I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well Read online

  Teaching consisted mainly in giving them new words, correcting their pronunciation, dictating to them small pieces of anything I happened to see while looking out of the window. And reading excerpts from Conrad. Or else we played games. I would borrow one of their watches with a sweep second-hand and say: “Miss Laroque. You are walking in Brighton from the Steine to the West Pier. Tell me, in one minute, all the words beginning with the letter “M” that you would see. Now.”

  “Mouse . . . Mutton . . . Murder . . . Mister . . . Missus . . . Miss . . .”

  “Sir. That’s not fair.”

  “Six, Miss Laroque,” I said. “Twenty-five seconds to go.”

  “Mimosa . . . Macaroni . . . Man . . .”

  They were mainly young girls. Some were there for business reasons: to be a receptionist in their father’s hotel; another was going to be an air-hostess; another to work in an export office. But the majority were there for a holiday.

  I had been there three weeks when Mrs. Siemens came in. The age of the students didn’t vary a great deal; they were in their teens or early twenties. But Mrs. Siemens, a handsome-looking woman, with grey hair combed neatly back in a bun, and very light-blue eyes, was in her seventies. The immediate reaction to her presence was to subdue everyone. And we got a lot more done. She sat halfway up the left of the horseshoe, listening to what I was saying. Sometimes she took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. I took it that she had some allergy. When it was her turn to read, she read softly and very slow, and apologized at the end for not doing better.

  At eleven we had a ten-minute break. The teachers would go into the office and have coffee. The students would either go to a small cafe nearby or stay in the room, open the windows, lean out, and smoke. One morning I came back early and a new student, a Mexican, offered me a cigarette.

  “Sir. You like Turkish?”

  I said I did.

  Two weeks later, on a Friday, Mrs. Siemens came up to me.

  “Thank you very much,” she said graciously. “This morning was my last lesson. I enjoyed myself very much. I have a small present for you.”

  We shook hands. And I went down the stairs holding my books and this package carefully wrapped in white paper with a neat red ribbon.

  In the office I unwrapped it. It was a large package of Turkish cigarettes. I was deeply touched. None of the others had bothered to say more than “goodbye.” Perhaps, I thought, it’s just old age that feels it has to pay for even the briefest encounter.

  I asked the secretary in the office about Mrs. Siemens. She said that Mrs. Siemens was a widow. That she was part of the Siemens, in Germany. They were extremely wealthy. Her son had died and the doctors advised her to get away and do something to take her mind off things.

  And as the secretary was talking I remembered that the words I introduced to the class during her stay—the passages I chose to read or dictate—for some reason kept harping on some aspect of death: on cemeteries, gravestones, funerals, coffins.

  But this was Friday and there was little food in the house and I knew that I would have to walk back the three miles. If I had breakfast that morning, I didn’t mind the walk. After Preston Circus it was very pleasant. There were the small gardens, each one with the name of an English city and with a single stalk of corn growing incongruously in their middles.

  I went into a large tobacconist and told the girl behind the counter that I had bought this package of Turkish cigarettes for a friend as a gift, and I found out that he doesn’t smoke. The girl examined the box closely. Finally gave me fourteen shillings.

  I went out and bought half a dozen eggs, a tin of luncheon meat, a loaf of bread, some sugar, tea, cheese, a newspaper, and took the bus back.

  But that afternoon—though I watched my wife and children eat—I felt I had betrayed something.

  RINGA RINGA ROSIE

  The buchanans’ fourteenth move in five years was to a semi-detached brick cottage in Bogtown. The front faced the main road. The back had long gardens, then a cricket field which sloped down to brush and a river.

  Moving had, by now, become an accepted but reluctant part of their lives. Whenever they moved into a new address, no serious attempt was made to change the place or impose on it any sense of possession. All Sheila did was to take down a few of the pictures from the walls and cover with cloths the tin trunks and tea chests until they became part of the set furniture.

  Bogtown was a row of labourers’ cottages on one side of the main Guildford-Horsham highway. At both ends were filling stations and two pubs. One would have long gone out of business had it not also been a rest point for the coaches plying between London and the south coast. On Sundays the village boys sat on their motorbikes in front of the filling stations and watched the cars go by. At night the place was lit up by a yellow-glass Shell sign, above a garage. When the garage closed the village was in darkness except for the sweeps made by passing headlights and the glow from thrown-out cigarettes on the road.

  The Buchanans came here, as they did in their previous moves, out of necessity. They were unsatisfactory tenants. They were always behind with the rent. The electricity never received payment until they were threatened with disconnection. And since most of the time they were just trying to make sure that there was enough for the day’s food, there was little inclination or time left in seeing that the garden was looked after, or the place kept tidy. In any case the furnished accommodation which they could afford, by the time they had moved into it, had already become run down and seedy.

  This time they had moved from a partly furnished semi-detached suburban house in East Finchley. At two-pounds-ten a week, the cottage was exactly half of the rent of the house. But even at that price they were being taken.

  The rooms were damp. Patches of grey clotted the ceilings and the walls. The furniture was uncomfortable—a collection of junk that was picked up at various auction sales. And until the cold weather came, the place had fleas.

  On their second day the Buchanans went on a tour of inspection. In the long back garden dead stalks mixed with new shoots. The grass was overgrown. The rhubarb was wild. There were weeds and two dead apple trees. The middle of the garden was a rubbish dump. And from the rubbish and from every other mound where previous tenants had emptied the lavatory bucket, giant nasturtiums with thick fleshy-white tubular stalks twisted magnificently up. The nasturtiums were enormous. The white of the stalks swamped the yellow orange brown of the petals. They crawled and twisted over the ground like a series of swollen blood vessels.

  In the neighbouring gardens the grass was cut, the dividing hedges trimmed. There were small greenhouses and rose-bushes and apple, plum, and pear trees. There were cultivated blackberries, strawberries, and straight rows of vegetables.

  “We always seem to move,” Sheila said, watching three blue tits on the other side of the hedge—faces like Indians with war paint—picking at a piece of fat dangling from a wooden post, “into places where the gardens on either side are always neat and well looked after.”

  Whenever the wind dropped there was a smell of decomposition.

  He was writing a new book. And she, besides housework and trying to make ends meet, also kept the children out of the cottage by taking them for long walks so he could work in quiet—and on the way filled the second-hand pram with bits of wood which she would hide with the raincover so that the neighbours wouldn’t see—and wrote a weekly air-letter to her parents in Ottawa, which was a form of blackmail, for only on that basis did they send her ten dollars every week. Besides this, their only other income was the eighteen shillings family allowance.

  George and Sheila had never lived in the country before. They had grown up in Kingston and had come over after graduating from Queens for their one trip abroad. But this was extended when Sheila became pregnant. They married. And George refused to return until he had a book published. So far their lives consisted of c
hanging addresses, from one of the outskirts of London to the other, leaving small debts behind. But never had they allowed themselves to be cut off in the way they were now.

  In the country when they couldn’t pay the monthly newspaper bill, they had to go without newspapers. And likewise when the coal ran out. There was no alternate choice. The coalman lived five cottages away and when George promised that he would pay at the end of the week, and then couldn’t, the coalman said, “I’m a man of principle,” and refused to deliver any. George then took an old sack, went across the snow-covered cricket field, and into the drifts of the brush.

  The wind blew the loose snow onto his face and against his eyes. In the fields across the river he could see horses. They swirled in and out of focus, manes blowing. It was, he thought, like a scene in a Russian film. He went to the river, which was frozen, and began to pull the dead branches from the trees. Breaking easily the very green, strong-smelling light wood with his foot and then throwing the pieces into the sack. And carrying the sack on his back, like the coalman, he went back through the gusts. He thought that this should make him hate this kind of life. That it ought to give him some incentive, to do something else. Instead, he looked at the drifting snow, the staring horses, the backs of the cottages, the blurring gardens, and thought it was fine. Someday he would write about it.

  It was fine until he brought the sack inside the cottage. The two small children were there with running noses, and they had brought the cot down for the baby as this was the only room they could keep warm in winter. Nappies were around the fireplace, and drying clothes hung on a line from the ceiling across the room. But the wet wood only filled the room with smoke.

  They had been living in Bogtown five months. It was a Saturday morning, the middle of February, when she came upstairs and said, “There’s no food for the weekend. You’ll have to do something.” He hitchhiked into Horsham and pawned his typewriter. That lasted them a week.

  The following Saturday it was raining when she walked, without her usual knock, into his room. “The baker is outside. I’m not answering the door. We’ve no food for the weekend. And the milk lady isn’t going to deliver any more unless we pay a pound tomorrow. You’ll have to do something.”

  So he came down and fumbled with the broken kitchen-door handle. When he finally opened the door he made a joke about the broken handle. But the thin, dark man in white uniform did not find it amusing. He stood there. One hand held the wicker basket, the other his book. George took a plain white loaf. “We’ll pay next week.” The man didn’t say anything. He closed his book. But when George put his hand out again to get another loaf, the man said, “I was told that all you could have was one bread.”

  George went back upstairs to his room, sat down in the chair, and looked out of the window. The garden was muddy and drab, the cricket field very green. He saw a large bird at the end of the field, by the river, gently flapping enormous wings. It had a small black body. Then he realized it was a man carrying a long plank of wood on his shoulders. And made a note of this in his notebook.

  Downstairs he could hear Sheila becoming irritable with the children. And for his benefit she kept saying out loud, “It’s all right. Daddy will do something.”

  He came down again.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” he said quietly. “It’s raining too hard. I’ve got nothing to sell.”

  “How about the printer?”

  “He’s away for the weekend. Gone to see his sister at

  Bognor.”

  He went over his list of what he could do. When there was nothing, he could usually borrow ten shillings from the printer down the road. Once, when they were hungry and living in Clapham, he did a song and dance for them, crossing his hands while he moved his knees together and apart. It made them laugh. And laughing they went to bed. But this time she was becoming hysterical.

  “You gotta do something.”

  “But what can I do?”

  The baby fell over a broken plastic flute and began to cry, then ran up to him and buried her head between his legs. The rain came down from the roof, and down the windows, and into the barrel by the drain. It overflowed onto the sogged earth, forming pools in the depressions.

  “I don’t care what. Long as you do something.”

  He went upstairs and looked through his room. Only a few used paperbacks were left on the bookshelves and an old copy of Gulliver’s Travels that the secondhand bookseller in Horsham had refused to buy. He came down carrying a small green address book and began to telephone. Sheila and the children just stood and watched.

  “Hello, Bill. This is George Buchanan. How are you? I bet you are. We’re fine. Sheila and the kids. Look, Bill, the reason I rang. I’m hard pressed at the moment. Could you send me ten pounds? You’ll have it back by the end of the month . . . I see. Sure, I understand. How’s Tangier? No, just raining. I’ll tell Sheila. Any time you come to England, drop in. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back home next year. Sure. Bye.”

  He hung up. Looked through his address book. Then he was talking again.

  “May I speak to Paul de Secker-Remy? Hello, Duke. Guess who this is? No. George Buchanan. Bucky, the genius. Long time no see. I bet you are. Me too. Three, girls. We’re living in England. I hear you’ve got yourself some hotel in the Laurentians. Paul, the reason I called. I’m in a spot at the moment. Could you telegraph a money order for fifty dollars? You’ll have it back by the end of the month. Rose Cottage, Bogtown, near—Twenty-five will do. No . . . I didn’t. I don’t worry too much about income tax. Yeh, sure. Sounds like a nice car. I understand. Bye.”

  He continued to go through the pages of his address book, calling up people, and he was getting near the end when Kate, the three-year-old, said: “What Daddie doin’?”

  “I’m doing something.”

  “What Daddie doin’?”

  “Talking on the telephone.”

  “Don’t be silly, Daddie, that’s only the top-end of my toy iron,” Cassie, the eldest, said—a blue-eyed girl of five with blond, curly hair.

  “Daddie funny,” Kate said. “Daddie pretendin.’”

  He had gone through to his last address when Kate ran to him and took his hand. For her that game was over. She began to pull him. “C’mon, Daddie, play inga-inga-osie.”

  Now Cassie took his other hand. And Sheila, standing by the stairs, began to weep. For a short while Cassie didn’t know whether she should join her mother and cry as well. But Kate pulled him, then her, and then went over and held out her hand for Sheila. She took hold. And the four of them went around the room in a circle, singing loudly.

  Ringa—ringa—rosie.

  A pocketful of posie,

  A tishoo. A tishoo.

  We all fall down.

  And they all did, laughing.

  I’LL BRING YOU BACK SOMETHING NICE

  I

  Gordon rideau’s eyes were closed and he could hear the trucks going by outside the window on the main London-to-Guildford road, and in between the trucks, the alarm clock on the floor. At his feet the hot water bottle was cold. He shoved it to the edge of the bed. Then he opened his eyes and saw the wallpaper: wide yellow bars separated by thin black lines.

  His wife, Coral, lay with several blankets over her so that just her dark hair was sticking out. Between them a National Health orange bottle was wrapped in a nappy to keep the milk inside it warm in case the baby woke during the night.

  He could hear Kate walking down the stairs. The hall light was on. The brown curtains across the bedroom were drawn. The room was cold. There was a pitcher standing in a large basin—both had a red rose painted on the enamel—and a large bedpan with an old copy of Vogue on top. A small triptych of three angels stood on the mantel above the small fireplace which was stuffed with newspapers, cardboard, and bits of coloured crepe paper. All this they had inherited from the owner of the cot
tage. Their belongings: a steel trunk was open in a corner, in another corner two smaller trunks. Inside were clothes jumbled and spilling out.

  Coral sat up quickly, turned back the cover, and looked closely down one leg. Near the ankle she picked off a flea and, carefully, crushed it between her fingers. Then she left the bed.

  Gordon watched her. There is nothing graceful about her movements, he thought. She was wearing a grey sweater and put on a blue skirt. She took the nappy with the makeshift milk bottle and the alarm clock, and went downstairs.

  Now he lay in bed in a sense of luxury. He was alone, staying in. He drew his knees up to keep warm. He heard the radio downstairs playing dance music. And lay there wondering whether she would bring him a cup of tea.

  A door opened below and Kate called out,

  “Breakfast is ready Daddy.”

  “Coming,” he said.

  And remained in bed knowing that in a few minutes she would open the door again and say, “Breakfast is ready Daddy.”

  And he would say, “I’m just getting my socks on.”

  But he had them on all night, and his shirt, and a heavy black sweater.

  The child came lightly up the stairs. She had just turned four. A shy attractive child with blond straight hair and fine small features.

  “OK,” Gordon said as she came into the bedroom. “I’m coming.”

  “Post, Daddy.”

  She gave him a brown envelope.

  He opened it. It was a letter from the electricity company saying that a man had come yesterday to disconnect the electricity but no one was in. He was going to come on Friday at eleven unless they could pay £12 5s. 2d.