Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  Chapter III

  April

  1. Unsatisfactory conversation

  Hervey Russell had been in London more than three months without seeing her husband. One evening she was putting on her coat when the porter, a cynical ex-sergeant by name Jaffers, came up to tell her that a Lt. Vane was asking for her downstairs. Jaffers smiled knowingly as he said it.

  ‘That’s my husband,’ Hervey said to Renn. Her heart beat quickly. She wished she had put on her better coat that morning. When she came into the hall, Penn was leaning against Jaffer’s desk, making himself agreeable. He was always affable to subordinates unless these failed to respond in the right way. Hervey was pleased to see him. He looked very well and satisfied. His Air Force uniform attracted some glances in the street, from people who were less used to it than to khaki. He noticed it and began to tell Hervey about an old lady who had spoken to him in Oxford Street and insisted on his driving home with her to dinner.

  ‘But when was this?’ Hervey asked. ‘You’ve just come, haven’t you?’

  Penn looked at her quickly. ‘It was last year some time,’ he said. ‘Where d’you want to go, my dear?’

  ‘Usually I go to the Corner House for some coffee,’ Hervey said. ‘More for your money there.’

  ‘Still pretending to starve yourself?’ Penn laughed.

  ‘I don’t starve, but I can’t spend much. My room and breakfasts cost thirty-two shillings.’

  ‘Leaving forty-eight shillings a week for coffee,’ Penn said.

  Hervey struggled with a familiar rage. ‘Leaving eight shillings a week for everything,’ she said quietly. ‘You know I send that woman two pounds a week every week for Richard.’

  ‘Well, well. Quite the little business woman,’ Penn said amiably. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll refuse to share dinner with me. I’m going back at nine.’

  Too disappointed not to show it, Hervey stood still. ‘I thought you had leave.’

  ‘No. No leave yet. I came up to collect some stores, and the transport is going to wait for me until nine. Do come along, my dear. People are looking at you.’

  Hervey swallowed her disappointment in silence. Her spirits rose again in the café, because of the people and the crossed yellow lights. She liked the impersonal excitement of sitting in a place like this, where she could watch without talking. Her mind sprang awake, like one of those table-maps on which arrows of light dart from point to point, marking the passage of trains, ships, aeroplanes.

  ‘This is a splendid place,’ she said to Penn, in a happy voice.

  He rested his hand on her knee. ‘I ought to be coming home with you.’

  Hervey was surprised to feel herself shaking. ‘You’ll have leave soon, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh. Probably next month. Can you find room for me?’

  ‘You don’t write to me,’ Hervey said.

  ‘I knew you would say that sooner or later,’ Penn exclaimed. He made his voice sound patronising and amused. ‘You’re pricelessly funny when you think you’re being subtle, Hervey.’

  Hervey was astounded by this answer. When she did not see Penn for a long time she forgot how suspicious he was and being reminded of it she was startled and afterwards angry or depressed.

  ‘I know you so well that you don’t surprise me any more,’ Penn said. He was smiling. ‘I knew, the moment you began about having no money, that you meant to get at me somehow. Well, well. I don’t write to you and I don’t send you money and you’re starving. Ha, ha. It just happens that I’d come meaning to ask you if you wanted money. I suppose it never occurs to you that it costs a great deal more to feed in the mess than in rooms. And mark, I didn’t ask you to leave me and betake yourself to London. You’re doing it entirely to please yourself.’

  ‘Don’t let’s quarrel,’ Hervey said in a low voice.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Penn said. He had talked himself into very good humour. ‘You haven’t told me how you like working in an office. I somehow gathered that you weren’t finding it such an easy life after all.’

  ‘I don’t find all of it easy,’ Hervey said. ‘I’m not really quick-minded.’

  ‘You’re quick enough,’ Penn said kindly. He began to talk to her about his life in Canterbury. His face altered, becoming younger and softly attractive. As Hervey listened to him she could not help seeing that he enjoyed his life without her. Well, she thought, with a sigh, I can understand that. Though she was three years younger than her husband she often felt towards him as she did to Richard. But at the same time that she wanted him to enjoy his life she wanted to feel helped and supported by him. In the end she was often neither so kind nor so sensible as her instincts, and then everything went badly for them.

  She felt full of unfamiliar food, and sleepy. To her half listening, the life Penn described sounded curious and improbable. She did not believe everything he said. Anxious to seem interested, she smiled and nodded. Penn interrupted his story to chaff the waiter who brought their coffee. She disliked this and sat with a fixed bright look until it was over. Then she said: ‘But who is it you take to these dances, Penn?’

  He looked sharply up: her face, smooth and round with well-being, satisfied him. Sinking himself easily in his chair, one booted leg crossed high over the other, he said : ‘Surely I told you in a letter? Ferraby and I made friends with two V.A.D.’s from the hospital. They live in rooms and old Ferraby’s quite sunk by his. Priceless. Mine’s curly-headed and buxom, and just nineteen. She’s been well brought-up, too—she’s priceless. She knows I’m a married man. I told her that at the beginning, to make sure. So we toddle off together to the dances, and I see her home and shake hands with her at the door, and it’s exactly as it should be.’

  While Penn talked he looked at her face to see the effect of his words. It would have done him as much good to watch the back of her head, since she was not listening to him. When she was interested, emotionally or even only for a purpose, she knew what was going on in the other person’s mind. While he talked she would be listening to have the sense of his mind, sometimes excited by the difference between two voices. At other times, when she had lost interest, she gave the least possible attention and effort. She seemed to be listening, her face alive and quick, but her ear only listened—she caught the physical sense of the words, and missed their meaning, and what was at work in them. The rest of her brain had gone on some business of its own. She would be sunk in this and perhaps watching for the right moment to speak of it. In all this she was not the simple direct person she seemed. A great many things had contributed to make her what she was becoming, and not least her mistrust of Penn. Not to trust the person to whom you are committed more deeply than to anyone, is a serious misfortune. Hervey never allowed that she had to guard herself from her husband, but she expected it. There were certain things she wanted from him still—of which the head and chief was that he should work for their son.

  She was thinking about this now, with a stubborn passion, having already planned what she meant to say. All that Penn was saying was so much noise—until the moment when she heard him say that he might be moved to Netheravon.

  ‘But, Penn,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought you’d be demobilised before very long. Have you heard anything?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘You haven’t done anything about it? Would they release you if you applied?’

  ‘Why should I? I’m quite comfortable and snug, thank you.’

  ‘But you can’t stay in the Air Force always,’ Hervey said gently. ‘The longer you hang on the less chance there will be of getting work. Just now there are plenty of jobs but in a few months, you’ll see there won’t be any.’

  ‘I’m not worrying myself,’ Penn said.

  ‘You ought to. Listen, Penn. If you’re going to be a schoolmaster again why not try now to get work in London? Then we could have a house and a nurse for Richard, and both earn money.’

  She could not help something coming into her voice. Penn laughed. ‘How you
do like to arrange my life for me, don’t you, my dear?’

  ‘It’s my life, too,’ Hervey said.

  Outside, it was not yet dark. They walked along the street to the Park, and sat down inside, facing the gate. There were people walking under the trees and cabs going between the gates and along inside the Park. All the time Hervey was thinking what she could say to force Penn to some action. The longer he stayed in the Air Force, working easy hours with subordinates to do the real work, irresponsible, because nothing depended on his efforts, going to a great many dances, well-fed, and his boots polished for him by a servant, he was becoming daily unfit for reality. She had had no effect on him this evening, and suddenly depressed she became silent. Penn was in a softened mood. He reminded her of an evening before the War when they sat at this same corner and talked about being married. To her embarrassment Hervey felt tears in her eyes. Penn noticed them and drew her arm in his.

  ‘My poor puppy,’ he said gently, ‘are you so miserable? Tell your tiresome dull Penn about it.’

  ‘You’re not tiresome,’ Hervey said. She gripped his hand. ‘I don’t want to go on living by myself.’

  ‘You’d rather have me than nothing,’ Penn laughed.

  ‘It needn’t be just dull and responsible,’ Hervey said. ‘We could go about together. I don’t want you to turn into a grub because you’ve lost your fine uniform.’

  ‘Don’t you? Only into a schoolmaster.’

  ‘You’ll have to turn some time.’

  ‘But not before time.’ He drew one glove on carefully and stood up. ‘I’ll get leave soon and we’ll discuss everything. You look after yourself until then. Don’t run away from me with an advertising magnate—ha, ha. I shouldn’t like it, you know.’

  ‘I wish you weren’t going,’ Hervey said. She looked, trying to think about them, at the leafless trees. Where a lamp came directly behind a tree the branches of the tree were elongated by a shadow which streamed from them upwards, into the darkness.

  ‘That’s very good of you, my dear,’ Penn said seriously. ‘I wish it too. I know I’m a bad boy in many kinds of ways and a disappointment to you and all that, but you can’t tell yourself I don’t love you. You can, but it would be a lie.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Damn it, I shall have to take a taxi. Coming to see me off? ‘

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Hervey said.

  Kisses given in the street, in a hurry to get away, are no satisfaction. As Hervey walked off, taking care not to look after the cab, she felt embarrassed and angry. She was angry with herself because she had talked emotionally. There was a falseness in the emotion, which made her ashamed now that it was over. She tried to think herself into calmness, walking quickly and carelessly, as if the Park were a lane. I don’t want to live with Penn, I only want not to be alone the whole time. Why have I no courage? She jerked her head, confused and now tired. A sense of her own inadequacy overcame her. I’m useless and clumsy, she thought. And should work harder. She recalled Penn’s face, kind and suddenly serious, as it had been in the moment before he drove off. He’s still Penn, who knows me better than anyone else—and he has helped me and been kind to me.

  There was a deep tenderness for him in her when she came to it after her anger. Really he angered her because he was idle and easy-going; because he refused, not openly but as if he were indifferent, to be responsible for Richard; because he had no sympathy with her in her anxiety about their future—she said she wanted them to have their place in the world, to be rooted, known, secure. He had no feeling for them as a family. He would like a little money, and to have a great many friends who took him at his reckoning—and that was all.

  Alas, Hervey’s own impulses to vagrancy, and fear and hatred of a settled life, sometimes had the better of her, and she said then vehemently that she wanted nothing, nothing, except one room and peace. Penn never failed to remind her of these wild speeches.

  She had reached her room before she became calm. Then, while she brushed her hair and undressed, she tried to think of Penn and herself and Richard in London. Can I do it? she wondered. She knew already how the weight of it would be on her. Before, when I was free, she thought confusedly, work was easy. Now half my energy is mortgaged—to be divided by Penn and my baby. What is left will not be enough for me to write my books. Lacking conceit, she did not give more than a flying thought to the last. The impulse only was there, urging her not to give, to save herself. It accounted for the dry reluctance she felt in committing herself to own a house of her own, with all that owning involved. Only for Richard she would force herself to it.

  I can’t bother on with my hair another day, she thought suddenly; I shall cut it off. She threw the brush down with joy. At once everything seemed easy and simple, and before she got into bed she wrote part of a letter to Penn.

  2. Conversation in a field

  In the morning shé went to a hairdresser in Oxford Street and asked him to cut her hair short. She did not watch the shearing. There was a mirror in front of her and she sat looking down, hating the man’s fingers on her skin. When it was finished he gathered up the long dust-soft strands into a plait and gave it to her. She touched the plait delicately: she thought it felt faintly warm still, like a bird that has only just died.

  ‘It’s a very unusual colour,’ the man said. ‘The only colour we can’t copy.’ She sat rigid, just able to endure him, while he arranged the cropped hair. When she looked at it, it was terrible—harsh, ugly. She did not know how to alter it. All she wanted was to get away, out of the place, which was hateful to her.

  She was an hour late at the office. When she walked into her room Renn gave her one glance, under raised eyebrows, and returned to his work.

  ‘It doesn’t suit me, does it?’ Hervey said, in a deliberately jeering voice.

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ he said briefly.

  She went red with shame.

  The next day she appeared with her hair raked straight back. Thus exposed, her forehead domineered over her face. There was so much of it, and with its four clearly-defined swellings, that it seemed out of proportion with her body. Renn looked at her without smiling. But he was more friendly than he had been.

  It happened that evening when she came home that she found two friends waiting for her outside the house. One, Philip Nicholson, was still in khaki; the other had been demobilised and sent back to his research. In a moment, when she turned the corner of the street and saw them, five years vanished like a puff of smoke—a great mercy of time, to make it appear that there had been no War. But in the next moment, as she ran up to them, she saw the shapeless pockets of Philip’s stained, leather-patched jacket. He was smiling at her. T.S. said in a severe voice :

  ‘You’re damned late, young Hervey. We’ve been here forty minutes. Your landlady wouldn’t let us in to wait.’

  ‘You can come in now,’ Hervey said, as happy as never was. ‘There’s no food, though.’

  ‘How like you,’ Philip said. He put his arm in hers, and with one accord the three marched along the street. There revived in them, only by being together, their country contempt for Londoners. ‘Look at that son of a banker,’ T.S. said, pointing to a man walking innocently at the other side of the road. He stood still. ‘Let’s put up a practice barricade in this street.’

  They were standing near a shabby two-seater car, so old that it must have been held together by the rust. ‘Look, our Hervey, that’s my car,’ Philip said.

  ‘He gave a fiver for it,’ T.S. said. ‘But he can’t drive yet. All that happens is that the thing acknowledges his superior intelligence.’

  They squeezed into the car, after Philip had started the engine, and drove off down the road. The car lurched like a camel. When he put the brake on at the crossing, it dug its front wheels into the ground and leaped. Off they went again, with all the effects of a tank in action. Hervey held on. She was not in the least frightened, but she wished she had on a thicker coat. She was shivering and T.S. put his arm round her to warm her
. ‘Where are we going?’ she shouted.

  T.S. shouted back : ‘To Philip’s country house.’ His face was relaxed and young, the strain lifted from it by the excitement. He was twenty-four and looked a hard-living thirty, as did most of the young men of that age who managed so survive four years’ war. ‘Have you ever felt such a car?’ he shouted. It reminded him of one night they moved the companies by bus: he had his arms round Peters, who was cold. Wish I’d pushed him over the side, he thought, remembering something that happened to Peters.

  Hervey stared round her. They had reached an outskirt of London no more repulsive than the rest. Two rows of new brick houses festered by the side of the road for another quarter of a mile. Then fields began, breathing mist into the evening air. The sky beyond them was like the dusk-coloured glass in old windows. They drove for another hour. A few yards ahead, on the left of the road, a hut made of sheets of corrugated iron advertised itself as The Dug-out. A Good Pull-in. Open All Night.

  Philip stopped the car. There was a caravan at the far end of the field beyond the Dug-out. It was a very small caravan. A packing-case of books took up more than a third of the space. Between the case and the door Philip had set a canvas bed, a chair, and two large oil-paintings of horses. Although there was no room to move, the effect was neat and soldierly. Even the horses stood in line, as if on the parade ground. His army valise, hanging from a nail, held his few clothes. He took his meals at the Dug-out, where, he said, the food was very bad and the company excellent, consisting of tramps, lorry-drivers, and an odd soldier or two.