I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

“Yes.”

  “When I was in Leipzig I was taken to the Thomaskirche and shown where Bach played the organ. In the aisle, on the floor, there’s an area of aluminum where he is buried. And in the middle of the aluminum, in large clear letters, it had BACH. Someone had placed a red rose in a corner. The organ was at the far end of the church. It’s small. The pipes look like children’s crayons standing on end.”

  “My boyfriend is an organist,” she said. “A good one. He came to see me. We went to Leipzig. In the Thomaskirche he was given permission to play Bach’s organ.”

  Outside. A grey sky . . . low clouds . . . small fields . . . hedges . . .

  “Where are you going?”

  “Oxford.”

  “What are you doing in Oxford?”

  “A Ph.D.”

  “In what?”

  “English.”

  “On what?”

  “Decadence.”

  I thought, how marvellous. On a train in England just after eight in the morning. And we are talking about decadence.

  Neither of us was certain what it was. But she was interested what form it took in art. She thought it might be when something—a way of painting, of writing, a style—goes on after the life of the original is over.

  Oxford came too soon. She got off. I was on my own until St. Erth, where I got off, walked across the covered wooden bridge, took the branch line that went by Lelant Estuary, then the coast, to St. Ives.

  I keep coming back. To this place. To this house. Although now it is only the top floor and the attic that I rent. I keep coming back to these shabby damp rooms, with the paintings on the walls given to me by people no longer here. The old black gas stove, the small (rust-on-the bottom) fridge, the plain wooden table. I can’t leave go of this place. The life that was lived here is no longer here. The ceiling is cracked and peeling and when it rains patches are wet. The wood of some of the windows is worn and splintered. It all looks used and worn-out and not repainted or repaired. Yet I feel comfortable here even though the life wasn’t comfortable. Nor is it now.

  I live opposite stone—stone cottages—stone terraced houses—street after street of stone—no trees.

  But there are the windows. In the rooms on the top floor. And when I go up the turning stairs to the attic. And see the colours of the far shore fields, the sun over the bay, the lighthouse, the gulls, the low clouds moving from the land to the sea.

  And, from the windows, on the other side, the back and front gardens of the larger houses farther up on the slope with the neat rows of vegetables, the poppies growing wild in the tall grass, the shrubs, the flowers.

  And I like being here because I’m on my own. I do what I want to do when I want to do it. I get up—the gulls wake me—before the sun is above the horizon. Make breakfast (a grilled Manx kipper), have cups of coffee, read the morning paper. Listen to the radio. For the first few days that is all I do. Except for walks by the coast, the estuary, in the country (the foxgloves), on the moor (the changing colours of the bracken), or through the town. I get fresh mackerel from the fishmonger, hot bread and saffron from the bakery. There is a familiarity . . . as if I have never been away.

  But after a week, sometimes less, I am ready to leave. I’ve had enough. This slow pace, these uneventful days and nights, these spartan and used rooms. When I now walk through the town I see it for what it is—a backwater. A few more days . . . I feel strangely exhausted doing nothing. I go to bed, while it is still light, draw the curtains. And it’s as if I’m in a small cabin, on a large passenger ship, on an ocean. The ship has its engines stopped. And it’s drifting.

  Gradually the pace that is here takes over. The tiredness goes. I go upstairs to the attic, to this familiar desk, and start to write.

  I remain here, living like this, until I finish something, or a first draft of it. Then I fly back to Toronto, where I live a different life with Mrs. Garrens, a widow of forty-six. She has a large secluded house in three acres of grounds (lawns, gardens, trees), a gardener, a housekeeper. In winter we travel.

  So these two lives. The one with Mrs. Garrens began four years ago—eighteen months after her husband, an industrialist, died. The one in St. Ives, in 1949, when I was twenty-four and living in London for the first time.

  There was still food rationing, bomb damage, cigarettes under the counter, The Third Man, cheap Algerian wine, large Irish sausage at Sainsbury’s. And a lot of displaced people.

  I had come over to do postgraduate work at the University of London and rented two rooms above the Institute of Child Psychology in Notting Hill Gate. Opposite was a garage. The door beside the garage had Theosophy painted above it.

  In my third week, I returned late from a party and couldn’t get the key to open the outside door. I saw a light in the garage. And walked across the street. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling and a thin man in a white shirt, in his sixties, was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

  I told him I lived above the institute and couldn’t get in.

  He remained silent. Then said, “Come with me.”

  I followed him in the dark to the back of the garage where cars were parked.

  “You want a Rolls or a Bentley?”

  “Bentley,” I said.

  He opened the boot of a car, brought out a blanket, unlocked a back door, put the light on, gave me the blanket, and said goodnight.

  It was all white inside. A shiny white, like satin. I stretched out across the back seat. It was like being in an expensive coffin.

  When I woke it was raining. And almost nine next morning.

  That evening I went to Chelsea to see Nicholas Kempster, who was with me at university and lived in a bed-sit on Oakley Street. He left a note on the door saying he’d be back in a few hours.

  I went to wait in the nearest pub. It was dark and gloomy (the walls were painted brown) and empty except for an old man sitting by the side of the fireplace. He seemed to be staring into space. A pint of beer was on a small table in front of him. He didn’t touch it all the time I was there. He had on an officer’s fawn greatcoat, unbuttoned. His hair was grey and uncombed. I recognized him as Augustus John.

  The next time I saw Augustus John was two years later, in a black and white photograph on the wall of a pub, the Globe, in Penzance. The others in the photograph were Maurice Mayfield (a war artist) and his attractive wife, Nancy, dressed like a gypsy. Maurice Mayfield tried to look and live like Augustus John. I knew this because, in those two years, I met Elizabeth. We married, and decided to come down to Cornwall. We rented a large granite house with a walled garden from Maurice Mayfield. When he heard what I was doing he let me have it cheaply.

  So we lived in this fine large house (it was the finest house we ever lived in) while the owner and his wife and four young children lived in a small primitive cottage on the moors. Maurice would come in every morning on an old bicycle to his studio—a small partitioned section of the building, near the house, where I worked. He always wanted me to see his new paintings. They were of peasant or gypsy women. Stylized figures, often in black, like the one above our bed called The Angel of Sleep. Though I didn’t care for his work, I liked Maurice. Years later, I was told he came from a working-class family by the London docks. You wouldn’t have known from the way he spoke. The soft voice, the careful diction, the good manners. A large man with a small head, short red hair, blue eyes, a face that looked as if he had just caught the sun. He went around dressed like a peasant farmer. And he smiled easily.

  He told me he was trying a new technique (beeswax) and wanted me to see what he had done. I didn’t like any of them. Then I saw on the wall a small unframed oil of a woman’s head and shoulders. She wasn’t smiling. The hair was close to her head, parted in the middle and pulled back, to form a bun. She didn’t have much of a chin. It was mostly in browns. But there was an immediacy, a human quality, that none of the ot
hers had.

  “I like that,” I said, glad that here was something I could be enthusiastic about.

  “It’s not by me.” Maurice smiled. “It’s by Gwen John.”

  It was the first time I had heard her name.

  At Mousehole we lived on the slope of a hill in this cut-granite house, with the high granite wall around it, and the copper beech, bamboos, roses, inside. At night, in bed, we could see the roofs of the cottages sloping to the harbour. The boats, in the bay, fishing between the chimneys. We had little money. I went out with the fishermen from Newlyn and bicycled back after midnight. The moon on the water . . . heard a fox . . . an owl from Paul. Then going up the outside granite steps, wondering if we still had electricity. Two days later an elderly man, from the electricity company, came to disconnect our supply. I held the ladder so he could climb and do it.

  That night we ate our meal by candlelight.

  The fishermen left pilchards and mackerel outside the front door. The farmer, from the fields above, left broccoli, new potatoes, and lettuce. Ellen was born. The butcher, Mr. Brewer, left five shillings on her pram when she was asleep. Then the money ran out and there was little I could do here to earn any. So we moved: to London, Devon, Brighton. When things improved we went back to Cornwall and to this house.

  A few years later I read that Augustus John had died. And on the television news caught a glimpse of Maurice Mayfield at the funeral. Then Maurice Mayfield died. Our children left home. Elizabeth died. I went back to Canada, to Toronto, where I met Mrs. Garrens.

  It started as a business arrangement. Mr. Garrens had left instructions that he didn’t want a memorial stone. But Mrs. Garrens wanted to do something. She told me he liked books and thought of having a book prize, in his name, to be given every two years to a promising writer. And she wanted me to select the writer. We continued to meet in her house to discuss this. Soon we talked about other things. The prize was never mentioned. We were both still young enough to miss the physical side of marriage. And we didn’t like living on our own.

  But I have this illness. What other men do with other women I can only do with my wife. And when she died I thought, now I have to learn to be promiscuous.

  When I moved in with her it was Mrs. Garrens’s life that I began to live. Not only the house with the spacious grounds. But the large rooms with floor-to-wall white carpets, the walls painted a delicate green. The paintings on the walls. The one I liked was a drawing, a nude, by Matisse. The meals cooked by the housekeeper. The dinner parties. I also began to travel.

  She took me first to France. (Mrs. Garrens grew up in the South of France and talked about the fields of blue cornflowers in the long grass that were part of her childhood.) I had never been to France. It was the country Elizabeth always wanted to see.

  In Paris we stayed in a hotel by the Luxembourg Gardens. We often went into the Gardens. Then to a restaurant, then back to the hotel. We went to Marseille and did the same. We both seemed to have a lot of energy, especially early in the morning, as if we had to catch up on lost time. She would make a sound from her throat as she reached her climax. Then give me these quick little kisses all over my face.

  At breakfast, she said,

  “Your eyes go up when you’re happy.”

  Next morning at breakfast she said,

  “Your eyes tilt when you come.”

  On our last day in Marseille she asked,

  “Is there any place you would like to see?”

  I said Dieppe.

  So we went to Dieppe. Went for walks by the coast. Had picnics in the countryside. And to a different restaurant every night. And sometimes we ate in the hotel where we stayed along the front. The bed was wide and high. And there were long mirrors on the doors of the wardrobe.

  “I’m your last fuck,” Mrs. Garrens said.

  That’s the way our life has gone. And I like the life we have together. But after seven or eight months, I become restless. Another month or two and I need to leave. I am pulled back (why, I don’t know) to this pretty backwater, these seedy rooms, to being alone. And to work here.

  This January I told Mrs. Garrens. “I need to go to St. Ives.”

  Mrs. Garrens doesn’t like this. When I tell her I need to go she becomes anxious. We have little quarrels. And when I’m packed, the bags downstairs, waiting for the limousine to come up the drive to take me to the airport, I feel sad about leaving her.

  We sit in the front room, having a drink and talking quietly.

  She never uses my name but calls me ‘you.’

  And I always call her Mrs. Garrens.

  I arrived back here on January 10th. There had been continual rain in England for weeks. Drizzle. The sky was overcast. It was raining now. And in the passing small fields there was flooding.

  When I arrived in St. Ives it was grey and wet. The open railway station above the beach was deserted. I began to walk with my bags. The streets were empty. Just the sound of the gulls. The rooms, the attic, were cold. They were damp. There was no heat except from the gas rings of the black kitchen stove. I put the three on that were working. There was also a strike. The water was cut off. When it came on I was told to fill the bath. I would take saucepans of water from the bath to the kitchen, to make coffee, to wash the dishes, to shave.

  I had caught a cold and had a temperature. I decided to go to bed. But I wanted something to read. I went to the small library. Saw a biography by Susan Chitty of Gwen John. I returned to the cold, damp, and dusty rooms, put on two sweaters, thick woollen socks, and several extra blankets. I went to bed in the narrow front bedroom, with the bottle of duty-free brandy that I had bought.

  And began to read.

  How Gwen John led a middle-class upbringing in Wales. Went to Paris to be a painter. Became a model to earn some money. Met Rodin. They became lovers. She was, for a while, happy. Then he discarded her. She wrote him letters every day. And waited in Luxembourg Gardens hoping to get a glimpse of him.

  After that she withdrew . . . she continued to paint . . . but didn’t look after herself . . . hardly eating . . . little money . . . she ended up in a shed at the bottom of a garden . . . the rain coming in from the roof.

  The Second World War. The Germans invaded France. Augustus John was in the South of France with some of his women friends and several children. He was to drive and pick up Gwen John in Paris, then head to one of the ports. But he avoided Paris. And got on the last ship for England.

  With the Germans invading, Gwen John left Paris. Got as far as Dieppe. Collapsed in the street. People thought she was a vagrant. Took her to a hospice, where she died. No one knows where she is buried. Augustus John was supposed to do a memorial stone. But he never got around to it . . .

  SOAP OPERA

  I phoned my mother in Ottawa just after 6:00 p.m. No reply. A few minutes later I tried again. Then I took Fred, mostly beagle, out for his walk through the small park (at twelve he still has this rapid acceleration and expects me to throw a tennis ball for him to chase), around the reservoir and the wall of green trees that hide the ravine. In front, by the path, were the four saplings planted a few years ago with the name-plates: In Memory of My Beloved Papa, Joseph Podobitko. I wondered who Joseph Podobitko was. I had asked the Portuguese gardener who looked after the grounds if Joseph Podobitko had worked here. He told me that Joseph Podobitko didn’t work here. He didn’t know who he was, and it cost three hundred dollars to put up one of those saplings.

  I came back to the house with Fred and phoned again. I tried the Civic Hospital. I asked if she was a patient. Silence. Then her voice (slow and shaky) said, “Hello.”

  “When did you go in?”

  “This morning at ten.” It was an effort for her to talk. “I’m just played out.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll take the early train.”

  That evening I phoned my
sister Sarah in Carleton Place. She had come to Ottawa and had been staying with Mother for a week.

  “I couldn’t take it any more,” Sarah said. “She doesn’t want to live. She has given up.”

  “A person who calls an ambulance and gets herself admitted as an emergency case hasn’t given up.”

  “But you don’t know what she talks about.”

  “I’ll take the early train,” I said. “It gets in around noon.”

  “I’ll be with her in the morning and you will be with her in the afternoon.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ll get together later.”

  My mother was on the fifth floor of the surgical ward in a room by herself. When I walked in she was asleep, propped up by pillows. I was dismayed at how she had changed. I brought one of the grey leather chairs to the side, sat, and waited.

  It was a large air-conditioned room with two windows. The blinds were halfway down, the curtains halfway across. On a small table by the bed, a telephone. On a chest of drawers some flowers wished her a speedy recovery. On the wall a painting, a reproduction, of two rowing boats by a blue pier with the moon out. The room had another room within it. A private bathroom. All the walls were orange and cream. And the doors light blue. The large front door was opened as far as it could go. And on it a name-plate: Donated by Mr. Thomas Sachs.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “No. It’s a nice large room.”

  “I paid into Blue Cross,” she said weakly, “for semi-private. But they put me in here. Do you think they made a mistake?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  She looked up at the two standing metal forms beside her. One had a bag that was giving her blood. It was almost empty. The other, water. And that was full. She watched closely, as I did, as the drops appeared.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “That I have jaundice. That I’m bleeding inside. But they say they can stop that. He’s a very nice man.”