Cohen wished to interest her. He thought that perhaps he could use her. The thought crossed his mind, If she’s at all like her grandmother she’ll try to use me. That displeased him. He looked again at her face and saw in it more of the withdrawn contemptuous old woman. He decided that she had stayed long enough.
Outside in the street Hervey went over the interview with a growing feeling of shame. She tried to recall all she had said and to construe the impression it must have made. The conviction of her utter inadequacy returned to beat inside her brain. Her face burned crimson. To forget what had happened she walked quickly in the May sunlight. The evening was as clear as glass, mirroring rose and delicate amber clouds in the sky above Trafalgar Square. Her self-possession began to return.
2. Frank reads the Daily Post
The evening traffic past the Dug-out had scarcely begun. One lorry had drawn up under the hedge and the driver, a thin man with blue patient eyes, was gulping down hot coffee. He looked at the road. ‘Going north?’ Frank said.
‘Middlesbrough.’
‘Ah, I was in Garton’s Yard the year before the War.’
‘You made a good exchange,’ the driver said. He wiped his hand across his mouth and felt for the buttons of his under-jacket, an old khaki tunic. After he had started the engine he came back. ‘Want to keep the paper, mate?’ He handed it across the counter.
‘Thanks,’ Frank said. He laid it down and went into the back room. His wife looked at him from the bed with a smile. ‘How d’you feel, Sally?’ he asked. The presence of the other woman tied his tongue—he felt in the way. He went back to the shed facing the road and leaned against the counter reading the Daily Post. An article on the workers and ‘direct action’ caught his eye. He read it through twice. The writer showed that strikes and any such violent action injured the workers more than the other classes. They must put their trust in … English sense of justice … the ballot box … constitutional methods … the slow march of democracy … prosperity for all. But what if our votes don’t get us anywhere? he thought. He read the article again. No, nothing in it about that. Woman Found Dead in Tub. Shooting in Ireland.
He read the news, and the sporting pages. A lorry drew up beyond the Dug-out. The driver came running back. ‘Three sandwiches quick, mate. I got to be in Carlisle by four ac emma.’ Frank cut and folded rapidly. He served eight persons in quick succession. After this a lull. No one, no lorry or cart in sight. He went back into the house. Standing, irresolute, he listened for sounds from the other room. A footstep, the creak of a board, then his wife groaned. It was an animal sound—he could not believe she had made it. Scarcely knowing what he was about he opened the door and went straight to the side of the bed. ‘Oh, Sally is it bad?’ he said.
‘I didn’t mean to call out,’ his wife said. ‘Shan’t do it again. I don’t want to frighten away customers.’ She smiled. Her face changed quickly—as though a hand passed over it, wiping away her youth. He felt his heart stop.
‘I’ll call you if I want help,’ the other woman said kindly.
He was elbowed out of their room and the door shut on him. For a moment he was resentful without knowing why. He could not be angry with his young wife, so he hated the older woman. Spreading herself in the place, he thought. Too many women—we could have managed.
He went outside. As if to even things his mind took him to where there had been no women, only men. He rarely thought about the War. When he did no whole vision of it stayed in his mind. His life before the War, and after it, was a plain story. He could say. That year I was in Garton’s; that summer the strike started. The four years of war were different: he remembered incidents, single moments, with a vividness which struck him dumb about them. But there was no order in his memories, and if, as he was falling asleep, the corner of a trench in blazing sunlight leaped from nowhere into his mind he could not be sure into which month, or year, of the War it fitted. Yet he could see the texture of the earth and sandbags, feel the heat of that sun in his body, and hear words spoken as carelessly as if no mind were laying them up for the future. Once, when he was walking across the field to the caravan with the captain’s breakfast, he remembered an hour lying out on night patrol, his body taut flattened against the ground. His hand felt the crack in the ground into which he had driven the ends of his fingers. The smell, like nothing else, of ground that has been fought over rose in his nostrils, and his heart pounded in his throat. Another time he stood again at the back of a dug-out watching the officer write on a pad held on his knee—the candle bent over and he watched it carefully, and the hand moving across the paper.
The road outside the dug-out was straight for about five hundred yards. He marched, swaying with fatigue. His body was no longer separate, but dragged and was dragged at by the rest of the marchers. That would be the Tunnels, he thought.
A lorry drove clean through the lines of swaying men and stopped. Frank shook himself, heated coffee, and listened for sounds from the room. Nothing.
‘Got a paper?’ the driver asked. Frank handed over his Daily Post. ‘I can’t read that rag,’ the other said.
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘Can’t you read? Or don’t you care what happens?’
‘I thought it was a sort of socialist paper,’ Frank said.
‘Socialist be blowed,’ the driver said. He swallowed his coffee. ‘You got a nice place here,’ he said, looking about. ‘Bad luck for you when they begin the bye-pass.’
Frank looked at him for a moment. ‘Bye-pass? What’s that? Where is it?’ he said.
‘’Tisn’t anywhere yet. It’s going to cut out all this’—he swept his arm round—‘and save twenty miles on the road north.’
‘Far from here?’ Frank asked. It was an effort to ask. He kept his voice low.
‘About three miles.’
‘Have to move,’ Frank said.
He stood still, when the other man had gone, trying to think it out. They couldn’t go on living here—if it was true. He felt convinced it was true. For a moment his dismay was so acute that he had to hold on to the shelf for support; nothing seemed safe. A door opened in the house behind him ; he heard it but did not move.
He felt hungry of a sudden. Breaking off a piece of bread he stood eating it, and thinking. That they could do this, ruining him, and he helpless. A feeling of bewilderment seized him: all round him there were millions like himself, working, eating, looking at the faces of those nearest them, touching things, working, working: who thought about them? who knew them? I’m no one, he thought. He touched his skin and ran his hands over his body, trying to reassure himself. Here I am, he thought; they can’t just wash me out, I’m living, I’m here. He felt small and uncertain. His throat was dry, a mouthful of bread stuck there and he had a time swallowing it out of the way.
He had his elbow on the copy of the Daily Post. Moving aside, he noticed it, and thought, Newspapers are a lot of words, I can’t vote myself a living, can I? He seized the paper and began to tear and fold it into pieces the right size to cover shelves. Make some use of it, he said to himself.
Bustling about, he felt more cheerful and with that and with the idea of making some enquiries—ask people, go across there and have a look round—he began to be confident. He ate another slice of bread, feeling slightly hollow inside.
His name spoken behind him. He swung round, and saw the woman smiling and beckoning. He followed awkwardly, scowling at her because she was all smiles. Sally looked different, his girl again.
‘I didn’t call out again,’ she said.
‘It isn’t over, is it?’ he said, dumbfounded. He knew it was, but his tongue was much slower than his mind.
‘Look at him then,’ Sally said kindly.
Instead, he looked at her. My lovely girl. He tried to say something.
‘Don’t you like him?’ Sally asked.
‘If only they’ll let us live,’ he burst out.
Sally looked at him, drowsy and serene, her pain
s not remembered now. ‘Why shouldn’t we live? We’re decent people. Aren’t we? Who’s going to stop us living?’
3. Thomas Harben makes plans
Many people knew Thomas Harben—his wife, his fellow-directors, managers of departments, secretaries, scientists employed by him, journalists, foreign industrialists and their envoys, bankers, his mistress. None of these people, not even the last, knew that he could not sit at a square table without running his fingers over the corners. In a strange room he was uneasy until he had touched and passed a finger over every square corner about the furniture. He would stand, carelessly, beside the mantel-shelf, walk past a sideboard, feel with his hand for the edges of his chair. Walking in the streets he counted, and touched, the right-angled corners of walls; he paused at the end of the pavement and his foot felt idly round the edge. He had been doing this for so many years that it had ceased to be a habit and become a pressing need. When he was younger he tried sometimes to break himself of it, but his discomfort was so great, and increased the longer he abstained, that he yielded. Nowadays he performed these small acts methodically as part of his life, and had ceased to reason about them. Occasionally it came into his mind that there was something comical in the spectacle of a man of his importance edging across a room to touch the angles of a cupboard, and then he laughed. He could laugh at himself.
Dressing for his wife’s dinner party, he came to a standstill before the dressing-table. By using both hands he could touch all four corners in a flash. That over he gave his mind to adjusting his tie. His long sardonic nose seemed to be taking an interest in the business; it looked down at his fingers fiddling with the ends. He watched both in the glass, feeling almost friendly toward them.
For a man of fifty-six his face was very little lined. You could not say it was a young-looking face, but neither was it old—its long heavy cheeks, long nose, mouth closely gripped, deep eye-pits, seemed made of a substance more enduring than flesh. Such lines as he had were deep. He was a big man, heavy but without much flesh on him. In repose his face was still sardonic and alert. Speech altered it very little. Only his mistress could say whether it changed under a sensual emotion, whether the eyes veiled themselves—perhaps the mouth loosened for a short time. His wife had certainly forgotten.
He was thinking of his wife as he dressed. Of her extraordinary habit of mixing people at her dinner parties, regardless of effect. The truth, he knew it, was that she could not endure his acquaintances, but a vestigial sense of duty made her ask them, not too often, to the house, and then she found herself driven to invite two or three friends of her own, by way of bodyguard. It was simple—not vexing, almost funny.
He admired in his wife her unshakeable self-assurance. She knew her place in the social pyramid, its privileges, its duties. She looked after the tenants on her father’s land, now hers. In London she gave the right number of dinner-parties, some large, none noisy, always followed by most excellent music. She understood that, patronised musicians, travelled to Bayreuth, to Salzburg. She knew something, enough, about modern art, and bought judiciously. She read many books—but when? he had no idea : perhaps in bed. In all these—culture activities (it was thus that his mistress spoke of them to him, but with respect, and with her slow smile)—he took no part. He was entirely uninterested. His life touched hers only in the certainties both felt. Lucy had hers through her family; his were a matter of power and character, he had started with the competence left him by his father and made himself one of the eight richest men in Europe. Curiously, he could think of himself as a man, a male animal, and compare himself strength for strength with a docker or a furnace-man, but he never thought of Lucy as a woman with the bodily shape and habits of other women. He had once expected children from her.
The thought that he had no son scarcely troubled him. It visited him at odd moments—as now, when he was looking at his face in the glass he saw queerly a young face beneath the bones of his own, and it occurred to him that it might have been his son’s. That was a strange thing. Now for a moment he wondered whether Lucy—does she ever think of it? Lucy when young. He frowned in the effort of memory.
The door leading to his wife’s rooms was at the other side of the landing. It was slightly open when he came to it, and obeying an impulse he went in to speak to her. ‘Who’s coming here to-night, Lucy?’
He stared at her long straight back, as if it might split and reveal a much younger woman hidden away there. Nothing short of this miracle would be any use. He could not of himself recall the least smile or word of the lost young woman.
‘George Ling again? But I can’t stand the fellow,’ he said, with abrupt vigour.
‘You said he must come once a year,’ his wife answered. ‘The last time was eighteen months ago.’
‘Well who else? Marcel Cohen?’ He exploded with laughter. He never failed to find amusing the encounters of Lucy with her Jews. Needing music, she could not do without them, and her very bones protested against their presence in her house. As well as a go-between for Lucy when she needed some celebrated musician to play in her music room, Cohen was his associate on half a dozen Boards. He detested George Ling, who was afraid of everything and yet stank of piety, but not so forcibly as he distrusted Cohen. And they were his allies (but thank God not his only ones) in the struggle he foresaw. He had felt, then thought it, placing his thoughts like sentries. The outlines of the struggle were acid-sharp in his mind—one or other of the nations would make beak and bones out of the post-war remnants; one, with or without satellites, would secure itself, for a generation at least, against the competition of the rest. As he saw it, it was only a matter of prevision and brute energy. America? In all simplicity Thomas Harben believed that the Americans would fumble the catch, because they were American—that is, foolhardy and inexperienced—not English. Japan? sharply more dangerous, he thought, seeing a runner stripped to the skin.
A cold enthusiasm kept his thoughts grinding at the mill. He thought in abstractions as concrete as steel rails and the keels of ships. When he used the words ‘man power’ he saw a half-naked steel puddler, but far from starting in him the ideas of a common humanity this image only angered him. A sullen will in the half-naked man opposed itself to his. This sweating brute at his furnace had feelings, desires, energies, not used up in work. Strikes, quarrels about hours—crowning impudence, the talk of nationalising this industry and that. To nationalise my industry, thought Harben. It was stupefying. It was enough to drive a man mad.
‘There’s another strike starting in the Garton yards,’ he broke out.
His wife looked at him calmly. ‘You don’t seem able to manage as the old lady did. She had no strikes during the War.’
‘And the fault’s hers,’ Harben exclaimed. ‘Her War bonuses to the men! I warned them, at the time I warned them. The Board used to agree to anything she said. Now she’s sold out and left me to carry the burden.’ In spite of his anger he could not help laughing. ‘The old devil. A nice pudding she mixed us. They’ve finished with bonuses, of course, and they’re going to take wage cuts as well. Do you know—if one could run an industry without men—that would be something.’
‘What would you use?’
‘Machines without men,’ he said promptly. ‘And I don’t doubt it’ll come to that—but not in my time.’
‘Trade is much worse, isn’t it?’ Lucy said politely.
‘Worse all the time. This is the moment they strike, and chitter-chatter in their unions about nationalising! Time and energy wasted to argue with them. I’d give something to argue them with machine-guns. Poor brutes of private soldiers who were shot for desertion deserved it far less.’
‘You might not have thought so if you had been a general,’ his wife said.
‘Eh, would I?’ he laughed.
He felt an impulse to clap her on the shoulder. That was enough—the mere notion was unseemly. He went away, fingering the edge of the door as he went.
The minutes before dinner—well now,
he reflected, looking about the room, Lucy has surpassed herself. He spoke to Evelyn Lamb; who answered by asking him, in a languid voice, something to do with the music. ‘Upon my word, I don’t know anything about it,’ he said. He saw Marcel Cohen standing at the other side of the room, and thought, There’s a man knows infinitely more about music than this clever silly woman and he has more sense than to talk to me about it. Making his way across he spoke in Cohen’s ear.
‘You remember my idea of a bureau of information and propaganda. Discourage all this subversive nonsense. I’ve thought about it a great deal now. I shall want to discuss it with you, my dear fellow.’
When he needs something I’m his dear dear fellow, Cohen said to himself. He made a gesture with elbows and outward-turning hands. ‘When you like,’ he said smiling. ‘Any time, any time. I am at your service.’
4. Ridley pays a call and makes notes
Ridley’s self-possession deserted him as he climbed the steps to the house. He was not sure—was it wise to call without an invitation? It was true she had said: ‘I shall really be interested, if you can hear who wrote that absurd article.’ But if it had been better to write? A brief amusing letter?
He rang the bell. The door opening, he felt as if he had stepped over the edge of a cliff. He fell and then waited for a year. When the man returned he looked into Ridley’s face and said civilly : ‘Mrs Harben is not disengaged, sir.’
Company Parade Page 16