Read England Made Me for Free Online

another; she had thought herself lucky to catch him in his moment of depression and truth, but it was a pleasure of another kind to catch him at his most joyous and his most false. He told her stories which began with a rather pallid veracity, but were soon as coloured as any he could possibly have told Maud or Annette or the Davidge girl.
    â€˜But I wrote to you about the General Manager’s Fiat?’
    â€˜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’).
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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).
    â€˜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 skÃ¥l , 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).
    â€˜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.
    â€˜This way. We’ll go this way.’
    A pirate