England Made Me (8 page)

‘I tried to get Herr Laurin. But he's not in Stockholm.'

‘He must return.'

‘I rang up his house. He's ill in bed. Shall I ring up Herr Asplund, Herr Bergsten?'

‘No,' Krogh said, ‘they would be no good at all. If only Hall were here.'

‘Should I send a car for Andersson? You could see him here yourself, Herr Krogh. It would only take ten minutes.'

‘Your suggestions,' Krogh said sharply, ‘are useless. I shall have to go to the man myself. Have the car ready in five minutes.'

He turned his eye to the Wall Street prices and tried to read. He had no idea of what to say to Andersson. E.K. on the ash-tray; E.K. on the carpet; E.K. flashing on above the fountain while he watched, above the gateway; he was surrounded by himself. It seemed to him that he had always been so surrounded. What could he say to Andersson? He could offer him money, but if he did not want money . . . He had to be friendly, he must reassure him, he must speak to him as man to man. It seemed a cruel injustice that Laurin, whom yesterday he had forgotten so easily, Laurin whom he despised, should find no difficulty in talking to these men. How would Laurin start? He had watched him often at his game. He made a joke and put them at their ease.

I too, Krogh thought, must make a joke. He tore a leaf off his memo pad and noted and underlined the word ‘joke'. What joke? ‘And when they came to the bawdy house . . .' At the Minister's the remembrance had made him smile. It had come out of a secret past and carried with it the pathos and beauty attached to something from an unhappy youth that had never been quite forgotten. He found that he could no longer smile; he was touched by a sense of shame and melancholy at the thought that he must use even that story for the sake of his career; he could remember no others.

And then, he wondered, what next? What would Laurin have said next? Perhaps he should inquire after the man's family. He rang for the secretary and presently noted on the same slip of paper, below the word ‘joke', ‘a wife, two sons, one in the factory, a daughter aged ten'. He wrote the words carefully, he underlined them; then he tore the paper up and dropped the pieces on the floor. One couldn't plan a human relationship like a graph of production. He tried to encourage himself: this is good for me, I have been too taken up by finance, I must enlarge my scope – the human side. He told himself: there must have been a time when I was at ease with other men, and tried to remember, but he could recall only the water dripping off the oars, his father silently waiting, the early light, the weary return.

The riveters on the bridge, he thought; they were my friends. But eating the hot dog out of the wind's way he had been alone, in the hammock bed alone (he couldn't remember one girl's face); only a bawdy joke remained of all that companionship.

But later there was Hall; we used to drink cheap red wine together near the Bull Ring and talk; once Hall wore a paper nose during a
festa
; we used to talk till midnight and after; of what? The machine, the friction, the expansion of metals were the only subjects he could remember.

‘Your car, Herr Krogh.'

He picked the price list from his desk and pretended to read it. Why should I go?

He took in very little of what he saw.

‘Your car, Herr Krogh.'

‘I heard you. I'm coming.'

He turned to the end of the list. U.S. Industrial Alcohol, U.S. Leather, U.S. Rubber, U.S. Steel. He thought grimly, quite without amusement: I'm a shy man.

It no longer gave him any pleasure to think that soon a new company under his control would be quoted there, as already he was quoted in Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and Brussels.

A joke, he thought, an inquiry after his family; ought I to offer him a cigar or a cigarette?

3

‘There should be speed-boats,' Anthony said. ‘Are you sure there aren't speed-boats?'

‘Listen,' Kate said, ‘is that the lift?' She could not disguise her anxiety; she had planned everything, her voice plainly told him, but with Krogh even she could not be certain of the result.

‘What will you do,' Anthony asked, ‘if he won't have me?'

‘What will
you
do?'

‘Oh,' Anthony said. ‘I'll scrounge along. Why worry, anyway?' He was like a native campaigner accustomed to travel vast distances with the lightest food; one didn't starve; one didn't die; in the kind of war he fought, survival was the greatest victory. Kate stood with strained pale face between Krogh's bookcase and Krogh's door, and he knew that she was afraid for him. He would have liked to explain to her the baselessness of her fear, but he lacked the right words. ‘I've been on my uppers before,' he said, but the phrase even to himself failed to convey the idea of his success. This was victory: somehow to have existed; happiness was an incidental enjoyment: the unexpected glass or the unexpected girl. It was perhaps the only lesson he had thoroughly learned at school, the lesson taught by the thirteen weeks of overcrowding, tedium and fear. Somehow time passed and the worst came to an end; there were breaks, there were moments of happiness: sickness, tea in the matron's room, punishments which carried with them a momentary popularity. One even after a time adapted oneself to circumstances, learned the secret of being tolerated, wore with conviction the common uniform.

But Kate he recognized was different: she had ambition, or perhaps the greater difference (for he had ambition too: his patent hand-warmer was a sign of it: the ambition to have money to spend) was that she had hope. Behind the bright bonhomie of his glance, behind the firm hand-clasp and the easy joke, lay a deep nihilism.

When he spoke again it was with a note of patronage as if she were a child for whom he was responsible, an imaginative child, a child with ideas. ‘Don't worry, Kate, about what he'll say. Really, you know, it doesn't matter. We may as well amuse ourselves. Show me the place. Are those books his?'

‘Yes.'

‘Does he read them?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘And through here?'

‘His bedroom.'

She was ill at ease; for the moment he felt himself older, more responsible, more knowledgeable than she. He was in his element, accustomed as he was to filling up time, better able than anyone to banish apprehensions. There had been a period, lying in cubicle beds, tossed in the narrow bunks of liners, when he had waited in fear of the hand plucking at the sheet, of the man in white drill from the office coming on board with the customs. But the years had trained him to be thankful for the moment, not to look forward. Now at this instant I am alone in the cubicle, now at this instant I am happy in my bunk, now for the moment only I am with Kate, with a friend. He pushed the door of the great sliding cupboard and disclosed a dense forest of suits.

‘Like a second-hand clothes shop,' he said. ‘Does he buy them wholesale?' He began to count them, but when he reached twenty he stopped. ‘The cloth's good, but the pattern – This red stripe's a bit loud, don't you think? And the ties. He seems to have plenty, but the colour –' They dangled row upon row like bright dead tropical fish. ‘I wouldn't be seen in one of them,' Anthony said. ‘The trouble is these foreigners don't know how to dress. Don't you help him choose?'

‘No, he has a special buyer.'

‘There's the job for me,' Anthony said. ‘What a commission one could draw! But doesn't he see the cloth before it's bought?'

‘He won't even have a fitting,' Kate said. ‘He hasn't had his measurements taken for two years. The suits come up in loads like this. Once every six months.'

‘But why?'

‘Of course he always bought ready-made clothes before he was rich. I don't suppose he ever went to a tailor. I believe he's afraid of them.' She hesitated. ‘He's a shy man. He hasn't many interests.'

‘What a jest,' Anthony said, ‘to take him in hand. First of all we'd get rid of those ties.'

‘No,' Kate said suddenly, ‘no.' She stood in the doorway between the two rooms, she dissociated herself carefully from his easy intimate stroll of inspection. He noticed that her lips needed making-up; they were too pale; they did not match her dress. He thought: Is he one of these old boys who disapprove of paint and powder? What right has he to dictate to her? and continued in a quick rage of jealousy: ‘We'd clean out all this stuff.'

‘Leave him alone.'

His anger went as quickly as it came; he listened to her voice raised in Krogh's defence with melancholy as if someone he had known well many years ago had failed to recognize him in the street, had passed on through another world of consciousness in which they had no memories in common. Kate, standing beside his bed while the cracked bell rang for tea, Kate in the crowded hall saying: ‘You will miss the train. You must go now.' Kate borrowing money for him, Kate planning, Kate deciding: he wondered how far these memories were excluded by Krogh on this occasion, Krogh on that. He looked at the suits, at the ties, at the steel and the glass of the bed; he noticed for the first time her platinum watch, her expensive ear-studs.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘he'll do without me. I shall be asking for my fare home tomorrow.'

‘He'll have to take you,' Kate said.

‘Because you love him?'

‘No,' she said, ‘because I love you.'

‘Dear thing,' Anthony said, ‘I've never met anyone quite like you. Blood must be thicker than water after all. How you'd hate me if I weren't your brother.'

‘It's not true,' she said.

‘Think: the cheap lodgings, the pawnbrokers, the jobs I lose, the dreadful friends I'd bring home to share the convivial kipper. No, no, old thing, you've risen in the world. You don't know what's meant by love when you say you love me.' He laughed at her serious attention. ‘It's just family affection, Kate darling.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I love you. I'll come back to London with you tomorrow if he won't give you a job.'

‘I wouldn't want you,' he said. ‘You'd quarrel with the land-ladies. What happens through that door? His study?'

‘No,' Kate said, ‘that's my bedroom.'

Anthony put out his hand quickly and set the coats swinging. ‘My God,' he said, ‘that red stripe. It hits you in the eye. Those ties. How anyone can wear such things! If I were a shareholder, I'd never trust a man like that.'

‘And what about Erik,' she said, her anger struck like a match to flare and go out and burn her own fingers, ‘do you expect him to trust a man in a fake tie who's been sacked from more jobs than I can count?'

‘Stop it,' Anthony said, ‘stop it.' He came close to her. ‘If I'd wanted to I could have made plenty of money in your way.'

She struck at his face quickly with her clenched hand, and he caught her wrist with a readiness which came from long practice, but with pain he wondered: how often has this happened before, how often, damn it all, and with whom?

‘You are quite right,' he said gently, releasing her hand, ‘there's Maud.' He admitted himself wrong according to the formula he had always ready. ‘I was jealous of the blighter. I must love you, Kate, it's the only explanation.'

‘Family affection,' she said sadly. He let it pass. Life was too short for quarrels, and now he directed at her his whole technique of appeasement. He forgot Krogh; he even forgot Kate, she was a blurred, composite figure, she was Maud, Annette, the barmaid at the ‘Crown and Anchor', the American girl in the
City of Nagpur
, his landlady's daughter that year in Edgware Road. ‘Darling,' he said, ‘I like your lipstick. It's a new shade, isn't it?' and immediately he remembered that she was wearing none; he should have mentioned her clothes or her scent.

But ‘Yes,' Kate said, ‘yes. It's a new shade. I'm glad you like it,' and he slipped back through the years to find the appropriate slang. ‘Kate, you're a stunner.'

Then at the sound of a key turning in the hall door he momentarily lost his confidence. This was the price he had paid for his freshness, his schoolboy air of knowing a thing or two; he lived in the moment and was never prepared for the sudden crisis, the stranger's face, the new job. Before he followed Kate into the drawing-room he looked hopelessly round, plumbing the possibilities of the bed, the wardrobe and the door beyond.