I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  “Are you happy?” Bill Stringer said.

  “Belly happy,” Rosalie said and chuckled.

  Ella Fitzgerald was singing “Moonlight in Vermont” and they went around the floor in confined spaces. Their bellies were against one another but their faces were apart. Rosalie smiled. Bill Stringer saw Starkie and steered Rosalie towards him. The music stopped and they released and went over to where Starkie was selecting a new lot of records to go on. “Boy, it’s warm here,” Stringer said. Starkie said yes, but he and Rosalie did not say much. Stringer left them and went over to the bar in the hallway and helped himself to some whisky, which was in a sherry bottle. A few minutes later Starkie came up to him. “Go over to Rosalie, Bill—we’ve just had a row.” He found Rosalie sitting by the window looking dejected but she brightened up as he approached. Dance? She smiled and got up and again they were dancing. He suddenly didn’t want to sleep with her—not like this. They danced and she kept close to him. Then by the door he stopped and opened it and, holding hands, they went out.

  The fine rain had almost stopped and they stood against a tree. They could hear from behind the closed door the record player going—another song being played. The door opening and closing. And another couple somewhere to their right. He kissed her. But she wasn’t going to let it go like that. Where can we go, she said. Where could they go. It was wet. Upstairs didn’t make sense. She was ready anywhere. Against a tree? So they went behind the tree. There was a nursing sister he remembered, against a post, but she was smaller and lighter and he was nineteen then. It was over in a couple of minutes. She straightened her clothes and they had returned to the small corridor where the bar was when they saw Albert Rivers and Nat Bubis slugging it out. Stringer went in with a few others to separate them. But two businessmen in berets picked up Albert Rivers by the scruff of his jacket and forcibly began to carry him out, his legs thrashing in the air. As he was dragged by the door he kicked against the glazed door, breaking the glass into pieces.

  Starkie quickly pulled the plug out of the record player.

  “Who’s going to pay for that door?” he said, red in the face.

  An awkward silence was in the room.

  “Nobody leaves here until I know who is going to pay for that door. It cost me seventy-five pounds.”

  Rosalie went over to him, with an anxious smile, and tried to talk to him, but he pushed her away.

  “—we feed these people, we give them drink, and look what they do.”

  “Now, Jimmy, take it easy.”

  Starkie slapped her face. “You and your artist bums.”

  Although he was furious he looked very funny with the baby’s bonnet on his head tied under his chin, his long thin nose sticking out of a red face. He hurried out of the room and up the stairs.

  The guests left in twos and threes—Rosalie at the broken door, apologizing—into the rain, like cats being put outside for the night.

  That night Rosalie slept in the other wing of Driftwood Heights, the one occupied by Garry Diamond and Red Cutler.

  VI

  I first met Garry Diamond and Red Cutler lying on the beach around Rosalie.

  “You know who you remind me of?” Red Cutler said.

  “I’ve been mistaken for a lot of people,” I said.

  “Joan Fontaine.”

  I thought it was funny.

  I saw them again a couple of days later on the front. A frigate had come into the bay for a courtesy call. It was in the local paper that the navy would be guests of the town for the weekend. The frigate was outlined in lights. It looked like one of those pictures people made from using the Xs on a typewriter. Garry and Red were promenading along the front with everyone else. Red was wearing a black silk cape that was crimson on the inside. They said they had prepared a meal back at Driftwood Heights and they were going to pick up some sailors and bring them back. They were as excited as any child with the thought of adventure.

  I had to go and see them on the Monday morning. They sometimes let out rooms and I had received a letter from a college friend who was thinking of coming down with his wife and children.

  I walked up the gravel path. The large white front door was open and Wagner was booming out. Garry wasn’t in, but Red was sitting beside a considerable mahogany table, smoking from a cigarette holder, in a dark green silk dressing gown. He was writing a letter.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said.

  “No interruption at all, my dear Bill.”

  “Would you have room to put up a friend of mine and his family at the end of September?”

  “I don’t think so. In fact I’m sure Sir Edward Lolli is coming down at the end of September—I’ll ask Garry when he comes back—isn’t Wagner marvellous?”

  Red Cutler was a plump, bouncy boy of twenty-five. When he walked in town he had a trick of putting his hands in the side trouser pockets and pushing the pockets further to the front, so that the trousers were tight at the back. His clothes consisted of tangerine bathing trunks, pink and blue cashmere sweaters, and very light-coloured sports shirts and flannels. He spoke in a rich, nervous voice. Gossip had it that he lived in a fantasy world. That he lied. And helped himself to other people’s change when nobody was around. He showed me the letter he was writing. It was on stationery that said Dorchester Hotel, London, W.1. It was addressed to Ludwig Jones, and he signed himself, in an elaborate script, Wolfgang.

  “Isn’t it a glorious morning?” Red Cutler said, and put his cigarette holder back in his mouth and watched me go out, down the gravel path, by the lawn that the gardener was mowing, the large cactus, the goldfish pond, the borders of subtropical flowers, and the tall hedgerows enclosing everything inside.

  There was a Dutch journalist. He had been in St. Ives four days and had already been to three parties. He was travelling around England sending back articles for a newspaper syndicate in Holland and they appeared in hundreds of small papers. He would remain in St. Ives until his cheque for his last article caught up with him, then he would move on. He had found out from Nancy that the painter to interview down here was Carl Darch, who lived in a cottage at Zennor.

  The Dutch journalist took a green double-decker bus out of St. Ives and onto the Land’s End road. He had never heard of the painter but had, with experience, been able to ferret out those people, in various places, who could put him on the right track. In any case he was well equipped. Like the bogus street photographer, he could pretend he had a film in his camera when he hadn’t. And to make the other person feel good, click away, and then say he would send him a copy when it appeared in some paper.

  The journalist got off at Eagle’s Nest and walked down the highway. Large haunches of moorland were on the left of the highway with the gorse and bracken beginning to turn to their autumnal colours. And on the right, small neat fields with stone fences and hedges sloped to the sea. He went down a rough winding path off the highway to the right and found the painter in having tea.

  Carl Darch was a stocky medium-sized man with china-blue eyes and a curious voice. He had what appeared a large face, but it was mainly because of the large jowls. He lived in this two-roomed cottage with Aladdin lamps, a bare table, bookshelves on either side of a fireplace, filled with paperbacks. The kitchen was the far end of the room, and its window faced the farmers’ fields. Narrow steps led upstairs to a bedroom.

  The journalist began by flattering Darch. But soon got down to the business side.

  “Why don’t you live in St. Ives?’’ he asked.

  “I don’t like St. Ives very much.”

  “But it seems to me such a lovely place,” the journalist said.

  “It is a nice-looking place,” Darch said, “but don’t you think it odd that these beautiful seaside resorts are just rest homes, where people with money come to die.”

  The Dutch journalist wrote this into his notebook. “How do you feel ab
out death?”

  “For me death is the end,” Darch said, “and there is really such a short time when one is capable of living that one ought to have some moments of happiness.”

  The Dutch journalist continued to write quickly, and then said, “What’s your politics?”

  “I’m a reactionary in politics,” Darch said, “but at least I feel at home with working-class people. Not like some left-wing people I know who love the lush life—large houses, good trimmings. If you bring a working-class person into their house—they can’t stand them.”

  “What is your philosophy of life.”

  “I love life very much,” the painter said, “and I just want to record it. I went on a bus yesterday to Penzance. And riding in it—I was alone on the top—I suddenly felt so much wanting to love someone—I suddenly felt so full of loving- Do you know what I mean?’’

  The journalist nodded his head.

  “—So that if a person came along who wanted it I’d be only too ready to give.”

  The journalist began to feel embarrassed. He hoped the painter was not leading up to a point of intimacy when he would ask him for some money.

  Darch took the journalist next door to his studio. It was another cottage, smaller than the first, and bare. A window overlooked the farmers’ fields. In his notebook the journalist wrote:

  There were canvases facing the walls, with chunks cut out if them. He paints on the wrong side of the canvas, usually one colour, the ones he had on easels were all painted a dull green, and on them was one, a portrait of a woman, a rather ugly woman done in pinks, blacks, and whites, she was stretched out in the nude, but he was going to cut her just at the head, it was a distortion, but it looked like a person, and there was another of a rather long face, with the buttocks exposed to you and a long arm and a long leg, but he wanted to have the body, like a map if the human, he said, as if a person was squeezed flat, all of himself against the painting. There was another of a head showing a man shouting. And then he showed me a photograph of the Petersburg revolution with people running, people ducking, people falling, a cow fallen—that was one if his favourites, there was one of Rembrandt, several of Rembrandts, and he was enthusiastic about those—“frying pan makes good palette”—there were things cut out of magazines, “I like distortions,” the people, portraits, often the mouth is open with the small teeth caught in the middle of a scream.

  They went back to the cottage and Darch went into the kitchen side and came back with two glasses and a half-bottle of gin and poured some in each glass.

  “You seem to be the only non-abstract painter down here,” the Dutch journalist said. “—Don’t you like abstract?”

  “You have to make something particular when you paint. Things that have mattered in your life. A particular person. A particular bird. And not be too much concerned with fashion.”

  The journalist wrote this down, took a sip of neat gin from his glass, and looked around the small bare room contemptuously.

  “I suppose I could be better known,” Darch said. “Time did an interview with me when I had a retrospective show at the Whitechapel Gallery. It was a very long and exhausting interview—they even wanted to know what brand of toothpaste I used. The first week it was supposed to come out, it didn’t—Castro made his revolution that week. They said they needed the space. It was rescheduled for the following week. I remember how that week all I could think of was whether the piece was going to come off or not. In Penzance I had to use the public telephone in a kiosk by Morrab Gardens. And I found someone had left four pennies in the box. I didn’t take them, even though I was hard up. For some reason I felt I was being tested—that there was a connection between the pennies being there—whether I took them—and whether the piece was going to appear. Then, walking along Market Jew Street, by the station, I saw sixpence on the pavement by the man who sells the Evening Standard—I didn’t pick that up either as I would have any other time. I felt this was still another test—”

  “Did the piece come out?” the journalist said impatiently.

  “No.” And Darch gave an ironic smile. “That week the Russians launched a sputnik. The story was killed. ‘Pill’ is how the telegram said. I have it here.” The painter went to the bookcase and from a cupboard pulled out a thick book, it looked like a Bible, and took from it, carefully, a thin telegram that was pressed like a leaf. The journalist read it and returned it. He saw the interview as a complete waste. And decided to leave as quickly as he could.

  “Aren’t you lonely out here,” he said, putting away his ballpoint pen and notebook.

  “No,” said Darch. “Most winters I spend in London . . . I like the corruption that you can only find in large cities.” And smiled as he said this.

  The journalist got up to go.

  “In summer tourists come down here to get souvenirs,” Darch said as they were walking to the door. “Lawrence lived in this cottage—”

  “D. H. Lawrence?” the journalist said, and you could see him turn his interest on and off, just like a light switch.

  “He lived here with his wife,” Darch said. “Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield lived in that cottage,” he pointed through the open window to the next group of cottages across the yard. “People come from all over, especially America. I’ve had one couple this August. She taught art in a school. They wanted to rent the cottage for a month—”

  “That’s very interesting,” the journalist said. And he took out his notebook and ballpoint pen again. “Can you tell me more about Lawrence while he was here . . .”

  And the painter did. The journalist made notes. Then took some pictures of the cottage, the door, the lane, the view of the fields, the moors. Thanked the painter—he said he would send him a copy with his piece in it—and walked back along the rough path, noticing for the first time the bushes with blackberries on either side, the rocks, the dips in the earth, the gorse, the bracken. It wasn’t a waste after all. He lit a Senior Service, noticed that the back of the matchbox he had bought in the Sloop had a joke. He made a note of this—matchboxes with jokes—he would have to get several others. Along with the exact wording on the plaque to Wesley, the exact number of Wesleyan and Methodist chapels and churches, and the number of urinals. It was details like this that had made his name in Holland.

  Back in the cottage the painter was angry with himself for having talked too much.

  By the middle of September the season was over. The sun still shone brightly but there was little warmth in it. You could walk comfortably in the streets and along the front. Although there were a few isolated, wealthier groups, with nannies, on the now deserted beaches, the summer haul was over. And those who lived here had replenished themselves to last through another winter.

  Every day saw another hotel, café close; the chairs stacked upside-down on the tables and, in the window, guttered candles with the wax of the season run down and hardened. “Bed and breakfast” cards were put away in drawers. And those who lived on the moors lost their summer jobs and were back to their winter inertia and romantic helplessness. A few old men and women went along the tideline and gathered bits of damp wood that they brought back to their small cottages, dried them on top of the stove, and watched them burn with a salt-green flame. While the unemployed, with hands in pockets, stood outside Barclay’s Bank watching the empty main street.

  By October the place was desolate. Cold winds swept the deserted beaches and lifted the loose sand down the empty streets. At high tide the water in the harbour crashed over the seawall, hit the side of shuttered cottages, went over their roofs and landed with a wump in the next street. Few people walked the streets, even at noon. Signs creaked by the shut bric-a-brac shops. Gulls tacked across the bay. A whole white flotilla under a grey sky, their wings trembling in the wind to keep into their bank as they crabbed and fought their way towards the rocks. And one gull, caught in between the electric wires, hun
g head down, the neck arching with the wind like the neck of a kettle. Black-backs appeared in the harbour, and they were hungry. On a sloped street a boy kicked a soccer ball up, waited for it to roll down to him, then he kicked it up again. He played by himself this way for hours. The bell in the church tower sounded very clear and melancholy. The light faded early. By tea time smoke almost hid the place as fires were lit in front rooms and the white-green glare of the TV filled the windows.

  There was a stir of life on November the fifth. Bonfires on the beaches, and the rockets and stars arched across the harbour, cascaded above the town, and into the bay. Things livened up even more at the start of December. The coloured lights—with shades of Little Boy Blue, Humpty Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood—hanging on an overhead wire, in the middle of Fore Street, were lit again. And old fishermen went around the streets pushing old prams filled with Christmas parcels to deliver for the post office. While the unemployed stood grimly and watched.

  Connie’s opened for Christmas week. And decorations appeared in shop windows. Driftwood Heights had a tall evergreen in front of the lawn with lots of coloured electric lights. Rosalie Grass had turned her house into a “salon” for the painters. To many of them Driftwood, in winter, was home. They came in from the moors, or from the studios facing the beach. And when they came it was to play the part expected of them. In return, they would be flattered by the kind of subservience that Rosalie had to anyone who was pronounced “creative”; besides, there were also the comfortable chairs, the warm fire, the drinks, the food, the manor house.

  Also in winter a different kind of sponger came down. They were quite unlike the people who arrived in the summer months. The ones now looked more like businessmen. They were very serious and they talked a lot about art and literature and values and integrity. They had, compared to the people down here, a purpose in life.

  “Oh Rosalie, darling,” said one of these, a very short nervous man in glasses, with a neat grey suit, and lips like a fish, and slightly bald, “may I use your phone? I must make a few calls to London to friends to send down some money. There’s been a mix-up at the bank and my cheques are all bouncing . . .”