England Made Me (5 page)

He was quiet, he was sincere, he was completely himself, he was all that she had asked him to be, and it amazed her even while she tried to grasp the opportunity. She had known him to be unreliable, deceitful in small ways, hopeless with money, but she had not realized his self-knowledge.

He repeated: ‘You know that as well as I do, Kate. I haven't a future.'

The water-fowl came up out of the water, feathers blown out against the cold. Distended like small brown footballs, they rolled up the slope of grass and disappeared, one after the other, flattening the leaves under their webbed feet.

‘You have, you have,' she said; her fear of proving inadequate to her opportunity conflicted with her gladness that at last, as so many years ago, they were face to face without reserve. ‘Trust me.' She thought: I have him now, this is Anthony, I must not let him go, but instead of the right word, she knew again a division of the brain and heart, so that it was she sitting there without a coat, without a future, without a friend, in a Harrow tie and an air. She would have taken him in her arms if he had not spoken.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘the luck may turn. Something may turn up.' She recognized at once that the moment had passed. He was as far away from her as ever he had been in the Shanghai Club, on the Aden golf-course. It had been less self-knowledge than a temporary break in the cloud of his self-deception. She had thought he needed help from her, but he needed only a breeze from the right quarter, a thought, a particular memory. ‘Did I ever tell you about the spoilt tea?'

‘I can't remember. It's cold. Let's go. About that warehouse . . . .'

But now the wind was set fair. He was ready to admit himself wrong even to the extent of admitting that after all he had a future. ‘I can see,' he said, ‘you don't like the idea.' He laughed with an unbelievable freedom from care. ‘I'll give your friend Krogh a trial.' He was like a man who has narrowly escaped a great danger. Relief made him hilarious, and hilarity made him the best of company.

And so he remained throughout the evening. He was tossed from one extreme to another; she had thought herself lucky to catch him in his moment of depression and truth, but it was a pleasure of another kind to catch him at his most joyous and his most false. He told her stories which began with a rather pallid veracity, but were soon as coloured as any he could possibly have told Maud or Annette or the Davidge girl.

‘But I wrote to you about the General Manager's Fiat?'

‘No, no,' Kate said, ‘there was nothing about a Fiat on any picture post-card.' After two schnaps, she was almost ready to believe what he told her. She warmed to him. She put her hand on his and said: ‘It's good to have you here, Tony. Go on.' But before he could speak, she had missed his ring (the signet solemnly presented to each of them on the twenty-first birthday, or rather in his case sent out to him, she could not remember where, by registered post, ‘Care of the club').

‘What have you done with your ring? Didn't you ever get the ring?'

She could see how he measured her mood, calculated how much he could tell her. Is the evening going to be a failure after all, she wondered? I must break myself, oh, I must break myself quickly of this habit of asking questions. But after so many years of separation they left her tongue before she knew.

‘Never mind,' she said, ‘go on. Tell me about the car, the manager's car.'

Anthony said slowly, putting his left hand over hers, with a protective patronizing gesture, bland and candid: ‘But I should like to tell you about that ring. It's a long story, but it's interesting. Old girl, you just can't imagine what strange spots that ring has led me to.'

‘No, no,' she said, ‘don't tell me that. Tell me about the car. But first let's move on, we can't get another schnaps here.' It amused her to guide him through the intricacies of the licensing laws, to get a little drunk on schnaps, in spite of the regulations (two for a man, one for a woman).

‘And now,' he said, ‘Liseberg.'

After the canal, the rustle of water at the edge of the grass banks, the whisper of men and women sitting on benches in the dark, the suburban road with no one passing, a limping procession of sounds came round the corners; not music, but as if a tuner were touching the keys of a piano, one after the other, in no particular order in a house a long way away. Above the house-tops a succession of towers was drawn sketchily in white lights; the notes came together as a tune fretting the memory, became through the high-arched entrance the blast of a remembered rhythm (the Foreign Secretary in a high stiff collar replied with extreme formality to her
skål
, while Krogh trod across the terrace from the lavatory, bowing to this side, bowing to that, and the couples danced beyond the glass doors, jingling and twinkling like chandeliers).

‘Come along, old girl,' Anthony said, ‘let's shake a leg.' The more he drank, the further back he plunged in time. His slang began the evening bright and hollow with the immediate post-war years, but soon it dripped with the mud of trenches, culled from the tongues of ex-officers gossiping under the punkas of zero hour and the Victoria Palace, of the leave-trains and the Bing Boys.

A rocket spat and flared and failed to burst in the middle air, going damply out and the stick falling; in a square bounded by the stone pillars of dance-halls and restaurants an emerald fountain played into a wide shallow emerald pool: up, up like the spire of a tropical plant under a sky cold and deep and cloudless, down again in a green lustre, splashing from pool to paving, turning silver at the margin. An empty switchback shot above the roofs and out of sight, whining like a spent record. In the booths beyond ragged firing-squads shot off their pieces.

‘This way. We'll go this way.'

A pirate ship floated on a still lake flecked with cigarette-cartons. A flower-lined path led in spirals to a little platform where two men in white overalls played chess against all comers at half a crown a game. Wherever you moved, through pink or green courtyards, through carefully contrived darknesses, you heard, beneath the music and the firing, the sizzling of the great concealed lights and saw the moths flock past to shrivel against the burning concave glasses.

Up into the light, down into the dark the switchback car; in an obscure booth a living fountain with pale-green skin and turban, water spurting out of scarlet stigmata on palms and feet; the cells of fat women, fortune-tellers, lion-tamers; the moths trooping by, like flakes of ash after a fire, going in one direction, not drawn from their course by the dim globes burning in the smaller booths.

Up above the roofs the switchback car; a rocket burst in mid-air, crowding the darkness with falling yellow fragments; the ragged squad loaded and fired.

‘You are too drunk to dance,' Kate said.

‘Listen,' Anthony said, ‘one more drink and I'll take on the world at anything you like. Throwing rings. You've never seen me throw rings.'

Coloured ping-pong balls danced up and down on a column of water.

‘Would you like a doll?' Anthony said, ‘or a glass vase? I'll get you anything you like to name. What do I have to do, anyway?'

‘Come along and throw a ring. You know you can't shoot. You get nothing unless you hit five balls in five shots. You never could hit a target when you were at school.'

‘I've learned a thing or two since then.' He picked up one of the pistols which lay on the counter of the booth and tried to judge the sights. ‘Be a sport, Kate,' he implored her, ‘and pay for me.' He was excited, he felt the weight, he swung it in his hand. ‘You know, Kate,' he said, ‘I'd like a job with guns. Instructor to a school or something of the sort.'

‘But, Tony,' she protested, ‘you've never been able to hit a thing.' She opened her bag, but before she could find her money, he had fired. She looked up and saw a yellow ball stagger on the pinnacle of water.

‘What luck,' she cried. He shook his head, too serious to speak, reloaded with a sharp feathered pellet, sighted quickly, swinging the pistol down to the level of his eyes, and fired. She knew before the ball dropped that he would hit it; she was attending perhaps the only performance at which he was supremely skilful, shooting at a fair. She did not see the balls struck; she watched his face, grave, intent, curiously responsible; his hands broad with bitten nails suddenly became like a nurse's, capable and gentle. He tucked a hideous blue vase under his arm and began again.

‘Tony,' she said, ‘what are you going to do with it?' as he laid a toy tiger at his feet. He paused in the act of opening the breech and frowned. ‘What, what did you say?'

‘This vase and tiger. What will you do with them? For God's sake, don't win any more prizes, Tony. Come and have a drink.'

He shook his head slowly; it was a long time before he realized what she meant; his eyes were continually straying back to the balls dancing in the fountain. ‘A vase,' he said, ‘it's always useful, isn't it? For flowers and things.'

‘But the tiger, Tony?'

‘It's not a bad tiger.' He wouldn't look at it, pressing the pellets into place. ‘If you don't want it,' he said, ‘I'll give it away.' He fired and loaded, fired and loaded while the balls cracked and dropped and a small crowd gathered behind. ‘I'll give it to that girl on Tuesday,' he said, and sighed and pointed to a green tin cigarette-case marked with the initial ‘A' and put it in his pocket and walked away with the vase under one arm and the tiger under the other. Kate had to run to catch him up.

‘Where are you going?' she called behind him, and felt her brain stabbed with his home-sickness when he replied: ‘Oh, Kate, I'd never get tired of doing that,' as he walked on hopelessly between the arc-lights. He said: ‘One time, on Bank Holiday . . . I was never at home again on Bank Holiday.'

‘What was the girl's name?'

‘I've forgotten.'

She put her hand under his arm and the vase slipped and fell and lay in blue ugly fragments at their feet, like a broken bottle to mark the end of a night's drinking.

‘Never mind,' he said gently, pulling her closer to his side, ‘there's still the tiger.'

PART II

1

T
HE
bronze doors slid apart, and Krogh was in the circular courtyard, Krogh was surrounded by Krogh's. The cold clear afternoon sky roofed in the cube of glass and steel. The whole lower floors one room deep were exposed to him; he could see the accountants working on the ground floor, the glass flashing primrose before the electric fires. He noticed at once that the fountain was completed; the green shape worried him as he was not often worried; it accused him of cowardice. He had pandered to a fashion he did not understand; he would have much preferred to set in the fountain a marble goddess, a naked child, a nymph with concealing hands. He paused to examine the stone; no instinct told him whether it was good art or bad art; he did not understand. He was uneasy, but he did not show his uneasiness. His high bald face, like a roll of newspaper, showed at a distance only bold headlines; the smaller type, the little subtleties, obscure fears, were invisible.

He grew aware of being observed; he was watched through the glass by an accountant over his machine, by a director from his chromium balcony, by a waitress drawing the black leather blinds in the staff restaurant. The day faded quickly above his head, the lights began to go on behind the curved glass walls while he dallied beside the green statuary.

Krogh mounted the steel steps to the double doors of Krogh's. When his foot touched the top step, the doors swung open. He bent going in; it was a habit he had never broken; six feet two in height with a flat aggressive back, he had been forced for years to bow in the doorway of his bed-sitting-room, his small flat, his first works. Waiting for the lift he tried to dismiss the statuary from mind.

The lift was unattended; Krogh liked to be alone. He was enclosed now by a double thickness of glass, the glass wall of the lift, the glass wall of the building; the office, like an untrustworthy man, emphasized its transparency. Moving slowly and silently upwards to the top floor, Krogh could still see the fountain; it receded, grew smaller, flattened out; as the concealed lighting went on all round the court, the brutal shape cast a delicate shadow, like a drawing on porcelain on the circular polished paving. He thought, I am neglecting something, with obscure regret.

He entered his room and closed the door; the papers he had demanded were stacked neatly on a desk which was curved to follow the shape of the glass wall. He could see the reflection of the log fire in the window; a log shifted and fell and a spray of pale heatless sparks rose up the glass. It was the one room in the building unwarmed by electricity. The gentle beating of the flames was a form of companionship to Krogh in his soundproof room, in his Arctic isolation. Night was dropping into the court below like streamers of ink into a grey luminous liquid. He wondered whether he had been mistaken about the fountain.