England Made Me Read Online Free PDF

married. And there was this, Kate thought, to be said for the old man: Anthony’s ability to get out of a dangerous predicament had never failed. In a dive or a police court one could ask for no better guide or counsellor; he would be quite certain to know by instinct the back door or the right man to bribe. Nobody but Anthony would have come unscathed through so many shabby adventures.
    Already he was looking round, measuring his surroundings, bright and eager and hopeful. ‘What can one do in this place at night?’ he asked. He added, with a deceit which took her unprepared: ‘I mean, of course, flickers, music-hall. One’s got to be so careful in a port,’ and he gazed with sudden boredom at the small lonely garden, the abandoned stage, the broken drum, the leaves drifting, the brush sweeping them away. Then he turned on her his expression of blank innocence, polished and prepared.
    â€˜Oh, can’t you be yourself?’ Kate said. Tears of loneliness pricked behind the lids. She missed him painfully as he built up between them this thin façade of a fake respectability as she had missed him when he first went abroad: the cabin trunk on top of a cab, in the crammed tiny hall the suitcase rebelling against the locks, the trail of a pyjama cord across the carpet; good-bye between the umbrella-stand and the stained glass. At any rate then there was no deceit; they were as open to each other as they had been five years before in the darkness of the barn; he was white and frightened and ready to weep, as she told him that he must go, that he would miss his train, and kissed him quickly and felt her brain divided as she watched him pull at the stiff cab door, half her body go with him drearily vibrating on the black polished cushions. But at least she believed that he would write, not anticipating the picture post-cards, the ‘This is a pretty place’, the ‘We bathed here’, the ‘My window marked with a cross’, the growing bonhomie, the strange tricks of phrase protectively adopted, until at last there came the sense that he was irrevocably one of them, one of the seedy adventurers who had not courage enough for gaol. And now, she thought, raising her compact to hide her hopelessness, even a post-card would bring him nearer.
    â€˜Can’t you be yourself?’ she repeated, wondering what trick she might have learned from Annette or Mabel to surprise his sincerity. She said: ‘Tonight we’ll drink a lot and go to Liseberg.’
    He winced at the suggestion. ‘What sort of a place? –’
    â€˜Oh,’ Kate said, ‘it’s quite respectable. Quite family. You can dance a bit or shoot a bit or jolt your liver on a switchback. I’ve no doubt it’s dull compared with what you’ve seen, but if we drink first . . .’
    â€˜You know,’ Anthony said, ‘we haven’t had a serious talk yet.’
    â€˜What about?’
    â€˜Oh, Things,’ Anthony said, ‘Things. If you aren’t going to have any lunch, let’s find somewhere quiet,’ and he raked the restaurant, the empty schnapps-glasses, the crumby plates, with austere disapproval. Nor, he declared, when she suggested that he might show the port to her as he had shown it to Miss Davidge, was it nearly quiet enough.
    â€˜How you keep on about that girl,’ he protested, ‘you might be jealous the way you speak. Can’t we get out of town for a little? Isn’t there a park?’
    For half an hour they sat on a wooden seat beside a pond watching the water-fowl, and boys pushed bicycles with brightly painted spokes up-hill away from Gothenburg; in the block of flats at the edge of the park the lights came out, one by one, brilliant and small and defined like matches struck in a cinema. A thin scum covered the water, and as the fowl pushed their way across, a few leaves clung to their flanks.
    â€˜You’ve brought me