‘A headache.’ He turned back towards them, tooth-mug in hand, and called through the two rooms: ‘What’s this parcel?’
‘Ties,’ Kate said.
‘I’ve got enough ties, haven’t I?’
‘Tony chose them for you this afternoon.’
‘Tony?’ he said.
‘Open it. They are good ties if Tony chose them.’
‘I don’t need them. Send them back.’
‘He paid for them.’
Krogh said: ‘He shouldn’t have done that. You ought to have stopped him, Kate.’
‘He’s grateful to you. He wanted to do something.’
Krogh said: ‘Why does everyone give me things? I can buy them, can’t I? Hall gives me cuff-links. I’ve got enough cuff-links.’
‘All right,’ Kate said, ‘I’ll send them back.’ She came through to the bedroom and took the parcel. ‘You’ve emptied the aspirin bottle. What’s the matter, Erik?’
‘Only a headache.’
‘Let me see what he bought.’ She opened the parcel; they lay there in striped discretion; he had good taste in clothes. ‘You might as well wear them.’
‘No. I’ve got enough. Send them back.’
She carried them through to her own room and laid them in a drawer between her vests. A lift-bell rang, she could hear Gullie in the drawing-room click the cards; she thought: I haven’t a plan, he’s gone, the last thing I said was ‘Go to hell.’ Sadly she reproached herself for a lack of care: from childhood she had been brought up by servants who told fortunes in tea-cups, by nurses who threw salt over the left shoulder, to be careful of last words. Quarrel if you must, but make it up before night. ‘Go to hell,’ that was for the beginning of an evening, not the end, for greeting, not for parting. In childhood one had been more careful; death was closer; one hadn’t this hard grip on life. She touched the ties tenderly, tucking them in.
‘There’s Hall,’ Gullie said to them as they came back together, ‘what did I say? I knew he’d come back.’ The lift stopped; it was Hall.
He came in hat in hand, thin and cold, narrow and unfriendly, the fog like dust in his red eyes. It had got in his throat. He was hoarse when he said: ‘I left my note-case.’
‘There it is, Hall,’ Krogh said. He didn’t seem to want to take it, smoothing his throat with his yellow-gloved hand; it was as if he wanted to say something, but no one would give him the cue.
‘I’ll walk home with you, Hall,’ Gullie said, but it wasn’t that.
‘Did Anthony come back with you?’ Kate said. She had the impression as he smoothed his throat of some great pain hopelessly demanding sympathy even from her, but she distrusted him and wouldn’t give it. ‘Isn’t he here?’
‘No,’ Hall said, ‘I left him and came back.’
‘Have a drink, Hall,’ Krogh said.
‘Thank you,’ Hall said. ‘It gets your throat, out there. But here, with a drink,’ he sketched a smile at them, roughly, unconvincingly, ‘everything’s all right again, everything’s O.K.’
‘He’ll be home now,’ Kate said. ‘I’ll just give him a ring.’
‘Do you play Patience, Hall?’ Gullie asked, laying out the Imps of Mischief.
‘Patience? No,’ Hall said, and ‘no,’ the voice said, coming up the wire, ‘Captain Farrant’s not come in.’
‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘to give me a ring when he comes in. His sister. Even if he’s late. Tell him I’m waiting up to speak to him. Yes, however late.’ She excused herself to them. ‘It’s a superstition.’ She said with sad affection: ‘It beats all. He’s calling himself a captain now.’
PART VII
MINTY stood at the door, took the names, noted the wreaths: the huge wreath from Krogh, the small one from Laurin; he noticed that there was none from Kate, none from Hall. The coffin slid smoothly along its runway beneath the angular crucifix. The doors opened to receive it; the flapping of the flames was picked up by the microphone beside the altar and dispersed through the great bleak building. Minty crossed himself: they might just as well have left the body in the water. He had a horror of this death by fire.
Kate and Krogh stood together in the first row; behind was old Bergsten and Hall and Gullie; the Minister had sent a wreath. One or two clerks, a woman from the hotel, stood near the door; outside a crowd had collected to see Krogh come out. A child had been taken to its first funeral, it didn’t understand the standing still, the long wait, the silence, the nothing to look at; its thin bored wail troubled Minty. He felt like a dumb man for whom another acts as interpreter and falsifies his meaning.
For Minty suffered, noting the wreaths he suffered, noting names, vexed by the crying, wanting a cigarette he suffered. He thought: I’ll borrow a crown from Nils: and suffered. This was the fourth friend. There wouldn’t be many more.
Sparrow, outcast Sparrow because he never washed behind the ears: they went for walks together every Sunday, trudging stolidly along the high road, avoiding the favourite field paths, seldom talking. They had no interests in common: Sparrow in the holidays blew birds’ eggs without success, smashing the shell, spattering his mouth; Minty collected butterflies. During term, collecting only dust from cars along the high road, they were friends because they had no other friends; they were ashamed of each other, were grateful to each other, sometimes escaping together from the wet towels in the changing-room, loved each other.
Connell died in a week. Was popular for a week, put a drawing-pin on a master’s chair, gave Minty a bar of chocolate, said he’d ask him to tea, went home early during the French hour and died of scarlet fever.
A voice behind him said: ‘So sad. Poor young man. A week too in the water.’ It was Hammarsten, late as usual, slipping in with his note-book. He whispered beneath his hand: ‘The rehearsals are going well. All except Gower. I need another Gower.’ He said: ‘Any relatives?’
‘No, no relatives,’ Minty said. He thought of his mother, of old Aunt Ella; he thought, we don’t run to much in the way of relatives.
And there was Baxter who let him down when it came to the point, who would have nothing to do with the package of assorted goods from the Charing Cross chemist.
‘To think,’ the blonde whispered at Hammarsten’s elbow, ‘that only last week he held me in his arms.’
Minty winced. He wanted incense to take out the odour of Chanel. He wanted candles to light before the saints. He wanted every possible aid for his fantastic belief that his fourth friend perfected had joined Connell in some place of no pain, no failure, no sex.
He said: ‘You aren’t the only one.’
‘He had such a way with him.’
‘He had a girl. He introduced me.’ He made his proudest claim. ‘No one else knew about her but me – and his sister.’
‘Poor, poor young thing,’ Hammersten said. ‘Where is she?’ peering into the bright hard glittering church through his steel-rimmed, black-ribboned eye-glasses.
‘In England. She doesn’t know. Nobody knows her address.’ But all the time he knew, Minty knew, remembered Coventry. It was the one secret he would preserve from this friendship (the morning in his room he tried to forget, tried to forget the lack of milk, the lack of a cup, the starveling hospitality). The secret of friendship he kept as carefully as he would have kept the relic of saints, the Saxon thigh-bone, the holy bandied splinter itself: the bar of chocolate which he never ate, preserved for years, until at last it was lost in one of his innumerable moves through no carelessness of his own: the Brownie snap of himself with a butterfly-net taken by Sparrow: a copy of The Bushman’s Vade-Mecum Baxter gave him: now to be added, the name Coventry.
Hammarsten said: ‘You slipped up badly over the marriage announcement. Lucky not to lose your job.’
Minty laughed: lucky! he couldn’t help himself: lucky still to be here to count the wreaths, tot up the names, write out his paragraph, and then up the stairs, the fifty-six stairs, fourteen to the Ekman’s home, twenty-eight to the empty flat, the single umbrella,
the engraving of Gustavus, and at last the brown dressing-gown, the cocoa in the cupboard, the Madonna on the mantel. But yes, on second thoughts, lucky: things might have been so much worse.
‘And today,’ Hammarsten said, ‘the great new American issue was subscribed. Life and death, life and death,’ he began to cough, throwing up a little old phlegm on to his grey stubble, his frock-coat, and up in the air behind him, wheeling over the lake, zooming down towards the City Hall, rising and falling like a flight of swallows, the sun catching their aluminium wings as they turned, came the aeroplanes, a dozen at least, making the air noisy with their engines as the sound of the organ died away.
The child stopped crying. ‘Look,’ she cried, ‘look.’ Something was happening at last.
The woman from the hotel slipped out, looking here and there at everybody with her narrowed gleaming commercial eyes; the clerks hurried out (they had to be back at work). Old Bergsten was supported by his chauffeur down the steps into the street; he wasn’t certain why he was there (you could tell it by the cross way he looked about him; he was prepared at any moment to be put upon). Gullie stayed a moment, said something appropriate to Kate, waited until he was outside to put in his monocle. When he saw Minty he tried to avoid him, but Minty caught his sleeve. ‘You’ll be at the Harrow dinner?’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘I had an idea,’ Minty said. ‘One gets so tired of the old toasts, the school, the headmaster, all the rest. I thought if the Minister replied for Literature and you for Art –’
‘Well,’ Gullie said, ‘well. It’s worth consideration, my dear fellow.’
‘Of course, you’re so many-sided. You could reply for Music, for Drama – not to speak of the Services.’
‘Just let me know,’ Gullie said, pulling away, ‘send a card.’
‘You were there, weren’t you, that last night?’ Minty said.
‘What do you mean? Where?’
‘Playing cards with them.’
‘Oh yes. Yes.’
‘You’ve heard what people have been saying, that he couldn’t, even in the fog, have just walked into the water.’
‘People will always talk.’
‘Was he drunk?’
‘He’d had a few. My dear fellow, you can’t imagine how foggy it was. It took me an hour to get to the Legation.’
‘I know how foggy it was,’ Minty said. ‘I was out in it.’ He coughed. ‘It’s in my throat still. Standing around all the evening.’ He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a silver match-box. ‘I wanted to give him this.’ He twisted it to show the engraved arms. ‘I was really at Harrow, so it’s no good to me. He’d have liked it.’
‘Well then, you know how foggy it was.’
‘He came out with Hall. I couldn’t speak to him then. I thought I’d follow them, but I lost them at once. It was about ten minutes later I heard him shout.’
‘Poor devil.’
‘Yes, but it was after the shout that Hall came back. He must have been nearer to it than I was, but he’d heard nothing.’
‘You’re imagining things, Minty.’ Minty turned to watch Hall come down the church, and Gullie pulled himself free. ‘Send me a card about the dinner like a good chap.’
‘Yes,’ Minty said, ‘yes. The dinner,’ and watched Hall coming to the door; took in with extravagant and useless hatred the wasp waist, the brown velvet lapels; if I could do anything: he stood, a small yellow avenging fury between Hall and the street, the cold clear sun, the crowd, the arabesque of aeroplanes across the sky.
‘Excuse me, Mr Hall.’ He barred the way, scraping his sore tobacco-bitten tongue along his teeth, aware of revenge wilting in the common everyday air until it became no more than the will to vex, to tease. ‘Have you a statement to make?’
Hall said: ‘What do you mean? A statement?’
‘Surely,’ Minty said, blowing his fumy breath in Hall’s face as he blew his coffee to cool it, ‘surely you must be one of the new directors? With all your experience you’ll be managing the New York end?’
‘No,’ Hall said, ‘Laurin is going there.’
‘But Mr Krogh owes you so much.’
‘Listen,’ Hall said. ‘Get this straight. He owes me nothing. It’s me who does the owing.’ He slipped on his tight brown gloves. ‘And if we don’t see eye to eye about the way I manage things, that’s my funeral.’ He said: ‘You’d better not worry Mr Krogh while I’m round.’
‘You didn’t send a wreath,’ Minty said. ‘Didn’t you and he get on together?’
‘No.’ Hall said.
He waited in the entrance for Krogh to appear, and the two men went off together to the car, side by side, with several feet between, saying nothing. The crowd was silent because it was a funeral. The brain and the hand: the heavy peasant body uneasy in the morning coat, cramped by the collar; and the hand, destruction with a wasp waist and jewelled cuff-links flashing like ice. They had nothing to say to each other; what lay between them, held them apart, left them lonely as they drove away together, was nothing so simple as a death, it was as complicated as the love between a man and a woman.
When they had gone the crowd began to leave. There was nothing to wait for. There was nothing further to see. ‘Look,’ the child said, ‘look,’ dragged along the pavement, tripping on the edge of the paving, watching the aeroplanes.
‘Well,’ Minty said, ‘I’ll have to go to the office, get this in.’ He didn’t know how to talk to her; she was a woman; and just because she was a woman she woke his malice. ‘He let me down badly over your wedding.’
‘We were going to be married.’
‘Well,’ Minty said, ‘I must be pushing along. See you some time, I suppose. If you’d like to come to an arrangement –’ He wanted to escape; he despised scent, silk stockings, powder, salve; like a small smoky Savonarola his nostrils shrank with distaste; he would not feel clean again until he was drinking his cocoa by the meter, under his house photographs. He jumped when she spoke to him; he was not used to be held in conversation: he was ready to suspect the worst of any woman who troubled to talk to him.
Kate said: ‘You heard him shout. I didn’t hear a thing. I didn’t feel a thing.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know.’ He said: ‘I couldn’t see. And when Hall came back I thought it must be all right.’
‘They’ve had a quarrel,’ Kate said. ‘Erik and Hall.’
‘You think –’ Minty said, ‘Hall –’
‘Think,’ Kate said, ‘I know it.’ He flinched from her certainty, for if one was sure, one ought to do something, and what, he thought, with sour self-pity, can Minty do?
‘So Laurin’s going to New York,’ Kate said.
‘You’ll stay, of course?’ he asked, with contempt.
‘No,’ Kate said, ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Oh fine,’ Minty said, ‘fine. How it’ll hurt them. Couldn’t you think up anything better than that? After all, he was your brother; he was only my –’ he sheared away from the word ‘friend’. Standing there she awed him with her quiet, her moneyed mourning; he couldn’t claim more than acquaintanceship; she robbed him a little of Anthony with every sight of her gloves, her shoes, her model dress. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a few days ago I could have ruined them. A word to Battersons. But what would have been the use? There’s honour among thieves. We’re all in the same boat.’
‘He wasn’t a thief,’ Minty said, defending Sparrow, Connell, Baxter. . . .
‘We’re all thieves,’ Kate said. ‘Stealing a livelihood here and there and everywhere, giving nothing back.’
Minty sneered: ‘Socialism.’
‘Oh no,’ Kate said. ‘That’s not for us. No brotherhood in our boat. Only who can cut the biggest dash and who can swim.’
The aeroplanes drove back above the lake, leaving a plumy trail: ‘Krogh’s. Krogh’s,’ over Stockholm, a thin trellis-work of smoke; the ‘K’ fading as the ‘S’ was drawn.
‘So you’re going back to England?’ Minty
said, remembering the fifty-six stairs, the empty flat, the Italian woman on the third floor.
‘No,’ Kate said, ‘I’m simply moving on. Like Anthony.’
the incense cones, the condensed milk, the cup (I’ve forgotten the cup).
‘A job in Copenhagen.’
the missal in the cupboard, the Madonna, the spider withering under the glass, a home from home.
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