England Made Me (21 page)

3

Kate read the memorandum over carefully. At first it meant nothing to her. She knew nothing about the A.C.U. except that it was the most prosperous combine of paper-mills in Sweden. It had been one of the best investments that Krogh had made and he had made it on his own responsibility without consulting his directors. It had been an investment pure and simple, a use for surplus money, and its sale to Batterson's meant nothing at all. He was selling his control at a profit to be used elsewhere. Why worry?

But she worried none the less. The short-term loans worried her. It was untidy, the continual shifting of small blocks of capital; it offended her in the same way as dust on a mirror. One wanted a clear image. Somebody knocked on the door. She thought: There can't be anything wrong, this is solid – these offices of glass and steel, the rare woods, the eighteenth-century wall-paper in the directors' dining-room, the works at Nyköping, this bowl of expensive flowers. She thought of the A.C.U. The figures were set out on the memorandum: production 350,000 tons annually, of which 200,000 tons are for export; associated pulp mills: production of mechanical pulp 300,000 tons; of chemical pulp 1,000,300 tons; the associated saw-mills, 15,000 miles of logging channels, 50,000,000 logs floated annually. This was real, nothing was more real.

‘Welcome your erring brother,' Anthony said.

Kate looked up. This is more real, she thought: those are figures, I've seen what Krogh can do with figures, but this is myself. He grinned at her. ‘I'm late. Is the great man angry?'

She said: ‘What's up?' He was cocky, but he was sullen. He stood there pluming himself in her mirror, waiting for her to guess what he had been at. His was the weakness which should have been hers, the uncertainty, the vanity, the charm of something rash and unpremeditated. It was the nearest she could get to completeness, having him here in the same room, arguing, bullying, retreating. She bitterly envied lovers their more complete alliance.

‘I've been seeing Loo,' Anthony said.

‘Who's Loo?'

‘The Davidge girl.'

‘You needn't tell me that,' Kate said. ‘She's left her powder on your coat.'

‘She wants me to leave here.' He said uneasily, ‘She doesn't think my job's respectable.' He wilted with grace against her desk; he was all the moral conscience, she thought, that they could summon up between them. She could see her own face in the mirror behind his back – the pale careful profile, the long lids which qualified the hardness of the eyes, so that it was possible to believe that perhaps in the last resort she hadn't the energy to be completely ruthless. Good Looks and Conscience, she thought, the fine flowers of our class. We're done, we're broke, we belong to the past, we haven't the character or the energy to do more than hang on to something new for what we can make out of it. Krogh is worth us both, but she watched the graceful curve of Anthony's attitude, the padded shoulders of his new overcoat: one can't help loving oneself.

‘Well,' Anthony said, ‘there's something in what she says. I don't know whether it's a job for – well, you know what I mean.'

‘I wish I did.'

‘Well, damn it all, if one must use the word, for a gentleman.'

‘You don't understand,' Kate said. ‘It's our only chance.'

‘I don't mean your job. That's different.'

‘It's our only chance,' Kate repeated. ‘We haven't got a future away from here. This is the future.'

‘Oh, come,' Anthony said, ‘that's pitching it strong. After all, here we are foreigners.'

‘We're national. We're national,' Kate said, ‘from the soles of our feet. But nationality's finished. Krogh doesn't think in frontiers. He's beaten unless he has the world.'

‘Minty was talking,' Anthony said, ‘about short-term loans.'

‘That's temporary.'

‘You mean he's had to take them already?' Anthony asked. ‘Is money so close? It looks bad. Do you think we are safe here? I'm all for rats. I don't believe in any Casablanca stuff.'

‘You don't imagine,' Kate said, ‘that Krogh could be beaten by us. That's all that nationality is – it's we, the hangers-on, the little dusty offices I've worked in, Hammond, your pubs, your Edgware Road, your pick-ups in Hyde Park.' Deliberately she turned away from the thought that there had been a straightness about the poor national past which the international present did without. It hadn't been very grand, but in their class at any rate there had been gentleness and kindness once.

‘It's home,' Anthony said.

He raised his lonely small boy's face, ‘You don't understand, Kate. You've always liked this modern stuff, that fountain.'

‘You're wrong,' Kate said. ‘It's home to me too.' She spread her hands hopelessly across the desk towards him. ‘It's you. As long as I have you, I've kept it even there. You're my Ladies' Bar, Anthony, my beastly port.'

‘And, of course,' he went on, following his own thoughts and paying her not the least attention, ‘you're fond of Krogh.'

‘I've never loved him. I'd have despised him if I'd loved him. Love's no good to anyone. You can't define it. We need things of which we can think, not things we only feel. He thinks in figures, he doesn't feel vague things about people.'

‘He was human enough last night,' Anthony said. ‘Leave him to me. I'll educate him.'

Kate said: ‘For God's sake. Have I got to save him as well as you?'

‘I'll make him human.' He was hopeless; he couldn't see her point.

‘I don't believe,' Anthony said, ‘he even knows his staff. I've been talking to a man here and there. A young chap in the publicity department. He's never even seen Krogh. They get dissatisfied, you know. The managers have too much power.'

‘They seem to have been telling you a lot,' Kate said.

‘Those that can talk English. Of course, they think I can help them. They know I've got on well with Krogh.'

‘You've told them that, of course?'

‘Well, one likes to be liked.'

Kate said, ‘I've got to see Erik now. Shall we have lunch together? I can show you a place –'

‘I'm sorry, old thing,' Anthony said, ‘you know how it is. I've promised, if Krogh doesn't want me, to have lunch with Pa and Ma.'

‘Pa and Ma?' She added quickly: ‘Of course. I'm sorry. I've been working. I know whom you mean.' But she wasn't quick enough; she felt his irritation. He explained laboriously. ‘They are leaving at the end of the week. I've got to do the polite. Show them where to eat.' She thought, with a sense of hopeless ennui: I had been looking forward to showing
him
. ‘You know where to eat?'

‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘I've picked up a hint or two. I've been talking to the fellows here. I like them.'

‘You must have made a lot of contacts.'

He said again apologetically, ‘One likes to be liked. Has old Hammarsten rung up yet?'

‘What about?'

‘Krogh promised him money yesterday at Tivoli to produce a play by Shakespeare. The one about Gower.'

She stared at him. ‘Money for a play? Now?' She accused him, ‘Did you have a hand in this?' She laughed, ‘How could you?' but she watched him covertly. He was weakness, but weakness could be very strong. She remembered his first post in an office at Wembley and the letter to their father she had intercepted, not to save her father anxiety but to protect Anthony's own story from harsh contradiction. He was clever, the managing director had written, he had a fine head for figures, there were no specific complaints, but he was corrupting the office. ‘How could you?' she said, and touched his sleeve; his coat was damp. He stood away from the desk to let her by and she saw the mark he left on the polished surface of her desk; she rubbed it dry with her hand. It was like mildew.

‘Have you been in the lake?' she said.

‘The mist was heavy. I met Loo before breakfast.'

She said, ‘You ought to take a cinnamon and quinine. Your chest's always been weak since that pleurisy.'

‘Forget it,' Anthony said. ‘You know too much, Kate. One might as well be married.'

‘I'm sorry. It's a long time since we've been together. I expect you are stronger these days. There are plenty of things I don't know about you. I didn't know that you shot well.' She gave in; it was no good being proud; strength couldn't hold out against that sullen obstinate weakness. ‘Have lunch with me tomorrow. There's a lot I want' – no, not to ask, I mustn't use the word ‘ask' – ‘you to tell me. Post-cards and one night in Gothenburg. It's not much. We used to know each other well.' Standing at the corner of the class-room, she thought, listening to that cry; it wasn't a question of knowing each other well in those days; it was as if one were bearing a monstrous child who could scream or laugh or weep audibly in the womb. I would have welcomed an abortion in those days; but is this how one feels when the abortion has been successful? No more pain, no more movement, nothing to fear and nothing to hope for, a stillness indistinguishable from despair.

‘Sorry, Kate. I'm afraid tomorrow – after all,' he said wryly, ‘you've got me now for years. Give Loo a chance at me.'

‘All right,' Kate said, ‘keep me a day or two next week.'

‘I'll take a cinnamon and quinine,' Anthony said. He was suddenly apologetic. He drew a flower from her vase and said, ‘You ought to wear one. It just matches your dress. Have you got a pin?'

‘I don't wear flowers in the office,' Kate said. As she went out of the door she looked back and saw him fit the flower into his own buttonhole. It was the culmination of all her plans, to have him there, making himself at home beside her desk, ‘a home from home'. The sun was out, the mist had drained upwards from around the fountain, it was hot in the glass passage waiting for the lift. She tried to reassure herself with uneasy humour – ‘a home from home'. But she was handicapped; she couldn't build up his London inside the glass walls of Krogh's as a seaside landlady can construct Birmingham with the beads, the mantel ornaments, the brass-work in the fender. She wouldn't if she could; she wanted security for him now; he had accused her – ‘you've always liked this modern stuff' – and she had denied it, but with only partial truth. Her dusty righteous antecedents pulled at her heart, but with all her intellect she claimed alliance with the present, this crooked day, this inhumanity; she was like a dark tunnel connecting two landscapes, on one side the huddled houses, the backs with their washing and their splintered window-boxes, on the other –

She knocked at the door and went in. Erik lay on a sofa in the padded beige room.

‘What is it, Kate?' he said. ‘Sit down.'

There was no telephone in the room, no pictures, no table; only a chair for his secretary.

She said, ‘I'm a little worried.'

‘Why?'

‘These short-term loans.' She was grateful to him because he didn't laugh at her; he considered her remark as seriously as if it had been made at a conference by someone with special knowledge. She was suddenly touched by the pity one is compelled to feel for anyone who has been mercilessly ‘used'. She had used him from the start, from the first day in Hammond's office; she had recognized what he needed and she had supplied it with no other end in view than this: Anthony downstairs talking to ‘the fellows', presenting her with her own flower, Anthony making himself at home.

‘I know,' he said, ‘these are not easy days. Everyone is suffering in the same way.'

‘But are we safe?'

‘Quite safe as long as we keep our heads – and our tongues.'

‘But this help to Hammarsten. Is that keeping your head? Can you afford it at the moment?'

‘Twenty thousand crowns is not very much to afford. The publicity is worth five times the amount. This is the moment to spend money. I've ordered two more cars. The others can be sold as soon as the new ones are delivered. Go shopping, Kate. Get yourself new things.'

‘Publicity?'

‘You don't realize how closely we are watched.'

‘Why are people so interested? When I buy a toothbrush –'

‘You know better than I do. I don't know much about people.'

She believed she knew: men were conditioned by their insecurity. It was not that they envied him his money or were consciously opposed to his international purpose; it was that increasingly they needed sensations to take their minds off their personal danger: a murder, a war, a financial crash, even a financial success if it were sufficiently startling. She was disturbed when she thought of the immense impersonal pressure that was exercised on any man with power, to induce him to make a sensation at the cost of security: by ultimatums, telegrams, slogans, huge bonuses with nothing paid into the reserve. It was only a man completely out of touch with what people thought, without a private life, who could resist this pressure. And Anthony wanted to make him human.

‘I was worried, too, about this sale to Batterson's. The A.C.U. has been useful. Why must we get rid of it now? It's sound, isn't it?' She was struck by the curious irresponsibility of his gaze; he was excited, he was heavily mischievous. She said, ‘I know it's sound. I've been looking at the figures.'

‘Even the A.C.U. needs capital,' Erik said.

‘But it has the capital. The investments are sound.'

‘The directors,' Erik said, ‘have rationalized the investments. Its capital is now invested in our Amsterdam company.'