The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘I just happened to see you passing and I thought …’ she said, trying vaguely to secure her hair.

  ‘My!’ said Foley lightly, ‘you get up late, don’t you? Are these your London hours?’ He was pleased with himself for having found this vein of careless ease right at the outset, so much so that he could not resist giving Gwendoline his sexy, down-from-under look. Unfortunately, she wasn’t looking at him, but gazing rather worriedly down the street.

  ‘I don’t usually,’ she said. ‘I just saw you passing and I felt that I owed you an explanation. No, I don’t usually get up so –’ She stopped abruptly and stared down at him, widening her eyes slightly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  ‘Only when you have visitors?’ supplied Foley, with bitter alacrity, for he too had heard the sounds which had caused her to break off, a wanton joyous splashing from within, mingled with throttled bursts of a baritone voice. Beyond any doubt it was Bernard, having a bath. Foley looked grimly up into her eyes. She must have thought the coast was clear while he was in there, forgetting Bernard was the sort who would splash about and sing, even in other people’s baths.

  ‘He must be having a lovely game with the loofah,’ Foley said. The sounds were those of a man in full possession. The image of Bernard wallowing there, the warm water stirring his pampered genitals, was suddenly too much for Foley. ‘I’ll be getting along then,’ he said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Gwendoline said. ‘No, wait a minute, don’t go yet.’ She regarded him helplessly for a moment. ‘I am sorry, really I am,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind, never mind,’ Foley said. All he wanted was to get away.

  ‘But I felt that I owe you an explanation.’

  ‘I think I understand already.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Listen, Bernard goes back to London the day after tomorrow, that’s Friday. I could see you in the afternoon if you liked. We could go for a walk.’

  For the sake of dignity Foley appeared to consider for a few moments. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Friday then. I’ll call for you.’ He had already begun to move away, and Gwendoline closed the window quietly, shaping some final words, which he did not understand, through the glass.

  The walk back was a gloomy one. He was tempted, on his arrival, to go straight upstairs, but Moss had to be faced sooner or later and so after a minute’s struggle he proceeded directly to the casting-room expecting to find him at work there.

  Moss however was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of work in progress. On one of the benches there was scattered debris of plaster chips. Foley took these at first for scrapings off the mould, but looking more closely he found them to be the fragments of pixies. He stood beside the bench for some time fingering the minute pieces, wondering what accident could have befallen them. They could not simply have fallen and been swept up or the pieces would have been much larger. They could not be diverse sweepings from the floor; they had an unmistakable appearance of belonging together; and besides, it was new, fresh plaster. Rather it seemed as if something heavy had fallen squarely on to them as they stood in a row on the bench. But what object so heavy was there in the room? And where, in any case, could such an object have fallen from?

  Foley abandoned the problem abruptly and stood for some time looking around the room, rather at a loss. The ovens were quite cold. It was apparent that Moss had not spent much time here this morning. He crossed to the window, which was so dusty that it was quite impossible to see out, and rubbed with his fingers a clear oval in the middle. His action startled a huge, fawn-coloured spider that had been lurking in the crack between the pane and the sill. It shot diagonally across the window and up the wall towards the ceiling, making in its haste a disagreeable, dry, whirring sound.

  He stooped a little and looked through the oval at Moss’s view. The farmyard was quite deserted. One of the farm dogs, a thin, black, shivery bitch with mangled ears, came trotting up the defile of the farmyard holding something in its mouth. It held its head up high and rigid, and trotted on stiff legs, looking neither to left nor right, but seeming apprehensive of both quarters at once. The unusual nobility of its demeanour – quite different from the slightly hysterical ingratiation it showed at all other times – was due, Foley realised, solely to greed and the fear that the thing in its mouth might be detected and disputed by one of the other farm dogs before it could be taken somewhere private and bolted. The thing itself was difficult to identify. It was black and wet-looking; shreds of it hung down and dripped on either side of the dog’s jaws, though perhaps the drips were merely saliva. Still moving at the same stately pace the dog, whose name he thought was Betty or Maria, disappeared through an opening in the fence at the top end of the farmyard.

  He was just about to turn away from the window when he caught sight of Moss, some way off, making diagonally across one of the high fields that bordered the lane. He was clearly heading for the house. While still several hundred yards away he stopped dead, as though struck by a sudden thought and remained motionless thus for several moments while Foley peered at him through the oval. Then the distant figure crouched slightly and the next moment broke into a series of fierce and inexplicable motions, bounding from side to side and flailing the air. Foley was inexpressibly startled by this. For a moment he thought that Moss had gone mad out there in the middle of the field. But as Moss drew nearer it became apparent that he was slashing about him with a stick, knocking off thistle tops. He was striking out with all his strength and the seed-cases of the thistles were bursting and glinting like sparks all around him. There was a savage energy in this display, and a quality of adroitness too, which Foley found disturbing. He recalled the broken thread on that bolt, the way Moss could heave sacks of plaster.

  He was through the gate now. In a matter of a minute or two he would be in the house. Foley was in doubt as to the best course to follow. He did not really want Moss to find him mooning about in this room; it might seem like snooping or, worse still, give Moss the feeling of having been missed. On the other hand Moss had to be met and spoken to, a semblance of normality to be maintained. He decided to stay where he was.

  Moss came straight into the casting-room, still holding the stick, the whole lower half of which was wet with sap. When he saw Foley he smiled, but at the same time seemed to stiffen and become more deliberate in his movements. He held the stick now with diffidence as though he had only just picked it up and didn’t know quite what to do with it. After a moment he rested it carefully against the wall.

  ‘I’ve just been out for a walk,’ he said.

  ‘Jolly good idea!’ Foley exclaimed immediately, putting on to his face an expression of delight.

  A silence followed. Foley felt his nerve slipping. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘whatever happened to those –’ He stopped abruptly. He had been meaning to ask about the crushed pixies, but some intimation made him wary. He glanced at Moss’s large hands. ‘I’ve just seen one of the farm dogs,’ he said, ‘with a bloody great black thing in its mouth. It looked pretty foul, but it might have been meat. Can Royle have taken to feeding his dogs at last?’

  ‘No,’ Moss said. ‘No, it’s not that.’ Solemnity had descended on him with this question and Foley recognised with relief a familiar expression – Moss the imparter, the doler out of facts.

  ‘I know where that came from,’ Moss said. ‘Do you remember that ram I told you about? I found it stuck in the bog down below the farm.’

  ‘It was dead, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, it was. It didn’t look dead at first, mind you. It was upright in the mud, the mud was holding it up.’

  ‘I remember your telling me,’ Foley said.

  ‘Yes, well. The dogs must have found it about the same time that I did. They’ve been eating it piecemeal ever since. They bolt down there when they feel like a snack, and pull a bit off. They have to scramble about a bit in the mud to get at it—that’s why the stuff looks so black. It’s rotten too by this time, of course. And the ram was proba
bly diseased to begin with.’ Moss paused, then added: ‘It’s filthy, really, isn’t it? Royle should feed them properly.’

  ‘Yes, he should,’ Foley said quickly. They stood silent for a few moments, united in disapproval of Royle. Then Foley said casually, ‘I suppose we ought to be thinking about lunch.’

  It was the right remark, at this juncture, restoring their respective roles almost unimpaired. Moss assumed a placid, inward look. ‘We’ve got those sausages left,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we might have toad-in-the-hole.’

  ‘Splendid,’ Foley said, stretching his lips laterally without actually opening them, to show a kind of beaming appetite. They were back, he reflected as he went upstairs to put on a bit of work on the pixies, they were back, for the moment anyway, in the pre-Max era. He thought of this period as a sort of Golden Age when he and Moss had lived in the undifferentiated garden. He felt sure Moss had been meeting Max – probably that was why he had gone out this morning. His new knowledge of Moss, at least, could never be eradicated, he was certain of that. But the knowledge, paradoxically, had rendered Moss unpredictable. As he took up his little spray and took aim at the nearest pixie, Foley wondered with some dismay what thought could be churning in Moss down there in the kitchen, busy with his toad-in-the-hole.

  12

  His forebodings were soon realised, during that very afternoon and evening in fact, and all the next day. If he had not at the time understood Barbara Gould’s remark, he came to understand it very quickly. What he had not seen and what she presumably had was that he was now, in Moss’s eyes, a deliverer from travail, a means to freedom.

  The plain fact was that Moss had begun to look at him with open desire. He found a hundred pretexts in the course of the next couple of days for visiting the floor above, and he would remain a long time, looking on, trying to engage Foley’s attention with sudden questions, such as what he would like for supper or whether he wanted his trousers ironed. Foley grew nervous, listening for footsteps on the stair, even fancying once or twice that Moss had slipped unnoticed into the room and was watching him from some hidden point of vantage. It became increasingly difficult for him to avoid the suspicion that he was being stalked by Moss about the house. All urge to expostulate vanished immediately in the burning intensity of Moss’s regard. The fear of precipitating a crisis was always with him, though what he really was afraid of was not clear. He dreaded any explicit recognition that things had changed.

  It was in the evenings above all, when he could not feign absorption in work, that the strain became greatest. He was aware of Moss’s gaze the whole time, wherever in the room he happened to be. The light of desire seemed to have expanded the pupils, given them a blazing quality, which Foley found impossible to confront. He had never been the object of such desire before and did not know how long he could stand it. It affected his sense of identity, so that his simply continuing to inhabit the room began to seem like acquiescence. Yet he could not summon the resolution to go out.

  To make things worse Moss had returned, except for these brief, dreadfully solicitous questions, to his habitual taciturnity. That former spate of words had been like a phase in a malady, the ramblings of fever. His eyes now contained all that delirium. The result was that conversation between them was halting and marked by long pauses, made urgent by Moss’s loud breathing. All this oppressed Foley terribly. Yet in ostensible ways Moss was the same as he had always been; he wore the same clothes, had the same attitudes to the business, the same practical, pedestrian way of life. And this too struck Foley as treacherous: he could not help expecting Moss to break with the past in some obvious way, however slight.

  Moss did nothing of the sort. He merely continued to keep Foley in unwavering focus. Such an intense regard was indistinguishable from hatred: there was no placating it without self-damaging consequences. Foley felt persecuted; but he was nevertheless constrained to act in a consciously elegant way. He took more care over his appearance. When he stood anywhere within Moss’s range of vision he could not help wondering whether he composed well.

  All things considered, it was a positive relief for Foley to get away on the Friday afternoon. He slipped out of the house immediately after lunch without saying anything to Moss, though there was not much hope of concealing his absence now that Moss was continually popping up to see him.

  Gwendoline was quite ready when he arrived and they left immediately without his being asked to wait. He felt sure that this was part of a deliberate policy. She was afraid that his grievance would grow too large and insistent within four walls. No doubt she reckoned that outside in the open, whatever reproaches detonated between them would be more easily dispersed.

  It was rather a windy day. Gwendoline was wearing a tweed skirt and a woollen cardigan over her blouse. Her hair, which was of that fine variety easily blown about, was confined in a silk scarf tied below the chin and this gave a naked, patient look to her face, a look of endurance. Foley noticed too with a peculiar bitterness that she had taken great pains with make-up this afternoon, even to the extent of applying mascara, which she did not normally use; her mouth, which was set and serious, glistened slightly with lipstick.

  They skirted the harbour and took a path which would lead them up out of the village, across open fields, and eventually to the cliffs again at the next bay down the coast, Ralland Bay. For the first few minutes neither of them said anything. Several times Foley was about to speak but a sort of obstinacy, an unwillingness to sue, prevented him. As the silence continued he began to have a doomed feeling. Glancing surreptitiously at her face he noted how grave it was, almost exultantly so. His bitterness increased. How she must be enjoying this. She was rounding the thing off, gracefully. For this she had made up her face and was observing now a ritual period of silence and solemnity. It was she who had wanted the explanation – she had been determined not to be cheated of it. Where did they learn this trick of prolonging, this mistimed, infuriating honesty? Better to have let him slink away out of her life to the sound of Bernard’s sated gurglings in the bath. Then at least he would have had her treachery to assuage him. But no, she had to seem blameless.

  ‘Bernard will be back in London by now, I expect,’ Foley said. ‘Will he be starting work again straight away? The senior partners must be waiting with agonised impatience for Bernard to take over the helm again.’ This sneer had been irresistible, but as soon as he uttered the words Foley regretted them, since they exposed him to Gwendoline’s kindness.

  ‘Yes,’ Gwendoline said with predictable forbearance, ‘I suppose he’ll start more or less straight away. Look, let’s not talk about Bernard just yet, shall we? It’s such a beautiful afternoon.’

  They were approaching the sea again now. They heard the harsh clamour of the gulls and then saw them, as it were, flung and littered against the sky, motionless on spread wings as though skewered on the wind. The path narrowed and sloped more steeply as they followed the descent towards the sheltered bay. They were obliged to walk one behind the other. For most of the time Foley led the way but during the last few minutes, when the path got easier, Gwendoline was in front. Then he was able to observe the steady carriage of her shoulders and head, the grace and certainty of her steps on the rough path, the movement of her thighs in alternate definition against the thick skirt, the brief flexing of her calves. She was big-boned without being angular, and the evident strength of her body was not of the athletic type, which he detested, but seemed a strength that sought only to be expressed in traditional ways, in docility. For these few minutes, while he was able to look steadily at her undetected, he felt an emotion akin to grief for what he had lost. He would never sleep with her now – and here his mind flickered a curse towards whistling Moss – nor had he even the power to harm her. She was out of range. His regret had nothing to do with her character; he had never sought to understand this; and for what seemed to him the systematic and self-regarding way she was conducting this final walk he had nothing but contempt. But she rep
resented now an impoverishment of his life – he had the illusion that she could have aggrandised him.

  The path ran level for a few yards through patches of brambles already weighted with green fruit, and then turned sharply, bringing them within sight of the little bay spread just below them. They came to the foot of the cliffs and walked across the shingle to the far side of the bay, through the bleached refuse of the spring tides, corks, floats, sticks and bits of fishing tackle, tangled in the tough, thick-bladed grass.

  ‘Some of these cork floats are very decorative, really,’ Gwendoline said. ‘Something could be done with them.’

  ‘The shapes are interesting,’ said Foley. ‘They might do for bookends or bases for lamps, something of that sort. They’d have to be weighted, of course.’

  ‘Painted in contrasting colours,’ Gwendoline said.

  They became interested in the possibilities of rope-mesh and bits of net and lobster pots, as though planning to set up house together. Talking in this way they reached a grassy level area on a knoll above the shingle, overlooking the sea and sheltered by the overhanging cliffs. Here, by common consent, they sat down together.

  Immediately their bodies were at rest the former constraint returned, and the topic of marine décor withered rapidly. Clearly, the moment for Gwendoline’s explanation had arrived. For some time, however, she said nothing, merely stared out to sea, while Foley studied her profile covertly.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ she said at last. She sighed and took off her scarf, shaking her head sharply so that her hair settled straight behind and did not get caught in her collar. At the same time she compressed her lips with what might have seemed determination; but Foley felt sure she was merely checking on the distribution of her lipstick. He had not thought it possible that he could ever again regard her as anybody’s victim, but something dutiful and childish about these preliminaries touched him strangely. They were impersonal, as though she were taking part in a ceremony almost, in which her own judgement counted for nothing. She was Bernard’s victim, now; still practised upon, if not innocent.