England Made Me (16 page)

Anthony said, ‘Damn'; he smiled anxiously, blinked in the glare of the flood lamps; ‘I've never tried that story before. It's generally a bomb.' He said, ‘I'll tell you. Only Kate knows. I was skinning a rabbit and the knife slipped.'

‘Pihlström,' Krogh said. Cautiously, round the corner from the main avenue, came the man in the grey suit, treading softly like a cat circumnavigating a dustbin. Krogh said wearily, ‘The game's over.' He added with the same qualm of conscience he might have felt if he were betraying someone dear to him, selling him stock which he knew not only to be worthless in the long run, but worthless now, immediately, indisposable: ‘We've been silly.'

‘Leave him to me,' Anthony said.

He advanced on Pihlström, seized an arm, turned him round and pushed him round the corner of the booth. Pihlström made a succession of quick yapping cries: ‘Hammarsten. Hammarsten.' Professor Hammarsten was standing with two or three other men in front of a betting booth lined with little brass handles. ‘Hammarsten.' There seemed to be an argument going on about a coin which Hammarsten had presented. ‘Hammarsten.' He turned round quickly and his spectacles fell off. ‘Pihlström.' He groped blindly on the gravel with his foot, drawing an irregular circle round the spectacles. ‘Pihlström,' he called appealingly. Anthony ran Pihlström forward. ‘Hammarsten.' Professor Hammarsten began to stoop for his spectacles, then leapt straight again with a cry of anguish, his hand on the small of his back. ‘Pihlström.' Three men began to explain to him something about a coin which the booth-keeper held. Anthony let go of Pihlström and pushed him into the Professor's arms. ‘Hammarsten.' They held each other for a moment; then Pihlström stooped and picked up Hammarsten's glasses; Anthony and Krogh watched them from a distance. Presently they divided: one walked one way, one the other, and disappeared. They were not hurrying; there was a lack of enthusiasm in their movements.

‘Have you ever been a chucker-out?' Krogh said. Anthony sighed. ‘No,' he said, ‘I'm not in the mood for stories; not after that mistake of mine. I could have sworn it was the Indian Ocean.'

‘It was,' Krogh said.

‘My God,' Anthony said. ‘You mean there was nothing wrong? Never ask me to play poker with you; it'll have to be rummy; something where it's just honest luck and there's no room for bluff. What a poker face!'

‘Can you really shoot?'

‘Can I shoot?' Anthony said. He put his arm in Krogh's and hurried him down two avenues. Occasionally they stopped at a booth, but ‘too easy', Anthony said. At last he found what he wanted. The prizes were numbered. ‘Would you like a cigarette-case?' Anthony said.

‘I have this one.' Krogh took from his pocket a case of thin inlaid wood. It had been designed by the same sculptor as the statue, as the ash-trays; it bore the monogram E.K. He was proud of it. He said: ‘There's no other like it in the world.' It lay, almost as light as a powder-puff, in his palm.

‘Yes, it's pretty,' Anthony said, ‘but you want something for formal occasions, something in pig-skin. That one there: it would look well with a gold monogram. I'll get it for you.'

Afterwards he said, ‘We'll have a drink.'

He didn't know a word of Swedish, but he had taken control. They had their beers. ‘Weak stuff,' Anthony said, ‘you come to England and I'll show you. Could I put down a Younger now? I'd say I could. Or a couple of Stone's special. You don't need more than a couple.'

He held Krogh entranced with his ease of manner, his air of knowing a thing or two of the very things which Krogh knew least. He watched Anthony as a middle-aged woman who had been brought up under another dispensation might watch a young girl who knew all the right cosmetics, the best ingredients for cocktails, the right doctor to go to if one started something one didn't want to finish. He felt a little envy, a little affection, even a little amusement, but chiefly a sense of how quickly time had passed for him and how slowly it must have passed for the other who knew so much, so early.

‘What about shaking a leg?'

‘I don't understand.'

‘Dancing a bit.'

The loudspeaker played what were probably the latest tunes, a ring of arc lamps flooded the wooden boards; the small fair faces followed the intricate music with pinched attention, the girls stepping slowly on their delicate small feet, solemn, receiving like a sacrament the communication from their partners of a foot to the side, a foot between, a foot backward, thinking of the shop, of the office, of the dress they couldn't afford – ‘in the silence of my lonely room' – of summer over – ‘day and night' – of the winter fashions.

‘No. I won't dance. But you go and dance. I'll watch you.' No good to assure himself, I am Krogh, to remember his initials in electric lamps, the factories working day and night; one shift going off at seven; the next at three in the morning; he was afraid to ask one of the girls who stood around the floor to dance with him. He saw Anthony tour the floor, taking a look at a girl here and a girl there; he did not speak a word of the language, but he was no more of an expatriate than Krogh, the Swede, born in the hut on Vätten, who learned arithmetic at the village school. Perhaps, he thought, I have unlearned too much, seeing Anthony take a girl by the arm and lead her on to the floor; when I was young –

But he would not deceive himself; the quality of truth was in the air of Tivoli; one could not be a hypocrite in a place where no one was present for mixed motives, where pleasure was the only, the undisguised inducement. Even when I was young, he thought, I was the same. They told stories in Stockholm of his schooldays, his early proficiency as a business man and as an inventor; how he had constructed a periscope which could be used through the window to disclose when the master was coming round the corner of the building, of how he had traded postage stamps for fruit and held them, packed in straw, till the height of the summer when his fellows would give all the stamps they possessed for a bite of something juicy. He knew the stories; he knew they were untrue, he knew the dullness of the truth – the plodding industry, the certificates gained one by one; he had hardly begun to live with any vividness before the idea of the new cutter had come to him one day of a Chicago spring. He could remember the exact pattern which the great dredger had made, swinging across the sky; he had seen it through the window of the foreman's hut; he had leant out and called to the driver: ‘Five feet more to the left'; the long hard North American winter was over, he had smelt spring through the liquid asphalt, the smoke, the rain-wet metal; the macadamized roadways were splitting under the gentle persistent pressure of the grasses. But he had no love for nature, he remembered that spring day not because it was more beautiful than others, but because, looking down at the plan of the bridge pinned out on the drawing board, while the dredger swayed and flopped and sank through the pale-blue air, he thought: if I arranged the knife just so, the sliding tray, the brake detaching the cog, would the friction be too great? He had never been aware of having thought deeply on the subject of those small, absurdly cheap, absurdly necessary goods, which were now known as Krogh's. Once he was a boy his father had said that So-and-So must be worth a million; for a week he had worked in the shops at Nyköping and seen the old type of cutter in action and given notice because he saw no future in so old-fashioned a firm for even the most stubborn diligence. Now, suddenly, the idea for a new cutter had come with no apparent effort and impressed on his mind for ever the spring day, the smell of shrubs and asphalt, the dredger dipping and swaying.

Something in the new ease he felt with Anthony recalled that period. It was no coincidence that he had remembered the names of Murphy, O'Connor, Williamson and Aronstein (O'Connor had been killed in Panama, buried under forty tons of mud when a dredger broke; Aronstein had gone into oil; Williamson and Murphy were probably dead in France). He had never known them well, though he had worked with them for eighteen months, but he had not been shy with them, as he had been shy with Andersson, as he was shy of the sunburned shopgirls solemnly dancing. Deliberately he made an effort to go back, to peel off the years and their inhumanities as one peels the leaves of a neglected calendar, glancing at the mottoes, the verses, the trite sayings of dead rhetoricians, occasionally pausing at some unexpectedly vivid line: 1912 when he went into partnership, 1915 when he bought out his partner, 1920 when he first began to aim at the world monopoly, 1927 the peak year when he bought the German interests, made his loan to the French Government, established himself in Italy; but it only brought him to the present, the short-term loans, the threatened strike, Laurin's silly voice from the microphone advising caution.

He thought: what am I doing here? This is absurd. The gentle creaking of the wooden boards under the dancers' feet; the orderly crowd moving in two lines up the shooting booths, down past the fortune-tellers, the switchback, the scenic railways; the sudden cool courts at either end with the coloured fountains rustling between the black sky and the white concrete; the seats by the lake side; the light of a ferry boat moving away like a bicycle lamp over the dark polished lake: these were Sweden as much as the silver birch woods round Vätten, the brightly-painted wooden hut, the duck staggering in mid-air, his mother waiting on the tiny quay; but the images had no longer any meaning for him, he was like a man without a passport, without a nationality; like a man who could only speak Esperanto.

The table rocked and righted itself; he looked round to see tall weedy old Hammarsten pull up a chair. ‘Good evening, Herr Krogh.' He rubbed his finger across the white bristles on his chin, and leaning closer confided to Krogh: ‘I've sent Pihlström home.' He said: ‘I could see at once that you didn't want to be bothered by a man like Pihlström. I told him I'd seen you leave in a taxi.'

‘And he believed you?'

‘Oh, but Herr Krogh, I put it rather more subtly. I asked him to lend me a taxi fare to follow you.'

‘Very clever, Professor, but really –'

‘Of course he got into the taxi and drove away.'

The old man made a sound as if he were drinking hot tea. He said with immense satisfaction: ‘He'll be on the other side of the lake by now.'

‘How are your language classes, Professor?'

‘Not too good, not too good, Herr Krogh. One is compelled to drive the quill. It leads one into strange company. Pihlström, the Englishman Minty, Beyer – do you know Beyer?'

‘I haven't that honour,' Krogh said.

‘It is quite impossible to trust Beyer,' Hammarsten said. ‘He was responsible for that article the other day on your career.'

‘It was complimentary.'

‘But so inaccurate. It is only we older men who pursue Truth amid the distractions – I confess it, Herr Krogh – of a not very
distingué
profession.' He said with extraordinary venom, under his breath, as if he were talking to himself: ‘Mud-slingers.'

‘It seemed reasonably accurate.'

‘But 1911, Herr Krogh, for the date when you went into partnership. 1912 you must confess would have been – let me say, nearer to the truth.'

‘Yes, it was 1912.'

‘I know it. I know it. I have followed year by year, driving the industrious if humble quill, the career of Sweden's greatest –' The old man was horribly sincere. His steel glasses were misted with emotion. He was rapidly becoming inarticulate. ‘I picture the day when beside Gustavus Adolphus –'

‘A glass of beer, Professor?' Krogh said with a weariness and an impatience he took no trouble to conceal. He thought of all the interviews he had been forced through the years to give to this decayed teacher of languages, not from pity but from necessity, because he represented the most respected of Swedish papers, because there was some justification in his boast: he did at least try to be accurate. He repeated sharply when Hammarsten failed to answer: ‘A glass of beer?'

‘Thank you, Herr Krogh,' Hammarsten said sadly (as if he had been woken from some dramatic dream to the thirsts of the body). He fell silent nursing the glass with his palm, watching with complete inattention the dancers.

‘You wanted to speak to me?' Krogh said.

‘I only thought,' the old man said, ‘that you might wish to make some statement. Your leaving the opera after the first act will have been noticed. There will be rumours.' He paused and said into his beer which he lifted as far as his chin: ‘Believe me, Herr Krogh, I know what you think of us. We pester you; you cannot get away from us.' His steel glasses slipped a little way down the bridge of his nose: ‘You must remember, it is our living.'

‘I have no statement to make,' Krogh said. ‘Is it impossible sometimes to do what I want to do, spontaneously, without being questioned afterwards?'

‘Quite impossible,' the Professor said.

‘How one ought to envy you others.'

‘It's just as impossible for us,' Hammarsten said, ‘but we haven't your compensations.' He dipped into his beer and withdrew with some white foam on his nose. He had mislaid his handkerchief. He used the corner of his sleeve, blushing and looking this way and that way to see whether he had been observed. ‘For example, Herr Krogh, it has always been my ambition – you will laugh at me – to have a little, just a little and in the purest sense, “flutter” with the theatre. I should like – but what an inadequate word “like” is – to produce in Stockholm –' he hesitated.

‘Well?'

‘The great
Pericles
.'

‘What is that?'