England Made Me (6 page)

He went over to his desk and put a call through to one of his secretaries. ‘When will Miss Farrant be back?'

A voice replied from a microphone: ‘We expected her today, sir.'

He sat down at his desk and idly spread his palms; a man is born with what is marked on the left palm; on the right palm is what he makes of life. He knew enough of the doubtful science to recognize Success, Long Life.

Success: he was quite certain that he deserved it, these five floors of steel and glass, the fountain splashing beneath the concealed lights, the dividends, the new flotations, the lists closed after twelve hours; it pleased him to think that no other man had contributed to this success. If he died tomorrow the company would be broken. The intricate network of subsidiary companies was knitted together by his personal credit. Honesty was a word which had never troubled him: a man was honest so long as his credit was good: and his credit, he could tell himself with pride, stood a point higher than the credit of the French Government. For years he had been able to borrow money at four per cent to lend to the French Government at five. That was honesty – something which could be measured in terms of figures. Only in the last three months had he felt his credit not so much shaken as almost imperceptibly contracted.

But he was not afraid. In a few weeks' time the factories in America would have righted that. He did not believe in God, but he believed implicitly in the lines on his hand. His palm told him that his life would be a long one, and he believed that his life would not outlast his company. If the company failed, he would never hesitate to kill himself. A man of his credit did not go to prison. Kreuger, lying shot in the Paris hotel, was his example. He questioned his courage for the final act as little as he questioned his honesty.

Again he was obscurely troubled by the idea that he had neglected something. The statue in the court came back to worry him. On this building he had employed men whom he had been told were the best architects, sculptors, interior decorators in Sweden. He looked from the curved tuiya wood desk to the glass walls, from the clock without numerals to the statuette between the windows of a pregnant woman. He understood nothing. These things gave him no pleasure. He had been forced to take everything on trust. It impressed itself on him for just so long as it took the clock to strike the half-hour that he had never been trained to enjoy.

And yet the evenings had somehow to be passed until he was tired enough to sleep. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out an envelope. He knew what it contained, the tickets for the opera that night, the next night, all the week. He was Krogh; his taste in music had to be displayed in Stockholm. But he sat always in a small wilderness of his own contriving, an empty seat on either hand. It at once advertised his presence and guarded his ignorance; for no importunate neighbour could ask him his opinion of the music, and if he slept a little it was unnoticed.

He called his secretary. ‘If I am wanted,' he said, ‘I shall be at the British Legation for tea. Put through any long-distance calls.'

‘The Wall Street prices?'

‘I'll be back in time.'

‘Your chauffeur, Herr Krogh, has just rung up. The car has broken down.'

‘All right. It doesn't matter. I'll walk.'

He rose and his coat caught an ash-tray and spun it to the floor. His own initials were exposed, E.K. The monogram had been designed by Sweden's leading artist. E.K. – the same initials endlessly repeated formed the design of the deep carpet he crossed to the door. E.K. in the waiting-rooms; E.K. in the board-room; E.K. in the restaurants; the building was studded with his initials. E.K. in electric lights over the doorway, over the fountain, over the gate of the court. The letters flashed at him like the lights of a semaphore conveying a message over the vast distances which separated him from other men. It was a message of admiration; watching the lights he quite forgot that they had been installed by his own orders. E.K. flickering across the cold plateau a tribute from his shareholders; it was as close as he got to a relationship.

‘Well, Herr Krogh, it's finished at last.'

Krogh lowered his eyes; the reflected light died from them; they focused with detachment on the figure of the door-keeper who beamed and rubbed his hands in hopeless bonhomie.

‘The statue, I mean, Herr Krogh, it's completed, finished.'

‘And what do you think of it?'

‘Well, Herr Krogh, it's a bit odd. I don't understand it. I heard Herr Laurin say –'

He was irritated that a man who because of his youth and inexperience owed everything to him – for who would have dreamed of appointing Laurin, pale ineffective Laurin, to a directorship if he had not? – should disturb him for a moment with his doubts.

‘Understand this.' He watched the little man's exuberance wither. ‘That statue is by Sweden's greatest sculptor. It's not the business of a door-keeper to understand it; it's his business to tell visitors that it's the work of, of – get the name from my secretary, but don't let me ever hear you suggesting to visitors that the group's difficult to understand. It's a work of art. Remember that.'

He moved across the courtyard, then turned again; the light of his monogram flickered through the falling water. ‘If it wasn't a work of art, it wouldn't have been commissioned by Krogh's.'

Across the sky stretched the hillside lights of Djurgården, the restaurants, the high tower in Skansen, the turrets and the switchbacks in Tivoli. A thin blue mist crawled from the water, covering the motor-boats, creeping half-way to the riding lights of the steamers. An English cruising liner lay opposite the Grand Hotel, its white paint glowing in the light of the street lamps, and through the cordage Krogh could see the tables laid, the waiters carrying flowers, the line of taxis on the North Strand. On the terrace of the palace a sentry passed and repassed, his bayonet caught the lamplight, the mist came up over the terrace to his feet. The damp air held the music from every quarter suspended, a skeleton of music above an autumnal decay.

On the North Bridge Krogh turned up the collar of his coat. The mist blew round him. The restaurant below the bridge was closed, the glass shelters ran with moisture, and a few potted palms pressed dying leaves towards the panes, the darkness, the moored steamers. Autumn was early; it peeled like smoke from the naked thighs of a statue. But officially it was summer still (Tivoli not yet closed), in spite of cold and wind and soaked clay and the umbrellas blowing upwards round the stone Gustavus. An old woman scurried by dragging a child, a girl student in a peaked cap stepped out of the way of a taxi creeping up the kerb, a man pushed a hot chestnut cart up the slope of the bridge towards him.

He could see the lights in the square balconied block where he had his flat on the Norr Mälarstrand. The breadth of Lake Mälaren divided him from the workmen's quarters on the other bank. From his drawing-room window he could watch the canal liners arriving from Gothenburg with their load of foreign passengers. They had passed the place where he was born, they emerged at dusk unobtrusively from the heart of Sweden, from the silver birch woods round Lake Vätten, the coloured wooden cottages, the small landing stages where the chickens pecked for worms in soil spread thinly over rock. Krogh, the internationalist, who had worked in factories all over America and France, who could speak English and German as well as he could speak Swedish, who had lent money to every European Government, watched them of an evening sidle in to moor opposite the City Hall with a sense of something lost, neglected, stubbornly alive.

Krogh turned away from the waterside. The shops in the Fredsgatan were closed; there were few people about. It was too cold to walk, and Krogh looked round for a taxi. He saw a car up the narrow street on the right and paused at the corner. The trams shrieked across Tegelbacken, the windy whistle of a train came over the roofs. A car travelling too fast to be a taxi nearly took the pavement where Krogh stood, and was gone again among the trams and rails and lights in Tegelbacken, leaving behind an impression of recklessness, the sound of an explosion, a smell. In a side street a taxi-driver started his car and ambled down to the corner where Krogh stood. The explosion of the exhaust brought back Lake Vätten and the wild duck humming upwards from the reeds on heavy wings. He raised his oars and sat still while his father fired; he was hungry and his dinner depended on the shot. The rough bitter smell settled over the boat, and the bird staggered in the air as if cuffed by a great hand.

‘Taxi, Herr Krogh.'

It might have been a shot, Krogh thought, if this were America, and he turned fiercely on the taxi-driver: ‘How do you know my name?'

The man watched him with an air wooden and weather-worn. ‘Who wouldn't know you, Herr Krogh? You aren't any different from your pictures.'

The bird sank with beating wings as if the air had grown too thin to support it. It settled and lay along the water. When they reached it, it was dead, its beak below the water, one wing submerged like an aeroplane broken and abandoned.

‘Drive me to the British Legation,' Krogh said.

He lay back in the car and watched the faces swim up to the window through the mist, recede again. They flowed by in their safe and happy anonymity on the way to the switchbacks in Tivoli, the cheap seats in cinemas, to love in quiet rooms. He drew down the blinds and in his dark reverberating cage tried to think of numerals, reports, contracts.

A man in my position ought to have protection, he told himself, but police protection had to be paid for in questions. They would learn of the American monopoly which even his directors believed to be still in the stage of negotiation; they would learn too much of a great many things, and what the police knew one day the Press too often knew the next. It came home to him that he could not afford to be protected. Paying the driver off, he felt his isolation for the first time as a weakness.

He could hear the siren of a steamer on the lake and the heavy pounding of the engines. Voices came through the mist muffled, the human heat damped down, like the engines of a liner flooded and foundering.

2

Krogh was not a man who analysed his feelings; he could only tell himself: ‘On such and such an occasion I was happy; now I am miserable.' Through the glass door he could see the English man-servant treading sedately down marble stairs.

He was happy in Chicago that year.

‘Is the Minister in?'

‘Certainly, Herr Krogh.'

Up the stairs at the servant's heels: he was happy in Spain. His memories were quite unconcerned with women. He thought: I was happy that year, and remembered the small machine no larger than his suitcase that began to grind upon the table of his lodgings, how he watched it all the evening, eating nothing, drinking nothing, and how all night he lay on his back unable to sleep, only able to repeat over and over again to himself: ‘I was right. There's no serious friction.'

‘Herr Erik Krogh.'

The room was full of women, and he experienced no pleasure at the way they watched the door with curiosity and furtive avidity (the richest man in Europe), their faces old and unlined and pencilled in brilliant colours, like the illumination of an ancient missal carefully preserved under glass with the same page always turned to visitors. The Minister attracted elderly women. He was absorbed now by the little silver spirit-lamp under the kettle (he always poured out the tea himself), and a moment later, after a nod to Krogh, he was picking up slices of lemon in a pair of silver tweezers.

‘This is a great day, Mr Krogh,' a hawk-like woman said to him. He had often met her at the Legation and believed that she was some relative of the Minister's, but her name eluded him.

‘A great day?'

‘The new book of poems.'

‘Ah, the new book of poems.'

She took his arm and led him to a fragile Chippendale table in a corner of the room furthest from where the Minister poured out tea. All the room was Chippendale and silver; quite alien to Stockholm it was yet like a cultured foreigner who could speak the language fairly well and had imbibed many of the indigenous restraints and civilities, but not enough of them to put Krogh at his ease.

‘I don't understand poetry,' he said reluctantly. He did not like to admit that there was anything he did not understand; he preferrred to wait until he had overheard an expert's opinion which he might adopt as his own, but one glance at the room had told him that here he would wait in vain. The elderly women of the English colony twittered like starlings round the tea-table.

‘The Minister will be so disappointed if you don't look.'

Krogh looked. A photograph of de Laszlo's portrait faced the title-page: the sleek silver hair, the rather prudish quizzing eyes netted by wrinkles, the small round appley cheeks. ‘
Viol and Vine
.'

‘
Viol and Vine
,' Krogh said. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Why,' said the hawk-eyed woman, ‘the viola da gamba, you know, and – and wine.'

‘I always find English poetry very difficult,' Krogh said.

‘But you must read a little of it.' She thrust the book into his hands and he obeyed her with the deep respect he reserved for foreign women, standing stiffly at attention with the book held at a little distance almost on the level of his eyes – ‘To the Memory of Dowson' – and heard behind him the Minister's voice tinkling among the china.