Chapter XXIII
David Renn Goes to see his Mother
Renn spoke to Hervey in a sharp voice. ‘Is this fellow Ridley a friend of yours?’
‘No, why?’ Hervey said. She spoke anxiously, expecting that she had done wrong.
‘We can’t print another of his essays in The Week. The first was enough.’
‘I haven’t asked him for another,’ Hervey said. She glanced over the pages. ‘What is wrong with this one?’
‘Everything,’ Renn said angrily. ‘It’s just another Now then, boys, all together, hip hip, what jolly dogs are we. I won’t use it.’
‘He’s becoming important,’ Hervey said, sighing. ‘Can we afford to make an enemy of him?’
‘We can’t afford his friendship,’ Renn said. He looked at her with a light smile. ‘Poor Hervey. You don’t like failures, do you? If I let you, you’d turn The Week into a glorious success. But it would have ceased to be an honest paper. Perhaps after all it isn’t worth the trouble. But you haven’t much public conscience, have you?’
‘I don’t like being poor,’ Hervey said.
Renn opened his mouth to deal with her, thought better of it, and got up. ‘Finish off these proofs for me,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I’m going home.’
He went out and walked towards the Earlhams’ flat. The lights were all lit in the streets. He passed a line of people waiting in the yellowish glare for one of the theatres. Did I once stand there? he thought. I was just nineteen. He remembered buying a paper to read as he waited, because of the words on the poster. Austrian Ultimatum. Is that all I remember? Six years is a long time.
He heard his name called. Turning, he saw a man who had been his platoon sergeant in France. He came striding towards Renn past the waiting lines. A leather strap over his shoulders supported a tray filled with cheap sweets. ‘What are you doing with that thing?’ Renn asked.
‘It’s my new trade,’ the other man said, smiling. ‘Help yourself to a stick of chocolate.’
‘Thanks,’ Renn said. ‘I never eat chocolate.’ He put his hand on the man’s arm and turned him towards the nearest café. It was a dark small room, with a Greek proprietor, who did not object to shabby pedlars. When they were seated, he noticed that his late sergeant was the colour of grey wax. His clothes were thin and shabby, and he wore a muffler in place of a shirt. ‘What’s happened to you?’ Renn asked.
‘Nothing unusual. I hadn’t a job. My old firm was very polite to me, shook hands and all that, awfully glad you’ve come safe out of it, my dear chap, sorry, unfortunately filled your place when you left—your successor is a married man with a family. But I’m married, I said. During the War. I married in 1917. Splendid, splendid. You won’t have any difficulty in finding a job. Refer to us whenever you like. Goodbye.’
‘And did you?’ Renn asked. He tried not to notice his friend’s hands. They were shaking so that he could not hold his fork and it clattered to the floor. The little Greek picked it up, wiped it absently on his sleeve, and handed it back with a polite smile.
‘Did I what? I was out of work for sixteen months. My wife went home in the end. Last week a fund, charity for ex-soldiers, fitted me out with this thing. You buy the chocolate from them and make a small profit if you sell the lot.’
‘Is it heavy?’
‘Try it.’
Renn placed the strap round his neck. He went out, leaving his sergeant to finish another mess of lentils and meat, and walked alongside the queue. One woman asked him the price of the bars of chocolate. He had forgotten to ask, and answered Fourpence at random. There were sixteen bars and three boxes of chocolates marked one shilling. That made about eight shillings’ worth in all. What was the profit on it?
‘You’re a nice one,’ she cried angrily. ‘Look, they’re marked threepence. As plain as your nose. I’ve a great mind to give you in charge.’
‘Don’t do that,’ Renn begged. ‘I really made a mistake. Have one for nothing instead.’
The woman looked at him with hatred but snatched the packet he held out to her. He waited to see whether she would thank him. She examined it in a cold silence. He went up and down between the queue and the street. A boy bought three pennyworth from him. The strap dragged at his shoulders and he felt horribly exposed. The doors of the theatre opened and now no one took any further notice of him. He saw a policeman at the side of the road and thought it well to return quickly to the cafe. ‘I didn’t do very well,’ he said. He folded a pound note and placed it on the tray.
‘You’re very kind, but it’s no use, you know,’ the man said. He shivered a little.
‘Nothing’s any use,’ Renn said.
‘You’re born and brought up—educated—I suppose that cost the country something. You even fight for them, though that wasn’t all bad. In the end you’re not wanted. There’s no room for you in the country. What I want to know is—why don’t they kill you if you’re nothing but a nuisance? If they’ve nothing for me to do, if it’s true I’m only in the way, a disappointment to my wife, and no need for me to live, why not painlessly get rid of me?’ He spoke with excitement. ‘I could kill myself, of course, but, do you know, I have a prejudice against that? Besides, I should have to do it clumsily and as cheaply as possible. No, no, it’s their responsibility, but they won’t take it. Why?’
A stout woman, followed by two others, stepped out of a car at the main entrance to the theatre. They were furred, jewelled, and so well made up that each face was as like the other two as the three balls of dung in the road.
‘It seems there’s plenty of room for those women, but not for a healthy man of twenty-eight,’ Renn said. ‘Are you healthy, by the way?’
The other only smiled. ‘Do you remember coming back from Gommecourt that night?’
‘You were carrying their rifles for three men,’ Renn said.
‘They were heavier than this tray. When I take it off I feel that my neck has broken.’
They parted outside the café. Now I shall have to avoid Shaftesbury Avenue at this time, Renn thought. He hated himself for having thought it. He looked back. His old sergeant was being moved on by the policeman. Renn walked quickly away, uncertain now whether he wanted to see Louis and Rachel. They would talk to him about a Labour government and how in time everything would be changed and become decent. But how will that save my sergeant? he cried. In time he’ll be dead—or too done to care.
He crossed the road and stepped on to a bus. With luck, he thought, I can catch the last train to Hitchin. He caught it, and sat looking through the window. In the dusk, houses, then trees and fields, slipped past him like driftwood swirling in brown water. It was dark when he walked down the road from the station and stood outside his mother’s house. There was a card in the window. He stepped closer to read it. Plain Sewing Done Here and Mending. He opened the door and whistled, then walked into the sitting-room. His mother was seated with a book in front of her at the table in the window, her tongue pressed between her teeth, as a child reads. She’s not understanding a word of it, he thought. He glanced at the book, and saw that it was a schoolbook, one of his own, a dryasdust history of Europe in the Dark Ages.
His mother looked at him without surprise. ‘I was just going to write to you,’ she exclaimed. ‘Luckily for us I made bread this morning.’ She closed her book with an air of relief and came round the table to him. She was so moved that she forgot to kiss him.
‘You’re still too thin,’ she said, smiling. ‘You ought to live with me. I miss you, too. There’s no one to answer my questions. Even before he had his stroke your father was not very talkative, as you know. Do you know, this is a terrible book you studied, Davy. It says they burned whole villages in France and when the wars ended people were starving.’
‘We have certainly progressed a good deal,’ Renn said. ‘I never noticed it before.’
‘You haven’t changed,’ his mother said. ‘Last Monday your headmaster stopped me in the street to ask after you. He said you we
re always his best pupil, but he was afraid that you had no respect for authority.’
‘He was wrong, I had too much,’ Renn said, smiling.
Mrs Renn was gaily opening cupboards and setting plates and knives on the table. ‘What do you think?’ she laughed, ‘I found your bowler hat in the loft yesterday. Do you remember when you left school and went to work in London? It was a few months before the War. You came home to see me in July and when I opened the door there you were, wearing the bowler hat. You looked frightful in it—like a little boy playing at shops. I was afraid to ask you about it. Afterwards—when you enlisted—I put it in the loft, thinking, now he’ll soon forget it.’
‘I remember it quite well,’ Renn said. ‘I bought it as soon as I went to London. I thought I needed one, and I couldn’t wear my cap in Regent Street, could I?’
His mother looked into the cupboard again. ‘Would you like me to make an omelette? There are four eggs. My left-hand neighbour gave them to me for the socks I mended. Her husband wears five pairs a week. He’s very anxious about his looks. At night, she says, he places strips of sticking-plaster over his worst wrinkles. I suppose he has to in these times. You don’t tell me anything in your letters. Are you happy? Is your work going on well? Now that you are an editor you will be sought after by other people. Do you like that?’
‘Very much indeed,’ Renn answered.
Chapter XXIV
Hervey Loses a Part of the Ground Gained
1. Three days in August 1921
That year the summer was dry and hot. The commons round London smouldered and the streets smelled of earth. It reminded you that the paving stones covered what had been fields in a livelier England.
Hervey’s northern-bred bones melted in this heat. She grew thinner and lazy, and formed the opinion that London is no place for a Christian soul.
Penn told her that his holiday had been allotted to him for the second week of the month. He went to spend it alone in Dorset. The day after he came home again there was forwarded a letter addressed to him in Dorset. It was laid with Hervey’s, and happening to glance at him as she gave it up, she saw a most curious look on his face. She saw it—and immediately forgot it. It meant no more to her eyes than a change of light on the wall. Penn took the letter to read it in his own room.
She went to bed and fell asleep, being tired. Towards the morning, but while it was still dark, she awoke suddenly.
A thought had spoken in her ear. She was asleep when it began speaking and awake before the words were all out. That letter is important for you, it said. She lay for a moment still and awake. The stillness was as it were visible, enclosing her bed and the room between its hands. Also her mind was still. She was vividly conscious of her body lying in the bed.
After this moment, she got up, without reflection, and went into Penn’s room. She felt her way to his coat, which was on the chair by his bed, felt in the pockets for the letter, took and fetched it to her room, and read it, standing with her hand on the bed-rail. It was a short letter, the words poor and foolish. But it made so clear that at first she did not see it that Penn had been a long time the writer’s lover and they had spent the first week of his holiday together. There will be other letters, she thought. She went back to Penn’s room, not troubling to be quiet or careful, and peered along the shelves until she found a collar-box stuffed with letters. When she was taking it Penn half awoke, and she spoke to him. He went to sleep again.
Again in her room, she looked at the letters until she found one signed in full, ‘Len Hammond,’ but did not read them. For the first time an overwhelming excitement seized her. She felt charged with it, and as though she would burst apart. Also for the first time since she awoke, she began to look at what had happened. She cried out, ‘I’m free, I’m free.’ Then she fell on her knees and prayed to be kept from mean thoughts. Her prayer formed itself: ‘I had to steal these letters because Penn would not have told me any of the truth—but don’t, my God, let me be mean in using it.’ She felt cold. Suddenly she began crying. Tears rushed from her and fell on to her hands. She was torn with them and shook from head to foot. ‘But I’m old, I’m old.’
She got into the bed for warmth. She did not know why she had cried but it was at this moment, when she was saying ‘I’m old,’ that a much younger Hervey began to take possession of her. This girl—she was about nineteen—did not know that Hervey had come to an end of her husband and of her love and respect and passion for him.
Hervey was always methodical. She lay there, stretched out stiff and straight on her back, and planned, not vaguely, but most precisely and patiently, what she must do, as if it were a matter of life and death that she should say this, and do that, from the moment of rising. I must sleep now, she thought. But when she closed her eyes it was as though she had turned on a light in a curtained room. Her mind was clenched on itself. She was forced to repeat her plans over and over, until her brain felt as though it had grown to her skull.
Now the light began to stream into the room, but she was still so cold that she could not help shuddering. It came to her to go into Penn to get warm.
Penn half roused when she came in, then, feeling the cold of her body, he drew her closer to him and tried to warm her. His hands moved over her. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked suddenly.
She was seized with grief. She would have wept again, but forced herself to be quiet. Penn felt the effort of her body and said gently: ‘What’s the matter, my love?’
‘Nothing, nothing’ She was overcome with shame for her act of treachery.
After their breakfast together she went out as usual but did not go to the office. She believed that the girl was living at Tonbridge in Kent. She went directly to the station and looked up the trains to Tonbridge. One started in half an hour. She sat down to wait, her hands folded. Now and then her lips moved as she rehearsed carefully questions she would ask. Was it because she was tortuous or because she distrusted him, that the idea of questioning Penn himself did not occur to her? Above all, I must be calm and polite, she thought. She was pleased to find that she had so much lucidity. It seemed a proof that she was not much hurt.
How strongly and clearly I am thinking, she thought. It was true, but she did not know that she had gone mad.
At Tonbridge she stood trembling in a station telephone booth looking up the Hammonds. There were only two in the book, one a butcher. She called on the butcher first. His name was not Hammond and he had no daughters. The streets were untidy with the traffic of a small town and so airless that the sunlight stood in her way like a wall. She kept asking people to direct her to Dean Road. It was outside the town, and when she reached the house and found there an old rude woman she did not know what to do. Her tongue felt thick and she had trouble in speaking. ‘Do you know any other Hammonds living in Tonbridge?’ ‘No!’ She went back to the station, and to London.
For a long time she trudged about the streets in the sun, uncertain what to do. She felt very hungry and went into a small café. As soon as she had sat down she began to tremble, so violently that she was afraid people would see it. She ordered tea and bread and butter. When it came she drank eagerly but her throat closed against the food. She got a mouthful of the bread and had to put it out into her handkerchief when she thought no one was looking.
In the early evening she was walking across the Green Park and saw T. S. Heywood at her elbow. ‘I had to run after you,’ he grumbled. He looked at her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, I’m hot,’ Hervey said. She spoke slowly because each word had to be dragged from a great depth.
He made her sit down. He noticed that she kept putting her hand to her throat. ‘Do you know a good lawyer?’ she said.
‘I can send you to mine. Who d’you want punished?’
‘Why, no one,’ Hervey smiled. She yielded to a strong impulse. ‘I find I can divorce Penn and I don’t know where to set about it.’
T.S. did not answer at once. He felt a prick of annoyanc
e that she was taking it badly. But she’s unreasonable, he thought, irritated.
Almost for the first time he had the feeling that she was a woman : a female creature. In the same moment he wanted hotly to comfort her. He laid his hand on her knee. ‘My dear Hervey,’ he said tenderly.
Hervey pushed his hand off and snarled at him. He was horribly startled and thought, She’s more like a young wolf. He felt that if his hand had been any closer she would have bitten it. It put him at ease with her again : he asked no questions, wrote down the address of his lawyer for her, and told her to mend the sleeve of her dress.
That was like Philip, she said.
She went home, talked to Penn a little, and went to bed.
During her sleep her mind seemed to be feeling its way quickly through darkness. In this forced march it came to this memory and to that, until her life came about her like a swift heavy rush of earth down a hillside carrying away villages and the roots of trees.
The next day was Sunday. Penn asked her to go out, but it was too hot, she said, too hot. She could not face so burning a light. Indeed the sky was white hot and the sun pressed down on the streets at the level of faces like a sheet of brass. In the evening she could not longer hold in, and she went into Penn’s room and stood by the table, her head thrust forward, and said : ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in love with this Hammond?’ Penn did not say anything. He stood at the other side of the table and looked at her. ‘If you’ll tell me about it, I can divorce you and you can have her in peace.’
To her astonishment Penn began to cry. ‘Don’t you love me, then?’ he said. He wiped his tears with the sides of his hands.
Hervey frowned, trying hard to understand him. ‘Please, what has that to do with it?’
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