England Made Me (22 page)

‘I see,' Kate said.

‘You are quicker than Hall.'

She thought: This is the moment I've always been expecting, the moment when we leave the law behind, push out for new shores. It seemed curiously unimportant. One had always expected the drawn-out business of good-byes, tears on wharfs, last sight of shipping. There was only one question to be asked: ‘Is it safe?'

‘Very nearly safe,' Erik said. She trusted him absolutely; if it was nearly safe, there was no more to be said. One couldn't afford to be squeamish or unadventurous when one was responsible for somebody one loved. He said, ‘You'll find that some cheques, some entries in our books have been pre-dated.'

‘Of course,' Kate said. ‘Is there anything I can do?'

‘No, everything's arranged.' He got up. ‘You know, Kate, you were not wrong, after all, about the fountain. I like the fountain.' He put his hand on her arm. ‘You are quicker than Hall, Kate. Hall never liked the fountain.' She could feel uneasiness in his finger-tips.

She said, ‘We are not safe.'

‘We'll be safe when the American sales have gone through,' Erik said. ‘We shall be safe in less than a week. We are all but safe. The strike's settled.'

‘You mean something else may happen?'

‘We've got to be very careful for a few days. You can see,' he said, ‘how I trust you. We've known each other for a good many years now, Kate. Will you marry me?'

‘A wife, you mean, doesn't have to give evidence? Is that true in Sweden as well as in England?'

‘There's no danger in Sweden. I'm thinking of England.'

‘It was good of you not to make love to me.'

‘We are two business people,' Erik said.

‘I shall want a settlement for myself.'

‘Of course.'

‘And something, too, for Anthony.'

‘I like Anthony. He knows the way around. I'm fond of him, Kate.'

‘But a settlement?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a pity,' Kate said, ‘that we can't pre-date the marriage like the cheques.' She smiled. ‘Anthony will be pleased. There's nobody more respectable than Anthony. Anthony –' she dwelt on the name; she might have been marrying Anthony and not Erik at all; he stood at her side as stiffly as a best man in a vestry. Anthony's safe, she thought; I've undone the damage I did him when I sent him back, back from the barn to conform, to pick up the conventions, the manners of all the rest. He tried to break away and I sent him back. Now I've discovered a way out for him. But the exhilaration was touched with regret; she couldn't help remembering the Bedford Palace, the apples they'd eaten to take the smell away. One believed in a new frontierless world, with Krogh's on every exchange; one believed in having no scruples while one got what one wanted most – security; but the old honesties and the old dusty poverties of Mornington Crescent spoke in one's voice when one said again: ‘Anthony will be pleased. When shall it be?'

‘We'll wait a day or two,' Erik said, ‘and see how things go on. If the sale of the A.C.U. goes through all right,' he hardly hesitated, ‘we'll be able to take our time.'

Kate nearly loved him. He was so clumsily honest with her even when his books, she supposed, were already immaculately forged. She had often heard rumours of how much he had to pay in blackmail; for the first time she was in a position, if she wished, to blackmail him herself. But she didn't want to; she had used him, it was only fair that he should be allowed to use her. She said, ‘You could have trusted me anyway.'

He nodded; he was always ready to accept what she said to him as truth; he would never have let a column of figures go by like that, he would have checked them every one, whatever accountant had been over them before him. She took his hand and kissed it; she pitied him as he stood there in his padded silenced room where nobody could trouble him. She said, ‘Dear Erik, I'm going to tell Anthony,' and left the room. Going down in the lift she remembered, she didn't know why, a tramcar she had seen out of control on the North Bridge; glass and steel and the face of the driver with his hand pressed on a lever and the current running through and sparking behind the glass. It rocked by her in the dark and she could tell by the flicker of light that something was wrong. It went by her like something in the grip of a passion, bright and quick and unreliable.

‘Congratulate me,' she said aloud in the lift, ‘I'm going to be married. Anthony, I'm going to be married,' and she thought with sudden kindness: Perhaps this is what Erik feels, this sense of a sum solved, the square root taken, the logarithm correctly read. She said again in her own doorway: ‘I'm going to be married, Anthony.'

‘Who to, Kate?' he asked. He looked up quickly, he was sitting at her desk, and again she had a sense of dampness; her desk was marked with it where his elbows had rested.

‘To Erik, of course. Who else?'

‘No,' Anthony said, ‘you can't. She saw then that he had been reading the papers on her desk: he had even opened a telegram which had been delivered since she had left him.

‘How dare you?' she said. ‘You little cheat.'

‘He can't get away with it,' Anthony said.

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Oh,' Anthony said, ‘you can trust me about these things. I've got a head for figures. I can put two and two together.' He said with a schoolboy gravity, ‘You know, Kate, there are limits to what you can do. Believe me, I've discovered them. He can't pass the buck like this. Batterson's weren't born yesterday.'

‘Nor was Erik.'

‘Loo was right. It's not respectable.'

‘Give me the telegram.'

‘Why,' Anthony said, ‘you can see it all. He's bolstering up Amsterdam with the A.C.U. It's as plain as a pikestaff.'

‘You don't have to tell me,' Kate said. ‘I know it all, too. Even to the pre-dated cheques.'

‘The pre-dated cheques!' he whistled. His gravity broke. He said: ‘To think that Krogh's . . . and we know.'

‘You've got to keep it to yourself.'

‘He must make it worth our while, Kate.'

She thought: I've always believed there was this difference between us; that there was nothing I wouldn't do for him, but there were things he wouldn't do for me or for himself. She smiled with tenderness, she wasn't angry any more: I haven't discovered yet what they are. It gave her a deep pleasure to think there was something she didn't know about Anthony after all these years. She said, ‘Anthony, I'm not going to blackmail him. I'm going to marry him.'

‘But, Kate, you don't love him.' He was incorrigibly conventional, he was hopelessly innocent, the idea of blackmail lay as lightly on his spirits as a theft of plums. She was frightened by his superficiality; he didn't know where he was; he needed protection. She would do anything, she thought again, for him; she did not wish to deny him even blackmail. She felt that to deny him anything would mar the absurd happiness of his discovery. So she explained gently: ‘It's a form of blackmail. He's going to make a settlement.'

But on this point he was stubborn: ‘You don't love him.'

‘I love you.'

‘That's not the point.' He was worried; he was muddled; he said something under his breath about ‘children' and blushed with self-consciousness.

Kate said: ‘I'm sterile. You needn't be afraid,' and seeing his embarrassment, added with an enraged despair: ‘I don't want them. I've never wanted them,' and felt her body stretch to receive him. ‘You're so conventional, Anthony,' and she thought: a child inside me would be no closer than we've been, and yet there he stands, and there it would stand, blushing, self-conscious, my God, how prim, forgetting what they don't want to remember.

‘Such a waste,' he said, staring back at her, flushed, childish, inarticulate. She was prepared for him to say something about a good man's love. But they were at cross-purposes. He didn't mean that she was wasted; he meant the opportunity was wasted. ‘The chance may never come again. We could lift a good sum from him and clear out. Why, we could catch the train tonight. Tomorrow Gothenburg. We'd be in London on Saturday in time to go to Twickenham. Kate,' he said, ‘we could go to Stone's for a chop and a pint of special. I daresay my room hasn't been taken yet. The landlady would find a room somewhere for you. We shouldn't have to look for a job; he'd have paid us our price.'

She watched him fascinated. It almost seemed as if there was nothing he wouldn't do, but she knew that somewhere on that straight steel track down which his brain now so quickly drove there burned a permanent red light; somewhere he would stop, waver, make a hash of things. He wasn't unscrupulous enough to be successful. He was in a different class to Krogh.

‘It's so easy, Kate. He'll just have to pay us our price. If he refuses I'll give the whole story to Minty; even that way we'd make our fares home, and I expect you've got a little saved.'

She asked curiously: ‘You wouldn't mind living on me?' She believed that she was reaching the end of what he was willing to do, but when without hesitation he agreed (after all, he said, they were brother and sister) she felt the weariness of a traveller who discovers that his maps again are faulty. Was it possible that she had over-estimated the simplicity of that bland loved conventional brain?

Anthony got up from her desk holding the telegram. ‘I'll see him now.'

‘What are you going to say?'

‘Best be quite blunt.'

‘No, no, Anthony,' Kate said. ‘I've just been letting you run on. You can't really blackmail Erik.'

‘Why not? Kate,' he said, ‘you don't know a good thing when you see it.'

‘You aren't clever enough, Anthony, that's why. You wouldn't be here now if you had the brains to blackmail Erik. Oh, Anthony,' she said, with a deep affection, ‘what a pair we are. How I love you. If only you had the brains, if only you weren't so respectable –' she didn't finish: she was thinking of Saturday morning at Tilbury, the long ride home, the shilling in the meter and the small blue flame ready for their toast and tea. She thought: I've saved him from these, but he brought the memory with him wherever he entered, like a sandwich-man advertising some dear cheap tune: Anthony saved from Anthony, but herself incomplete without Anthony. A white bird blew up against the window, rattling its beak against the Vita glass, then drifted backwards on flat wings, like a bird seen from a plane, out-flown. This, she repeated to herself over and over again, is security, the future, this must be ours. No more past. We've lived too much in the past.

‘Trust me,' Anthony said.

‘Not with him,' Kate said sadly. ‘Dear Anthony, you're newly hatched compared with him. You don't really think that you could hold up Krogh's. He'd break you before you could open your mouth. He'd have you in prison, he wouldn't stop at anything. You wouldn't be safe. Why do you want to, anyway, now that we are getting all we need, a settlement –'

‘He's not good enough for you, Kate,' Anthony said stubbornly. He was still worried, it was obvious, about such problems as Marriage without Love, the Childless Wife. But he surrendered the chance, in a graceful friendly way he surrendered it, with no more than a backward look at her desk, at the thought of the pre-dated cheques, the telegram, the sale to Batterson's. ‘Of course, Kate, what you say goes.' She could see the birth of a new idea in his rather flashing smile. ‘At any rate, we've got to celebrate tonight.'

‘It's not public.'

‘Never mind. He's got to have a party. Listen, Kate, ring up the manager of the hotel at Saltsjöbaden and book a table, tell him whom to expect.'

‘Erik won't come.'

‘If I got him to Tivoli, I'll get him to Saltsjöbaden. This is the point: we can get a big rake-off for this dinner. Ask for a hundred crowns.'

Kate went to the telephone. ‘You think of everything, Anthony.'

‘Wait a moment. He must make it a hundred and fifty or Krogh dines at the opera.'

‘Saltsjöbaden three-two,' Kate said.

PART V

1

Y
OUNG
Andersson, directly he heard what his neighbour said, dropped his hand from the lever and took his foot from the pedal of the Krogh cutter. The machine stopped with a flap, flap, flap of its leather belt; immediately the moving tray which fed it became cluttered. His neighbour shouted to him; young Andersson took no notice. He had few ideas and small power of expression. He turned his back on the cutter and walked down the aisle between the machines towards the cloakroom. On the floor above, one of the drying-chambers became congested, its tray stuck in its groove; in the room behind an electric saw piled a tray so deep with strips of wood that they overflowed on to the floor. The man who fed it with wood went on feeding it with wood; it was his job, he didn't know what else to do, so that news of the congestion did not reach back to the room where the logs were being unloaded. The men there continued to take them one by one from the hook which drew them from the lorries waiting in a long queue in the courtyard.