The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘Go through to the back,’ Bailey said. ‘We don’t want anyone spying on us. There’s some whisky in there.’

  ‘But what’s the matter?’ asked Foley. ‘I was expecting to find you on the crest of the wave.’ Behind him Bailey uttered a single throaty laugh. They went behind the counter into the small kitchen. It was stuffy in there and spiritous fumes once again assailed Foley. A half-empty bottle of whisky stood on the little aluminium draining board.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Bailey enquired, in lifeless tones. There was a marked absence of bounce in his whole manner.

  ‘Yes, I would rather,’ Foley said. ‘What’s the matter, why aren’t you open?’

  ‘Do you mean you don’t know? I thought the whole bloody village would know by this time.’ The prospect of repeating the story seemed to enliven Bailey somewhat. He got a tumbler from the shelf above the draining board and poured out a liberal quantity of whisky. ‘Water with it?’ he said.

  ‘Just as it is, please.’

  ‘I never take anything with mine either.’ Bailey settled himself down again on to a small kitchen chair over whose confines he spilled out in all directions. The seat of the chair ended just under the fleshy part of Bailey’s thighs, squeezing them so that they swelled tightly inside his voluminous grey flannel trousers. The thighs thus expanded were each of them thicker than Foley’s waist. ‘Never spoil a good drink by mixing things with it,’ he said. ‘That’s a maxim of mine.’

  ‘Cheers!’ Foley said, resolving to wait in patience on Bailey’s sense of the dramatic.

  ‘Cheers, cheers,’ responded Bailey, with bitter alacrity. He downed half his tumbler, then opened his mouth in a sort of snarl to let the heat of the whisky out. ‘Why don’t I open?’ he said, and repeated the throaty laugh. Still fixing Foley with his eye he attempted to lean forward in his chair, no doubt to lend intensity to the words he was about to utter, but he suffered a temporary loss of equilibrium which caused his head and trunk to go on slowly and helplessly declining until he was looking down directly at Foley’s knees. This apparently was his point of balance, because from here he was able slowly to hoist himself backwards until Foley’s face came once more into his line of vision. Arrested at this angle of inclination he stared at Foley speechlessly for several seconds.

  ‘Yes, why?’ said Foley, rather nervously. Deceived by Bailey’s bulk and ponderousness of movement he had not realised how drunk the latter really was.

  ‘Because I bloody well can’t, for fear of proceedings,’ Bailey said loudly, slapping one knee and only just hitting it. ‘As soon as I open that door to the public there’ll be a court order against me.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Foley.

  ‘Have another drink,’ Bailey said. ‘I’m having one. As a matter of fact I’ve been having the odd one all morning.’

  ‘All right,’ Foley said. ‘But what on earth is all this about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Bailey said, when their glasses were full again. ‘That painter chap, you remember, the man I hired to paint smugglers on the walls, he lives in a shack up above the village with a bloody great moat all round him …’

  ‘I know, yes I remember,’ said Foley. ‘You mean Graham.’

  ‘Graham,’ repeated Bailey, and his eyes almost disappeared into his head. ‘Graham,’ he said again in a voice charged with hatred. ‘That’s the one I mean. Him. He’s done for me. He might as well have blown the place up. Those pictures he did … I should never have taken him on, something warned me against it. I had a feeling from the beginning he wasn’t the right man. It was a hunch. That’s what I did, I went against my hunch.’ With this word his American accent had returned, its plangency subdued but still quite unmistakable.

  Foley allowed his glass to be refilled. He was drinking to keep pace with Bailey, which was a mistake really, in view of the latter’s evident capacity and the fact that he was already well lubricated and running smoothly.

  ‘He let me down,’ resumed Bailey. ‘He didn’t paint smugglers at all, he painted wreckers. You know what wreckers are?’ Bailey’s trunk began another slow and rather majestic roll forward. He got Foley in focus again with something of an effort. ‘Those fellows who brought ships on to the rocks then pinched all the cargo. They did the crew in first, of course. Well, that wouldn’t have mattered. I mean it was all the same to me whether they were smugglers or wreckers, only that bastard painted real people.’

  He paused for so long at this point that Foley felt constrained to put in a remark. ‘All artists use their personal experience,’ he said, but he knew quite well what Bailey meant.

  ‘Local people,’ Bailey said. ‘Important people, people of standing. They all had nasty expressions but you could recognise them. They were recognised. Not by me, of course, being a stranger here. The vicar and the curate were in it and the landlord of the pub and there were aldermen in it, sticking knives into injured sailors, drinking rum out of the bottles, and an old chap called Brigadier Martin, maybe you’ve heard of him, he’s a Justice of the Peace, he was in it, receiving stolen goods, and his wife too, with her hair in bloody great rollers. He even brought the women into it, you see, nothing was sacred to him, nothing.’

  Bailey brooded for some moments, nursing his glass. ‘Well, I didn’t know, you see,’ he said. ‘At the time.’

  ‘It was naughty of Graham,’ Foley said.

  ‘Naughty?’ repeated Bailey. ‘Naughty?’ He looked at Foley unbelievingly. His head had now developed a tendency to wobble, very slightly. ‘He might think he’s got away with it,’ he said. ‘But I’m going up there later. Paid him his money, I did, on the dot.’

  ‘In full?’

  ‘I paid him half,’ Bailey said, and nothing could have been more impressive than this truthfulness, nor shown more convincingly Bailey’s state of shock. ‘I thought he gave me a funny look from under that bloody cap of his,’ he went on. ‘He’s keeping out of the way now, but I’ll find him. I’ll have the money back for a start. Then I’ll do him up. I’ll squash him.’

  Taking in once again the dimensions of Bailey, Foley felt some complacency that he was not himself the object of this intention. Whatever the other’s commercial buffooneries, his bulk compelled respect.

  ‘I never did like these little runts,’ Bailey said, and all his travails with his own bulk gave poignancy to this. ‘I just thought I’d have a drink or two first,’ he added.

  ‘No more for me,’ Foley said, but he was too late, or Bailey didn’t hear him. He had protested over this drink because he felt it to be the one which would allow him no further illusions of sobriety, would in fact change the nature of his visit, turning what he had envisaged as a sociable couple of drinks into something like a session.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bailey, mistaking the nature of his reluctance. ‘Got another bottle here.’ He raised himself a little and reached behind him, bringing out from somewhere a sealed bottle of Vat ’69.

  Bailey took a large swallow from his glass. His capacity to absorb whisky seemed endless. ‘I was taken in,’ he said, with pathos. ‘I didn’t know, you see. Being a stranger here. I opened for business last Wednesday – a bit later than I expected. The place was packed within an hour I tell you, they were queueing outside, mostly visitors of course, they didn’t know any different any more than I did. But there were a few people here and there taking quite a bit of interest in the paintings. I thought Graham had done a good job then. 1 even felt grateful to him.

  ‘Then about midday a fellow came in and asked for a word in private. I brought him in here. He said he was on the Council and a captain in the Territorials. I found out afterwards that he was in the picture too, egging the others on he was, in a sneaking sort of way. He said he had spoken to his solicitors, who had told him it was actionable. I tried to tell him I didn’t know any of these people he said were in the paintings, but all he would say was that they’d prosecute if I didn’t close down at once. “You’ll have to close down,” he kept sayi
ng.’

  Bailey changed his delivery from the bitter staccato of disastrous narrative to a tone ampler and more rhetorical. ‘What could I do, I ask you, what could anyone have done? What would you have done in my place, a stranger here with nothing behind you? I have had to keep the place closed ever since, turning good money away.’

  ‘You don’t mean you believed him?’ Foley said. ‘Did you close down only because of that? He was only trying to frighten you. I mean, what could they actually do?’

  ‘They could prosecute,’ said Bailey. ‘I asked him, I saw the whole situation at once, I put it to him man to man – I’ve always believed in the man to man approach – I offered to paint over the pictures myself, on the spot. Nothing doing. I painted them over just the same.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Foley said. ‘Those paintings don’t exist any more, anywhere. They’ve got nothing on you now, have they? They’re trying to put you out of business, that’s what it is. Anyone who isn’t a native, they’re against him from the start. I should fight it, if I were you, call their bluff.’

  Bailey emitted a snorting sound, jerking his head up to give it free passage. ‘Call their bluff,’ he said. ‘What bloody well with? I keep telling you I’ve nothing behind me. Listen, supposing someone took photographs of those murals. I don’t know, do I?’ He raised his head and endeavoured to fix Foley with a keen gaze. The whisky seemed now to be taking delayed effect on him. It was like watching the slow, gentle death throes of a sick and elderly elephant. His great head that in the passion of explaining had wobbled incessantly was now motionless again, sunk on his breast. His chins multiplied indefinitely there, and all the reclinations of his body expressed torpor. From time to time a tremor ran through him, his limbs stirred as though in protest, and he raised his head seeking to fix Foley in a glassy and truculent regard. Suddenly he began speaking again.

  ‘Bloody swine,’ he said, referring to the Councillor or perhaps to Graham. ‘I can’t stand a court case; I’ve nothing behind me. Everything I had went into this place, the alterations, the improvements, the … décor. I’m in debt. I’ve been living on what the caterers sent ever since last Saturday. Meat pasties and potato crisps … Everything I had, all my savings. I had a good job, I was in the Co-op. I might have been manager, but I wanted to have my own business. I studied it, gave up my evenings, took correspondence courses. Ask me any question, function of the wholesaler, different types of retail organisation. I am well up in the subject. My sister, I lived with my sister, she was against it from the start. Nothing venture, nothing win, I told her.’

  Bailey somehow got the last of the whisky into his glass. ‘It ought to have been a certainty,’ he said. ‘Catering business, expanding resort. This has just come at the worst time, before I could get going properly. If I could only have had a couple of months to pay back, I’d have been all right. Just a season, that’s all I needed.’

  The pathos of Bailey’s being denied what every butterfly and bug can confidently expect, a summer season, moved Foley. Was his own season not blighted in mid-career by Moss’s vagaries? Bailey, he now saw, was no mere money grabber, but an idealist, like himself. The impulse that had taken him, in spite of a sister’s protests, from the safety of the grocer’s counter and the prospect of managerial rank to this debauch in a cramped kitchen was akin to that which causes other, wieldier men to engage in remote explorations or sail single-handed across great oceans. And although he lacked the grit to defy the councillors, who could blame him for that? Through correspondence course and visions he might have prepared himself for almost anything but Graham. Graham belonged to the class of calamities which men cannot guard against.

  Leaning forward, Foley put a hand on one of Bailey’s spongy knees. ‘Why,’ he asked earnestly and almost tenderly, ‘do you sometimes speak with an American accent?’

  Bailey reared up again, breathing stertorously. ‘American accent?’ he said in an indignant voice. ‘What do you mean, American accent? Wass the marrer with you?’

  ‘Never mind,’ Foley said.

  ‘Who are you saying got an American acshent?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Foley said.

  ‘I come from Middlesboro,’ said Bailey. ‘I shall have to sell up and get out. I had everything ready, the barrelsh, the netsh, the lampsh, everything. The skullsh.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Foley said.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to say you want your money for them skullsh. And I don’t blame you. No shentiment in business, keep shentiment out of business. That’s a macshim of mine … But will you wait a bit, that’s what I want to know, till things are shettled up?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t mind waiting,’ Foley said, perceiving there was no choice.

  ‘You’re a white man,’ said Bailey. ‘You’re a good guy. True blue.’ His head had begun to sag again, declining on to his chest. His eyes slipped quickly over Foley’s face and came to rest in a fixed stare at the floor between them. His remaining words came out slurred and indistinct. ‘I can always tell a good man, pick him out of a hundred, what am I shaying, a thousand. Never wrong. I – am – never wrong. Knowledge of human nature,’ said Bailey. ‘You’ll never get far in business without it, never.’

  ‘But how can you know?’ asked Foley. He felt suddenly eloquent and responsible. A spokesman. ‘How can you ever know human nature? All the knowledge you are talking about is retrospective and it doesn’t help much in the present because nothing is ever the same twice in your life, no situation is exactly repeated. Where do you get your criteria?

  ‘I think experience is overrated, actually. You still have to start all over again every time with every new person. So it seems to me that what you need is energy, not experience. These good judges of human nature that people talk about are usually just old men and women who have lost their energy and try to apply some sort of preconceived standard to people.

  ‘Take my case. My partner, Michael Moss. Three years we’ve been in business. You can’t help making assumptions about a person in three years. People have got to be supposed to be calculable to a large extent, whatever their ultimate mystery and all that.

  ‘I was wrong about Moss. Moss is a homosexual. Keep it to yourself, of course. How could I be expected to know that? He doesn’t show any of the obvious signs of it. At least I didn’t notice anything odd about him. He didn’t tell me. He should have told me when we formed the partnership. Then I should have known what I was getting into. He deceived me, wouldn’t you say he deceived me?’ Foley paused, challengingly, but Bailey made no answer.

  ‘He did deceive me. He might say he didn’t know at the time. But he must have known in some way. He must have suspected something. He’s not such a fool. You know why he said nothing about it? He was hoping I’d turn out that way inclined as well. That’s what I find so difficult to forgive. And do you know that Moss blames me now for not having seen through him? He actually holds it against me. If you asked him at this very moment he’d almost certainly say that I’d injured him. What it comes down to is that my assumptions about Moss were mistaken but his about me were dishonest. No two ways about it.’

  Foley fell silent for some moments, possessed by a sense of injustice. Bailey breathed regularly, showed no disposition to intervene.

  ‘Now you’re going to find this difficult to believe,’ Foley continued, ‘but I can’t help feeling that Moss is in the right somehow. You know what I mean? I feel that he’s in the right and I’m in the wrong. In spite of everything. He’s on my conscience, I can’t quite explain it…’

  Thus for a moment Foley came near to apprehending the reality and tyranny of Moss’s love. But the effort was too difficult to be sustained for long, and when he spoke again he had returned to that level on which Moss could be wholly blamed. ‘He has deserted me,’ he said. ‘In the middle of the season, just when our commitments are heaviest.’ He leaned forward and prodded one of Bailey’s knees. ‘What do
you think of that?’ he demanded in impassioned tones.

  Bailey made no reply, but a long and trailing sigh escaped him. His head, supported by a neat scaffolding of chins, still rested on his breast.

  ‘Without a word of explanation,’ Foley said. He lowered himself in his chair and leaned back, tilting his head in order to look into the other’s face. Bailey’s eyes were closed and his moist, childish mouth a little open. In sleep he looked quite guileless and curiously pagan.

  Foley sat forward on the edge of his chair, advancing his face as close as possible to Bailey’s without actually rising. ‘You have got an American accent,’ he said softly, straight into Bailey’s still face. ‘And it’s no good pretending otherwise. I think you started using it because you thought it sounded high-powered. Well, I should drop it if I were you, it makes you sound untrustworthy. And another thing, Bailey, let me give you a bit of advice, don’t you go in for maxims and sayings so much. Try to use your loaf a bit more.’

  He smiled for some moments into Bailey’s unconscious face, feeling pleased and powerful. Then, rather dizzily, he stood up. He was beginning to go from the room when a charitable impulse visited him. Turning back he looked round the room for several moments without seeing what he wanted. In the café itself, however, he found, rather pathetically, a little pad for making bills out, in a leather case, with a pencil attached to it by a string. Bailey had clearly neglected none of the appurtenances. Tearing out one of the bills, Foley wrote on the back of it in block capitals: ‘It’s no use going to Graham’s place, you will only fall into the stream because he has taken the bridge up and besides he has probably left for good by this time.’ He went back into the kitchen and laid the paper on Bailey’s lap, hoping no sudden motion of an unquiet dream would dislodge it. Then, feeling virtuous and somewhat lightheaded, he made his way through the café, braving the fixed disdain of the skulls. In spite of his fumblings with the chain, Bailey had not succeeded in locking the door, having forgotten to close the padlock, and Foley let himself out without difficulty.