England Made Me (9 page)

Composure came back with his first sight of Erik Krogh; even his jealousy wavered. The man was only a poor bloody foreigner after all. He wore a suit with a mauve stripe which was much too prominent, his check shirt was crude, his tie didn't tone. And there was nothing in his physical appearance to rival Anthony's. He was tall and might have had a good figure once, but he had put on flesh badly; he hadn't worn well. He was the kind of man who looked better in public than in private. Anthony began to bubble with bonhomie behind Kate's back. Here was someone to touch for tin, someone who didn't know too much and had lots of the ready. It was astonishing, almost unbelievable, that this was Erik Krogh, and again the thought came to him, as it had come after every failure, before every possibility of success: the whole damned thing is luck. What a laugh. Look after number one.

‘I'm glad you're back, Kate,' Krogh said. He retreated back into the hall, he didn't even take off his hat, he watched Anthony with apprehension, he was too tired to be polite. His tiredness welled from him like an ectoplasm in the darkness of the hall. Little noises came from the passage through the chink of the door, feet moving away, the closing of the lift gates, somebody coughed, a sea bird mewed outside the window, and the tiredness flowed out of him as if at a séance, restless with the shaking of tambourine, the creak of table.

‘Where have you been, Erik?' He closed the door carefully, nipped out the thin glitter from the passage.

‘There's a reporter waiting about.'

‘What does he want?'

The flow of weariness for a moment ceased; he said with sharp vitality: ‘A series of great Swedes.' Then he was as tired as before, feeling for somewhere to put his hat. ‘Somebody's set them at me. I don't know why.'

‘This is my brother. You remember. I wired you something –'

He came out again into the light of the room and Anthony saw how his hair receded from his temple, giving the impression of more brow than most men have. ‘I'm pleased to meet you, Mr Farrant, we must have a talk tomorrow. You must excuse me tonight. I've had a tiring day.' He waited stiffly for Anthony to go; the impression was not so much one of rudeness as of awkwardness.

‘Well, I'll be pushing along to the hotel,' Anthony said.

‘I hope you had a good journey.'

‘Oh, it wasn't so dusty,' Anthony said.

‘Electrification,' Krogh began and stopped. ‘Oh, you must forgive me. Dusty. I had forgotten the expression.'

‘Well, good-bye,' Anthony said.

‘Good-bye.'

‘Can you amuse yourself, Tony?' Kate said.

‘Oh, I'll find a flicker,' Anthony said, ‘– or the Davidge perhaps.' He let himself out and closed the door behind him very slowly; he was curious to know how they greeted each other when they were alone. But all he heard Krogh say was: ‘Dusty. I'd quite forgotten,' and a moment later: ‘Laurin's ill.'

Through the glass lift-shaft he could see the hall far below him, glittering with light; the porter's bald head bent over the visitors' book sailed slowly up towards him, two men sitting on either side of the hall uncurled like watch-springs till he could see their waistcoats, their legs, their shoes, till they faced him through the door of the lift. He got out and closed the door. When he turned again they were on their feet watching him. One of them, a young man, came forward and said something to him gently in Swedish.

‘I'm English,' Anthony said. ‘I don't understand a word.' He looked over the young man's shoulder to the smile which dawned on the other's face. Small, wrinkled, dusty, with a stub of cigarette stuck to his lower lip, he advanced with outstretched hand. ‘So you're English,' he said. ‘Isn't that lucky? I'm English too.' There was something in his manner, cocky and ingratiating, which Anthony remembered well. It was the shabby badge of a profession, as unmistakable as a worn attaché case, a golf bag hiding the detachable parts of a vacuum cleaner.

‘I don't want to buy anything,' Anthony said. The Swede stood at his elbow, his head a little on one side, listening carefully, hoping to understand.

‘No, no, you're wrong,' the man said. ‘My name's Minty. Have a cup of coffee. The porter will oblige. I'm not a stranger here. Ask Miss Farrant about me.'

‘Miss Farrant's my sister.'

‘I ought to have guessed it. You take after her.'

‘I don't want a cup of coffee. Who are you anyway?'

The man peeled the stump of cigarette off his lip; it was stuck as hard as sticking-plaster and left a few yellow shreds behind it. He ground the rest under his heel on the black glass floor. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘you're suspicious. You don't trust Minty to do the right thing by you. But you won't get a better price in Stockholm for a story.'

‘Oh,' Anthony said, ‘you're journalists, are you? Do you always follow him around? Have a cigarette?'

‘He's News,' the little dusty man replied and helped himself to two. ‘If you only knew how little news there is in this place, you'd understand how close I have to stick. I'm a space man. Nils here, he's all right. He's on the staff, but I can't afford to miss a thing.' He coughed, a long dry cough reeking of tobacco. ‘He's board and lodging to me,' he said, ‘he's cigarettes, he's coffee. My one fear is that he'll die first: a couple of lovely blessed columns for the funeral, the wreaths and all; half a column of tributes every day for a week – what an orgy – and then, silence, good-bye to Minty.'

‘Well,' Anthony said, ‘I must be going now. Won't you walk along with me?'

‘I daren't,' he said. ‘He might come out again. He was at the British Legation this afternoon and left early, much too early, and caught me napping. I'd popped across the bridge for a bite and Benediction. I can't lose him again today.'

‘He won't come out again,' Anthony said, ‘he's dog-tired.'

‘Dog-tired? I wonder why.'

‘Perhaps,' Anthony said at random, ‘because Laurin's ill.'

‘Oh no,' he said, ‘it wouldn't be that. Laurin's of no importance. No one cares about Laurin. He didn't, did he, say anything about a strike? There are rumours –'

‘He was too tired,' Anthony said, ‘to discuss things with me properly tonight. I shall be seeing him tomorrow though.'

‘We might perhaps,' Minty said, ‘– have you a match? Thank you so much – come to some arrangement. I can always do with a little intimate story. What exactly are you? You are new here, surely?' He smoked while he talked, never taking the cigarette from his mouth; his face was grey with inhaling; sometimes the smoke blew up and burned his eyes.

‘Yes,' Anthony said, ‘I've only just joined the firm. I shall have a confidential position.'

‘That's fine,' Minty said. ‘We'll work together. Give Nils a cigarette. He's a good boy.' He searched the pockets of his shabby suit. ‘Well, well, I've come out without a card, but I'll write my address on this old envelope.' He sucked a stump of pencil and looked up at Anthony's tie with sudden bright interest, a sparkle among the dust. ‘I see you were at the old place,' he said. ‘Those were the days, eh? But Henriques would have been before your time, and Patterson. I don't suppose you'd remember old Tester (six months for indecent assault). I try to keep up with them. Whose house were you?'

‘Oh,' Anthony said, ‘he would be since your time. We called him – Stodger. But shall you wait here all night, Mr Minty?'

‘I shall give up at midnight,' Minty said. ‘Then it's home and a hot-water-bottle for Minty. Have you been back lately, Mr Farrant?'

‘Back? Oh, you mean Harrow. No, not for a long time. Have you?'

‘Not for donkey's years.' The eyes were clouded with cigarette smoke; they emerged bloodshot and full of tears. ‘But I keep up with the place. Every now and then I organize a little dinner. The Minister's a Harrovian. He writes poetry.'

‘You see something of each other then?'

‘Ah, he tries not to recognize Minty,' he said in a voice that seemed to Anthony as cracked as a boot-boy's bell, swung from dormitory to dormitory, and then the hand on the clapper, the boots heavy on stone, climbing down to the cupboard beneath the stairs. Minty added shrilly, as though searching in vain for the old intonation, the jargon of gymnasiums and changing rooms: ‘He's a beastly aesthete.'

‘I'm tired,' Anthony said, ‘I must go. I'll see you again.' He held out his hand and he saw how Minty noticed at once the frayed patch on the cuff. ‘For a good story,' Minty said, ‘I'd pay you in advance. But it's got to be exclusive. You'll have plenty of others after you if you've joined Krogh's. Don't touch them. They're just a lot of foreigners. I've lived here for twenty years now and I know what I'm talking about. Harrovians ought to stick together anyway. You don't get your pickings unless you stick together.' He turned away quickly as someone rang for the lift from an upper floor and watched its sparkling crystal progress with tired greed. The young smart Swede stood at his elbow watching where he watched, turning where he turned, with the devotion of a page in an Elizabethan play who has followed a monarch into poverty and exile. So Anthony left them.

Passing through the flat doors he came immediately to the Visby quay. Lake Mälaren licked gently the last stone steps; the rail of a small steamer stuck above the level of the pavement. The light of a street lamp reached just far enough to touch the water sliding back and forth over the stone; in the saloon two sailors played at cards. Anthony stood on the pavement and stared at them through the glass pane, across the padded velvet settee, to the polished oblong table.

Cards, Anthony thought, I could just do with a game of cards. He rattled the few coins in his pocket and stared, trying to make out the game they played. The boat gently rubbed the quay, and a black cat moved up and down on the deck, sharpening its claws between the boards. He could hear the tram bells by the City Hall, and while he watched the card players a tram came by and glittered like low late sunlight into the water. One of the players looked up at him and smiled.

Anthony turned up the collar of his coat and went on to his hotel. This place, he thought, will do as well as another; it's better than Shanghai; I can get along with Minty and earn enough to keep me for a while. I'll stay a week, even if Krogh won't have me, and opening a window he leant far out into the cold wet evening air and saw a gull cruising on wide wings down the narrow street between the hotel backs, and he thought Tuesday, I must get some money from Minty or Kate or Krogh. What shall I do with her? I'll give her the tiger, she's a sweet thing. She believed everything I told her about Gothenburg, we'll find some kind of a park, that sort of entertainment's dirt-cheap. Her name is Davidge and she comes from Coventry. The gull folded its wings and came to rest on an hotel garbage can. Kate doesn't want the tiger and the vase is broken.

Kate and Krogh, he thought, and me and Maud. He shut his eyes in sudden pain and when he opened them again the gull had gone. We were in the barn and she said to me: Go back; she was right, of course, after two years I was as popular as anyone. She was by my bed and I was happy and in great pain and I was going to lose my eye. In the hall I felt nothing, I scratched my hand upon a nail turning to take my bags and I felt nothing; I was ill for six days on board with the poison; and I sent a post-card when we got to Aden. We were never together again; she used to know when I was in pain, and I used to know if she were miserable. They said that was the curse of being twins, but I think we were happy, knowing what the other thought, feeling what the other felt. This is the curse, the ceasing to know.

Krogh is with her now.

He began quickly to unpack. With each thing that he took from the bag she had bought him in Gothenburg it was as if he were re-affirming his belief that certain things were inevitable, that certain things were past, that you had to take life as you found it, success and ignorance, failure and the stranger in the bed; the rather torn photograph of Annette which he had stripped from its frame (he leant it against his tooth mug), the ties which he had crammed into his pocket at the lodgings, his new pants, his new vests, his new socks,
The Four Just Men
in a Tauchnitz edition, his dark-blue pyjamas, a copy of
Film Fun
. He turned out his pockets: a pencil, a half-crown fountain pen, an empty card-case, a packet of De Reszke cigarettes. He did not keep much in his pockets; his good suit had to last. He had bought a tie-press in Gothenburg and now very carefully he draped in it his Harrow tie; the others could wait their turn. He hung his coat upon a chair and arranged his trousers under the mattress. Then he lay for a while in his pants and shirt; he was tired, he had passed through the fear of the new faces and reached the inevitable stage, of studying where his profit lay. He had lain thus more times than he could count on a strange bed, without ever finally tiring of so much thought, so many hopes, with so little result.

It will have to be half and half with Minty unless I get a good job.

He closed his eyes and suddenly, without warning, with all the old clarity he became aware of Kate's thoughts beating in his brain. It was as if in the ravaged country between them, over the dynamited bridges, through the unfriendly villages, past the old entanglements, a spy had crept and at the frontier, joining two wires, had put them again in touch, so that she could tell him that all was for the best, that again she had managed things, that she was in control, above all that she loved him.

But love, he thought, that means me and Maud, you and Krogh. ‘That is my bedroom,' she had said when he pointed at a door and a little later she had tried to strike him with her fist.