I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  The next summer he was away. I received a postcard from Antibes in June. A month later another card came from Saint-Tropez. In the fall I went to McGill and began my pre-med. Then the war came. I joined the RCAF and went overseas. And I heard no more of Dobell. When the war ended I went back to McGill, got my degree, then took six months off and visited parts of Europe and Africa that Dobell had told me about.

  I intended to practise in the east—but things didn’t work out that way. And after a few stopping-off places in Northern Ontario, I found myself in Vancouver, which was very pleasant. For ten years now I have built up a fairly successful practice, married, have a son and daughter, friends, and a fair amount of cash to do the things I want to do. Then last summer something curious happened.

  I became homesick for the east. At thirty-four, with youth definitely over and middle age relentlessly approaching, I found myself turning more and more to my roots and the friendships those bred. And though I have very close friends on the west coast I felt that I wanted to go back to the places and the people with whom I’d had the formative experiences of my youth. I seemed to have reached a point where I wanted to take a look backwards and sum up an epoch in my life, so as better to go forward. I felt a curious lack of completion. The momentum of youth was dying down without generating a new passion. And although I’m interested in medicine, I cannot say that it grips me totally.

  So I flew back. Spent the first three days in Montreal. Montreal was a reassurance. It had not changed too much. Not along the parts of Sherbrooke Street I knew or walking along St. Catherine . . .

  The water still dripped from the gargoyles of Christ Church Cathedral and at noon the carillon at St. James’s played its tin-penny tunes. At the corner of University, the man who sold the Star and Gazette (under the turning clock of the Bank of Montreal) looked, with age, even more like Ernest Hemingway. In Phillips Square the pigeons pecked at soaked bits of bread and in the pools of water the sharp reflections of Birks and Morgan’s, the statue of Edward VII, and the taxis on either side, while a Jehovah’s Witness stood with a copy of Awake in his hand. At night, the gay neon of the restaurants, the films, the delicatessens, the grey buses. And above them the three sweeping searchlights probing aimlessly through the low clouds. While at the end of each intersection the black shape of Mount Royal with the lit, stubby cross on top .

  . . . Except it was a different person now seeing this. And though I kept bumping into acquaintances and bits and pieces of my past, there was the inevitable disappointment. I suddenly wanted to go back to Île aux Noix.

  My father had sold the cottage just after Mother died and had come out to Victoria. There was really only Dobell. I sent him a telegram on the off chance that he might be there. When I returned to the Mount Royal that evening there was one waiting: LET ME KNOW WHEN ARRIVING CHAUFFEUR WILL MEET TRAIN—ARTHUR.

  The chauffeur who met me at St. Johns was new and had nothing of the servant about him. Although he wore the traditional dark double-breasted suit and chauffeur’s cap—on him it looked a masquerade. He was stout, short, and slightly bowlegged. The face, although clean-shaven, was swarthy. He looked like a well-fed peasant. We talked on the drive in. I said he was new. “A little over a year—You have pleasant journey—You are tired at end of day—”

  His English was full of copybook phrases and he volunteered on his own that he was Hungarian. Outside. A few lights of farmhouses and lights by the river and patches of water in the fields lit up by the moon. I asked after Dobell. He appeared non-committal. “He has waited to see you.”

  He was waiting in that room with the oil paintings and the stuffed animal heads on the walls. I was prepared for the usual signs of old age, but not what appeared a different person. He was thinner, and this made him even smaller. His face was long and sallow, empty of any kind of expression. He rose to meet me, and his legs, bent at the knees, dragged across the floor. His hands hung near his chest like a pair of lifeless claws, and they shook. The left hand more than the other. When we grasped hands, there was no pressure in his. He said, “It is good to see you.”

  But there was no emotion in his face. All vitality seemed to be drained out of him. I must have talked to cover up my embarrassment. But he stopped me.

  “I imagine this is a shock to you.”

  The left hand began to tremble more than the other, and the right hand went over to steady it.

  He still spoke quietly but the voice was coarse and less distinct. And looking at him I wondered if the brain was still active in the man and was only imprisoned by this shell of a body. I had, professionally, diagnosed as soon as I entered that Dobell had Parkinson’s disease.

  At supper, the chauffeur was also the butler; but Dobell hardly touched the food.

  “Tell me what happened to you. I saw in the paper that you did graduate.”

  I told him of the west, marriage, the family, wartime flying. He listened. But there were many silences. And there was an unhappy quality about the silences.

  The cook was also the maid. She was also new. A German girl who spoke a shy English, in her twenties, pretty, with prominent cheekbones and high breasts.

  I waited for him to tell me his story. But he didn’t. Sometimes while I was talking the trembling hands, forgetting to hold on to each other, would creep up to the chest, and then he would remember and bring them down again.

  The room hadn’t changed. Except that his portrait was added to the others on the wall. It was painted the way I remembered him.

  He appeared to be exhausted quickly, and we went to bed early. I had the same room as that first time. There were dried pussy willows in the small ornamental brass vase on the dresser, and a picture of himself, as he used to look, on his yacht, with me beside him. In one corner were several of the portable phonographs, and stacks of old records.

  I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. My light was still on and the wind was blowing the curtain from the window. I heard a cock crowing. I looked at the window—it was dark outside—and saw my face in the glass. I waited, and heard it crow again. Only instead of coming from the outside it seemed to come from somewhere in the house.

  I put on my dressing gown and went out. There was a small night light on in the hall and I could see from the landing straight down to the large room with the paintings and stuffed animal heads. The room was in shadows except for a wedge of light from the door to the kitchen, which was open. Then I saw the chauffeur come out of the shadow of a corner, in his bare feet and long winter underwear. He was shuffling in front of the cook, who also had her clothes disarranged, her hair loose, and who kept making furtive little gestures of trying to escape, while the chauffeur kept following. He continued to stalk, shuffling his legs, and holding his hands lifelessly up in front of his chest in a cruel parody of Dobell. Then suddenly he leapt up, arms and legs flung out, and gave a crow of a cock.

  Finally he cornered her—gave one more pathetic shuffle, then a vigorous crow—and hugging her to him like a bear, he lifted her off the ground. She immediately threw her arms around his neck, her legs fastened around his buttocks. Then he carried her inside the lighted door of the kitchen. I returned to my room, went back to bed, and listened as the clock in the house struck two.

  In the morning I was awakened by a cock crowing not far from the window. It was the real thing this time, it sounded asthmatic. Then it was answered by another cock, some distance away. I dressed and went outside.

  The morning had a fresh, clean smell. The air cool. In front of the house leading to the elms and cove, the lawn was beautifully kept—the slugs moved like pieces of slow rubber across the cut grass—but where I remembered similar lawns on the sides and behind the house, there were chickens.

  I watched the birds come running—heads forward, flapping wings, sometimes leaving the ground—as the chauffeur brought pails of food to the small, rough, wooden houses, while the roosters stood on the r
oofs of the houses, stretched up their necks magnificently, and crowed.

  From the kitchen a nice smell of coffee and the cook greeted me shyly and asked if I would like three or four eggs with the bacon. Then the chauffeur returned.

  “You like my hens? I ask Mister Dobell if I can have them. He say to me OK. In the back. We start in the back but soon they need more room. Now we have the sides.”

  The cook said something in German to the chauffeur.

  “You like a drive, sir? Mister Dobell never wake until mid-day.”

  I suggested we drive down the river to where the cottage was.

  There were stilts on either side of it, all deserted. The old road had not been mended and the car climbed and heeled and swung sideways as it went in and out of the large holes. I went down the gravel path. My parents’ cottage looked shabby compared to the stilts. Two planks were missing in the raised walk. The grass had overgrown. The flagpole was no longer on the lawn by the mountain ash. I looked around and for a while it brought back sadly the happy time I had here. I peered inside one of the windows. Whatever furniture was there was draped in white sheets.

  The chauffeur watched me.

  “I used to live here,” I said.

  “Once upon a time ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “You now come back?”

  “No. I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to.”

  We drove back in silence. Passed the low fields. A few horses were grazing. A child stood on a hay wagon. The wind lifted her skirt above her head. She waved in our direction. I waved back.

  Back to the house, and a chicken squawked as it ran in front of the car. Dobell was sitting in a large chair on the flat stone porch looking out to the elms and the river. He was bundled up in a black winter coat, hands in a muff. From the kitchen I could hear the chauffeur and the cook talking in German. They had a radio on, and a girl with a husky voice sang about “Real Love.”

  The chickens were supposedly kept behind the wire fences, but some had come through holes, or over the top, and were invading the front lawn and the approaches to the river. I watched a honey-brown rooster head off a couple of hens, then, as they settled down to peck at the earth, he nervously lifted his neck and crowed. And he was immediately answered from the other side of the house. And then another crowed even further away, before he replied.

  Dobell sat there motionless.

  A duck waded in the shallows. And across the river, swallows became thick like carbon dust from a sharpened pencil. While in the marshes splashes of red flew slowly by, then settled black on the reeds.

  Occasionally we spoke, but it was only small talk. Our thoughts remained and we had nothing to say, because there was nothing for either of us to discover in each other. I knew I would leave soon. And I also knew that I would not come back, except as a tourist.

  A VIEW

  ON THE SEA

  I

  There were four gulls on the side of the roof across the street. And they kept up a continual noise. Sometimes they just opened their beaks and whined and took a few steps forward and whined again, while another would mutter a few sharp tongue things I used to do on the trumpet. Then, for some unknown reason, one of them would start to honk and let out a full-throated piercing sound, its whole body shaking. That went on for a few seconds, and back to the muttering. Two of them seemed to be muttering in a kind of conversation. Until, again, the piercing sound, the background mutter, and the pitiful faraway whine.

  It was too hot to close the window. So I kept it open. The Back street was on the level with the front door, and the window faced a pink-painted cottage where a couple, with two small boys and a grandmother and grandfather, were down. Last week it was a honeymoon couple—this time three generations. They quarrelled outside. They scolded the children. The gulls. The cars going by a matter of inches from the window, blotting out the light. The passing visitors with their portables full on. I decided to go out and to try and work at night.

  I went into Connie’s Expresso and took a small blue table by the door. On the walls were blown-up black and white photographs of the harbour and the front. They were taken some time ago when the place was still full of fishing boats. A young girl in a green smock stood behind the counter. She was tall, heavy-set, and with an oval, expressionless face. A portable radio beside her played uninterrupted music. I had a hamburger and gave the girl one and six. Then a cup of black coffee, and that came to another sixpence. The sign behind the counter said American Style, but there wasn’t much meat in the hamburger, and the onion was fried. Still, the coffee was strong. I had another cup, and smoked a Gauloise, and looked out.

  The water in the bay was a thick, deep blue. The sun brilliant. It showed up the fields on top of the cliffs of the far shore; the lower Towans with the bald patches in the coarse grass; the long line at the bottom of dazzling sand; and the white lighthouse in the bay, a milk bottle with a camera stuck in its throat. Two French crabbers, anchored beside each other in the deep water, faced the wind. But there wasn’t much of a breeze. Tourists walked by the open door. In shorts, slacks, sandals, bare feet. Holding hands. It was all very informal. No rush.

  A couple of tourists came into the restaurant. An elderly man and a slightly stooped woman. He had a cane and a small grey moustache. He went to the counter and brought back some tea and wholemeal biscuits to their table.

  “Is that your radio?” he said to the girl.

  “Why,” she said, “is it too loud?”

  “No,” the tourist man said.

  “I bring it here for company. At home I never listen to the radio—”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In the Back Road.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” the tourist man said. “You’ve got the most beautiful bay in England and the finest sand beaches—This place is wonderful—”

  “I think it’s a dump,” she said. “It’s so boring. There’s nothing for us to do—”

  “Have you been to Land’s End?”

  “No.”

  “And you live here?’’

  “Born here and lived here all my life.”

  “You’ll have to be a good girl and take a look at Land’s End.”

  “I’m the eldest of nine,” the girl said. “I have to look after the others—”

  “Like a mother,” the tourist woman said quietly to her husband.

  They dunked the wholemeal biscuits carefully in the tea. Then ate the biscuits. Then drank the tea.

  “But I wouldn’t like to live in St. Just,” the man said. “You know St. Just—”

  “No,” she said, “I’ve never been to St. Just.”

  “—it’s a very sinister place. We went over this morning and we met a girl there. She told us she leaves St. Just every Friday and comes into Penzance and stays in Penzance until Sunday night—”

  “Penzance is a bit of a dump.”

  “Would you like to go to London?”

  “It’s funny,” the girl said, brightening up, “I’ve never wanted to go to London. The place I’d like to go is South America. Ever since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to go to South America.”

  “That’s some way from here,” the tourist man said.

  The girl smiled. “I guess I’ll just have to marry someone with lots of money.”

  I finished my coffee and went out.

  It was very pleasant along the front. Cool air, the smell of the sea, and so much for the eyes. I walked by the stone building of the Salvation Army, Woolworth’s, the Shore Café. Music was leaking out of the Harbour Amusements, and at its entrance a boy, twirling a stick, gathered pink candy floss from a machine while a child rode a wooden rocking horse for sixpence. In front of Literature and Art, tourists were picking their way through the picture postcards. And others were picking their way through earthenware pots, mug
s, soup bowls, small stone lighthouses, souvenirs at the Arts and Crafts. But there weren’t many in the stores. They were lying on the dry sand of the harbour; they swam and splashed and stood in the clear shallows; they sat in striped deck chairs, green benches, along the wharf. The clock in the church, by the urinal, struck eleven. And the sun came down brutally. It caught the glass of thousands of windows facing the bay; the bright paint of the cottages and hotels; the stone of the terraces; the two piers; the blue water, and the close-cropped greens, browns, yellows of the far shore fields. Everything appeared so vivid and sharp, as if all these colours had just been freshly washed. I walked along the harbour, by the rails. The tide was going out. It left the fine shell sand ribbed, and in the depressions bits of glistening water. Young seagulls, their feathers speckled brown and white, were foraging behind the outgoing tide. One had found a dead spider crab, and poked at its underside.

  On the long granite pier a row of parked cars was being cooked and at the pier’s end a small boy sat fishing, watching the water. Seaweed clung to the granite sides—small hands severed at the wrist—below the waterline they waved lazily from side to side.

  I left the harbour at the slipway, walked up a narrow passage, by another car park; past a Methodist chapel that was now an art gallery; past white- and cream-washed cottages with Bed and Breakfast signs. And I came to the beach. Quickly, I went down the hot stone steps, and onto dry sand. At an empty stretch I took off shoes, socks, shirt, trousers—I had on swimming trunks underneath—rented a surfboard from the beach stores, ran across the hot, dry, then damp sand, through the warm pools, until I came to the shallows. The water was cold. I waded in, ran some of the breaking water over my arms and chest, and as the next breaker came in to spend itself out, I plunged in. The shock of cold water lasted briefly. And when I stood up I no longer thought the water was cold. I went further out with the board, half swimming, to get to the deeper water. At chest high I stopped, my back to the incoming waves. I let two go by. They broke before they reached me, and I leaned back into them. But I took the third. I watched it gather behind me, the dark line in its upper part advance, then, leaping onto the board and kicking my legs I was lifted and flung downward—felt the wood smack into the stomach, as I remembered from childhood jumping on a sleigh to go down a slope—and pointing downward I was carried in a glistening white cascade as the wave broke around me and water crashed into my face and eyes. When I felt the wave losing some of its momentum I twisted my body and the board from side to side so that I went through the water like a drunken driver sending patches of spray from one side then the other as I curved into the shallows, skimmed along in a few inches, until I was deposited onto the wet sand.