‘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 st
ranger 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.
Anthony got off the bed and began again to undress. But the room was cold (he shut the window), it was bare. He tore the coloured cover off Film Fun and stuck it against the wall with a piece of soap: a girl with large thighs dressed in a green bathing-suit sat in a swing with her knees apart. He tore out a photograph of Claudette Colbert in a Roman bath and balanced it on his suitcase. Two girls playing strip poker he put above his bed with more soap.
Well, he thought, that’s a bit more comfortable, and stood in the middle of the room wondering what to do next to make the room like home, listening to the hot-water-pipes wailing behind the wall.
4
I awake and Erik sleeping and his hand cold on my side. All settled. He said to me ‘Laurin’s ill,’ but I knew it was not that. So tired he was. Never seen so tired now asleep so cold his hand. Anthony asleep now, the scar below the eye, the knife slipping upwards suddenly through the rabbit’s fur, the scream, he went on screaming, no control the matron said. I woke in the middle of the night hearing him fifty miles away. Knew he was in pain. Father ill. They wouldn’t let me go. The French exam all that day long the irregular verbs and twice the supervisor went out with me to the lavatory. I spoke to her and she said to me: ‘You mustn’t speak until you have handed in your paper.’
Like an old married couple after thirty years. A silver copper what d’you call it golden wedding.
Erik said: ‘The strike’s off. I managed it as well as Laurin could have done.’ He said: ‘I told him a joke, asked after his family, gave him a cigar.’ I said: ‘Was that all you gave him?’ He said: ‘I gave him a guarantee that the wages in America would not be lowered.’ I said: ‘Did you write it down?’ He said: ‘No. I just gave him my word.’ How tired he was.
Awake sleeping hand cold all settled.
He said: ‘What can your brother do?’ Post-cards from Aden, the vacuum cleaner, the waitresses listening, ‘you made me love you,’ that day in the music-hall he bought me a drink in the bar, the first I’d ever had, and Father said: ‘where have you been all day?’ and he said: ‘walking in the park.’ I was hopeless. I said: ‘He was always good at arithmetic.’ Erik said: ‘There’s nothing I can do for him. Tell me yourself. Is he good for anything?’ I said: ‘He’s good for nothing except winning tigers.’ He thought I was cracked. He said: ‘Winning tigers?’ I said: ‘He was emptying the shooting booths last night at Gothenburg until I stopped him.’ I never thought that would appeal to Erik, not in his nature, joke, inquiry, cigar, cold hand against my side. He said: ‘I’ll give him a job.’
‘I’ll give you a job,’ he said to me. The little dusty office in Leather Lane. He sat up very stiff in the only other chair with his gloves on and Hammond scraped and scraped to him. Pince-nez falling off the pointed nose, nibbling voice, rat face. He said: ‘She’s always given satisfaction,’ and upset the ink on his desk rising too quickly to open the door. A friend of my father’s he felt responsible. The business bought up and the office in the hands of the breakers and my father dying.
When I left England my father said: ‘I wish Anthony were with you.’ He said I must be careful, there would be temptations. But he had never been tempted, he didn’t know what the word meant, lying there in his bed dying slowly, knowing nothing. The smell of medicine, the nurse at the door, the stained glass in the hall, in the mahogany bookcase a complete set of Punch in blue cloth bindings; his uncle had known Du Maurier and he remembered how people were shocked at Trilby. And he said to me one year: ‘I don’t like Miss Mollison. A girl should not be seen at a play with her employer.’ Honour the dead, these were the maxims he lived by, a little bit of England, Anthony wrote that he must have marble, I said ‘devoted, devoted children is too strong,’ but Anthony said devoted was four letters cheaper and anyway it was seemly. But these were his maxims. Do not show your feelings. Do not love immoderately. Be chaste, prudent, pay your debts. Don’t buy on credit. ‘Devoted’ was too strong. On mother’s grave ‘affectionate husband’, he did not grudge five letters in the good cause of accuracy.
He read Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and did acrostics all the days of his life. A little bit of England. He was disliked by his servants. He was an honourable man. His palm was warm as mine is warm. He may have loved Anthony too in his own way. Why did I dislike him so?
These were the reasons. I will be precise and remember clearly. He would have appreciated that. It is the dead hour of night when graves give up their dead. He did not care for The Bride of Lammermoor. He said it was exaggerated, the work of a sick man. And Troilus and Cressida was not, he was certain, by Shakespeare, for Shakespeare was not a cynic. He had a profound trust in human nature. But be chaste, prudent, pay your debts, and do not love immoderately.
These were the reasons. Anthony learning (the beating in the nursery, the tears before the boarding school) to keep a stiff upper lip, Anthony learning (the beating in the study when he brought home the smutty book with the pretty pictures) that you must honour other men’s sisters. Anthony learning to love with moderation. Anthony in Aden, Anthony in Shanghai, Anthony farther away from me than he had ever been, Anthony making good; yes, he loved Anthony and he ruined Anthony and he was tormented by Anthony until the end. The telegrams, the telephoned messages, the face grinning over the bed-rail: ‘I’ve resigned.’
Now in the darkness be fair, Erik sleeping; hand cold on my side, all settled, only the Strand, a strip of water and a street between us – seem standing darker than last year they stood and say we must not cross, alas, alas.
He said: ‘winning tigers,’ he said: ‘I’ll give him a job.’ I cannot understand. I would wake him and ask him but he is tired, he would think I want him. Only once I wanted him, an ambassador to dinner, and I drunk and the first-secretary pulled at my dress while they talked business in the other room. I said: ‘What’s the good? How can we? They’ll be back any minute. Have some more brandy?’ He was as tall as Anthony, Erik’s height, he had a duelling scar under his right eye (in the mirror over the mantel it was the left eye), he taught me to swear in his language and we laughed; I wanted to let him do what he wanted to do, but they were talking business in the next room, and I said: ‘do you skin rabbits?’ and he thought I was cracked. That night I wanted Erik, I wanted anyone, I wanted a man I could see from the window while I undressed sheltering at the quayside.
Erik said: ‘they’ll take the loan, they’ll take the loan,’ and he couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t sleep, and soon we were happy and tired together because of that man’s scar and the other man’s loan. And that night.
Anthony near Marseilles, father dying, the electric light burning until seven in the morning under a heavy shade, the nurse reading, the kettle boiling, the sterilized swabs ready in a basin covered with gauze. My year in hospital. Putting the iodine where the vaseline should have been.
The blue vase broken and Anthony said: ‘But still we’ve got the tiger.’ Would it have been the same tonight to Erik if I had said: ‘winning blue vases, winning cigarette cases marked with an initial A,’ would he have said, even then: ‘I’ll give him a job?’ Tiger burning bright in Tivoli, immortal eye, the hand against my side, feet touching mine; even there the women watched him when he turned, when he smiled, what shoulder and what art, to see the rockets throwing down their spears. I saw the girl’s eyes on him in Gothenburg, the badly-painted face, the trust, the innocence, the cunning that asks to be betrayed. Those we love we forget, it is those we betray we remember. Did she smile her work to see? He said: ‘I’ll give her the tiger.’ And when my heart began to beat in the Bedford Palace in Camden Town (he told father ‘we were walking in the Park’) I loved him more than I had ever done before. The days of oranges were over, but he bought me peanuts.
And I watched with twisted sinews of the heart, with jealousy, the female tumbler falling towards the boards, the tights, the toothy smile, peroxide queen. It was my sixteenth birthday; I stared at the clock; and when it showed 6.43 I said: ‘It’s my birthday,’ and when it showed 6.49 I said, ‘Many happy returns.’ A comedian came on the boards wearing check trousers drawing a toy lamb.
These memories one turns over like an old couple after thirty years, who have shared first love first hate first drink first treachery when I said: ‘You will miss your train.’ The bitter draught. He couldn’t drink the beer, spluttered, turned away, face saved by rising curtain, but the sherry I drank and held my breath and never made a sound. Afterwards eating apples at Mornington Crescent to take the smell away.
England Made Me Page 7
