‘But I wrote to you about the General Manager’s Fiat?’
‘No, no,’ Kate said, ‘there was nothing about a Fiat on any picture post-card.’ After two schnaps, she was almost ready to believe what he told her. She warmed to him. She put her hand on his and said: ‘It’s good to have you here, Tony. Go on.’ But before he could speak, she had missed his ring (the signet solemnly presented to each of them on the twenty-first birthday, or rather in his case sent out to him, she could not remember where, by registered post, ‘Care of the club’).
‘What have you done with your ring? Didn’t you ever get the ring?’
She could see how he measured her mood, calculated how much he could tell her. Is the evening going to be a failure after all, she wondered? I must break myself, oh, I must break myself quickly of this habit of asking questions. But after so many years of separation they left her tongue before she knew.
‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘go on. Tell me about the car, the manager’s car.’
Anthony said slowly, putting his left hand over hers, with a protective patronizing gesture, bland and candid: ‘But I should like to tell you about that ring. It’s a long story, but it’s interesting. Old girl, you just can’t imagine what strange spots that ring has led me to.’
‘No, no,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me that. Tell me about the car. But first let’s move on, we can’t get another schnaps here.’ It amused her to guide him through the intricacies of the licensing laws, to get a little drunk on schnaps, in spite of the regulations (two for a man, one for a woman).
‘And now,’ he said, ‘Liseberg.’
After the canal, the rustle of water at the edge of the grass banks, the whisper of men and women sitting on benches in the dark, the suburban road with no one passing, a limping procession of sounds came round the corners; not music, but as if a tuner were touching the keys of a piano, one after the other, in no particular order in a house a long way away. Above the house-tops a succession of towers was drawn sketchily in white lights; the notes came together as a tune fretting the memory, became through the high-arched entrance the blast of a remembered rhythm (the Foreign Secretary in a high stiff collar replied with extreme formality to her skål, while Krogh trod across the terrace from the lavatory, bowing to this side, bowing to that, and the couples danced beyond the glass doors, jingling and twinkling like chandeliers).
‘Come along, old girl,’ Anthony said, ‘let’s shake a leg.’ The more he drank, the further back he plunged in time. His slang began the evening bright and hollow with the immediate post-war years, but soon it dripped with the mud of trenches, culled from the tongues of ex-officers gossiping under the punkas of zero hour and the Victoria Palace, of the leave-trains and the Bing Boys.
A rocket spat and flared and failed to burst in the middle air, going damply out and the stick falling; in a square bounded by the stone pillars of dance-halls and restaurants an emerald fountain played into a wide shallow emerald pool: up, up like the spire of a tropical plant under a sky cold and deep and cloudless, down again in a green lustre, splashing from pool to paving, turning silver at the margin. An empty switchback shot above the roofs and out of sight, whining like a spent record. In the booths beyond ragged firing-squads shot off their pieces.
‘This way. We’ll go this way.’
A pirate ship floated on a still lake flecked with cigarette-cartons. A flower-lined path led in spirals to a little platform where two men in white overalls played chess against all comers at half a crown a game. Wherever you moved, through pink or green courtyards, through carefully contrived darknesses, you heard, beneath the music and the firing, the sizzling of the great concealed lights and saw the moths flock past to shrivel against the burning concave glasses.
Up into the light, down into the dark the switchback car; in an obscure booth a living fountain with pale-green skin and turban, water spurting out of scarlet stigmata on palms and feet; the cells of fat women, fortune-tellers, lion-tamers; the moths trooping by, like flakes of ash after a fire, going in one direction, not drawn from their course by the dim globes burning in the smaller booths.
Up above the roofs the switchback car; a rocket burst in mid-air, crowding the darkness with falling yellow fragments; the ragged squad loaded and fired.
‘You are too drunk to dance,’ Kate said.
‘Listen,’ Anthony said, ‘one more drink and I’ll take on the world at anything you like. Throwing rings. You’ve never seen me throw rings.’
Coloured ping-pong balls danced up and down on a column of water.
‘Would you like a doll?’ Anthony said, ‘or a glass vase? I’ll get you anything you like to name. What do I have to do, anyway?’
‘Come along and throw a ring. You know you can’t shoot. You get nothing unless you hit five balls in five shots. You never could hit a target when you were at school.’
‘I’ve learned a thing or two since then.’ He picked up one of the pistols which lay on the counter of the booth and tried to judge the sights. ‘Be a sport, Kate,’ he implored her, ‘and pay for me.’ He was excited, he felt the weight, he swung it in his hand. ‘You know, Kate,’ he said, ‘I’d like a job with guns. Instructor to a school or something of the sort.’
‘But, Tony,’ she protested, ‘you’ve never been able to hit a thing.’ She opened her bag, but before she could find her money, he had fired. She looked up and saw a yellow ball stagger on the pinnacle of water.
‘What luck,’ she cried. He shook his head, too serious to speak, reloaded with a sharp feathered pellet, sighted quickly, swinging the pistol down to the level of his eyes, and fired. She knew before the ball dropped that he would hit it; she was attending perhaps the only performance at which he was supremely skilful, shooting at a fair. She did not see the balls struck; she watched his face, grave, intent, curiously responsible; his hands broad with bitten nails suddenly became like a nurse’s, capable and gentle. He tucked a hideous blue vase under his arm and began again.
‘Tony,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do with it?’ as he laid a toy tiger at his feet. He paused in the act of opening the breech and frowned. ‘What, what did you say?’
‘This vase and tiger. What will you do with them? For God’s sake, don’t win any more prizes, Tony. Come and have a drink.’
He shook his head slowly; it was a long time before he realized what she meant; his eyes were continually straying back to the balls dancing in the fountain. ‘A vase,’ he said, ‘it’s always useful, isn’t it? For flowers and things.’
‘But the tiger, Tony?’
‘It’s not a bad tiger.’ He wouldn’t look at it, pressing the pellets into place. ‘If you don’t want it,’ he said, ‘I’ll give it away.’ He fired and loaded, fired and loaded while the balls cracked and dropped and a small crowd gathered behind. ‘I’ll give it to that girl on Tuesday,’ he said, and sighed and pointed to a green tin cigarette-case marked with the initial ‘A’ and put it in his pocket and walked away with the vase under one arm and the tiger under the other. Kate had to run to catch him up.
‘Where are you going?’ she called behind him, and felt her brain stabbed with his home-sickness when he replied: ‘Oh, Kate, I’d never get tired of doing that,’ as he walked on hopelessly between the arc-lights. He said: ‘One time, on Bank Holiday . . . I was never at home again on Bank Holiday.’
‘What was the girl’s name?’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
She put her hand under his arm and the vase slipped and fell and lay in blue ugly fragments at their feet, like a broken bottle to mark the end of a night’s drinking.
‘Never mind,’ he said gently, pulling her closer to his side, ‘there’s still the tiger.’
PART II
1
THE bronze doors slid apart, and Krogh was in the circular courtyard, Krogh was surrounded by Krogh’s. The cold clear afternoon sky roofed in the cube of glass and steel. The whole lower floors one room deep were exposed to him; he could see the ac
countants working on the ground floor, the glass flashing primrose before the electric fires. He noticed at once that the fountain was completed; the green shape worried him as he was not often worried; it accused him of cowardice. He had pandered to a fashion he did not understand; he would have much preferred to set in the fountain a marble goddess, a naked child, a nymph with concealing hands. He paused to examine the stone; no instinct told him whether it was good art or bad art; he did not understand. He was uneasy, but he did not show his uneasiness. His high bald face, like a roll of newspaper, showed at a distance only bold headlines; the smaller type, the little subtleties, obscure fears, were invisible.
He grew aware of being observed; he was watched through the glass by an accountant over his machine, by a director from his chromium balcony, by a waitress drawing the black leather blinds in the staff restaurant. The day faded quickly above his head, the lights began to go on behind the curved glass walls while he dallied beside the green statuary.
Krogh mounted the steel steps to the double doors of Krogh’s. When his foot touched the top step, the doors swung open. He bent going in; it was a habit he had never broken; six feet two in height with a flat aggressive back, he had been forced for years to bow in the doorway of his bed-sitting-room, his small flat, his first works. Waiting for the lift he tried to dismiss the statuary from mind.
The lift was unattended; Krogh liked to be alone. He was enclosed now by a double thickness of glass, the glass wall of the lift, the glass wall of the building; the office, like an untrustworthy man, emphasized its transparency. Moving slowly and silently upwards to the top floor, Krogh could still see the fountain; it receded, grew smaller, flattened out; as the concealed lighting went on all round the court, the brutal shape cast a delicate shadow, like a drawing on porcelain on the circular polished paving. He thought, I am neglecting something, with obscure regret.
He entered his room and closed the door; the papers he had demanded were stacked neatly on a desk which was curved to follow the shape of the glass wall. He could see the reflection of the log fire in the window; a log shifted and fell and a spray of pale heatless sparks rose up the glass. It was the one room in the building unwarmed by electricity. The gentle beating of the flames was a form of companionship to Krogh in his soundproof room, in his Arctic isolation. Night was dropping into the court below like streamers of ink into a grey luminous liquid. He wondered whether he had been mistaken about the fountain.
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.