Chapter One

My first impression was that the stranger’s eyes were of an unusually light blue. They met mine for several blank seconds, vacant, unmistakably scared. Startled and innocently naughty, they half reminded me of an incident I couldn’t quite place; something which had happened a long time ago, to do with the upper fourth form classroom. They were the eyes of a schoolboy surprised in the act of breaking one of the rules. Not that I had caught him, apparently, at anything except his own thoughts: perhaps he imagined I could read them. At any rate, he seemed not to have heard or seen me cross the compartment from my corner to his own, for he started violently at the sound of my voice; so violently, indeed, that his nervous recoil hit me like repercussion. Instinctively I took a pace backwards.

It was exactly as though we had collided with each other bodily in the street. We were both confused, both ready to be apologetic. Smiling, anxious to reassure him, I repeated my question:

“I wonder, sir, if you could let me have a match?”

Even now, he didn’t answer at once. He appeared to be engaged in some sort of rapid mental calculation, while his fingers, nervously active, sketched a number of flurried gestures round his waistcoat. For all they conveyed, he might equally have been going to undress, to draw a revolver, or merely to make sure that I hadn’t stolen his money. Then the moment of agitation passed from his gaze like a little cloud, leaving a clear blue sky. At last he had understood what it was that I wanted:

“Yes, yes. Er — certainly. Of course.”

As he spoke he touched his left temple delicately with his finger-tips, coughed, and suddenly smiled. His smile had great charm. It disclosed the ugliest teeth I had ever seen. They were like broken rocks.

“Certainly,” he repeated. “With pleasure.”

Delicately, with finger and thumb, he fished in the waistcoat pocket of his expensive-looking soft grey suit, extracted a gold spirit-lighter. His hands were white, small, and beautifully manicured.

I offered him my cigarettes.

“Er — thank you. Thank you.”

“After you, sir.”

“No, no. Please.”

The tiny flame of the lighter flickered between us, as perishable as the atmosphere which our exaggerated politeness had created. The merest breath would have extinguished the one, the least incautious gesture or word would have destroyed the other. The cigarettes were both lighted now. We sat back in our respective places. The stranger was still doubtful of me. He was wondering whether he hadn’t gone too far, delivered himself to a bore or a crook. His timid soul was eager to retire. I, on my side, had nothing to read. I foresaw a journey of utter silence, lasting seven or eight hours. I was determined to talk.

“Do you know what time we arrive at the frontier?”

Looking back on the conversation, this question does not seem to me to have been particularly unusual. It is true that I had no interest in the answer; I wanted merely to ask something which might start us chatting, and which wasn’t, at the same time, inquisitive or impertinent. Its effect on the stranger was remarkable. I had certainly succeeded in arousing his interest. He gave me a long, odd glance, and his features seemed to stiffen a little. It was the glance of a poker-player who guesses suddenly that his opponent holds a straight flush and that he had better be careful. At length he answered, speaking slowly and with caution:

“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you exactly. In about an hour’s time, I believe.”

His glance, now vacant for a moment, was clouded again. An unpleasant thought seemed to tease him like a wasp; he moved his head slightly to avoid it. Then he added, with surprising petulance:

“All these frontiers . . . such a horrible nuisance.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to take this. The thought crossed my mind that he was perhaps some kind of mild internationalist; a member of the League of Nations Union. I ventured encouragingly:

“They ought to be done away with.”

“I quite agree with you. They ought, indeed.”

There was no mistaking his warmth. He had a large blunt fleshy nose and a chin which seemed to have slipped sideways. It was like a broken concertina. When he spoke, it jerked crooked in the most curious fashion and a deep cleft dimple like a wound surprisingly appeared in the side of it. Above his ripe red cheeks, his forehead was sculpturally white, like marble. A queerly cut fringe of dark grey hair lay across it, compact, thick, and heavy. After a moment’s examination, I realized, with extreme interest, that he was wearing a wig.

“Particularly,” I followed up my success, “all these red-tape formalities; the passport examination, and so forth.”

But now. This wasn’t right. I saw at once from his expression that I’d somehow managed to strike a new, disturbing note. We were speaking similar but distinct languages. This time, however, the stranger’s reaction was not mistrust. He asked, with a puzzling air of frankness and unconcealed curiosity:

“Have you ever had trouble here yourself?”

It wasn’t so much the question which I found odd, as the tone in which he asked it. I smiled to hide my mystification.

“Oh, no. Quite the reverse. Often they don’t bother to open anything; and as for your passport, they hardly look at it.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that.”

He must have seen from my face what I was thinking, for he added hastily: “It may seem absurd, but I do so hate being fussed and bothered.”

“Of course. I quite understand.”

I grinned, for I had just arrived at a satisfactory explanation of his behaviour. The old boy was engaged in a little innocent private smuggling. Probably a piece of silk for his wife or a box of cigars for a friend. And now, of course, he was beginning to feel scared. Certainly he looked prosperous enough to pay any amount of duty. The rich have strange pleasures.

“You haven’t crossed this frontier before, then?” I felt kindly and protective and superior. I would cheer him up, and, if things came to the worst, prompt him with some plausible lie to soften the heart of the customs officer.

“Of recent years, no. I usually travel by Belgium. For a variety of reasons. Yes.” Again he looked vague, paused, and solemnly scratched his chin. All at once, something seemed to rouse him to awareness of my presence: “Perhaps, at this stage in the proceedings, I ought to introduce myself. Arthur Norris, Gent. Or shall we say: Of independent means?” He tittered nervously, exclaimed in alarm: “Don’t get up, I beg.”

It was too far to shake hands without moving. We compromised by a polite seated bow from the waist.

“My name’s William Bradshaw,” I said.

“Dear me, you’re not by any chance one of the Suffolk Bradshaws?”

“I suppose I am. Before the War we used to live near Ipswich.”

“Did you really, now? I used at one time to go and stay with a Mrs Hope-Lucas. She had a lovely place near Matlock. She was a Miss Bradshaw before her marriage.”

“Yes, that’s right. She was my great-aunt Agnes. She died about seven years ago.”

“Did she? Dear, dear. I’m very sorry to hear that . . . Of course, I knew her when I was quite a young man; and she was a middle-aged lady then. I’m speaking now, mind you, of ’ninety-eight.”

All this time I was covertly studying his wig. I had never seen one so cleverly made before. At the back of the skull, where it was brushed in with his own hair, it was wonderfully matched. Only the parting betrayed it at once, and even this would have passed muster at the distance of three or four yards.

“Well, well,” observed Mr Norris. “Dear me, what a very small place the world is.”

“You never met my mother, I suppose? Or my uncle, the admiral?”

I was quite resigned, now, to playing the relationships game. It was boring but exacting, and could be continued for hours. Already I saw a whole chain of easy moves ahead of me — uncles, aunts, cousins, their marriages and their properties, death duties, mortgages, sales. Then on to public school and university, comparing notes on food, exchanging anecdotes about masters, famous matches, and celebrated rows. I knew the exact tone to adopt.

But, to my surprise, Mr Norris didn’t seem to want to play this game after all. He answered hurriedly:

“I’m afraid not. No. Since the War, I’ve rather lost touch with my English friends. My affairs have taken me abroad a good deal.”

The word “abroad” caused both of us naturally to look out of the window. Holland was slipping past our viewpoint with the smooth somnolence of an afterdinner dream: a placid swampy landscape bounded by an electric tram travelling along the wall of a dike.

“Do you know this country well?” I asked. Since I had noticed the wig, I found myself somehow unable to go on calling him sir. And, anyhow, if he wore it to make himself look younger, it was both tactless and unkind to insist thus upon the difference between our ages.

“I know Amsterdam pretty well.” Mr Norris rubbed his chin with a nervous, furtive movement. He had a trick of doing this and of opening his mouth in a kind of snarling grimace quite without ferocity, like an old lion in a cage. “Pretty well, yes.”

“I should like to go there very much. It must be so quiet and peaceful.”

“On the contrary, I can assure you that it’s one of the most dangerous cities in Europe.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Deeply attached as I am to Amsterdam, I shall always maintain that it has three fatal drawbacks. In the first place, the stairs are so steep in many of the houses that it requires a professional mountaineer to ascend them without risking heart failure or a broken neck. Secondly, there are the cyclists. They positively overrun the town, and appear to make it a point of honour to ride without the faintest consideration for human life. I had an exceedingly narrow escape only this morning. And, thirdly, there are the canals. In summer, you know . . . most insanitary. Oh, most insanitary. I can’t tell you what I’ve suffered. For weeks on end I was never without a sore throat.”

By the time we had reached Bentheim, Mr Norris had delivered a lecture on the disadvantages of most of the chief European cities. I was astonished to find how much he had travelled. He had suffered from rheumatics in Stockholm and draughts in Kaunas; in Riga he had been bored, in Warsaw treated with extreme discourtesy, in Belgrade he had been unable to obtain his favourite brand of toothpaste. In Rome he had been annoyed by insects, in Madrid by beggars, in Marseilles by taxi-horns. In Bucharest he had had an exceedingly unpleasant experience with a water-closet. Constantinople he had found expensive and lacking in taste. The only two cities of which he greatly approved were Paris and Athens. Athens particularly. Athens was his spiritual home.

By now the train had stopped. Pale stout men in blue uniforms strolled up and down the platform with that faintly sinister air of leisure which invests the movements of officials at frontier stations. They were not unlike prison warders. It was as if we might none of us be allowed to travel any farther. Far down the corridor of the coach a voice echoed: “Deutsche Passkontrolle.”

“I think,” said Mr Norris, smiling urbanely at me, “that one of my pleasant memories is of the mornings I used to spend pottering about those quaint old streets behind the Temple of Theseus.”

He was extremely nervous. His delicate white hand fiddled incessantly with the signet ring on his little finger; his uneasy blue eyes kept squinting rapid glances into the corridor. His voice rang false; high-pitched in archly forced gaiety, it resembled the voice of a character in a pre-war drawing-room comedy. He spoke so loudly that the people in the next compartment must certainly have been able to hear him.

“One comes, quite unexpectedly, upon the most fascinating little corners. A single column standing in the middle of a rubbish-heap . . .”

“Deutsche Passkontrolle. All passports, please.”

An official had appeared in the doorway of our compartment. His voice made Mr Norris give a slight but visible jump. Anxious to allow him time to pull himself together, I hastily offered my own passport. As I had expected, it was barely glanced at.

“I am travelling to Berlin,” said Mr Norris, handing over his passport with a charming smile; so charming, indeed, that it seemed a little overdone. The official did not react. He merely grunted, turned over the pages with considerable interest, and then, taking the passport out into the corridor, held it up to the light of the window.

“It’s a remarkable fact,” said Mr Norris, conversationally, to me, “that nowhere in classical literature will you find any reference to the Lycabettos Hill.”

I was amazed to see what a state he was in; his fingers twitched and his voice was scarcely under control. There were actually beads of sweat on his alabaster forehead. If this was what he called “being fussed,” if these were the agonies he suffered whenever he broke a by-law, it was no wonder that his nerves had turned him prematurely bald. He shot an instant’s glance of acute misery into the corridor. Another official had arrived. They were examining the passport together, with their backs turned towards us. By what was obviously an heroic effort Mr Norris managed to maintain his chattily informative tone.

“So far as we know, it appears to have been overrun with wolves.”

The other official had got the passport now. He looked as though he was going to take it away with him. His colleague was referring to a small black shiny notebook. Raising his head, he asked abruptly:

“You are at present residing at Courbierestrasse 168?”

For a moment I thought Mr Norris was going to faint.

“Er — yes . . . I am . . .”

Like a bird with a cobra, his eyes were fastened upon his interrogator in helpless fascination. One might have supposed that he expected to be arrested on the spot. Actually, all that happened was that the official made a note in his book, grunted again, and turning on his heel went on to the next compartment. His colleague handed the passport back to Mr Norris and said: “Thank you, sir,” saluted politely and followed him.

Mr Norris sank back against the hard wooden seat with a deep sigh. For a moment he seemed incapable of speech. Taking out a big white silk handkerchief, he began to dab at his forehead, being careful not to disarrange his wig.

“I wonder if you’d be so very kind as to open the window,” he said at length in a faint voice. “It seems to have got dreadfully stuffy in here all of a sudden.”

I hastened to do so.

“Is there anything I can fetch you?” I asked. “A glass of water?”

He feebly waved the offer aside. “Most good of you . . . No. I shall be all right in a moment. My heart isn’t quite what it was.” He sighed: “I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. All this travelling . . . very bad for me.”

“You know, you really shouldn’t upset yourself so.” I felt more than ever protective towards him at that moment. This affectionate protectiveness, which he so easily and dangerously inspired in me, was to colour all our future dealings. “You let yourself be annoyed by trifles.”

“You call that a trifle!” he exclaimed in rather pathetic
protest.

“Of course. It was bound to have been put right in a few minutes, anyhow. The man simply mistook you for somebody else of the same name.”

“You really think so?” He was childishly eager to be reassured.

“What other possible explanation is there?”

Mr Norris didn’t seem so certain of this. He said dubiously: “Well — er — none, I suppose.”

“Besides, it often happens, you know. The most innocent people get mistaken for famous jewel thieves. They undress them and search them all over. Fancy if they’d done that to you!”

“Really!” Mr Norris giggled. “The mere thought brings a blush to my modest cheek.”

We both laughed. I was glad that I had managed to cheer him up so successfully. But what on earth, I wondered, would happen when the customs examiner arrived? For this, if I was right about the smuggled presents, was the real cause of all his nervousness. If the little misunderstanding about the passport had upset him so much, the customs officer would most certainly give him a heart attack. I wondered if I hadn’t better mention this straight out and offer to hide the things in my own suitcase; but he seemed so blissfully unconscious of any approaching trouble that I hadn’t the heart to disturb him.

I was quite wrong. The customs examination, when it came, seemed positively to give Norris pleasure. He showed not the slightest signs of uneasiness; nor was anything dutiable discovered in his luggage. In fluent German he laughed and joked with the official over a large bottle of Coty perfume: “Oh, yes, it’s for my personal use, I can assure you. I wouldn’t part with it for the world. Do let me give you a drop on your handkerchief. It’s so deliciously refreshing.”

At length it was all over. The train cranked slowly forward into Germany. The dining-car attendant came down the corridor, sounding his little gong.

“And now, my dear boy,” said Mr Norris, “after these alarms and excursions and your most valuable moral support, for which I’m more grateful than I can tell you, I hope you’ll do me the honour of being my guest at lunch.”

I thanked him and said that I should be delighted.

When we were seated comfortably in the restaurant car, Mr Norris ordered a small cognac:

“I have made it a general rule never to drink before meals, but there are times when the occasion seems to demand it.”

The soup was served. He took one spoonful, then called the attendant and addressed him in a tone of mild reproach.

“Surely you’ll agree that there’s too much onion?” he asked anxiously. “Will you do me a personal favour? I should like you to taste it for yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” said the attendant, who was extremely busy, and whisked away the plate with faintly insolent deference. Mr Norris was pained.

“Did you see that? He wouldn’t taste it. He wouldn’t admit there was anything wrong. Dear me, how very obstinate some people are!”

He forgot this little disappointment in human nature within a few moments, however. He had begun to study the wine list with great care.

“Let me see . . . Let me see . . . Would you be prepared to contemplate a hock? You would? It’s a lottery, mind you. On a train one must always be prepared for the worst. I think we’ll risk it, shall we?”

The hock arrived and was a success. Mr Norris had not tasted such good hock, he told me, since his lunch with the Swedish Ambassador in Vienna last year. And there were kidneys, his favourite dish. “Dear me,” he remarked with pleasure, “I find I’ve got quite an appetite . . . If you want to get kidneys perfectly cooked you should go to Budapest. It was a revelation to me . . . I must say these are really delicious, don’t you agree? Really quite delicious. At first I thought I tasted that odious red pepper, but it was merely my overwrought imagination.” He called the attendant: “Will you please give the chef my compliments and say that I should like to congratulate him on a most excellent lunch? Thank you. And now bring me a cigar.” Cigars were brought, sniffed at, weighed between the finger and thumb. Mr Norris finally selected the largest on the tray: “What, my dear boy, you don’t smoke them? Oh, but you should. Well, well, perhaps you have other vices?”

By this time he was in the best of spirits.

“I must say the older I get the more I come to value the little comforts of this life. As a general rule, I make a point of travelling first class. It always pays. One gets treated with so much more consideration. Take today, for instance. If I hadn’t been in a third-class compartment, they’d never have dreamed of bothering me. There you have the German official all over. ‘A race of non-commissioned officers,’ didn’t somebody call them? How very good that is! How true . . .”

Mr Norris picked his teeth for a few moments in thoughtful silence.

“My generation was brought up to regard luxury from an aesthetic standpoint. Since the War, people don’t seem to feel that any more. Too often they are merely gross. They take their pleasures coarsely, don’t you find? At times, one feels guilty, oneself, with so much unemployment and distress everywhere. The conditions in Berlin are very bad. Oh, very bad . . . as no doubt you yourself know. In my small way I do what I can to help, but it’s such a drop in the ocean.” Mr Norris sighed and touched his napkin with his lips.

“And here we are, riding in the lap of luxury. The social reformers would condemn us, no doubt. All the same, I suppose if somebody didn’t use this dining-car, we should have all these employees on the dole as well . . . Dear me, dear me. Things are so very complex nowadays.”

We parted at the Zoo Station. Mr Norris held my hand for a long time amidst the jostle of arriving passengers.

“Auf Wiedersehen, my dear boy. Auf Wiedersehen. I won’t say goodbye because I hope that we shall be seeing each other in the very near future. Any little discomforts I may have suffered on that odious journey have been amply repaid by the great pleasure of making your acquaintance. And now I wonder if you’d care to have tea with me at my flat one day this week? Shall we make it Saturday? Here’s my card. Do please say you’ll come.”

I promised that I would.