England Made Me (4 page)

Kate looked through them at his face, sullen and defensive and momentarily robbed of charm.

‘He's taken us all over the port,' the old man said, ‘he's shown us the warehouses.'

‘And he's just been telling us,' the girl said, ‘how he got that scar.'

‘We thought,' the elderly woman said, ‘that it might have been the war.' They were nervous and shy; they seemed anxious to assure her that they had no designs on her brother; they shielded him from the reproach that he had allowed himself to be picked up by strangers.

‘But a revolution's much more exciting,' the girl said. Kate watched her closely, and a thought – Poor thing, she's fallen for him – touched her with pity, even while she assembled as evidence against her the large unintelligent eyes, the small damp badly tinted mouth, the thin shoulders, the patch of dried powder on the neck. She remembered Annette, and Maud swelling in a frame too small for her, the cheap scent on the pillow: he's always liked them common.

‘They ought to have given him a decoration,' the girl said, ‘saving the Minister's life like that.'

Kate smiled at Anthony shifting on his chair. ‘But didn't he tell you? He's too modest. They gave him the Order of the Celestial Peacock Second Class.'

They took it with perfect gravity; it even hastened their departure. They were obviously unwilling to waste his time; it might ruin their chances of a further meeting. They hoped for one in Stockholm. Were they staying there long? the woman asked.

Kate said: ‘We live there.'

‘Ah,' the man said. He hesitated: ‘We come from Coventry.' He was one of those men who are scrupulously fair in sharing information. He screwed his eyes up at her as if he were watching the movement of a delicate laboratory balance: another milligram was needed. ‘Our name's Davidge.' His wife, a little behind him, nodded approval: the balance was correct. She sighed with relief at the delicate adjustment; she was able now to think of other things, to correct the set of her gown in the large mirror on the back wall, to tuck away a stray grey hair, to smooth her gloves, to hint with delicacy that they would soon be gone.

‘Are you on a tour?' Kate asked, and noticed how the girl who shared none of their delicacies, who seemed a deliberate reversal of all the gentility they represented, protesting with badly chosen lipstick against their dim colours, their careful distinctions, had a sensibility which recognized her hostility, while they were aware only of her courtesy.

‘An individual tour,' Mrs Davidge gently defined.

‘I'm sure,' Kate said, with deliberate vagueness, ‘we shall see you again.'

But the girl lingered. While her parents stepped with an exaggerated elderly care down into the little brown garden between the terrace and the split drum, she remained obstinately planted. She was like a small wood image, brightly painted, set to some vulgar use among the dining-tables; one looked for the ash-tray and the cigarette stumps.

‘I can manage Tuesday,' she said.

‘That's fine,' Anthony said, fiddling with a fork. Kate was sorry for her, for her crude innocence, but it didn't suit her purpose to have Anthony reminded of what he'd been saved from; the girl represented at that moment the lights behind the bicycles, the leaves on Warren Street pavement, the port in the Ladies' Bar.

‘So you can manage Tuesday,' Kate said, watching the girl rejoin her parents among the stacked chairs. ‘And you saved the Minister's life.'

‘One's got to spin a yarn,' Anthony said, ‘and they paid for lunch.'

‘I paid for your breakfast, but I never noticed you spinning anything for me.'

‘Ah, Kate,' he said, ‘you know all my stories. Haven't I always written –?'

‘No,' Kate said, ‘you've written very seldom. Telegrams for Father; picture post-cards; how many picture post-cards; picture post-cards from Siam, from China, from India; I don't remember any letters.'

He grinned. ‘I must have forgotten to post them. Why, I remember a long letter I wrote to congratulate you when you got your job at Krogh's.'

‘A picture post-card.'

‘And when Father died.'

‘A telegram.'

‘Well, it cost more. I'd never spare expense for you, Kate.' He became serious. ‘Poor thing, you've had no lunch. It was a shame to start without you, but they invited me. It was a chance of saving money.'

‘Tony,' Kate said, ‘if you weren't my brother –' She let the sentence drift away over the crumbs and the soiled glasses unfinished, meaningless. What was the good?

‘You'd be gone on me,' Anthony said, turning on her the same glance as he turned, she knew, on every waitress, calculated interest, calculated childishness, a charm of which every ingredient had been tested and stored for further use. The thought came to her: If I could put back time, if I could twist this ring Krogh gave me and abolish all this place, the big drum and the dropping leaves and that face of mine in the mirror there, it would be dark now and a wind outside and the smell of manure and he with his cap in his hand, and I'd say: ‘Don't go back. Never mind what people say. Don't go back,' and nothing would be the same.

‘She's a sweet kid,' Anthony said. ‘She's swallowed everything I said. Why, I could have sold her any pup I wanted to,' and she could watch him progressing in thought up innumerable suburban pavements, ringing at doors, being sent round to the back. She was momentarily with him, watching the straightening of the Harrow tie, the adjusted charm, the adjusted hope, trying to distinguish what was courage, what was simply the conviction that something would always turn up.

And I have turned up.

The thought of what they could do together drove out her jealousy and fear. He was clever, no one had ever denied that he was clever, and she was stable, no one had ever dreamed of denying her stability. She had grip, she held on. Five years in the dingy counting-house in Leather Lane, then Krogh's, and later Krogh. ‘I want a drink,' she said, ‘I'm dry,' and when it came, ‘To our partnership,' she said.

‘You do put it down, Kate,' Anthony said, signalling to the waiter, running his tongue along his lips. He disapproved, he didn't believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn't lie with a friend's sister, and ‘decent' girls were never squiffy. The two great standards, one for the men, another for the women, were the gate-posts of his brain. She could see his lips tingling with the maxims of all the majors whom he had known lay down the moral law before smoking-room fires.

‘Dear Tony,' she said, ‘I love you.' He wriggled uncomfortably before her complete comprehension.

‘All the same,' he said, ‘it's wrong to drink on an empty stomach.' It was nearly admirable the way in which misfortune had never modified his slight pomposity; it would have been expelled from a man more self-conscious, less resilient, by the sense of inferiority; in him disaster had only strengthened it. His shabbiest days, she could guess, had not been his least pompous; she imagined him preaching morality to Annette, abstinence to Maud. A frayed sleeve would only drive him to a Guard's tie.

She had been in Stockholm when their father died, but Anthony returning from Aden had spent his last pound on an aeroplane journey from Marseilles. He had behaved with a pomposity and a propriety that would have been applauded in every club from which he had been excluded. She remembered his telegram: ‘Our father passed away quietly in his sleep on Saturday,' an orgy of expenditure on the magnificently trite phrase, followed by a series of economies and niceties of punctuation which left the rest of the telegram incomprehensible. ‘Regret Case Mabel Damaged Transit Semi-Colon Discharged Servant Trouble Head Dash Gouldsmith Affirmative.' He had told his father, she learnt later, that he had resigned, leaning over the bedpost, grinning and breezy and optimistic to the patient (the wiped tear for the nurse, the black suit for relations, the last clean collar for the priest and the solicitor). The human voice at last took up the theme so long confined to telegrams and post-cards; he was home again and he had resigned; honour had really been involved, but he couldn't explain that.

‘A penny for your thoughts,' said Anthony, and she saw that already he had recovered his poise and stood, as it were, on another doorstep full of hope and zest and the desire to exhibit his salesmanship.

‘I was thinking,' Kate said, ‘of Father.'

‘Ah, Father!' Anthony said. ‘How glad he would have been to see us here together.'

It was true. He had always regretted Anthony's long periods abroad; a brother, he believed, was a sister's natural protector until she married. And there was this, Kate thought, to be said for the old man: Anthony's ability to get out of a dangerous predicament had never failed. In a dive or a police court one could ask for no better guide or counsellor; he would be quite certain to know by instinct the back door or the right man to bribe. Nobody but Anthony would have come unscathed through so many shabby adventures.

Already he was looking round, measuring his surroundings, bright and eager and hopeful. ‘What can one do in this place at night?' he asked. He added, with a deceit which took her unprepared: ‘I mean, of course, flickers, music-hall. One's got to be so careful in a port,' and he gazed with sudden boredom at the small lonely garden, the abandoned stage, the broken drum, the leaves drifting, the brush sweeping them away. Then he turned on her his expression of blank innocence, polished and prepared.

‘Oh, can't you be yourself?' Kate said. Tears of loneliness pricked behind the lids. She missed him painfully as he built up between them this thin façade of a fake respectability as she had missed him when he first went abroad: the cabin trunk on top of a cab, in the crammed tiny hall the suitcase rebelling against the locks, the trail of a pyjama cord across the carpet; good-bye between the umbrella-stand and the stained glass. At any rate then there was no deceit; they were as open to each other as they had been five years before in the darkness of the barn; he was white and frightened and ready to weep, as she told him that he must go, that he would miss his train, and kissed him quickly and felt her brain divided as she watched him pull at the stiff cab door, half her body go with him drearily vibrating on the black polished cushions. But at least she believed that he would write, not anticipating the picture post-cards, the ‘This is a pretty place', the ‘We bathed here', the ‘My window marked with a cross', the growing bonhomie, the strange tricks of phrase protectively adopted, until at last there came the sense that he was irrevocably one of them, one of the seedy adventurers who had not courage enough for gaol. And now, she thought, raising her compact to hide her hopelessness, even a post-card would bring him nearer.

‘Can't you be yourself?' she repeated, wondering what trick she might have learned from Annette or Mabel to surprise his sincerity. She said: ‘Tonight we'll drink a lot and go to Liseberg.'

He winced at the suggestion. ‘What sort of a place? –'

‘Oh,' Kate said, ‘it's quite respectable. Quite family. You can dance a bit or shoot a bit or jolt your liver on a switchback. I've no doubt it's dull compared with what you've seen, but if we drink first . . .'

‘You know,' Anthony said, ‘we haven't had a serious talk yet.'

‘What about?'

‘Oh, Things,' Anthony said, ‘Things. If you aren't going to have any lunch, let's find somewhere quiet,' and he raked the restaurant, the empty schnapps-glasses, the crumby plates, with austere disapproval. Nor, he declared, when she suggested that he might show the port to her as he had shown it to Miss Davidge, was it nearly quiet enough.

‘How you keep on about that girl,' he protested, ‘you might be jealous the way you speak. Can't we get out of town for a little? Isn't there a park?'

For half an hour they sat on a wooden seat beside a pond watching the water-fowl, and boys pushed bicycles with brightly painted spokes up-hill away from Gothenburg; in the block of flats at the edge of the park the lights came out, one by one, brilliant and small and defined like matches struck in a cinema. A thin scum covered the water, and as the fowl pushed their way across, a few leaves clung to their flanks.

‘You've brought me here,' Anthony said, ‘and now.  . . .' He was suddenly cold and hostile and discomposed. ‘There's one thing I won't do. I won't sponge. I've never sponged.'

‘Erik will give you a job.'

‘You know I can't speak Swedish.'

‘Swedish is not important in Krogh's.'

‘Kate,' Anthony said, ‘I'd be lost in a business like that. I'm used to something smaller. Listen. All the way across on the boat I was thinking, I'd be no good to Krogh. I wouldn't have a chance to show.  . . .' A leaf circled down, touched his shoulder, fell between them on the seat.

‘There,' Anthony said. ‘Gold. You see, it missed me.'

‘It's still green. It means nothing. Look,' Kate lifted the leaf and held it near to him in the darkening air, ‘it's been nipped off. A squirrel. Or some bird.'

‘Listen, Kate, when I was down there in the port this morning, I saw a notice. In English. They want a man with experience, an Englishman, at one of the warehouses. Book-keeping.'

‘Yes, you could do that, I suppose,' Kate said.

‘I've kept more books than I can count.'

‘There wouldn't be a future.'

She had asked him: ‘Be yourself;' now when she could hardly see his face in the quick cold dark, when she shivered and remembered: He has no coat, what has he done with his overcoat? between the thought of pawn-shops and old-clothes dealers, he came to her with complete sincerity, like a friend one has almost forgotten, catching at the sleeve. ‘I haven't a future, Kate.'