencing in his relations with Gwendoline. Because he wished to appear unmoved, he had not gone rushing down to the village to demand an explanation; and also, of course, because he realised that it would not advance his cause with Gwendoline either, if he appeared too keen.

  They were sitting in the living-room, each occupied in his different fashion. Foley, wearing the black corduroy jacket which he always thought of as his smoking-jacket, was sitting in an armchair looking through his scrapbook, an activity he usually found soothing, even mildly inspiring, because all the pictures in it were of himself in some guise or other; they had been carefully cut out of magaz
ines during his days as a model. Moss was at a small table near the window doing the monthly housekeeping accounts. It had been understood from the beginning that he would do all the accounts, Foley having early established an exemption by claiming that he had no head for figures. By a series of such uncostly gestures as this Moss’s unswerving belief in his ineptitude had been secured. Moss was very bad at adding up too, but he had a doggedness which made up for this. He rarely got things to balance first time and would spend hours going over everything, muttering and becoming very dishevelled; but he never gave up until everything was accounted for; to do so would have meant a lessening of Foley’s faith in him.

  Because of his anxiety over Gwendoline the scrapbook was not holding Foley’s attention as completely as usual, although he still took pleasure in the pictures, especially those in which he appeared alone, coolly smiling in a business suit at the prosperous future now that he was insured properly or presenting an uppercrust profile in sports-wear. He did not usually have the picture all to himself in this way. In the great majority of them he was simply a hovering presence, sometimes no more than an elegant blur, beckoning from a sports car, gazing after some girl who had used the right shampoo, or one of an admiring group of males surrounding a deodorised girl at a party. There was one of him standing shocked beside an undeodorised girl in a Tube train which he did not like so much because the bowler he had had to wear did not suit his narrow head and because he had failed to achieve an expression of disgust, only one of flatulence; but he had included it for the sake of completeness. In some cases he was so far on the periphery of things that only he himself could have known who it was.

  Though he sometimes alluded to it nostalgically when he wanted to impress Moss or some stranger with his sophisticated past, Foley had detested this period of his life because one day was never like another and it was quite impossible to see your way, grasp your course as a whole, plan anything. The money was good of course – you might get ten or fifteen guineas for a morning’s work – but you could never count on it. You rang up your agent every evening to ask what there was next day. For days, weeks, there might be nothing, and then you had to do washing-up or something and you got tomato ketchup on the hand-woven tie your brief affluence had tempted you into buying. Either this or you found somebody to look after you a bit. Even now Foley could not think of this other than euphemistically; nor could he repress internal quakes and shudderings when he remembered Mrs Burroughs, her homely accent, her propensity for Guinness when she could have afforded anything, the playful way she would fold up a ten-shilling note and tuck it in his top pocket, the gleaming lipstick where there was no lip, the vast freckled breasts. The terrible toil of climbing night after night on to Mrs Burroughs in her bedroom, full of brass objects, in Maida Vale. Mrs Burroughs, together with a remark of his agent’s to the effect that people were getting used to his face, had driven him to Cornwall, to Moss and the pixies. He could never, he felt, go back to that life now. But the pictures themselves were satisfying: seeing oneself so variously posed and attired was like a continual enrichment of the personality, and Foley enjoyed the sheer proliferation of his features.