England Made Me (18 page)

1

A
NTHONY
was punctual. The bells were striking eight on either side the water when he came up on to the North Bridge. It was not his usual policy. He didn't care to be kept waiting by a woman; it put any relationship at once on the wrong footing. The woman should arrive first and he should be a little late, even if it meant hanging round a windy corner just out of sight, breezy and apologetic and incurably vague. But the case had altered. He had a job, and walking briskly through the early mist from Mälaren, which lay like dew on his new overcoat, he carefully considered his new technique: efficiency, punctuality, not too much time to spend with women, a man's man, must be at the office soon after nine, can spare you an hour, a weight of responsibility.

But already at the other end of the bridge she was waiting, and his manner weakened. Her absurd name was Lucia: poor kid, how tough. She'd dressed herself, without disguise, to kill: the small, the saucy hat which went so badly with the serious face. He thought: she might be meeting her lover and not a pick-up in Gothenburg, and again, as always, he found himself betrayed into tenderness by his astonishment that any woman should take the trouble to please him (even if it meant, as in Lucia Davidge's case, the putting on of too much powder). You might say what you would, even the toughest of them had a silly innocence which charmed; even Mabel had had that.

As he came close, she almost ran. They had the bridge to themselves. Her much-too-high heels skidded on the misted pavement and her head butted him in the chest, setting the small hat further awry. They kissed like old friends, without premeditation. He drew out from under his coat the tiger, but he had not thought of sheltering it when he first left his room, and its fur was dripping wet.

‘You dear,' she said. ‘How wet it is. You're both wet. You're nearly drowned.' Indeed the heavy mist lay on his coat and hat like heavy rain. He thought, one could hardly be more wet if one had been fished up from the lake, and because a thought of that kind was apt to weigh like a cold compress too long on his brain, he laughed it away, ‘I'm a good swimmer.' But it was not true. He had always feared the water: he had been flung into a baths to sink or swim by his father when he was six and he had sunk. For years afterwards he dreamed of death by drowning. But he had outwitted whatever providence it was that plotted always to fit a man with the death he most dreaded. It was the good swimmer who took risks: Anthony, the bad swimmer, was safe. He took none. Even now, reminded of his wet coat, he took none. He was as careful of his own health as a mother of her child's. ‘What we both want,' he said, ‘is a cup of good hot coffee.'

‘And some toast and marmalade.'

‘And some eggs and bacon.'

‘If only this was London.'

They laughed and sighed and felt English and wistful and exiled. But there's no time to be lost, Anthony thought: he knew how easily he caught cold; his chest was an imposing façade hiding a congenital weakness. He ran for a taxi and they flung themselves into it anyhow, out of breath and laughing and not knowing where to go and with the uneasiness that always comes to two people who take a journey together for the first time alone.

‘Where shall we go?' Anthony said, while the taxi-man waited at the door and the heavy mist fell and gathered on the bridge, dripping gently to the pavement, and somewhere near the city hall a ship's siren blew, the sound shrilling and catching in the pipe and shrilling again like a plover feigning a damaged wing. ‘I don't know this place at all. You choose. Where shall we go?' He began to take off his wet coat and surreptitiously he felt his shirt: it was dry. That was the kind of pleasure trip's end he never felt certain of avoiding: bed and a bad cold, perhaps pneumonia.

She said: ‘Drottningholm. I haven't been there. There's a palace.'

‘But is there breakfast?'

‘There must be breakfast.'

The mist slid across the windows, and she cleared a pane with her hand. Anthony kissed the back of her neck. She said: ‘If only poor father knew the life I led.'

‘You mean me?' Anthony said.

She turned to face him with a look which was meant to be bold to the point of recklessness, but was more like that of a scared animal. ‘You don't think you're the only one?' He thought: heavens, what is she after? He wanted to make some formal declaration of the purity of his motives, that he wanted nothing at the moment but his breakfast. She said airily: ‘Even in Coventry, you know, there are one or two men one can look at.' Her eyebrows had been thinned unevenly, there was an amateurish touch about her whole face, the too-pronounced lipstick, the dry flakes of powder on her neck. Her manner had the unconvincing swagger of a new boy at a boarding school who has something to hide, some physical defect or perhaps only an absurd name. Lucia, he thought, Lucia.

But as if, having once established the fact that she was the devil of a creature, she were happy to leave the rest to him, she said: ‘How's work?'

‘Fine,' Anthony said, ‘Krogh and I are getting along like a house on fire.' He put his arm round her and absent-mindedly stroked her left breast.

‘And what – what exactly are you?'

‘I'm his bodyguard. You know these big men in industry are all afraid that someone will take a pot shot at them. Well, my job,' he said swaggering in his turn, ‘is to be first on the draw.'

She leant back against him, her saucy hat pushed askew, her mouth dry, and said in an uneasy voice: ‘It doesn't sound right.' Her excitement reminded him of his position; he squeezed her breast in a friendly formal way and said: ‘It's right as rain. He's made of money.'

‘What I mean is,' she said, ‘it's not a job for a gentleman.'

‘I'm not a gentleman,' Anthony said and kissed her.

‘Oh, but you are,' she protested. The mist began to peel away from the flowery suburban streets, leaving white tatters in odd places, round chimneys, broken columns, tall pots of flowers and fountains. ‘I liked you for it from the first. That tie – I believe it's Eton.'

‘Harrow,' Anthony admitted.

‘I'm a snob,' she said. Her confessions were oddly mixed: they varied from the dare-devil to the humble. ‘I'm a beastly snob.' There was nothing she was not ready to say about herself, Anthony thought, except that she was scared, that she didn't know how to behave next. ‘It's nice seeing you after all these foreign men.'

‘But you haven't been in Sweden a week.'

‘Does it take a week,' she boasted, ‘to know a few men?' Then again she confessed quite humbly, ‘I've never been out of England before.' He was confused; he couldn't keep up with her hinted experiences and her self-exposed innocence. When in doubt, he told himself, make love, say nothing. He kissed her again, played with her breast, stroked her thigh, but her response startled him. He was like an expert poker player who has picked too ignorant an opponent: coveting the jackpot, one has an extra ace concealed, one has expertly cut the pack, but at the same time one expects a certain primitive reserve, an attempt to play, from an opponent; there are formalities which even a swindler likes to see observed. One is irritated, watching the revealing face, hearing the too guileless bids, by the thought that one might have won as easily without all this preparation, without a doctored pack; one might really have played square.

She put her hands to his head and held his mouth to hers; he could feel her legs shift and strain. She was hungry, she wanted satisfaction, all Coventry was in her gesture; why trouble to plot and lie and charm? He wondered with dismay whether he was not simply being used, whether this affair was his defeat rather than his victory. He thought, while he embraced her, of bicycles, of how one changed trains at Rugby.

But it was impossible to pretend that one felt guilty. Nowadays, he thought, with a rather shocked puritanism, seduction is really too easy; it lacked the glamour of locked doors, the bottle of champagne, ‘a man's rooms' at midnight; he wondered whether he could cope with this excitement. He was immeasurably relieved when she withdrew to her corner of the taxi and began to make-up again, but he longed to advise her: ‘Throw away that lipstick. It's the wrong shade.' He thought of Krogh's suits, the good material wasted, the appalling choice of ties. I must take these people in hand. When I'm through with them, they'll have learnt a thing or two. The idea of a visit to Krogh's tailors, of a shopping expedition with Lucia, lent his face an air of responsibility. He said: ‘I can't call you Lucia. It will have to be Loo.' He said: ‘I suppose the shops in Coventry are rather dreadful.'

Loo said from behind her compact, blowing little scented grains of powder all over the taxi: ‘Oh, we've got some good shops in Coventry. You'd be surprised. And then, you know, it's not two hours to London. Cheap tickets every day.'

He said: ‘I suppose you manage to get a lot of fun.'

‘Oh,' Loo said, ‘I'm not promiscuous. Besides, it's not safe at home. Father screams if I'm not back by twelve. You can't imagine the ructions. Why, he sits up for me.'

‘He's quite right,' Anthony said crossly. ‘You've got no business at your age –'

‘But don't you believe in freedom?' Loo said. ‘You aren't going to go all stuffy, are you? What's the use of travelling all over the world, being in revolutions and things like that, if you don't believe in freedom?'

‘It's different for a man,' Anthony said.

‘Not now it isn't,' Loo said. ‘Not now with birth control.'

‘I don't believe in birth control.'

‘How on earth do you expect a girl to go out with you –'

‘Damn it all,' Anthony said, ‘we are only going out to breakfast.'

She said with disappointment: ‘Don't you love me a bit, Tony? Oh, I don't mean of course emotionally. I hate people getting sentimental about quite simple things. Before you know where you are they become all possessive and want you only and expect you to want them only, as if man was a molygamous, I mean monogamous, animal. But physically aren't I a bit attractive to you?'

‘You don't know what you are talking about,' Anthony said.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘I don't pretend to have had all your experience. A girl in every port and any port in a storm.'

‘I don't believe you've ever had a man,' Anthony said. ‘I believe you're a virgin.'

She slapped his face hard.

‘I'm sorry,' Anthony said. He was hurt and angry.

‘It was a beastly thing to say.'

‘I'm sorry – I said I was sorry.'

The taxi stopped. They were at Drottningholm. They sparred all the time they were drinking coffee and eating rolls. They were both hungry, but they didn't know the Swedish for eggs.

‘How can you work in Sweden without knowing any Swedish?' Loo said.

‘You don't need any language at my job,' Anthony said.

‘It's not respectable.'

‘You oughtn't to mind whether it's respectable or not.'

Immediately she began to explain to him, quite gently, because she was no longer hungry, that respectability had got nothing to do with freedom. He lost his irritation and listened with a good deal of interest. You couldn't deny that she had brains. She used the word freedom several times; he was no longer shocked now that she was not practising it with him; she was, after all, as old-fashioned as himself. In Coventry, it seemed, they still found theories to excuse a ‘good time'. She belonged to the age when latch-keys were a major problem. He couldn't help comparing her favourably with Kate. Kate was a bit cold-blooded; she didn't make excuses; he still felt ashamed and angry when he thought of that moment in Krogh's flat – ‘that's my bedroom.' He had known, of course, long before he came to Stockholm that she was Krogh's mistress, but he had never learnt it before in so many words and she had never excused herself. He had an uneasy feeling that Kate, if taxed with it, would be more likely to speak of money and a job than freedom.

Dear Loo, he thought, she's old-fashioned, she's got principles. They walked up the road to the palace. The mist had gone; under a bright-coloured umbrella on a grey bridge a man was setting out his mineral-water bottles, cherry fizz and lemonade. ‘I want some cherry fizz,' Loo said.

‘You've only just had coffee.'

‘But I like cherry fizz.'

A family of ducks came downstream, one behind the other. They had an air of serious, if rather infantile, purpose, like a squad of Boy Scouts. One expected them to begin chalking messages on the bank or to gather around and light a fire with two matches.

‘People make such a fuss about sex,' Loo said. The bright pink cherry fizz bubbled in her glass. The ducks one after the other stood on their heads. ‘Just because one sleeps with a man –'

Anthony looked away over an acre or two of parched August grass to the low white palace, like a dead sea-bird, stuffed, with spread wings. ‘Tell me, how many men –'

‘Only two,' she said. ‘I'm not promiscuous.'

‘In Coventry?'

‘Once in Coventry,' she said, ‘and once in Wotton-under-Edge.'

‘And you are ready for a third?'

‘Barkis is willing,' she said.

‘But you'll be gone in a few days.' They came out on to the terrace at the back of the cold northern Versailles. Anthony had never felt more of an exile. It was windy on the terrace: a few trees with yellowing leaves, an attempt at topiary, outside a door in one of the wings a bottle of milk. They stood side by side, with hands clasped, above the bitten grass. A man with a broom came to tell them in English that the palace was not yet open to visitors.