England Made Me (11 page)

Minty put on his black overcoat and went downstairs. It was Tuesday, the twenty-third. A letter from home was due. For nearly twenty years Minty had fetched his monthly letters from the General Post Office; it prevented embarrassment. On occasion it was necessary to change a lodging without the usual notice. He found the sun quite hot in the square by the station, but he always wore a coat when he went to fetch his letters. He parked his cigarette outside in a spot where a beggar was unlikely to find it. Presenting a dog-eared card at the Poste Restante counter he believed that, as an Englishman and an old Harrovian, he honoured Stockholm by choosing it as his home. For no one could deny that he was a gentleman of leisure who might have lived in any place with a post office and scope for personality.

To his surprise there were two letters; this was something which had to be celebrated with another cup of tepid coffee. He chose a leather arm-chair facing the street in the lounge opposite the station and sat there waiting for his coffee to cool. He was so certain that this was one of his days that he ground out the stump of his cigarette and bought a packet. Then he tried a little coffee in a spoon, but it was still too hot.

On the point of opening one of the letters he paused, his eye caught by an unusual activity at the station. Several men were running across the road with movie cameras. He saw Nils darting by outside and waved to him. He remembered what it was all about. ‘The film star's return home.' He had earned sixty crowns a few days ago translating into Swedish all the dope he could discover in the movie magazines. ‘The screen's greatest lover.' ‘The mystery woman of Hollywood.' A number of people (were they hired by the hour? Minty wondered) began to cheer, and several business men, with portfolios under their arms, stopped on the pavement and scowled at the station. They obscured Minty's view. Minty stood on his chair. It was just as well to keep an eye open even if it was not his own pigeon. The actress was not very popular in Sweden; something disgraceful might happen; something which someone would want hushed up. If, for example, she was hissed . . .

But nothing happened. A woman came out of the station in a camel-hair coat with a big collar; it was just possible to see that she was wearing grey flannel trousers; Minty had one glimpse of a pale haggard humourless face, a long upper lip, the unreal loveliness and the unreal tragedy of a mask like Dante's known too well. The movie cameras whirred and the woman put her hands in front of her face and stepped into a car. Somebody threw an expensive bouquet of flowers (who paid for that? Minty wondered) which missed the car and fell in the road. Nobody took any notice. A little woman in heavy black tweeds and a black veil scuttled into the car and it drove away. The newspaper-men came together in front of the station and Minty could hear their laughter.

He opened the first letter. Scott and James, solicitors.
Enclosed find money order for £15, being your allowance for the month ending next September 20th. Please sign and return the enclosed receipt
. Reference GL/RS. GL, Minty pondered. I haven't had those initials before. New blood in the old firm. After twenty years it amused him to find the smallest variation in the letter's form. Before he opened the second letter he drank his coffee for luck.

Holy Cnut, it's Aunt Ella. I'd quite forgotten the old – the old woman (be careful, Minty) was alive.

Dearest Ferdinand
. The name checked Minty. He had not seen that particular arrangement of letters for a very long while. One signed one's Christian name on cheques, of course, but somehow Minty carried off the burden of the name.
Dearest Ferdinand
. He laughed and stirred his coffee; that's me.

Well, Minty thought, this is indeed a proud day. To have heard from the family. How long this coffee takes to cool. I've a good mind to write to mother on the strength of it. ‘Aunt Ella when she last wrote mentioned.  . . .' What a start it would give the dear woman to see my handwriting on an envelope. Not sweet enough. Another lump. But I don't know her address, and if I sent it to the solicitors they would return it. Reference GL/RS. Cool enough now. I could send it under cover to Aunt Ella and ask her to stamp and forward it. My handwriting under an English stamp. What a surprise for mother, but cautious, Minty, cautious. Your imagination runs away with you, Minty. Nothing must endanger the fifteen pounds a month so regularly and gracefully paid. Reference GL/RS.

‘I see you, Nils,' Minty said, wagging his finger roguishly at the young man on the pavement, ‘you knew it was pay-day and you want a cup of coffee. And you shall have one. This is a special day. I have had a letter from the Family.'

Nils came up the steps from the street, shy and graceful as a young fawn pressing its nose against a fence and seeing life go by behind the rails. Minty was life, Minty sipping his cold coffee, Minty yellow about the lips, ‘Have a cigarette,' Minty munificent.

‘Thank you, Mr Minty.'

‘Quite a commotion at the station.'

‘Yes, Mr Minty. She is a fine actress.'

‘Did she pay for the bouquet?'

‘No, I do not think that she did, Mr Minty. The card fell off. I have it here.'

Minty said: ‘Give it to me.'

‘I thought it might be useful to you, Mr Minty.'

‘You're a good lad, Nils,' Minty said. ‘Take another cigarette. Put it in your pocket.' He looked at the card. ‘Take the whole packet.'

‘No, really, Mr Minty.'

‘Well,' Minty said, ‘if you won't'; he put the cigarettes quickly into his pocket and got up, ‘business calls. Bread and butter. The squalid necessity of earning money.'

‘The editor,' Nils said, ‘wants to see you.'

‘Trouble?'

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘I can face him,' Minty said. ‘I have fifteen pounds in my pocket; I have heard from the Family.' He walked boldly out and round the corner; his shortness, his long black coat made him ridiculous, people smiled at him and he knew why they smiled. It had been poison to him once, but that was many years ago. He had taken the poison so often in small doses, dodging between side street and side street, that now like Mithridates he was immune. He could come out into the main streets, he could stand and talk to himself and plume his dusty image in the windows of haberdashers, minding the smiles hardly at all; only a little malice stirred in his veins, moved with the blood stream.

It stirred, after the long stairs, the machine-room, the opening and closing of glass doors, at sight of the editor. He resented the red military moustache, the curtness, the efficiency; one might as well work in a factory and have done with it. ‘Well, Herr Minty?'

‘I was told you wanted to see me.'

‘Where was Herr Krogh yesterday evening?'

‘I just went to snatch a cup of tea. There was no reason why he should leave the Legation like that.'

The editor said: ‘We are not receiving very much from you, Herr Minty. There are plenty of men we can employ for outside work. I think we may have to try someone else. You haven't a trained eye for news.' He blew out his chest and said suddenly: ‘Your health is not good enough, Herr Minty. That cup of tea. A Swede would not have needed a cup of tea. Poison. You probably take it strong.'

‘Very weak, Herr Redakteur, cold, with lemon.'

‘You should exercise yourself, Herr Minty. Have you a wireless set?'

Minty shook his head. Patience, he thought with venom, patience.

‘If you had a wireless set you could exercise as I do every morning under a first-class instructor. Do you take a cold bath?'

‘A tepid bath, Herr Redakteur.'

‘All my reporters take cold baths. You cannot be efficient, Herr Minty, with a bent back, an undeveloped chest, poor muscles.'

But this was the familiar poison. He had been slowly broken in by parents, by schoolmasters, by strangers in the street. Crooked and yellow and pigeon-chested, he had his deep refuge, the inexhaustible ingenuity of his mind. He blinked his scorched eyes and said with brave perkiness: ‘So I'm discharged?'

‘The next time you let slip an opportunity . . .'

‘I would rather leave now,' Minty said, ‘when I have something to sell.'

‘What have you to sell?'

‘A friend of mine, Miss Farrant's brother, has joined the firm. A confidential position.'

‘You know very well that you get the best price from us.'

‘For that,' Minty said, ‘but for this?' and he snapped a visiting-card on to the desk. It was stained with mud. ‘She never got the flowers,' Minty said. ‘They just fell in the road. That's what comes of employing athletic reporters. They can't throw straight. You ought to have come to Minty.' He wagged his finger and left the room; he was quite drunk on two cups of coffee, his monthly cheque, on Aunt Ella's letter. In the reporters' room he saw Nils. ‘I put him in his place,' he said. ‘He won't trouble me again for a while. Has Krogh left the flat yet?'

‘No. I've just rung up the porter.'

‘He's late,' Minty said. ‘Re-union, eh, Nils? A Night of Love. We're all human,' he said, sucking in his cheeks, shivering in the draught from the wide window, seeking malevolently for a stray cigarette-packet on an empty desk and finding none. ‘It's turning cold. It's going to rain again,' and while he searched the rain came; a great blown cloud from over the lake drifted like a derelict airship above the roofs, bringing shadow, bringing the first slow deliberate drops which stung the window-sill, broke and ran down the wall.

2

The shower caught the people sitting outside the restaurant unawares. It had been hot in the sun before the cloud came up from Mälaren. Anthony was entangled in the rush for shelter. Dusk fell unwanted and for a long while no lights went up, because the sun was expected any moment to reappear. Then the waiters reluctantly turned a few lamps on, but they gave no real light and were presently extinguished one by one. The rain tapped on the tables outside, soaked through the brown leaves in the square, washed across the pavement. Anthony ordered beer.

He had no coat and no umbrella. It was just as well for him to stay where he was. He did not want to move: he would get wet while he was on the way to Krogh's and spoil his only suit. He thought of economy, he thought of health, he thought of the nursery they had had one year in the crescent, the year before he went to school. The umbrellas passed like black and dripping seals; a foreign language he could not understand fretted his nerves. If he wanted to ask for a match, to ask the way, he would not be able to make himself understood. The waiter brought his beer; it seemed to establish between them the elements of companionship because the man had understood at least that much. The pale lamps burning in the daylight dusk, the waiter who had served him, his chair, his table, ‘some corner of a foreign land that is for ever England', he dwelt on them with a lush sad sentiment. His manner momentarily had a touch of nobility, of an exile's dignity as he stared into the outer world through the splashed glass and thought of nothing so immediate as Krogh's, of Kate waiting to tell him whether she had found him work, but of rain falling on untended unmarked graves, soaking through the clay.

‘How wet it is,' he said to the waiter. ‘The trees –' He wanted to establish his corner of England a little more securely by talking about the weather; he wanted to tell him how soon the leaves would all have fallen if the rain continued. He wanted to hang his corner with the conversational equivalents of Annette's photograph, the pictures from
Film Fun
; he did not want to have to move from here for hours. He would have all his meals here and they would get to know him.