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? Did you indeed? 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 unexacting, and could be continued for hours. Already I saw a whole chain of easy moves ahead of meuncles, 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 smoothness of an after-dinner 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 tooth-paste. 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 Pass-Kontrolle.”
“I think,” said Mr. Norris, smiling urbanely at me, “that one of my pleasantest 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 be 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 Pass-Kontrolle. 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 were 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.
“Eryes … 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.