England Made Me (25 page)

The plane slanted, his knees pressed the seat in front, they passed through bumpy air, working down through the clouds until the land appeared, square fields lying out flat to the horizon like a many-windowed skyscraper, photographed horizontally. They drove straight towards a thin mast upright in the air, but it sank away, it was a road two thousand metres down. They seemed to move so slowly that it took a minute for a farm, an exact square of white thatched buildings, to shift from the centre of the window out of sight; their shadow on the ground was the size of a thumb. The pilot's bearings taken, they rose again into the waste of cloud.

Fred Hall fell asleep. With his mouth open showing a blackened broken tooth, the nickel club medallion swaying as the headwind struck the plane, he carried with him the atmosphere of third-class Pullmans to Brighton, the week-end jaunt, the whisky and splash, peroxide blonde. His soft brown hat with a turned-up rim slipped over his forehead, and the movement registered itself in his sleeping brain as the touch of a hand. He cleared his throat and said ‘Elsie' aloud. In his dream Krogh was trying to tell him something, but Elsie interrupted, drew his attention away, wanted him to take a bath. Krogh stood outside in the road calling up to his window. ‘You haven't got your loofah,' Elsie said and told him that Lifebuoy soap was indigestible. She couldn't understand that he didn't want a bath, he wanted to speak to Krogh. He shouted loudly, rocking backwards and forwards as a storm came up over Denmark, ‘I don't like bath salts.' The Scandinavian Air Express climbed and climbed to get above the storm: 3,200 metres. ‘Skirts,' Fred Hall exclaimed and woke up. He was momentarily startled in the rocking roaring machine, rain streamed behind them like smoke, and then again they were in clear air, and the heavy grey clouds tumbled between them and the earth.

He closed his eyes again; he was no longer interested by the flight from Amsterdam; he knew the airports of Europe as well as he had once known the stations on the Brighton line – shabby Le Bourget; the great scarlet rectangle of the Tempelhof as one came in from London in the dark, the headlamp lighting up the asphalt way; the white sand blowing up round the shed at Tallin; Riga, where the Berlin to Leningrad plane came down and bright pink mineral waters were sold in a tin-roofed shed; the huge aerodrome at Moscow with machines parked half a dozen deep, the pilots taxi-ing casually here and there, trying to find room, bouncing back and forth, beckoned by one official with his cap askew. It was a comfortable dull way of travelling; sometimes Fred Hall missed the racing tips from strangers in the Brighton Pullman.

When he woke for the second time he scrambled back to the lavatory and smoked a cigarette; he sat uncomfortably on the seat, blowing acrid rings. There was about him in his ridiculous posture an air of complete recklessness; his flat narrow skull had not room for anything but obedience to the man who paid him, fidelity to the man he admired, and the satisfaction of certain physical needs: cigarettes, a monthly drunk, and what he always called ‘blowing off steam'. He wanted to blow off steam now; the amount of money he had been spending in Amsterdam frightened him. Krogh had begun where he had begun; he was perhaps the only living person in a position to measure Krogh's achievement – from the bed-sitting-room in Barcelona to the palace in Stockholm. But it did not seem strange to Fred Hall sitting on the lavatory seat; he thought with love, a love which expressed itself in gaudy presents (the jewelled cuff-links he carried in his hip-pocket), ‘I always knew the bugger had brains.' He swung his legs and spat out small perfect rings, endangering the lives of twelve passengers, a pilot, a wireless operator, and several thousand pounds of property. A little thing like that did not worry Fred Hall.

What had worried him was Laurin's directorship. He had met Laurin; he had no opinion of Laurin; unconsciously he judged men by their physique (it was doubtful whether he would have recognized Krogh's brains if they had been housed in a fragile body); Laurin was always falling sick. For a while he had been recklessly jealous; he was Krogh's oldest friend; he had never let him down, but he was not a director, he was only the man Krogh could always trust to do exactly as he was told. It was not that he was paid less than Laurin or the other directors, but sometimes ambition stirred in Fred Hall to see his name in print. He was not unreasonable, he didn't expect to be a director of the I.G.S., but sometimes it seemed to him that he might at least be on the board of some small subsidiary company like the Amsterdam one.

He stubbed out the butt of his cigarette between his legs and stood up. He didn't trust Laurin, he didn't trust anyone near Krogh except himself, he wanted to blow off steam, there was nothing he would like so much at the moment as to beat someone up. Suddenly with a fierce possessive affection he remembered Krogh's voice that morning over the telephone. ‘Fred,' he had said, as in the old days before they were employer and employed; he had told him to come directly everything was settled, he might be needed. Fred Hall stood with his legs apart in the swaying lavatory; under his feet he could feel the framework of the plane weighing on the wind currents, trembling with the engine's tremendous forward drive. My God, Fred Hall thought, if anyone's played the dirty on Mr Krogh, I'll just blow off steam. He didn't trust Laurin, he didn't even trust Kate. She's not our class, he thought. She was a skirt, she only lived with Krogh, he was convinced, for what she could get out of him. He didn't count his own three thousand pounds a year; he counted it so little that he had spent already more than a fortnight's earnings on a present for Krogh, which he would present with embarrassment, obstinate if it were refused, saying he had bought it for someone else who had no use for it and must find it a good home somewhere; they were smart cuff-links, you couldn't just throw them in the dustbin.

He staggered back to his seat; he was a little bow-legged, and that increased the turfy air he carried with him. He was anxious and impatient; he had left Amsterdam at 12.30, the selling of the shares had been quite checked, the price had even a little appreciated, he had his private information that there would be no more abnormal dealings; he had intended to catch the night train from Malmö to Stockholm. But now nothing would satisfy him but seeing Krogh before he went to bed. The plane was due at Copenhagen at 5.25, at Malmö at 5.40. He decided that Krogh's direction to come to Stockholm immediately the Amsterdam business was settled would cover the cost of an air taxi in his expenses sheet.

The wireless operator hung up his earphones; the pilot put on his gold-laced cap; the engines were shut off, and the sudden silence pressed on the ears through the wads of cotton-wool. They sank through deep cloud towards a dark-green sea, towards evening sparkling on the ripples, flat, yellow, luminous. Denmark was like the jagged pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. Nosing down, they swung in a wide arc over the sea, the wings were flattened out to lose the wind's resistance, they soared up again in a burst of the engine, then drove down, touched and sprang from the pale grass, bounced and beat it down. To Fred Hall the ten minutes' wait at Copenhagen seemed like an hour; he was fussed and aggravated, but he showed it only in his restless bowlegged walk.

And then at Malmö there was more delay, no taxi in the seaplane port; he had to wait until they fetched him one from Stockholm. He went into the refreshment-room and had a plate of creamy pastries and a cup of strong tea with a dash of brandy in it. Outside the water darkened and the masthead lights came out. With nothing better to do he began to write a letter to his mother at Dorking. He used an indelible pencil and a tear-off memo pad.

Dear Ma
, he wrote,
I'm going back to Stockholm for a day or two. I saw Jack in Amsterdam but not to speak to. Has the cat kittened yet? It's no good going on showing it that drawer; if she wants to kitten in the lavatory she will. I expect I shall be over for a few days at Christmas. Business is pretty lively. If I were you I'd lay off those shares for a week or two. Wait till I send you a wire. Did you put a fiver on Grey Lady as I told you to do? Don't you mind what the Vicar says, I'll have a chat with him at Christmas, we'll show him where he gets off. A man like that makes me cross. If I'd a day to spare, I'd just like to come across and blow off steam
. He looked out anxiously above his pile of crumbled pastry (he never had the patience to finish the dull parts of a cake), at the blue empty sky; he looked at his watch; he went on writing in a suppressed fury at time wasted; aware of the lights turned on, glittering in the glasses at the buffet, cracking in the mirrors.
I don't know what's come over the Vicar, talking to you like that. There's no harm in a little flutter
.

He put down his pencil; a light dropped out of the dark sky; a shadow brushed the water. He picked up his suitcase and dived for the door. ‘What do you mean,' he asked the braided official at the head of the steps (the water of the harbour slapped and sucked), ‘by saying there was no seaplane in the port? What about that seaplane?' and he pointed at the green light which bobbed and ducked towards them over the swell.

‘Your taxi is on the way,' the official said. He turned away from Fred Hall and shouted, but Hall caught his elbow and swung him round.

‘I'll take this one,' Hall said, ‘see. This one. I'm in a hurry.'

‘Impossible. This has been chartered for Krogh's. One of the directors,' and Fred Hall saw a staid procession advance towards the stairs: two black-coated valets with suitcases, and a thin middle-aged woman, her pinched face heavily painted, who shivered in furs, an officer from the seaplane station, who kept on saying: ‘Herr Bergsten . . . Herr Bergsten,' and the director himself, with his old bored eyes, a silk muffler twined round his scrawny neck. ‘Thank you, thank you,' he repeated, taking the officer's hand, feeling for the stairs with polished patent-leather shoes, while the official saluted and Hall stood back and thought with jealous rage: The old figurehead, treated like royalty, director Bergsten, he's never even heard of me, the nights in Barcelona when I paid for the drink: with pained possessive love: Erik can't depend on any of them, he pays them, he makes them famous, but when he wants something done he trusts Fred Hall.

‘Your taxi will be here in half an hour,' the official said, and when there was no reply he looked round, astonished at the speed with which the thin furious figure had faded into the dark.

4

Through the wide hotel windows the sea was present as a band of darkness, slipping and gleaming under the light of a small private boat bringing some business men home to dinner.

‘But this is supposed to be his celebration, not yours,' Kate said, dancing with Anthony. It was years since they had danced together. All their mutual childhood went into the perfect precision of their movements; they carried with them Mornington Crescent and their father's disapproval and the little stained-glass hall.

‘Never mind, he's marrying you, isn't he?' and the years they had been apart were pressed out between their bodies stepping to the obscure voluptuous muted tune.

She protested: ‘It'll make no difference,' and leant her cheek against his to hear ‘He's not good enough for you,' to catch some sign of jealousy: he couldn't really care for Loo.

He said: ‘By God, there's the Professor,' and the music stopped. She clapped and clapped for an encore, his breath was winy, his hand damp, he was free as she could never be free; he had no responsibilities, other people would always do the fighting for him. They returned to the table, he was a little drunk and whistled some war-time tune, picked up in what club, on what old creaking horned gramophone, in the company of ex-officers, about an only girl; his melodies, like his slang, never contemporary; he lived the life of a generation before him, snatching a girl between leave trains. ‘When I'm in love and you're in love.' He said: ‘Now, if Loo were here –'

‘Is that really Hammarsten?' Erik said.

Past three mirrors, past a bank of flowers, the Professor sat in state with a small neat platinum blonde girl on his knee; he had lost his glasses down her dress and now he looked for them, while she wriggled and laughed. A tall handsome black-haired woman with a white tragedy face beat her glass up and down on the table and told him she was disgusted, that she wouldn't take the part; a pale withered man lay across the table with his head in a plate. He hadn't got beyond the soup.

‘He's choosing his cast,' Kate said.

Erik Krogh began to laugh. Everyone looked at him. The manager came out from behind the bank of flowers and clapped his hands to the orchestra with blithe relief; he had been spying for half an hour between the leaves and the petals to see whether the party would be a success; all the waiters began to run about filling up glasses; a weight was lifted. Hammarsten suddenly spied them; he had his glasses again and now, spilling the blonde girl in her primrose dress on to the floor like a glass of hock, he came towards them, slipping and sodden and the worse for wear, tight black trousers and tailcoat. The two women trailed after him, leaving the pale man in the soup.

‘Sit down, Professor,' Kate said. ‘Are you choosing your cast?'

The black tragic woman said: ‘What an idea. There's a brothel scene,' she said using the English word as if she wouldn't sully the Swedish language.

‘Hot stuff,' Anthony said.

The little blonde said: ‘Well, if you won't take the part, I will. Won't I, Professor?'

‘Back row of the chorus.'

‘Well, I've legs, haven't I? Much good you'd be in a brothel.'

‘Ladies,' said the Professor, ‘ladies,' and dropped his glasses on the dark woman's lap.

‘But have you chosen,' Anthony asked, ‘what's his name – the druid?'