England Made Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Don’t go back. Never mind what people say. Don’t go back,’ and nothing would be the same.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Dear Tony,’ she said, ‘I love you.’ He wriggled uncomfortably before her complete comprehension.
    â€˜All the same,’ he said, ‘it’s wrong to drink on an empty stomach.’ It was nearly admirable the way in which misfortune had never modified his slight pomposity; it would have been expelled from a man more self-conscious, less resilient, by the sense of inferiority; in him disaster had only strengthened it. His shabbiest days, she could guess, had not been his least pompous; she imagined him preaching morality to Annette, abstinence to Maud. A frayed sleeve would only drive him to a Guard’s tie.
    She had been in Stockholm when their father died, but Anthony returning from Aden had spent his last pound on an aeroplane journey from Marseilles. He had behaved with a pomposity and a propriety that would have been applauded in every club from which he had been excluded. She remembered his telegram: ‘Our father passed away quietly in his sleep on Saturday,’ an orgy of expenditure on the magnificently trite phrase, followed by a series of economies and niceties of punctuation which left the rest of the telegram incomprehensible. ‘Regret Case Mabel Damaged Transit Semi-Colon Discharged Servant Trouble Head Dash Gouldsmith Affirmative.’ He had told his father, she learnt later, that he had resigned, leaning over the bedpost, grinning and breezy and optimistic to the patient (the wiped tear for the nurse, the black suit for relations, the last clean collar for the priest and the solicitor). The human voice at last took up the theme so long confined to telegrams and post-cards; he was home again and he had resigned; honour had really been involved, but he couldn’t explain that.
    â€˜A penny for your thoughts,’ said Anthony, and she saw that already he had recovered his poise and stood, as it were, on another doorstep full of hope and zest and the desire to exhibit his salesmanship.
    â€˜I was thinking,’ Kate said, ‘of Father.’
    â€˜Ah, Father!’ Anthony said. ‘How glad he would have been to see us here together.’
    It was true. He had always regretted Anthony’s long periods abroad; a brother, he believed, was a sister’s natural protector until she