I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  He showed me letters he had from T. S. Eliot, Picasso. And, from another folder, he brought out obituaries that he had cut from the Times. They were of writers, painters, editors of little magazines, who were known just after the war and who died young. They were people I also knew.

  “That’s why we get on,” Max said. “We have the same references.”

  The only sign of luxury was a large window looking out to the trees and gardens. “I come here when I can,” Max said. “In the morning the dew is on the grass . . . the birds have started . . . the flowers are at their best . . . I read, I smoke, I have a drink. I listen to the BBC Overseas Service for the news . . . I play the piano . . . I daydream. It’s my bolthole. Then I go to work.”

  He poured Remy Martin into the cracked cups. He sat on the couch. I, on the wooden chair. He lit up a Gauloise.

  “I read the same books again and again,” Max said. “Now that I don’t write—I copy out things that I like.” He opened a thick notebook, turned some pages, and read aloud.

  ‘”The heart—it’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating, it accepts anything. It’s not particular. But the body—that’s different—it has a cultivated taste—it knows what it wants.’

  “You know who said that?”

  “No.”

  “Colette.” He turned more pages. Read out, “To exist is enough.” Then turned to the last page of the notebook, showed it to me. The only thing on it was, “The final unimportance of human life.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “I didn’t. But when I read it—I don’t feel so bad.”

  He put out a Gauloise, lit another.

  “I’ll miss Fredericton—”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “When I’m sixty-five, I’ll retire to England. Somewhere in the country. Not too far from London.”

  “And your wife?”

  “She won’t want to come. But when the time comes she’ll go. As you see, my wife and I don’t talk much. Not now. We keep certain thoughts to ourselves.”

  We finished the brandy in the cups. He locked the door. We were walking to the house when his wife came quickly towards us.

  “Nettie’s escaped.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I went into her room. And she wasn’t there.”

  “I’ll use the car,” Max said. “You,” he said to his wife, “look in the restaurants, the library, the stores.”

  “I’ll look for her,” I said.

  “Fine. Do the side streets and by the river.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “A pink sweater,” his wife said, “grey skirt, and slippers.”

  I walked and looked for over an hour and a half. No sign of Nettie. I phoned up Max, from a call box, wondering if she was still alive.

  “The police have her,” he said calmly. “I’m going just now to the station to pick her up. She was trying to get on a bus. She had no money. She told them she was going to Canada.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Two weeks later it was a different Max who came to the George. He had come back from a three-day conference in Calgary. And he talked nonstop about women. “It’s all in the angle of penetration . . . If they have large bums . . . it’s better to use a pillow. I picked up a professor at the hotel bar about thirty-five or thirty-six . . . a medievalist . . . I asked her to spend the night with me. She said she would if I promised I wouldn’t do anything.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked surprised. “Nothing happened. I gave her my word.”

  That night he picked me up for the annual party of his creative writing class. The parents, he said, were away. “We’ll enjoy ourselves.” There were drinks, music, food. Max was the first one to start dancing. Then spent the rest of the evening, in a dark corner, with the girl who was giving the party. When he drove me back to the George he was like an adolescent. “Now you see why I have these creative writing classes.”

  “Better wipe the lipstick off before you go in the house.”

  Next morning he walked into my office. He was excited.

  “I needed a new secretary,” he said. “They sent me one. But I’ll have to let her go. I couldn’t work with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too sexy. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He led me down the corridor to the main office. And introduced me to this young tall girl who was smiling. She looked like girls I saw in the street. Blond short hair, healthy, outdoor type, in a tight sweater and a tight skirt.

  “Turn around,” Max said.

  And she did, as if she were a fashion model, still smiling.

  “How could I work standing close to her?”

  “She probably needs the job,” I said.

  “She’ll go back to the typing pool. Alone with her . . . I wouldn’t trust myself.”

  I liked Max better when the macho side of him was absent. One afternoon he picked me up and drove by the river into the country for about an hour. “I make this trip about once every six or seven weeks,” he said. “My wife goes more often. We have a daughter. She lives by herself, a solitary. She’s a lovely girl, twenty-four, you’ll see.”

  We went down a dirt track. There was a wooden shack with asbestos on the outside and on the roof. In a clearing, a small vegetable garden and some flowers. A brown dog came out and a black and ginger kitten. The dog barked. A voice said, “What is it, Fred?”

  Then Max’s daughter came out of the shack. She was tall and slim and she looked like one of those pre-Raphaelite paintings. She ran over and kissed Max.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  He introduced me. She looked a bit shy. She spoke softly. She brought us inside, made some coffee.

  There were different herbs . . . books to do with the psyche . . . Buddhism . . . happiness . . . there were plants growing in small pots . . . lots of paperback books . . . and postcards put up . . .

  I went out to leave them alone.

  We stayed about an hour.

  Max didn’t talk much on the drive back. “Every time I come back from seeing her I feel sad. And there is nothing I can do.”

  Before driving to the airport, I went with Max to see Nettie in her room. I told her I was leaving. But she took no notice. Max had bought her a colour television for her seventieth birthday. She was watching a train going across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was a travelogue showing the different provinces in the autumn.

  When it was over Nettie was silent.

  Then she said to Max, “Why did you keep that country all to yourself?”

  I returned to England, to my wife and kids, paid off the debts. Had a three-week holiday with the family in London. And there was enough money left for the next nine months. I began to write.

  All the time I was in Fredericton, I thought I hated it. But bits and pieces began to appear in my next novel and in several short stories.

  Max and I wrote regularly. He always included small details that I suspect he thought I might be able to use.

  . . . On a freezing night our mayor was pushed out of a moving car on the main street at three in the morning. He was pushed out by a lady who wasn’t his wife. He was in the nude . . . . They tried to burn the George down twice since you left . . . both times the fire engines arrived too soon . . . . The Brigadier died while on holiday in the Bahamas . . . . The Gentlemen of the Farm gave a farewell party . . . they are leaving for British Columbia. Sometime after midnight we went out of the farmhouse and there was a large wooden cross burning fiercely. Someone said, “Ku Klux Klan.” Someone else said, ‘’This is New Brunswick.”

  At Christmas he sent five pounds to each of our daughters.

  The following summer he and his
wife came to see us. They were travelling through the southwest in a rented car. In St. Ives they stayed in the best hotel, the Tregenna Castle. Max took us there for a meal. As we entered and saw the glass chandeliers, he said, “Ribbentrop was promised this hotel for his residence by Hitler after he conquered England.”

  Next day it rained. They stayed with us in the house. Max played ping-pong with the children. Then records. Hair was in fashion. Max played it over and over. He twisted to the music, he sang the songs, he liked the naughty words (“Mummy, Mummy, what is fellatio?”). He tried to get my wife to dance on the table.

  That is how I remembered him on that cool September morning when I heard that he and his wife were killed when their car went off the highway.

  Later that day I wrote his obituary for the Times.

  I came again to Fredericton, eighteen years later, this summer, to give a lecture. I stayed at the Beaverbrook. After a good breakfast, by a window facing the river, I went for a walk. I walked along the main street and to the side street where the George was. It was burned out . . . gutted. Planks of charred wood were hanging precariously. And where I had my rooms I could see blue sky.

  Wherever I walked I kept remembering Max. And things that happened. But for some reason I couldn’t find my way to the university. I asked a woman on the opposite side of the street. She said she was going part of the way. She told me she came from Ontario, from Hamilton. And couldn’t wait to get back. They had another year here—until their only daughter finished school.

  “This is failure city,” she said.

  I walked up the slope, by the trees and the grass of the university. They named a new building after him—Max Bleenden Hall—a girls’ residence. And on the quarter-hour the clock, above its entrance, has a delicate chime.

  TRICKS

  In the late spring I received an invitation to tutor, for four days, a class of teachers in their final year of training. On a bright morning I set off for an estate in West Cornwall. I took the train to Penzance. Then a green country bus. It went slowly up a steep road. At the top it levelled out. We were on an open moor. It was exhilarating. I could see for miles. A brilliant blue sky. Haunches of earth with gorse and bracken and scattered granite boulders. The only sign that said people were about—a row of wooden telegraph poles, by the road, carrying a single wire.

  I got off the bus on a plateau, and walked with my bag along a rough dirt road. It brought me still higher onto the moor. A cool breeze. A smell of coconuts came from the gorse beside me. I watched three gulls fly over. They appeared to fly in slow motion. There were no sounds. Not a car, not a person.

  When I saw the estate I didn’t expect anything as isolated to be so grand. From the moor it was almost hidden by trees and a few granite boulders. And the boulders, made smooth by the centuries, were taller than the trees.

  I swung open a heavy white gate and walked along a pebble drive. On either side—behind tall, trimmed green bushes—were thick subtropical gardens with flowers whose names I didn’t know. Bright pinks, whites, orange, yellow, light and dark purples and blues. A gap . . . a low stone wall . . . and behind it a fruit garden. Another stone wall . . . and behind that a vegetable garden with a greenhouse.

  The drive ended at the side of a large house with tall windows. A bus (“Hereford Education Authority” on its door) was parked by a used truck that had gardening tools. A path to the left of the house. Another to the right. I walked to the left, under a granite arch. And past the arch a sunken grass lawn neatly cut. The sunken grass lawn, with steep grass slopes, was sheltered on three sides by bushes, trees, and the front of the granite house. The wide other side was open. To the left, the upward-sloping moor, and the road across it the bus had taken. While in front, and to the right, tall grass with campion and foxgloves. Then a sharp drop of bracken and gorse. Several hundred feet further down the bracken and the gorse levelled out to a patchwork of cultivated small green fields with hedgerows for fences and cows around an isolated farm. The small fields went right up to steep cliffs. And past the cliffs, to the horizon, was the sea.

  Looking at all this, I didn’t notice a tall man with a stick (who must have come from the house) walking towards me. His feet kicked out—slightly ahead and to the side—while he held his head and shoulders back, as if to balance his walk. It gave him a slightly arrogant presence, even when he smiled. Fine features in a longish heavy face, a strong jaw, thinning white hair combed back. He was neatly dressed in grey flannels, a light grey tweed jacket, a red-checked shirt, a dark blue tie. He looked English and vaguely familiar. He also looked out of place here. But so did the sunken lawn, the sub-tropical gardens, the large house.

  “You a student?”

  “No, a tutor.”

  “You must be the other one.”

  It was then that I recognized him. Eric Symes, a singer in musicals, looking much older than the photographs I had seen in newspapers and magazines. But they belonged to the time he was well known. When I used to hear him on the radio and on records.

  “You will have the goose-house,” he indicated with his stick. “Past those trees. His is further along. After you leave your things, go to the other side of the house to the kitchen. Meet your students. They arrived earlier. If there is anything you want—ask Connie.”

  We stood looking at the view, in silence, for several minutes.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to fight to keep it this way. It’s Bronze Age.”

  He began to walk . . . stiff and erect, using the stick, while his feet kicked out—I guess he had a stroke—along the top of the grass slope . . . by the sunken lawn . . . towards an opening . . .

  “Come and see me,” he called back. “I’ll show you the house and the gardens.”

  A half-hour later I was in a warm kitchen, by a scrubbed wooden table, having a coffee (a red enamel pot was kept warm on the Aga), looking, from a wide window, at the moor, the sea, the sky, and talking with some of the students.

  When a taxi drove up, a tired-looking man of average height appeared. He wore a mustard military-cut overcoat and a black fedora. When he came in, carrying a green canvas bag, everyone stopped talking.

  “I’m Adolphe Cayley,” he said in a nervous voice.

  He looked uncomfortable.

  One of the girls said, “Like a coffee?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Milk and sugar?”

  “No. Black.”

  He had a few sips. Then walked over and asked if I was the other tutor. We shook hands formally. Coming closer he said, “Your first time, isn’t it? Don’t worry. I have done this many times. They usually send me to break someone in.”

  I had heard of Adolphe Cayley in much the same way as I had heard of Eric Symes. And in both cases I met them too late. Adolphe Cayley was known because of a short poem he had written some forty years earlier. It was used in an understated English war film. I can’t remember the lines. But it was how ordinary life, during a war, goes on. And will continue to go on after the war is over.

  He took his glasses off. He had light grey eyes. And, with the other hand, rubbed them. He put the glasses back on and asked if I was Canadian. He said he had been in Canada as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

  “Did you fly?”

  “No, I wrote propaganda.”

  He had a sister, he said, in Toronto that he visited.

  I asked if he liked Toronto.

  “It is very clean.”

  He kept wearing the black fedora. I thought he was bald. But later when he took it off, his short straight hair was black, not a grey hair anywhere. And I knew he had to be in his sixties.

  I also assumed he was English. But it was evident he was something else. When I finally asked him, he said, “I’m not thoroughbred. My mother is from France. When I’m introduced, if people look surprised, I
tell them—like Hitler but with an e.” He smiled. “Any of your books in print?”

  Surprised by this directness, I said, “No.”

  “Neither are mine. So we both know why we are here.”

  The white shirt was frayed at the neck. There was a stain on his tie. His brown shoes had the leather split on top. And the heels were worn right down. Yet despite his awkwardness and the outward appearance the impression I had was of someone with an inner dignity.

  And the awkwardness also seemed to disappear when he took charge. He told two students that their jobs would be to go out every day and bring back dead wood for the fireplace. He picked two others, told them to see Connie in the office. She would give them money and a list of food to buy in Penzance for the rest of the week.

  “We have to look after ourselves,” he said.

  On a sheet of paper he drew columns for the days we would be here. And asked the students to write their names for specific jobs.

  “Every day two people will prepare lunch and dinner. Two others will wash and clean up. At breakfast we fend for ourselves. The best cooks will be on the last night, when the final meal will be something special with wine.”

  That evening we had supper in the dining room. Bare timbers across the ceiling. A bright fire in the large fireplace. We sat on fixed wooden benches by wooden tables. While we were having coffee, Adolphe stood up. “I thought,” he said, “I would say a few words before we begin.

  “Tomorrow morning, at eight, we start to work. I’ll have seven—Peter will have seven. I’II pass around these two pieces of paper. They are marked for every half-hour of the morning with a five-minute break. Put your name down for the time you want to come. We will see you in that order. We’ll talk, give you assignments and, when you write them, go over them. The rest of the time you are free to do what you like. There is a small library. There are rooms to be by yourself—though everything in them is faintly damp. There are good walks. This extraordinary landscape. And no distractions. No radio, no television, no newspapers. We are cut off—”

  He drank some coffee.