England Made Me (28 page)

‘I was done here.' Minty added with indignation: ‘In the common ward.'

‘When they took out the stitches on the sixth day –'

‘They had to leave a tube in me. Even now I can't bear anything hot.'

‘I get a pain sometimes. I wonder whether they left something inside, a sponge, or forceps.'

‘Did you see the Minister,' Minty said, ‘off for a few days in town?'

‘He'll be there by the week-end.'

‘I often wonder,' Minty said, ‘whether I won't go back. Turn up suddenly. Surprise them all. I had a letter a few days ago from an aunt. One isn't quite forgotten. I'd like to be able to go to the Oratory again.' He tried to drink his coffee and put it quickly down and wiped his scalded lip.

‘A week today I'll be in England,' Anthony said.

‘I'll miss you,' Minty said, lifting his yellow hang-dog sorry-sullen face. ‘Everyone goes. Only Minty stays.'

‘Well,' Anthony said, ‘I'll have to go and tell Kate, gather enough of the ready. Have another coffee before I go?'

‘Thank you, thank you,' Minty said, very quickly in case the offer should be withdrawn. ‘It's good of you. I'd like another. It can stay cooling while I drink this one. If I wait long enough Nils is sure to come by. But one doesn't like to wait too long on just a single coffee.'

Anthony ordered the coffee. What the hell, he thought, I'm going home. If I don't feel happy at this moment, everything decided, only to get some tin and pack my bag and say good-bye again to Kate (we've lived without each other all these years, why worry now?), if I don't feel happy, when will I ever feel happy? And his brain stirred with a good enough substitute for happiness, a dry bitter quite cheerful recklessness. To burn one's boats. He said. ‘How about a farewell present, Minty?'

‘I would, really I would,' Minty said, ‘but really I haven't anything till next month.'

‘I mean one for you, a piece of headline news. I'll give it you for nothing because I like you, because you're as damned hard-up as I shall be next week.'

‘Too generous,' Minty said mechanically, anxiously watching for the waiter with the coffee.

‘Krogh's going to marry my sister.'

Minty said, ‘Oh, holy Cnut. Is it true? Are you sure it's true? I daren't lead them up the garden over that. They'd have my blood.'

‘Word of honour. Honest Injun.' He spread his fingers (a prep school memory) to show that none was deceitfully crossed.

‘Holy Cnut.'

He left Minty, swung his umbrella recklessly up the clouded watery streets; a few drops of rain tingled on the tram-tops in Tegelbacken, colour faded out of the City Hall, a tall dark pillar above the metal lake; boats burned; one couldn't stay now. In the Fredsgatan people stood in the shop doorways waiting for taxis. Anthony prodded at the iron flowers outside Krogh's with his umbrella, until the porter opened the gate: the perfect taste, the shrewd modernity of the great glass building touched his mood with malice. Everywhere the lights were on, although it was not yet midday; the electric heaters glowed and hummed. I could have told Minty a great deal more than that: the frame-up on Andersson, the sale to Batterson's. He ran up the stairs; he wanted to exert himself; the lift overtook him, shooting silently upwards with a black-coated clerk, his arms full of flowers. On a landing a girl in horn-rimmed glasses altered the position of a fleet of little metal ships creeping over a chart; she whispered aloud: ‘55′ 43″.' A telephone rang: a red light flashed above a door. Krogh's was at work: like a great liner built on credit, dependent on blind trust in the officers' control, Krogh's was on its diurnal putting out to sea. ‘67′ 25″.'

He opened a door: a great desk in the shape of a horse-shoe under low shaded lights, twenty draughtsmen sketching their ideas for twenty posters. An automatic gramophone played soft seducing tunes; a voice from a microphone instructed them. Wrong door. He opened another. Here there were separate desks of black polished wood.

‘Good morning, Lagerson.'

‘Good morning, Farrant.'

Anthony leant across one of the desks, laid his mouth close to a large pink ear. ‘I'm giving notice.'

‘No?'

‘Yes.'

The young man, Lagerson, with his mouth open had an under-water look: protuberant pink ears, a pale greenish face, he nuzzled gasping along the glass front of his tank. ‘Why?'

‘I'm tired of this place,' Anthony said. ‘No room for push, initiative.' He lowered his voice and his eyes clouded at sight of the sedate severe room. ‘What chance of making your fortune here? You ought to leave, see the world. What are you doing?'

‘Just a publicity story.'

Anthony perched with a swagger on the desk edge. In the rapt stupid gaze of Lagerson he saw himself: the bold adventurer, the man with drive. He kicked his foot viciously against the black wood. ‘This day week I have an appointment in Coventry.'

‘What's Coventry?'

‘A great industrial city,' Anthony explained. ‘Stockholm is nothing to it. Room for enterprise.'

‘Yes, it's dull here,' Lagerson whispered, mouth like rubber pressed against the tank-side. ‘One daren't say what one thinks. The sneaks there are.' His immature schoolboy face grew sullen.

‘Never you mind,' Anthony said. ‘Speak your mind. You'll find supporters. Make yourself felt, that's the only way.' He dropped his dangerous advice quite irresponsibly; he didn't care for Lagerson one way or the other; all he knew was that he was against Krogh, because of Andersson, because Krogh was in authority, because of Kate, and because he owed Krogh some gratitude.

‘Well, good-bye, Lagerson. Just got to get some tin.'

And so to the next floor.

‘Good morning, Kate.'

‘One second, Tony.'

He watched her hands move over the desk, arrange the opened letters in two piles, leaving everything neat before she spoke to him. Even her face was arranged carefully, he thought, in terms of affection, the right measure of affection: not yours sincerely, yours devotedly, yours passionately, but simply ‘Love from Kate'. He loved her, he admired her, but her efficiency irritated him as much as the fountain in the courtyard. He had been away too long, had come back to find her marked by Krogh's. He thought with gross self-pity: After all, I'm a burden to her, better be off, let her be, we've grown apart.

‘I've just been talking to Lagerson.'

‘One moment, Tony.'

They had grown apart and grown differently: life had pruned her, she had been developed by dangers along one line. He bore the knobs, excrescences, fungi of a dozen careers. He was conceited with failure and she puzzled him with the humility of success.

‘I'm going home,' Anthony said.

‘Home?'

He said with irritation: ‘I mean London – I don't suppose my room's still free. I know we haven't a home. It's a manner of speaking.'

‘Couldn't you have waited till after lunch to tell me?'

‘After lunch?'

‘I suppose you'd forgotten we were lunching together for the first time since we've been here. And you wouldn't have noticed, would you, that I'm wearing these?' she touched her flowers, ‘and this?' she touched her mouth. ‘Couldn't you have kept the cheery news until the coffee?'

‘I'm no good to you here.'

‘I suppose this is Loo's doing. What a bloody silly name it is.'

‘I don't see anything wrong in it. Names are just sounds, anyway. Kate, Loo – one's no sillier than the other.'

‘When are you going?'

‘I'm meeting her a week today.'

‘A week today.' Her engagement-pad, fourteen days at a glance, lay by her left hand. ‘Six o'clock. Cocktails at the flat to the directors.'

‘I'm meeting her for tea.'

‘And what about a job?'

‘One'll turn up. They always do.'

‘You could have kept this one. Aren't you tired, Tony, of job after job? There's no end to it after this.'

For a week, imagining that he was settled, he had forgotten how tired he was: the new faces, the new desks, interviews. He beat them off with memories of Loo, the familiar faces of the whores in Wardour Street, the kind paid companionship in hired rooms. ‘It's not respectable. The other night. What was wrong with Andersson? I won't do their dirty work. There are things I won't do.'

‘Poor Tony,' Kate said. ‘There's the difference between us. You ought never to have gone back.'

‘Gone back where?'

‘To school. I told you wrong that night you ran away.'

‘You're talking gibberish, Kate.'

‘You need money if you're going to have scruples.'

‘That's what I've come about, some tin.' He tried to pass it all off lightly, pain and good-bye, the going back. ‘I thought to myself when I got up this morning, Kate'll let me have a little ready. I'll pay it back.'

‘You thought that?' Kate said. ‘You were wrong. Don't be a fool, Tony. If you stay here a week, you'll have forgotten her.'

‘I know,' Anthony said. ‘That's why I'm going.' He was as obstinate as if his honour were involved in not forgetting, as if Loo were some message with which he had to pass the enemy lines, a verbal message, fading in his brain with every delay.

‘I knew this was happening,' Kate said. ‘I had my warning. Aren't I dressed to kill? But I expected it over the coffee. Your favourite lipstick, flowers.' She said with her first sign of weariness: ‘A sister's handicapped, isn't she? I can't appeal to you like Loo can; you'd think it indecent to say you loved me.'

‘But I do love you, Kate. Honestly.'

‘Like that. In that tone. This is how I love you, Anthony.' He had put his hand on her desk amiably, conciliatingly; she drove at his fingers with her penknife. He whipped them away. ‘For heaven's sake, Kate.  . . .'

‘The lover's pinch, Tony, which hurts and –'

‘You nearly cut me.'

‘Poor Tony, give it here. I'll make it well.'

‘I don't understand you, Kate.'

‘You used to, Tony. Don't you remember how we played telepathy in the holidays? I'd lie in bed and think of something and next morning at breakfast.  . . .'

‘It was an old trick of ours, Kate. I don't think we could work it now.'

‘I can. I knew this morning when I got up that this was going to happen. I heard you just as clearly as the time you screamed.'

Anthony laughed. ‘Then you've got the money all ready for me?'

‘No. No. You don't really believe that. Would you care for any girl who didn't think it worth her while to plot to keep you? I'm going to keep you, Tony.'

‘Against my will?'

‘Oh, I could say it was for your own good; it is for your own good; but what do I care? Because I love you, because you're the only damned man in the world I love.'

‘Brother and sister,' he jeered, with a sense again of a great waste; because it was impossible, in the same room with her, aware of her candour, her firm familiar fingers still holding the knife, even her scent, her choice of flowers, not to be disloyal to Loo. Loo was a recurring itch of the flesh; this was thirty years in common; but the itch when it was there, he knew, would always be stronger. Kate was for his satisfied moments; when you were satisfied you could turn to a sister, to family love. He said: ‘I'll ask Krogh for money. He owes me a week's pay.'

‘He'll give you nothing.'

‘I'll go to Minty then, sell him a story; I gave him one for nothing as it is. I told him about your wedding.'

‘You told him that? Tony, what a fool you are. Erik told you to have nothing to do with the Press.'

‘I could sell the story about Andersson.'

‘Tony, you're too innocent to live.'

‘He doesn't want another strike till America's through.'

He was fighting with all his resources for the itch. He tapped them out on her desk with his finger: ‘Andersson; the sale to Batterson's; dirty work at Amsterdam,' and he was aware with bitter self-pity that the itch had won: the common life, telepathy at daybreak, the scar above his eye had no power against the itch. He was as good as in Coventry already: the Moroccan café, the second room, between Woolworth's and the post office.

‘Listen,' Kate said. ‘When will the story be out? Tonight? Here's your money, and for God's sake keep out of the way.'

‘Thanks, Kate. It's good of you. I'll be off tomorrow. I'm no good really here.'

‘And Erik's ties must just go on – being Erik's ties.'

‘I'll choose him some this afternoon.' He kissed her with sudden passionate jealousy; he didn't really want to leave her, one never really wanted the itch to win. ‘What are you worrying about, Kate? You'll be coming across yourself soon. It's not as if I'm going East.'

‘No,' Kate said.

‘Don't worry, Kate.'

‘I'm just thinking,' Kate said. ‘Erik wants me.' The light was on above his door, but she waited; her face was momentarily open to him like a wide difficult plan of campaign. ‘Have dinner with me tonight, your last night, won't you? Keep me that free.' But he couldn't follow the plan; he'd lost the knack of map-reading: out of practice, far away from her.

‘Of course I will. At home?'

‘No, not at home. Somewhere quiet where we can be alone, where nobody will know where we are.'