England Made Me (3 page)

‘What is that tie?' she asked. ‘Surely it's not . . .'

‘No, no,' he said, flashing the truth at her so unexpectedly that she was caught a victim to the charm she hated. ‘I've promoted myself. It's Harrow.'

2

The fellows asked me to have another whisky. They all wanted to hear what I'd seen. For weeks before they had scarcely spoken a word to me, said I was lucky not to be turned out of the club, for claiming a military rank, they told me, to which I wasn't entitled. The sun beat down on the pavement outside, and a beggar lay in a patch of shadow and licked his hands; I can't think to this day why he licked his hands. The captains brought me another drink and the majors drew up their chairs and the colonels told me to take my time. The generals weren't there, they were probably asleep in their offices, because it was about noon. They forgot I wasn't really a captain, we were all commercials together.

A fishing boat rocking on the swell with a yellow light a man's height upon the mast, and a man kneeling and pulling at a bundle of nets in the pale light, with the sea and the dark all round him and we passing all lit up and a gramophone playing.

I told the fellows at the club how I was on the pavement when the coolie threw the bomb. A cart had broken down and the Minister's car pulled up and the coolie threw the bomb, but of course, I hadn't seen it, I'd only heard the noise over the roofs and seen the screens tremble. I wanted to discover how many whiskies they'd pay for. I was tired of being left out of every bridge four; I didn't know where to turn for a little cash. So I said I was badly shaken and they paid for three whiskies and we played cards and I won over two pounds before Major Wilber came in, who knew I had not been there.

Smell of whisky from the smoking-room, touch of salt on the lips. The gramophone playing, new faces.

So I went on to Aden.

Skinning a rabbit among the gorse bushes on the common, I shut my eyes for a moment and the knife slipped up through a fold of skin and stabbed me under the eye. They told me over and over again that I ought to have cut downwards, as if I hadn't known it all the time, and they thought I would lose my sight on that side. I was frightened and Father was ill and Kate came. Pale-green dormitory walls and the cracked bell ringing for tea, my face bandaged and I listening to the feet on the stone stairs going down to tea. I could hear how many waited by the matron's room for eggs marked on the shell with their names in indelible pencil, and the cracked bell ringing again before the boot-boy put his hand on the slapper. And then silence, like heaven, and I was alone until Kate came.

The man ran along the roofs and they shot at him from the street and from the windows. He dodged behind the chimney-pots and slipped in the rain pools on the flat roofs. He kept both hands clapped to the seat of his trousers because he had torn them in escaping and the rain beat on his head. It was the first rain we had had, but I could tell from the sky and the temperature and the sweat on the backs of my hands that it would go on now for weeks.

‘Kate,' I said, and she was there as I knew she would be there, and we were alone in the barn.

Many things there are to consider over thirty years, things seen and heard and lied about and loved, things one has feared and admired and felt desire for, things abandoned with the sea gently lifting and the lightship dropping behind like a small station on the Underground, bright at night and empty, no one getting out and the train not stopping.

I hoped it was the engaged tone, but I knew it was the ringing tone, and I rang up four times from a box in the Circus, while the faces glared at me through the glass as they waited their turn, and I remembered three times to press Button B and get my money back, but the fourth time when I knew there was no one there I forgot. So someone got a free call, and now I could do with even that twopence in my pocket. I might toss someone heads or tails and win the price of a drink. But they are nearly all Swedes on board and foreigners aren't sportsmen and I can't speak the language.

New faces and the old faces lost, dead or sick or dying, and the To Let board outside the block. When I pushed the button no bell rang, and the light on the landing had been disconnected. The wall was covered with pencil notes: ‘See you later', ‘Off to the baker's', ‘Leave the beer outside the door', ‘Off for the week-end', ‘No milk this morning'. There was hardly one patch of whitewash unwritten upon and the messages were all of them scratched out. Only one remained uncancelled, it looked months old, but it might have been new, for it said: ‘Gone out. Be back at 12.30, dear', and I had written her a post-card saying that I would be coming at half-past twelve. So I waited, sitting there on the stone stairs for two hours, in front of the top flat and nobody came up.

Feet on the stone stairs, running, scrambling, pushing, up to the dormitory; Kate gone and the room full and the prefects turning out the lights. Not a moment of quiet even at night, for always someone talks in his sleep the other side of the wooden partition. I lay sweating gently unable to sleep, forgetting the pain under my eye, waiting for the thrown sponge, the rustle of curtains, the hand plucking at my bed-clothes, the giggles, the slap of bare feet on the wooden boards.

Old faces, faces hated, faces loved, alive or dead, sick or dying, a lot of junk in the brain after thirty years, the prow rising to the open sea, the lightship behind, and the gramophone playing.

Down the stone stairs with money in my pocket meant for her; thirty bob to the good because she was not there; once gone, lost, not to be seen again. Fill the room with film actress photos, tear the portraits out of the
Tatler
: ‘Will you sign this for an unknown admirer? One shilling enclosed for packing and postage.' Whores in plenty in Hollywood, but no whore like my whore. Unhappiness always makes a man richer: thirty bob to the good and no one to visit.

I knew at once of course what it was about when they said: ‘The Manager wants to see you.' I'd expected it for days, so every morning I put on my best bib and tucker and cleaned my teeth extra well. I've forgotten who it was who told me once I had a dazzling smile, not knowing the practice before the glass, the constant change of paste, the expensive dentists for invisible fillings. A man's got to look after his appearance the same as a woman. It's often his only chance. Maud, for example.

Nearer forty than thirty, blonde, a little over-blown about the blouse. ‘There are things a man won't do,' I said, ‘and one is to take money from a woman,' so she respected me and gave me presents and I popped them when I needed some ready. We met on the Underground. All the way from Earl's Court to Piccadilly, eyeing each other down the length of the carriage; I had a hole in my sock and couldn't cross my legs. Slow. Slow approach. Meeting at last on the moving stair.

How quick with Annette. Ringing the bell of the flat, expecting another girl; then she opened the door and I thought: ‘She's the goods.'

When I opened the door he pretended to be writing; it's a stale trick to make you feel inferior and it never fails to work. ‘Oh, Mr Farrant,' he said, ‘I want to ask you about a complaint I received from the shippers. I have no doubt that you can explain.' Well, if he hadn't any doubt, I had.

And so on to Bangkok.

Spit and hiss of water, the gramophone quiet. The lights out along the deck, nobody about.

Lectures, my God, how many lectures in a man's life? Only Kate, I think, never; simply said do this and that, never nagged. And Annette, content and quiet and affectionate behind the drawn blinds in the half-light. Maud lecturing, Father lecturing, managers lecturing. God in Heaven, I'm Anthony Farrant, as good as they are. I can add up two columns of figures in my head, multiply by three, take away the number I first thought of. Even the managers know that. ‘Brilliant,' they say at first, ‘a quite brilliant piece of work, Mr Farrant,' because I've put money in their pockets; it's only later when I put a little in my own that they ask me to explain.

Selling tea. Three hundred spoilt sacks they could do nothing with and shooting in the streets. I bought the lot from them for a song and sold them again at the full rate. There's always money to be picked up in a revolution. But they looked at me askance after that. They never trusted me again.

Voices whispering in the dormitory: ‘Someone has left a vest in the changing-room. Honour of the House,' running the gauntlet of the knotted towels, noise over the roof-tops, paper screens trembling, spoilt tea, shooting in the streets, ‘honour of the firm.'

And so on to Aden.

Everybody in bed; the night cold and the water invisible under the pale knife-edge of foam. The man in the lower bunk talking all night in a language I do not understand, and the new day grey and windy, the canvas of the deck chairs flapping, and very few people at breakfast; an unshaven chin, the dismal jocularity of stewards, a girl with hair like Greta Garbo's walking alone, a smell of oil and a long time till lunch, Kate thinking of Krogh.

How do I know that she is thinking of Krogh? How did I know that she would be waiting for me in the barn?

She said: ‘We'll spend the night in Gothenburg,' and I knew she was worried.

I pretended I wanted to go to the lavatory and slipped out. I had my clothes on under my dressing-gown, carried my shoes and socks hidden, wore bedroom slippers. The cold of the stone steps crept through the torn sole. I left the dressing-gown in the lavatory and listened at the housemaster's door. It was all so easy. He had gone to supper and his window had no bars. But Kate sent me back and I trusted her: frost on the road and the smell of nipped leaves and a clear sky and I happy with everything behind; the hard ruts in the by-road and the noisy twigs snapping underfoot and the lamps of motorists on the main road and I miserable with everything the same as before.

Thinking of Krogh. ‘Use Krogh's. Krogh's are cheapest and best.' That was ten years ago, no, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, shopping with the nurse at the general stores, stooping in the doorway under the baskets, brushing against the tins of weedkiller, examining the mowing machines, while my nurse bought Krogh's. Now they are not the cheapest and the best. They are the only. Krogh's in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland, Krogh's everywhere. ‘Buy Krogh's' has a different meaning now: ten per cent and rising daily.

And I might have been as famous and as rich as Krogh if I had been trusted as Krogh has been trusted, if I had been lent capital; they gave me a five-pound note and expected me to be grateful. There was a fortune in every one of my schemes, if they had trusted me. Could Krogh have sold a hundred bags of spoilt tea?

But I've never been trusted.

When Wilber came in, there were no more free whiskies from the fellows there; I was drummed out of that club; and so on to Colombo. Grey sea, the telegrams home, the bandit sheltering behind the chimney-pot, escape from school after the cracked bell had gone lights out, shippers' complaints, and the sound of the bomb rattling behind the roofs; a hundred bags of spoilt tea, the little Chinese officer in gold-rimmed glasses smoking Woodbines, the green dormitory walls and the grey sea and the canvas chairs flapping, Kate thinking of Krogh; Krogh like God Almighty in every home; impossible in the smallest cottage to do without Krogh; Krogh in England, in Europe, in Asia, but Krogh, like Almighty God, only a bloody man.

3

Kate heard Anthony's voice long before she was able to pick out his table. She listened with jealousy, affection, an irritated admiration, to the cheerful plausible tones. So he had found friends already, she thought: two hours alone in Gothenburg and he had found friends. It was an enviable and a shameless trait.

At first she had thought him a little daunted by the new northern country for which none of his tropic experiences could have prepared him: he had walked silently under the tall grey formal houses, beside the neat canals; when she registered her luggage at the station she watched him look askance at the beds of flowers behind the buffers. In the streets every lamp-post, every electric standard bore its bouquet like a
prima donna
. The air was liquid grey.

But he was only summing-up; he had been in more ports than she could count. When she said: ‘I'll leave you now till lunch,' and gave him money and described the restaurant where she would meet him, he nodded abstractedly and immediately straightening the fallacious Harrow tie, with cocked chin and flat broad back, he was off and away, striding down the first street; he could have had no idea where it led to.

Apparently it had led to friends: he probably expected that. He had come to terms already with the new country.

‘And then the bomb exploded,' he was saying. ‘The coolie simply dropped it at his own feet. They picked him up in bits all over the city. My voice had frightened him.'

Kate came slowly up the steps to the terrace. The tables were stacked in the garden, and on a little stage opposite the terrace a man swept wet leaves off the boards. A big drum lay at the back with a rent in its skin.

‘And the Minister?' a girl's voice said.

‘Not a scratch.'

Anthony leant an elbow on the terrace rail; he had never looked better; he positively bloomed above a world falling away to winter. Seen across the restaurant floor he might have been a schoolboy in his teens. Three tourists hung upon his words; their chairs were pushed back from the table, their glasses empty, an elderly man and an elderly woman and a girl. The ravaged plate of
smörgåsbord
, the crumbs on four plates, told her that lunch was over.

‘Why, here's my sister,' Anthony said. She was five minutes early; some easy adventurer's phrase withered on his lips as he saw her. Even his courtesy momentarily deserted him, so that while the three strangers rose he remained seated; he was screened from her by outstretched hands and polite expressions and shifted chairs. ‘Mr Farrant's been kindly showing us Gothenburg,' the elderly woman said.