England Made Me (24 page)

‘That fountain,' the porter said, ‘was made by Sweden's greatest sculptor. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what this place cost. They dine off plate which would cost you a year's wages; he has diamond studs in his shirts.'

‘Diamond studs?'

‘In every shirt.'

Old Andersson had often spoken about wages; his son never listened; it was an old dull story. But now he became aware of an uneasiness; he looked from his oily hands to the porter cackling behind the gate. He thought of the man in the night-shift who had gone off his head and killed his wife and himself because she was going to bear another child. ‘That's a fine uniform you have,' he said.
Dear Anna
, the man had written on a piece of toilet paper,
forgive me. I can't bear the anxiety. I've got to do it. We've been happy. Love to your sister; she always was a help
. He must have killed his wife as an after-thought to spare her pain. There's sure to be some explanation, young Andersson thought, staring upwards at the highest glass floor.

‘You see, mine's brain work,' the porter said. ‘I have to know what to say to visitors. They give me a new pair of shoes every six months. One's got to be smart up here.'

‘I've got a new suit at home,' young Andersson said. ‘But I left work in a hurry. I've got to tell Herr Krogh about my father.'

‘You'll have to go to Saltsjöbaden then,' the porter said. ‘They've all gone out to dinner at the hotel.' It was as if he had a grievance against young Andersson which had to be washed off his brain in mockery. ‘You'll need evening-dress.'

‘Is it far?' Andersson asked.

‘It'll be twenty kilometres.'

‘I'd better be going,' young Andersson said.

‘No hurry. No hurry,' said the porter. ‘Plenty of time to change. There's a train every half-hour.'

‘I haven't any money for trains,' young Andersson said, ‘I'll have to walk.'

‘But you won't get there before midnight.'

‘I'll get a lift,' he said uneasily, turning away, hearing the porter laughing behind the iron flowers, not quite as confident as he had been in the comradeship of other men.

2

They left the chauffeur behind and Anthony drove. It was his idea. He said that the chauffeur made the car conspicuous. Krogh offered no objection; he had offered no objection from the start of the drive. When Anthony stopped and ordered a drink, Krogh drank too. Kate watched him with anxiety. He sat solidly over his drink, saying nothing.

At the restaurant where they stopped for the third time, Krogh broke a glass. Anthony had said, ‘Tomorrow Erik and I are going shopping. I'm going to choose him some clothes. After all, we're almost brothers now.'

She had not realized till then how much Krogh had drunk; he had had no lunch; he had been busy all the afternoon with long-distance calls. ‘We are going shopping, aren't we, Erik?' Anthony said and Krogh began to explain carefully that he wanted the party to be a success. He had every reason to be grateful to Anthony.

‘Have another drink?' Anthony said. But Krogh was still intent on finishing his speech. ‘All this morning,' he said, ‘I was able to work very clearly, because I hadn't to worry about tonight. I tore up the concert tickets. I thought – tonight we'll have a good time like we had in Tivoli.' He said suddenly, ‘
Skål
,' raising his glass, but his glass slipped, his hand followed it and it splintered between the table and his hand. He said, ‘I thought we won't care a damn.'

‘Let's move on,' Anthony said, and they got into the car again. It was quite dark now, but the huge headlamps of the car made the air in front of them a pale-green daylight. It was as if time were visible; day with night on either side. A rabbit rushed from night into day and up the hillside into the night again. They left the little restaurant with its bright beady lights under an awning in night and carried day with them at increasing speed down the blue level metallic way.

‘You've cut yourself,' Kate said, but Krogh was asleep beside Anthony, his hand bleeding on to the cushion between them.

‘My God,' Anthony said, ‘I've never had a chance to drive a car like this.' He accelerated, but one had no sense of speed; one was stationary; it was the rocky corner which whipped behind, the lighted cottage which flashed down the road, drenched for one moment in the green under-water daylight, so that one wondered at the extravagance of its small dimmed illumination as the headlamps washed through the curtains and swept the garden.

‘Erik's cut himself.'

‘It's nothing,' Anthony said. ‘The bleeding's stopped. Why wake him, Kate? It's just as good as if we were alone.' The dial trembled on 170. Anthony began to sing: ‘As I to you, As you to me'; they were alone in the great grey car.

‘We might leave him at a cottage,' Anthony said. ‘Let him have his sleep out.' He whistled a plaintive moony tune; the thin sound was spilt along the road out of the car's belly like the silk thread of a spider.

‘You wouldn't get your rake-off.'

‘That's true.'

They ran for a while beside the railway line; an electric train rushed noiselessly towards them and swerved away with a flicker of blue lightning along the rails; a small red light dodged and rocked before them. The sky was lit up behind a bluff out of range of the headlamps and when the road curved they came in sight of two cranes, steaming on either side the line, and a great treble arch of iron girder spanning the rails. A circle of arc lamps gave the workmen light; they sat astride the cross-girders, thirty feet in the air and tightened the bolts. The ground beneath them was littered with crowbars, screws and rusty brackets. Anthony braked the car and Krogh woke. ‘Stop here, he said. ‘It's the new bridge. I want to see –'

A small man in a shabby brown suit and a broken nose picked his way among the iron strands.

‘Brackets 145, 141, and 137,' he called, and a man threw a rope to him and came down it, hand over fist.

One of the cranes swung and dipped a hook through a cloud of steam, and a man loaded it with squares of brown rusty metal like giant grid-irons. They dangled over Krogh's car.

Krogh said, ‘They still use English brackets. Do you see the name? Chepstow.'

The men worked quietly, without hurry, talking gently to each other while they worked. They were joined by ropes, by the iron girders, by a common interest; the lamps of the grey car burned weakly outside the ring of arc lights. Anthony had shut off the engine and it grew cold in the car. No one took any notice of them, no one resented their presence. ‘Here a moment, Erik,' the foreman said, and a man in torn trousers followed him into the shadows behind the lights and they turned over the bolts, looking for something in the confusion of iron.

‘What brackets did you say?' a man called from the farthest girder. ‘145, 141, and 137,' the foreman said. ‘It's painted just where you are sitting,' and they laughed good-humouredly, allied together against the cold and dark, against death in the falling bolt, in faulty metal, in the frayed rope.

Krogh said, ‘I worked on a bridge myself once.' He pulled at the door of the car, ‘I want to talk to the foreman,' and stood awkwardly beside the car in his evening-dress, his fur coat over his arm. He said, ‘It was a bigger bridge than this.'

‘Give me a hand here, Erik,' the foreman said, passing in front of them, the pockets of his waistcoat stuffed with scraps of paper. He pushed his soft hat away from his smudged forehead and wiped his nose with his fingers. ‘What have you done with the fifty-seven bolts?'

‘You don't mean fifty-seven. You mean forty-three,' a man said.

The foreman took a piece of paper out of his breast-pocket. ‘You're wrong. It's fifty-seven.'

‘Then they are over here.'

The foreman limped straight towards Krogh down the sleepers. He put a cigarette in his mouth. He looked small and thin, peering this way, peering that way in the glare of the arc lights. The man in the torn grey trousers followed him and the men on the girders shouted that the bolts were here, there, beyond.

‘Give me a match, chum.'

Krogh shifted his fur coat to his other arm and felt in the pockets of his white waistcoat. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘I don't seem –'

‘Here you are,' the other man said, ‘catch.' The foreman caught the box and struck a match; he had to shield it with his hands from the wind. The arc lights showed up his hands against the night like close-ups on a screen; the fingers blunted, twisted with rheumatism, the stump on the left hand. His face was hidden by them; judging by the hands one would have expected something tougher, older, less friendly than the youngish smudged face with the broken nose.

‘Good evening,' Krogh said.

‘Evening,' the foreman said, passing him, going down the line with his companion, looking for a fifty-seven bolt.

Krogh came back to the car. He got in and sat down. ‘Scratched my hand,' he said. ‘Let's go on. It's only a small bridge.' He sat deep in the seat beside Anthony, his white tie a little crooked. ‘They have to work at night because of the trains,' he said. ‘They still get their brackets from Chepstow. Things don't alter much.' But he was altered, Kate thought. The sight of him standing on the track, interested in spite of himself, without matches when he was asked for them, without words to explain what he wanted, disquieted her. They moved slowly past the gang and he did not look out again; they had stayed the same, but he had altered.

‘On with the family party,' Anthony said.

Kate began to laugh. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘a family party. A damned dull family party.' She thought: He's one of us, fighting for his own security like one of us, he's not the future, he's not self-sufficient, just one of us, out of his proper place.

‘Oh boy,' Anthony said, driving down the accelerator, making the grey wings buck from the road, ‘this is going to be a night. Dull? Wait till you see the dinner I've ordered.'

‘It must have been the glass I broke,' Krogh said and nursed his hand.

Kate leant over his shoulder – we're a family party, one of us, I've used him and he's used me, but he's one of us, only a damned climber after all, as we are – ‘Show me your hand, darling,' she said. She tore up her handkerchief and spread it with cold cream. She took his hand with tenderness and touched the cut – poor devil, what a long and tiring way he's come, and they wouldn't take any notice of him, wouldn't recognize that he was once of their own kind, they humiliated him. She bound his hand firmly and put her arm round his shoulder: a family party, one might as well be kind: three of us now climbing together, honour among thieves.

3

The Royal Dutch plane swung off the ground, treading air; the great rubber tyre below the window bounced twice from the rough grass and then stood poised above the bright clean air station, the white roofs, near the sea the oil containers like rows of buttons on a grey-green suit. Fred Hall stuck the cotton-wool in his ears and the pilot took off his gold-laced cap and put on a little black skull-cap. One had the impression of settling to some important business. The cockpit of the Dutch plane was open to the cabin; one could see the legs of the pilot on the level of one's eyes, and above a great arc of blue cloudless sky. The wind eddies lifted the plane fifty feet at a time, as if a giant fist were exerting a personal pressure.

Fred Hall opened
Bagatelle
. The Zuyder Zee crawled backward as slowly as a worm; there was no sense of speed; it lay the colour of mud with inky patches, one island white buttressed against the low depressing swell. The plane climbed, tilted. As it climbed the air grew warmer, the sun beat more directly upon the windows. Fred Hall took off his overcoat and folded it carefully, brown with velvet lapels. With his narrow tanned face, his watch-chain with a dangling nickel disc, the silver armlets which kept his cuffs in place, he had the appearance of a prosperous bookmaker.

The plane pierced through the clouds; the sea was no longer visible, except occasionally like a small landlocked lake surrounded by Alpine peaks. ‘
Pilules Orientales
', Fred Hall read, going through the advertisements. At 1,200 metres a storm drove towards them, the rain flying like arrows parallel with the plane; in half a minute the storm was behind them, the clouds had broken, and a rainbow lay flat across the ground, moved slowly with them across country and hid a whole village under its pale colourings. ‘
La Timidité est vaincue en quelques jours
', Fred Hall read with astonished interest. It seemed odd to him that so extensive an industry, art photos and Oriental pills and invigorating medicines should be built up about a lot of skirts.

Again the clouds gathered; they lay round the plane like a heavy fall of snow. For a while they lit the page of
Bagatelle
with a brilliant rimy light, but at 1,800 metres the plane flattened out, all the clouds in the world were below; they lay, blindingly white to the horizon, and one had no sense of movement; the great rubber tyre, the heavy wing, trembled above the limitless frozen plain. Fred Hall undid his waistcoat; there was no protection from the sun; he wore a striped shirt. ‘
L'Amour au Zoo
', ‘
L'Amour au Djebel-Druse
', ‘
Amours et hantises d'Edgar Poë, ‘La Dame de Cœur
'. Fuss about a skirt, Fred Hall thought, letting the paper fall with melancholy morality upon his knee. 2,700 metres he noticed automatically and felt his right pocket and was only reassured when he remembered that he had them in his overcoat; you never knew when you might need them. All was settled in Amsterdam, he had nothing to do but report, but all the same he'd never yet been without a pair of knuckle-dusters. If you weren't a particularly good boxer, you had to look out for yourself in other ways.