About the Author

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography – A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

ALSO BY GRAHAM GREENE

Novels

The Man Within

It’s a Battlefield

A Gun for Sale

The Confidential Agent

The Ministry of Fear

The Third Man

The End of the Affair

Loser Takes All

The Quiet American

A Burnt-out Case

Travels with my Aunt

Dr Fischer of Geneva or

The Bomb Party

The Human Factor

The Tenth Man

Stamboul Train

Brighton Rock

The Power and the Glory

The Heart of the Matter

The Fallen Idol

Our Man in Havana

The Comedians

The Honorary Consul

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

Short Stories

Collected Stories

Twenty-One Stories

The Last Word and Other Stories

May We Borrow Your Husband?

Travel

Journey Without Maps

The Lawless Roads

In Search of a Character

Getting to Know the General

Essays

Yours etc.

Reflections

Mornings in the Dark

Collected Essays

Plays

Collected Plays

Autobiography

A Sort of Life

Ways of Escape

Fragments of an Autobiography

A World of my Own

Biography

Lord Rochester’s Monkey

An Impossible Woman

Children’s Books

The Little Train

The Little Horse-Bus

The Little Steamroller

The Little Fire Engine

1

SHE might have been waiting for her lover. For three quarters of an hour she had sat on the same high stool, half turned from the counter, watching the swing door. Behind her the ham sandwiches were piled under a glass dome, the urns gently steamed. As the door swung open, the smoke of engines silted in, grit on the skin and like copper on the tongue.

‘Another gin.’ It was her third. Damn him, she thought with tenderness, I’m hungry. She swallowed it at a draught, as she was used to drinking schnaps; skål, skål, but there was no one to skål. The man in the bowler hat put his foot on the brass rail, leant his elbow on the counter, drank his bitter, talked, drank his bitter, wiped his moustache, talked, kept his eye on her.

She stared out past the dusty door pane into the noisy dark. Sparks leapt in the thick enclosed air and went out, sparks from engines, sparks from cigarettes, sparks from the trolley wheels beating on the asphalt. An old tired woman swung the door and peered in; she was looking for someone who was not there.

She moved from her stool; the man in the bowler hat watched her, the waitresses paused in their drying and watched her. Their thoughts drummed on her back: Is she giving him up? What’s he like, I wonder? Jilted? She stood in the doorway and let them think: the deep silence of their concentration amused her. She watched the blue empty rails in front of her, looked up the platform to the lights and the bookstalls, then she turned and went back to her stool and was aware of their thoughts wilting again in the steaming air round the urns; the waitresses dried glasses, the man in the bowler hat drank his bitter.

‘It never rains but it pours. Take silk stockings for example.’

‘Another gin.’ But she left the glass on the counter, after barely touching it this time with her lips, and began hurriedly to make-up, as if it had been a duty she had been too excited to remember. Now, in the deep conviction that he would not come, she had one lonely hour to remember in all the things she had neglected: mouth, nose, cheeks, eyebrows. ‘Oh damn,’ she said. The pencil snapped, and she ground the charcoal end into the floor with her toe; ‘Oh damn,’ she said, caring not a hang that she was surrounded again by curiosity, alien and unfriendly. It was as if she had broken a mirror; it was unlucky; it was inefficient. Her self-confidence was shaken. She began to wonder if she would recognise her brother if, after all, he came.

But she knew him at once by the small scar under the left eye, the round face which had always looked as if only that day it had lost its freshness, like a worn child’s, the bonhomie which even a stranger would not trust. ‘Kate,’ he was all contrition, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. It wasn’t my fault. The fact is –’ and at once he became sullen, prepared not to be believed. And why, she thought, as she kissed him and touched his back to assure herself that he was there, that he had really come, that they were together, should anyone believe him? He can’t open his mouth without lying.

‘Have this gin?’ She watched him drink it slowly and was aware how her own brain recorded unerringly his anxiety.

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘You have,’ he said. ‘You’re prettier than ever, Kate,’ and charm, she thought, charm, your damnable accommodating charm. ‘Prosperity suits you.’ She watched him more closely and examined his clothes for any sign that the years had been less prosperous for him. But he always possessed one good suit. Tall and broad and thin and a little worn, with the scar under his lower lid, he was the mark of every waitress in the room. ‘A bitter, please,’ and a waitress tore along the counter to serve him, and Kate watched the automatic charm glint in his eye.

‘Where shall we eat? Where are your bags?’ He turned cautiously from the counter and one hand straightened his school tie.

‘The fact is –’ he said.

‘You aren’t coming with me,’ she said with hopeless certainty. She wondered for a moment at the depth of her disappointment, for he belonged to this place, to the smoke swirling beyond the door, to the stale beer, to ‘Guinness is good for you’ and ‘Try a Worthington’, he had the bold approach, the shallow cheer of an advertisement.

‘How did you know?’

‘Oh, I always know.’ It was true, she always knew; she was his elder by half an hour; she had, she sometimes thought with a sense of shame, by so little outstripped him in the pursuit of the more masculine virtues, reliability, efficiency, and left him with what would have served most women better, his charm. ‘They aren’t going to give you the Stockholm job then?’

He beamed at her; he rested both hands (she noticed his gloves needed cleaning) on the top of his umbrella, leant back against the counter and beamed at her. Congratulate me, he seemed to be saying, and his humorous friendly shifty eyes raked her like the headlamps of a second-hand car which had been painted and polished to deceive. He would have convinced anyone but her that for once he had done something supremely clever.

‘I’ve resigned.’

But she had heard that tale too often; it had been the yearly fatal drumming in their father’s ears which helped to kill him. He had not been able to answer a telephone without anxiety – ‘I have resigned’, ‘I have resigned’, proudly as if it had been matter for congratulation – and afterwards the cables from the East tremblingly opened. ‘I have resigned’ from Shanghai, ‘I have resigned’ from Bangkok, ‘I have resigned’ from Aden, creeping remorselessly nearer. Their father had believed to the end the literal truth of those cables, signed even to relatives with faint grandiloquence in full, ‘Anthony Farrant’. But Kate had always known too much; to her these messages conveyed – ‘Sacked. I am sacked. Sacked.’

‘Come outside,’ she said. It would have been unfair to humiliate him before the waitresses. Again she was aware of the deep listening silence, of eyes watching them go. At the far end of the platform she began to question him. ‘How much money have you got?’

‘Not a sou,’ he said.

‘But surely you’ve got a week’s pay. You gave them a week’s notice.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, striking an attitude against his smoky metallic background, against a green signal lamp burning for the East Coast express, ‘I left at once. Really, it was an affair of honour. You wouldn’t be able to understand.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Besides, my landlady will give me tick until I’m in funds again.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘Oh, I’ll get hold of something in a week.’ His courage would have been admirable if it had not been so feckless. Money, he had always been certain, would turn up, and it always did: a fellow he’d known at school noticed his tie in the street, stopped him, gave him a job; he sold vacuum cleaners to his relations; he was quite capable of selling a gold brick to an Australian in the Strand; at the worst there had always been his father.

‘You forget. Father’s dead.’

‘What do you mean? I’m not going to sponge.’ He believed quite sincerely that he had never ‘sponged’. He had borrowed, of course; his debts to relatives must by now have almost reached the thousand mark; but they remained debts not gifts, one day, when a scheme of his succeeded, to be repaid. While Kate waited for the express to pass and shielded her face from the smoke, she remembered a few of his schemes: his plan to buy up old library novels and sell them in country villages, his great packing idea (a shop which would pack and post your Christmas parcels at a charge of twopence a parcel), the patent hand warmer (a stick of burning charcoal in the hollow handle of an umbrella). They had always sounded plausible when he described them; they had no obvious faults, except the one fatal flaw that he was concerned in them. ‘I only want capital,’ he would explain with a brightness which was never dulled by the knowledge that no one would ever trust him with more than five pounds. Then he would embark on them without capital; strange visitors would appear at week-ends, men older than himself with the same school ties, the same air of bright vigour, but in their cases distinctly tarnished. Then the affair would be wound up, and astonishingly it appeared from the long and complicated pages of accounts that he had not lost more money than he had borrowed. ‘If I had had proper capital,’ he would explain, but he blamed no one, and no one was paid back. He had added to his debts, but he had not ‘sponged’.

His face, she thought, is astonishingly young for thirty-three; it is a little worn, but only as if by a wintry day, it is no more mature than when he was a schoolboy. He might be a schoolboy now, returned from a rather cold and wearing football match. His appearance irritated her, for a man should grow up, but before she could speak and tell him what she thought, her tenderness woke again for his absurd innocence. For he was hopelessly lost in the world of business that she knew so well, the world where she was at home: he had a child’s cunning in a world of cunning men: he was dishonest, but he was not dishonest enough. She was aware, having shared his thoughts for more than thirty years, felt his fears beat in her own body, of his incalculable reserves. There were things he would not do. That, she told herself, was the amazing difference between them.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave you here without money. You’re coming with me. Erik will give you a job.’

‘I can’t speak the language. And anyhow,’ he leant forward on his stick and smiled with as much negligence as if he had a thousand pounds in the bank, ‘I don’t like foreigners.’

‘My dear,’ she said with irritation, ‘you’re out of date. There are no foreigners in a business like Krogh’s; we’re internationalists there, we haven’t a country. We aren’t a little dusty City office which has been in the family for two hundred years.’

There were times when he did seem to share her intuition, to catch directly the sharp glitter of her meaning. ‘Ah, but darling,’ he said, ‘perhaps that’s where I belong. I’m dusty too, he remarked, standing there with uncertain urbanity, with an uneasy smile, in his smart, his one good suit, ‘And besides. I haven’t a single reference.’

‘You said you had resigned.’

‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that.’

‘Don’t I know it.’ They stepped back to let a trolley pass. ‘I’m damned hungry,’ he said. ‘Could you lend me five bob?’

‘You’re coming with me,’ she repeated. ‘Erik will give you a job. Have you got your passport?’

‘It’s at my digs.’

‘We’ll fetch it.’ The lights of an incoming train beat against his face, and she could watch with hard decided tenderness his hesitation and his fear. She was certain that if he had not been hungry, if he had not been without five shillings in his pocket, he would have refused. For he was right when he remarked that he was dusty too: the grit of London lay under his eyes, he was at home in this swirl of smoke and steam, at the marble-topped tables, chaffing in front of the beer handles, he was at home in the one-night hotels, in the basement offices, among the small crooked flotations of transient businesses, jovial among the share pushers. She thought: If I had not met Erik, I should have been as dusty too. ‘We’ll find a taxi,’ she said.

He stared through the window at the bicycle shops of the Euston Road; in the electric light behind the motor horns, behind the spokes and the tins of liquid rubber, autumn glimmered, lapsed into winter as the lights were put out and the bicycles were taken in for the night. ‘Oh,’ he sighed, ‘it’s good, isn’t it?’ Autumn was the few leaves drifted from God knows where upon the pavement by Warren Street tube, the lamplight on the wet asphalt, the gleam of cheap port in the glasses held by old women in the Ladies’ Bar. ‘London,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing like it.’ He leant his face against the glass. ‘Dash it all, Kate, I don’t want to go.’

He had used the one phrase which told her the real extent of his emotion. ‘Dash it all, Kate.’ She remembered a dark barn and the moon behind the stacks and her brother with his school cap crumpled in his hands. They had as many memories in common as an old couple celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. ‘You’ve got to go,’ and she watched him out of sight before she made her own way back to her school, the waiting mistress, the two hours’ questioning, and the reports.

‘You’ve got to come.’

‘Of course you know best,’ Anthony said. ‘You always have. I was just remembering that time we met in the barn.’ And certainly, she thought with surprise, he sometimes has his intuitions too. ‘I’d written to you that I was running away, and we met, do you remember, half-way between our schools? It was about two o’clock in the morning. You sent me back.’

‘Wasn’t I right?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘of course you were right,’ and turned towards her eyes so blank that she wondered whether he had heard her question. They were as blank as the end pages of a book hurriedly turned to hide something too tragic or too questionable on the last leaf.

‘Here you are,’ he said, ‘welcome to my humble abode.’ She winced at his mechanical jollity, which was not humble nor welcoming, but the recited first lesson in a salesman’s school. When the landlady smiled at them and told him in a penetrating whisper that he would not be disturbed, she began to realize what life had done to him since she had seen him last.

‘Have you got a shilling for the meter?’

‘It’s not worth while,’ she said. ‘We aren’t going to stay. Where are your bags?’

‘As a matter of fact I popped ’em yesterday.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We can buy you something on the way to the station.’

‘The shops’ll be closed.’

‘Then you’ll have to sleep in your clothes. Where’s your passport?’

‘In a drawer. I shan’t be a moment. Take a seat on the bed, Kate.’ Where she sat she could see on the table a cheap framed photograph: ‘With love from Annette.’

‘Who’s that, Tony?’

‘Annette? She was a sweet kid. I think I’ll take it with me.’ He began to rip open the back of the frame.

‘Leave her here. You’ll find plenty like her in Stockholm.’

He stared at the small hard enamelled face. ‘She was the goods, Kate.’

‘Is this her scent on the pillow?’

‘Oh no. No. That wouldn’t be hers. She hasn’t been here for a long time now. I haven’t had any money, and the kid’s got to live. God knows where she is now. She’s left her digs. I tried there yesterday.’

‘After you’d sold your bags?’

‘Yes. But you know when you once lose sight of a girl like that, she’s gone. You never see her again. It’s odd when you’ve known a girl so well, been fond of each other, seen her only a month ago, not to know where she is, whether she’s alive or dead or dying.’

‘Then that other’s the scent?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that other’s the scent.’

‘She’s old, isn’t she?’

‘She’s over forty.’

‘Plenty of money, I suppose?’

‘Oh, she’s rich enough,’ Anthony said. He picked up the second photograph and laughed without much amusement. ‘We’re a pair, aren’t we, you and Krogh and me and Maud.’ She didn’t answer, watching him stoop again to find his passport, noticing how broad he had become since she had seen him last. She remembered the waitresses staring over the dishcloths, the silence which surrounded their talk. It seemed odd to her that he should need to buy a girl. But when he turned, his smile explained everything; he carried it always with him as a leper carried his bell; it was a perpetual warning that he was not to be trusted.

‘Well. Here it is. But will he give me a job?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not so bright.’

‘You needn’t tell me,’ she said, sounding for the first time the whole depth of her sad affection, ‘what you are.’

‘Kate,’ he said, ‘it sounds silly, but I’m a bit scared.’ He dropped the passport on the bed and sat down. ‘I don’t want any more new faces. I’ve had enough of them.’ She could see them crowding up behind his eyes: the men at the club, the men in liners, the men on polo ponies, the men behind glass doors. ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘you’ll stick to me?’

‘Of course,’ she said. There was nothing easier to promise. She could not rid herself of him. He was more than her brother; he was the ghost that warned her, look what you have escaped; he was all the experience she had missed; he was pain, because she had never felt pain except through him; for the same reason he was fear, despair, disgrace. He was everything except success.

‘If only you could stay with me here.’ ‘Here’ was the twin dials on the gas-meter, the dirty pane, the long-leaved plant, the paper fan in the empty fireplace; ‘here’ was the scented pillow, the familiar photographs, the pawned bags, the empty pockets, home.

She said: ‘I can’t leave Krogh’s.’

‘He’ll give you a job in London.’

‘No, he wouldn’t. He needs me there.’ And ‘there’ was the glassy cleanliness, the latest fashionable sculpture, the sound-proof floors and dictaphones and pewter ash-trays and Erik in his silent room listening to the reports from Warsaw, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin.

‘Well, I’ll come. He’s got the brass, hasn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got the brass.’

‘And there’ll be pickings for yours truly?’

‘Yes, there’ll be pickings.’

He laughed. He had forgotten already the new faces he feared. He put on his hat and looked in the mirror and adjusted the handkerchief in his breast-pocket. ‘What a pair we are.’ She could have sung with joy, when he pulled her to her feet, because they were a pair again, if she had not been daunted at the sight of him in his suspect smartness, his depraved innocence, hopelessly unprepared in his old school tie.

‘What is that tie?’ she asked. ‘Surely it’s not . . .’

‘No, no,’ he said, flashing the truth at her so unexpectedly that she was caught a victim to the charm she hated. ‘I’ve promoted myself. It’s Harrow.’

2

The fellows asked me to have another whisky. They all wanted to hear what I’d seen. For weeks before they had scarcely spoken a word to me, said I was lucky not to be turned out of the club, for claiming a military rank, they told me, to which I wasn’t entitled. The sun beat down on the pavement outside, and a beggar lay in a patch of shadow and licked his hands; I can’t think to this day why he licked his hands. The captains brought me another drink and the majors drew up their chairs and the colonels told me to take my time. The generals weren’t there, they were probably asleep in their offices, because it was about noon. They forgot I wasn’t really a captain, we were all commercials together.

A fishing boat rocking on the swell with a yellow light a man’s height upon the mast, and a man kneeling and pulling at a bundle of nets in the pale light, with the sea and the dark all round him and we passing all lit up and a gramophone playing.

I told the fellows at the club how I was on the pavement when the coolie threw the bomb. A cart had broken down and the Minister’s car pulled up and the coolie threw the bomb, but of course, I hadn’t seen it, I’d only heard the noise over the roofs and seen the screens tremble. I wanted to discover how many whiskies they’d pay for. I was tired of being left out of every bridge four; I didn’t know where to turn for a little cash. So I said I was badly shaken and they paid for three whiskies and we played cards and I won over two pounds before Major Wilber came in, who knew I had not been there.

Smell of whisky from the smoking-room, touch of salt on the lips. The gramophone playing, new faces.

So I went on to Aden.

Skinning a rabbit among the gorse bushes on the common, I shut my eyes for a moment and the knife slipped up through a fold of skin and stabbed me under the eye. They told me over and over again that I ought to have cut downwards, as if I hadn’t known it all the time, and they thought I would lose my sight on that side. I was frightened and Father was ill and Kate came. Pale-green dormitory walls and the cracked bell ringing for tea, my face bandaged and I listening to the feet on the stone stairs going down to tea. I could hear how many waited by the matron’s room for eggs marked on the shell with their names in indelible pencil, and the cracked bell ringing again before the boot-boy put his hand on the slapper. And then silence, like heaven, and I was alone until Kate came.

The man ran along the roofs and they shot at him from the street and from the windows. He dodged behind the chimney-pots and slipped in the rain pools on the flat roofs. He kept both hands clapped to the seat of his trousers because he had torn them in escaping and the rain beat on his head. It was the first rain we had had, but I could tell from the sky and the temperature and the sweat on the backs of my hands that it would go on now for weeks.

‘Kate,’ I said, and she was there as I knew she would be there, and we were alone in the barn.

Many things there are to consider over thirty years, things seen and heard and lied about and loved, things one has feared and admired and felt desire for, things abandoned with the sea gently lifting and the lightship dropping behind like a small station on the Underground, bright at night and empty, no one getting out and the train not stopping.

I hoped it was the engaged tone, but I knew it was the ringing tone, and I rang up four times from a box in the Circus, while the faces glared at me through the glass as they waited their turn, and I remembered three times to press Button B and get my money back, but the fourth time when I knew there was no one there I forgot. So someone got a free call, and now I could do with even that twopence in my pocket. I might toss someone heads or tails and win the price of a drink. But they are nearly all Swedes on board and foreigners aren’t sportsmen and I can’t speak the language.

New faces and the old faces lost, dead or sick or dying, and the To Let board outside the block. When I pushed the button no bell rang, and the light on the landing had been disconnected. The wall was covered with pencil notes: ‘See you later’, ‘Off to the baker’s’, ‘Leave the beer outside the door’, ‘Off for the week-end’, ‘No milk this morning’. There was hardly one patch of whitewash unwritten upon and the messages were all of them scratched out. Only one remained uncancelled, it looked months old, but it might have been new, for it said: ‘Gone out. Be back at 12.30, dear’, and I had written her a post-card saying that I would be coming at half-past twelve. So I waited, sitting there on the stone stairs for two hours, in front of the top flat and nobody came up.

Feet on the stone stairs, running, scrambling, pushing, up to the dormitory; Kate gone and the room full and the prefects turning out the lights. Not a moment of quiet even at night, for always someone talks in his sleep the other side of the wooden partition. I lay sweating gently unable to sleep, forgetting the pain under my eye, waiting for the thrown sponge, the rustle of curtains, the hand plucking at my bed-clothes, the giggles, the slap of bare feet on the wooden boards.

Old faces, faces hated, faces loved, alive or dead, sick or dying, a lot of junk in the brain after thirty years, the prow rising to the open sea, the lightship behind, and the gramophone playing.

Down the stone stairs with money in my pocket meant for her; thirty bob to the good because she was not there; once gone, lost, not to be seen again. Fill the room with film actress photos, tear the portraits out of the Tatler: ‘Will you sign this for an unknown admirer? One shilling enclosed for packing and postage.’ Whores in plenty in Hollywood, but no whore like my whore. Unhappiness always makes a man richer: thirty bob to the good and no one to visit.

I knew at once of course what it was about when they said: ‘The Manager wants to see you.’ I’d expected it for days, so every morning I put on my best bib and tucker and cleaned my teeth extra well. I’ve forgotten who it was who told me once I had a dazzling smile, not knowing the practice before the glass, the constant change of paste, the expensive dentists for invisible fillings. A man’s got to look after his appearance the same as a woman. It’s often his only chance. Maud, for example.

Nearer forty than thirty, blonde, a little over-blown about the blouse. ‘There are things a man won’t do,’ I said, ‘and one is to take money from a woman,’ so she respected me and gave me presents and I popped them when I needed some ready. We met on the Underground. All the way from Earl’s Court to Piccadilly, eyeing each other down the length of the carriage; I had a hole in my sock and couldn’t cross my legs. Slow. Slow approach. Meeting at last on the moving stair.

How quick with Annette. Ringing the bell of the flat, expecting another girl; then she opened the door and I thought: ‘She’s the goods.’

When I opened the door he pretended to be writing; it’s a stale trick to make you feel inferior and it never fails to work. ‘Oh, Mr Farrant,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you about a complaint I received from the shippers. I have no doubt that you can explain.’ Well, if he hadn’t any doubt, I had.

And so on to Bangkok.

Spit and hiss of water, the gramophone quiet. The lights out along the deck, nobody about.

Lectures, my God, how many lectures in a man’s life? Only Kate, I think, never; simply said do this and that, never nagged. And Annette, content and quiet and affectionate behind the drawn blinds in the half-light. Maud lecturing, Father lecturing, managers lecturing. God in Heaven, I’m Anthony Farrant, as good as they are. I can add up two columns of figures in my head, multiply by three, take away the number I first thought of. Even the managers know that. ‘Brilliant,’ they say at first, ‘a quite brilliant piece of work, Mr Farrant,’ because I’ve put money in their pockets; it’s only later when I put a little in my own that they ask me to explain.

Selling tea. Three hundred spoilt sacks they could do nothing with and shooting in the streets. I bought the lot from them for a song and sold them again at the full rate. There’s always money to be picked up in a revolution. But they looked at me askance after that. They never trusted me again.

Voices whispering in the dormitory: ‘Someone has left a vest in the changing-room. Honour of the House,’ running the gauntlet of the knotted towels, noise over the roof-tops, paper screens trembling, spoilt tea, shooting in the streets, ‘honour of the firm.’

And so on to Aden.

Everybody in bed; the night cold and the water invisible under the pale knife-edge of foam. The man in the lower bunk talking all night in a language I do not understand, and the new day grey and windy, the canvas of the deck chairs flapping, and very few people at breakfast; an unshaven chin, the dismal jocularity of stewards, a girl with hair like Greta Garbo’s walking alone, a smell of oil and a long time till lunch, Kate thinking of Krogh.

How do I know that she is thinking of Krogh? How did I know that she would be waiting for me in the barn?

She said: ‘We’ll spend the night in Gothenburg,’ and I knew she was worried.

I pretended I wanted to go to the lavatory and slipped out. I had my clothes on under my dressing-gown, carried my shoes and socks hidden, wore bedroom slippers. The cold of the stone steps crept through the torn sole. I left the dressing-gown in the lavatory and listened at the housemaster’s door. It was all so easy. He had gone to supper and his window had no bars. But Kate sent me back and I trusted her: frost on the road and the smell of nipped leaves and a clear sky and I happy with everything behind; the hard ruts in the by-road and the noisy twigs snapping underfoot and the lamps of motorists on the main road and I miserable with everything the same as before.

Thinking of Krogh. ‘Use Krogh’s. Krogh’s are cheapest and best.’ That was ten years ago, no, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, shopping with the nurse at the general stores, stooping in the doorway under the baskets, brushing against the tins of weedkiller, examining the mowing machines, while my nurse bought Krogh’s. Now they are not the cheapest and the best. They are the only. Krogh’s in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland, Krogh’s everywhere. ‘Buy Krogh’s’ has a different meaning now: ten per cent and rising daily.

And I might have been as famous and as rich as Krogh if I had been trusted as Krogh has been trusted, if I had been lent capital; they gave me a five-pound note and expected me to be grateful. There was a fortune in every one of my schemes, if they had trusted me. Could Krogh have sold a hundred bags of spoilt tea?

But I’ve never been trusted.

When Wilber came in, there were no more free whiskies from the fellows there; I was drummed out of that club; and so on to Colombo. Grey sea, the telegrams home, the bandit sheltering behind the chimney-pot, escape from school after the cracked bell had gone lights out, shippers’ complaints, and the sound of the bomb rattling behind the roofs; a hundred bags of spoilt tea, the little Chinese officer in gold-rimmed glasses smoking Woodbines, the green dormitory walls and the grey sea and the canvas chairs flapping, Kate thinking of Krogh; Krogh like God Almighty in every home; impossible in the smallest cottage to do without Krogh; Krogh in England, in Europe, in Asia, but Krogh, like Almighty God, only a bloody man.

3

Kate heard Anthony’s voice long before she was able to pick out his table. She listened with jealousy, affection, an irritated admiration, to the cheerful plausible tones. So he had found friends already, she thought: two hours alone in Gothenburg and he had found friends. It was an enviable and a shameless trait.

At first she had thought him a little daunted by the new northern country for which none of his tropic experiences could have prepared him: he had walked silently under the tall grey formal houses, beside the neat canals; when she registered her luggage at the station she watched him look askance at the beds of flowers behind the buffers. In the streets every lamp-post, every electric standard bore its bouquet like a prima donna. The air was liquid grey.

But he was only summing-up; he had been in more ports than she could count. When she said: ‘I’ll leave you now till lunch,’ and gave him money and described the restaurant where she would meet him, he nodded abstractedly and immediately straightening the fallacious Harrow tie, with cocked chin and flat broad back, he was off and away, striding down the first street; he could have had no idea where it led to.

Apparently it had led to friends: he probably expected that. He had come to terms already with the new country.

‘And then the bomb exploded,’ he was saying. ‘The coolie simply dropped it at his own feet. They picked him up in bits all over the city. My voice had frightened him.’

Kate came slowly up the steps to the terrace. The tables were stacked in the garden, and on a little stage opposite the terrace a man swept wet leaves off the boards. A big drum lay at the back with a rent in its skin.

‘And the Minister?’ a girl’s voice said.

‘Not a scratch.’

Anthony leant an elbow on the terrace rail; he had never looked better; he positively bloomed above a world falling away to winter. Seen across the restaurant floor he might have been a schoolboy in his teens. Three tourists hung upon his words; their chairs were pushed back from the table, their glasses empty, an elderly man and an elderly woman and a girl. The ravaged plate of smörgåsbord, the crumbs on four plates, told her that lunch was over.

‘Why, here’s my sister,’ Anthony said. She was five minutes early; some easy adventurer’s phrase withered on his lips as he saw her. Even his courtesy momentarily deserted him, so that while the three strangers rose he remained seated; he was screened from her by outstretched hands and polite expressions and shifted chairs. ‘Mr Farrant’s been kindly showing us Gothenburg,’ the elderly woman said.

Kate looked through them at his face, sullen and defensive and momentarily robbed of charm.

‘He’s taken us all over the port,’ the old man said, ‘he’s shown us the warehouses.’

‘And he’s just been telling us,’ the girl said, ‘how he got that scar.’

‘We thought,’ the elderly woman said, ‘that it might have been the war.’ They were nervous and shy; they seemed anxious to assure her that they had no designs on her brother; they shielded him from the reproach that he had allowed himself to be picked up by strangers.

‘But a revolution’s much more exciting,’ the girl said. Kate watched her closely, and a thought – Poor thing, she’s fallen for him – touched her with pity, even while she assembled as evidence against her the large unintelligent eyes, the small damp badly tinted mouth, the thin shoulders, the patch of dried powder on the neck. She remembered Annette, and Maud swelling in a frame too small for her, the cheap scent on the pillow: he’s always liked them common.

‘They ought to have given him a decoration,’ the girl said, ‘saving the Minister’s life like that.’

Kate smiled at Anthony shifting on his chair. ‘But didn’t he tell you? He’s too modest. They gave him the Order of the Celestial Peacock Second Class.’

They took it with perfect gravity; it even hastened their departure. They were obviously unwilling to waste his time; it might ruin their chances of a further meeting. They hoped for one in Stockholm. Were they staying there long? the woman asked.

Kate said: ‘We live there.’

‘Ah,’ the man said. He hesitated: ‘We come from Coventry.’ He was one of those men who are scrupulously fair in sharing information. He screwed his eyes up at her as if he were watching the movement of a delicate laboratory balance: another milligram was needed. ‘Our name’s Davidge.’ His wife, a little behind him, nodded approval: the balance was correct. She sighed with relief at the delicate adjustment; she was able now to think of other things, to correct the set of her gown in the large mirror on the back wall, to tuck away a stray grey hair, to smooth her gloves, to hint with delicacy that they would soon be gone.

‘Are you on a tour?’ Kate asked, and noticed how the girl who shared none of their delicacies, who seemed a deliberate reversal of all the gentility they represented, protesting with badly chosen lipstick against their dim colours, their careful distinctions, had a sensibility which recognized her hostility, while they were aware only of her courtesy.

‘An individual tour,’ Mrs Davidge gently defined.

‘I’m sure,’ Kate said, with deliberate vagueness, ‘we shall see you again.’

But the girl lingered. While her parents stepped with an exaggerated elderly care down into the little brown garden between the terrace and the split drum, she remained obstinately planted. She was like a small wood image, brightly painted, set to some vulgar use among the dining-tables; one looked for the ash-tray and the cigarette stumps.

‘I can manage Tuesday,’ she said.

‘That’s fine,’ Anthony said, fiddling with a fork. Kate was sorry for her, for her crude innocence, but it didn’t suit her purpose to have Anthony reminded of what he’d been saved from; the girl represented at that moment the lights behind the bicycles, the leaves on Warren Street pavement, the port in the Ladies’ Bar.

‘So you can manage Tuesday,’ Kate said, watching the girl rejoin her parents among the stacked chairs. ‘And you saved the Minister’s life.’

‘One’s got to spin a yarn,’ Anthony said, ‘and they paid for lunch.’

‘I paid for your breakfast, but I never noticed you spinning anything for me.’

‘Ah, Kate,’ he said, ‘you know all my stories. Haven’t I always written –?’

‘No,’ Kate said, ‘you’ve written very seldom. Telegrams for Father; picture post-cards; how many picture post-cards; picture post-cards from Siam, from China, from India; I don’t remember any letters.’

He grinned. ‘I must have forgotten to post them. Why, I remember a long letter I wrote to congratulate you when you got your job at Krogh’s.’

‘A picture post-card.’

‘And when Father died.’

‘A telegram.’

‘Well, it cost more. I’d never spare expense for you, Kate.’ He became serious. ‘Poor thing, you’ve had no lunch. It was a shame to start without you, but they invited me. It was a chance of saving money.’

‘Tony,’ Kate said, ‘if you weren’t my brother –’ She let the sentence drift away over the crumbs and the soiled glasses unfinished, meaningless. What was the good?

‘You’d be gone on me,’ Anthony said, turning on her the same glance as he turned, she knew, on every waitress, calculated interest, calculated childishness, a charm of which every ingredient had been tested and stored for further use. The thought came to her: If I could put back time, if I could twist this ring Krogh gave me and abolish all this place, the big drum and the dropping leaves and that face of mine in the mirror there, it would be dark now and a wind outside and the smell of manure and he with his cap in his hand, and I’d say: ‘Don’t go back. Never mind what people say. Don’t go back,’ and nothing would be the same.

‘She’s a sweet kid,’ Anthony said. ‘She’s swallowed everything I said. Why, I could have sold her any pup I wanted to,’ and she could watch him progressing in thought up innumerable suburban pavements, ringing at doors, being sent round to the back. She was momentarily with him, watching the straightening of the Harrow tie, the adjusted charm, the adjusted hope, trying to distinguish what was courage, what was simply the conviction that something would always turn up.

And I have turned up.

The thought of what they could do together drove out her jealousy and fear. He was clever, no one had ever denied that he was clever, and she was stable, no one had ever dreamed of denying her stability. She had grip, she held on. Five years in the dingy counting-house in Leather Lane, then Krogh’s, and later Krogh. ‘I want a drink,’ she said, ‘I’m dry,’ and when it came, ‘To our partnership,’ she said.

‘You do put it down, Kate,’ Anthony said, signalling to the waiter, running his tongue along his lips. He disapproved, he didn’t believe in girls drinking, he was full of the conventions of a generation older than himself. Of course one drank oneself, one fornicated, but one didn’t lie with a friend’s sister, and ‘decent’ girls were never squiffy. The two great standards, one for the men, another for the women, were the gate-posts of his brain. She could see his lips tingling with the maxims of all the majors whom he had known lay down the moral law before smoking-room fires.

‘Dear Tony,’ she said, ‘I love you.’ He wriggled uncomfortably before her complete comprehension.