‘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’, p
resenting 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.’
‘I see,’ Kate said.
‘You are quicker than Hall.’
She thought: This is the moment I’ve always been expecting, the moment when we leave the law behind, push out for new shores. It seemed curiously unimportant. One had always expected the drawn-out business of good-byes, tears on wharfs, last sight of shipping. There was only one question to be asked: ‘Is it safe?’
‘Very nearly safe,’ Erik said. She trusted him absolutely; if it was nearly safe, there was no more to be said. One couldn’t afford to be squeamish or unadventurous when one was responsible for somebody one loved. He said, ‘You’ll find that some cheques, some entries in our books have been pre-dated.’
‘Of course,’ Kate said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No, everything’s arranged.’ He got up. ‘You know, Kate, you were not wrong, after all, about the fountain. I like the fountain.’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘You are quicker than Hall, Kate. Hall never liked the fountain.’ She could feel uneasiness in his finger-tips.
She said, ‘We are not safe.’
‘We’ll be safe when the American sales have gone through,’ Erik said. ‘We shall be safe in less than a week. We are all but safe. The strike’s settled.’
‘You mean something else may happen?’
‘We’ve got to be very careful for a few days. You can see,’ he said, ‘how I trust you. We’ve known each other for a good many years now, Kate. Will you marry me?’
‘A wife, you mean, doesn’t have to give evidence? Is that true in Sweden as well as in England?’
‘There’s no danger in Sweden. I’m thinking of England.’
‘It was good of you not to make love to me.’
‘We are two business people,’ Erik said.
‘I shall want a settlement for myself.’
‘Of course.’
‘And something, too, for Anthony.’
‘I like Anthony. He knows the way around. I’m fond of him, Kate.’
‘But a settlement?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a pity,’ Kate said, ‘that we can’t pre-date the marriage like the cheques.’ She smiled. ‘Anthony will be pleased. There’s nobody more respectable than Anthony. Anthony –’ she dwelt on the name; she might have been marrying Anthony and not Erik at all; he stood at her side as stiffly as a best man in a vestry. Anthony’s safe, she thought; I’ve undone the damage I did him when I sent him back, back from the barn to conform, to pick up the conventions, the manners of all the rest. He tried to break away and I sent him back. Now I’ve discovered a way out for him. But the exhilaration was touched with regret; she couldn’t help remembering the Bedford Palace, the apples they’d eaten to take the smell away. One believed in a new frontierless world, with Krogh’s on every exchange; one believed in having no scruples while one got what one wanted most – security; but the old honesties and the old dusty poverties of Mornington Crescent spoke in one’s voice when one said again: ‘Anthony will be pleased. When shall it be?’
‘We’ll wait a day or two,’ Erik said, ‘and see how things go on. If the sale of the A.C.U. goes through all right,’ he hardly hesitated, ‘we’ll be able to take our time.’
Kate nearly loved him. He was so clumsily honest with her even when his books, she supposed, were already immaculately forged. She had often heard rumours of how much he had to pay in blackmail; for the first time she was in a position, if she wished, to blackmail him herself. But she didn’t want to; she had used him, it was only fair that he should be allowed to use her. She said, ‘You could have trusted me anyway.’
He nodded; he was always ready to accept what she said to him as truth; he would never have let a column of figures go by like that, he would have checked them every one, whatever accountant had been over them before him. She took his hand and kissed it; she pitied him as he stood there in his padded silenced room where nobody could trouble him. She said, ‘Dear Erik, I’m going to tell Anthony,’ and left the room. Going down in the lift she remembered, she didn’t know why, a tramcar she had seen out of control on the North Bridge; glass and steel and the face of the driver with his hand pressed on a lever and the current running through and sparking behind the glass. It rocked by her in the dark and she could tell by the flicker of light that something was wrong. It went by her like something in the grip of a passion, bright and quick and unreliable.
‘Congratulate me,’ she said aloud in the lift, ‘I’m going to be married. Anthony, I’m going to be married,’ and she thought with sudden kindness: Perhaps this is what Erik feels, this sense of a sum solved, the square root taken, the logarithm correctly read. She said again in her own doorway: ‘I’m going to be married, Anthony.’
‘Who to, Kate?’ he asked. He looked up quickly, he was sitting at her desk, and again she had a sense of dampness; her desk was marked with it where his elbows had rested.
‘To Erik, of course. Who else?’
‘No,’ Anthony said, ‘you can’t. She saw then that he had been reading the papers on her desk: he had even opened a telegram which had been delivered since she had left him.
‘How dare you?’ she said. ‘You little cheat.’
‘He can’t get away with it,’ Anthony said.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Oh,’ Anthony said, ‘you can trust me about these things. I’ve got a head for figures. I can put two and two together.’ He said with a schoolboy gravity, ‘You know, Kate, there are limits to what you can do. Believe me, I’ve discovered them. He can’t pass the buck like this. Batterson’s weren’t born yesterday.’
‘Nor was Erik.’
‘Loo was right. It’s not respectable.’
‘Give me the telegram.’
‘Why,’ Anthony said, ‘you can see it all. He’s bolstering up Amsterdam with the A.C.U. It’s as plain as
a pikestaff.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Kate said. ‘I know it all, too. Even to the pre-dated cheques.’
‘The pre-dated cheques!’ he whistled. His gravity broke. He said: ‘To think that Krogh’s . . . and we know.’
‘You’ve got to keep it to yourself.’
‘He must make it worth our while, Kate.’
She thought: I’ve always believed there was this difference between us; that there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, but there were things he wouldn’t do for me or for himself. She smiled with tenderness, she wasn’t angry any more: I haven’t discovered yet what they are. It gave her a deep pleasure to think there was something she didn’t know about Anthony after all these years. She said, ‘Anthony, I’m not going to blackmail him. I’m going to marry him.’
‘But, Kate, you don’t love him.’ He was incorrigibly conventional, he was hopelessly innocent, the idea of blackmail lay as lightly on his spirits as a theft of plums. She was frightened by his superficiality; he didn’t know where he was; he needed protection. She would do anything, she thought again, for him; she did not wish to deny him even blackmail. She felt that to deny him anything would mar the absurd happiness of his discovery. So she explained gently: ‘It’s a form of blackmail. He’s going to make a settlement.’
But on this point he was stubborn: ‘You don’t love him.’
‘I love you.’
‘That’s not the point.’ He was worried; he was muddled; he said something under his breath about ‘children’ and blushed with self-consciousness.
Kate said: ‘I’m sterile. You needn’t be afraid,’ and seeing his embarrassment, added with an enraged despair: ‘I don’t want them. I’ve never wanted them,’ and felt her body stretch to receive him. ‘You’re so conventional, Anthony,’ and she thought: a child inside me would be no closer than we’ve been, and yet there he stands, and there it would stand, blushing, self-conscious, my God, how prim, forgetting what they don’t want to remember.
‘Such a waste,’ he said, staring back at her, flushed, childish, inarticulate. She was prepared for him to say something about a good man’s love. But they were at cross-purposes. He didn’t mean that she was wasted; he meant the opportunity was wasted. ‘The chance may never come again. We could lift a good sum from him and clear out. Why, we could catch the train tonight. Tomorrow Gothenburg. We’d be in London on Saturday in time to go to Twickenham. Kate,’ he said, ‘we could go to Stone’s for a chop and a pint of special. I daresay my room hasn’t been taken yet. The landlady would find a room somewhere for you. We shouldn’t have to look for a job; he’d have paid us our price.’