Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  ‘Don’t divorce me—don’t leave me,’ Penn said.

  ‘I thought you preferred her.’

  ‘Good God no.’

  Hervey leaned against the table. ‘Do you want to live with her?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Penn said.

  She was by now quite out of her reckoning. ‘I think you had better tell me who Len Hammond is,’ she said, staring.

  Penn did not speak at once. He removed his pince-nez, wiped them thoroughly with his handkerchief, dried his face with it, adjusted the glasses to his nose, looked at her through them, and said gently: ‘The girl I used to dance with in Canterbury. I told you about it at the time. She was a V.A.D. then.’

  Hervey felt a cold excitement, the pure satisfaction of the mind in completing a figure. Her body trembled, dissatisfied. ‘It’s been nearly three years, then.’ She grew crimson. ‘How did you—when you left the Air Force—did you write to her? How did you see each other?’

  After a silence Penn said : ‘I got her a job in the office. She’s gone now—left a month ago : her mother wanted her at home.’ He paused. ‘You saw her there once.’

  Hervey thought she had been struck on the breast. ‘Oh! ‘She stepped back, feeling for the support of the wall. ‘When I asked you, Who is that?’ She spoke so softly that it was as if she were sighing, alone in the room. ‘Oh, I didn’t know being deceived was like this.’

  ‘Don’t be childish, Hervey,’ Penn said.

  ‘That day it was I went home. I suppose you were with her then. You would be with her that night.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You must have laughed at me, the two of you. My coming in like that—and asking—that was a good joke.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, my dear.’

  She tried to defend herself against the word. ‘You both knew, and I didn’t. You looked at me together, both knowing.’ She clapped her hand to her mouth.

  Penn threw up his hands. ‘I can’t argue with you in this state.’

  ‘Don’t try,’ she said swiftly. ‘I shall begin to laugh at you. You look very silly yourself, undressing in front of your typist. You’re so long and thin.’

  ‘Much obliged,’ Penn said stiffly.

  Hervey felt miserable again. ‘What I don’t like is your creeping between bed and bed,’ she said. ‘Why did you have to fetch her to London, Penn? Tell me, tell me now.’

  ‘I wanted to do something for her,’ Penn said. He frowned at her absently. After a moment he added: ‘I can’t see that it was any worse to have her in London. After all, I’d had her. I couldn’t alter that, could I? Mind you, I didn’t mean it to start again.’

  Hervey looked at him.

  ‘I thought I was strong enough to see her without falling, as they say. In fact, though you won’t believe me, I had decided to prove it, by bringing her up here and not touching her. Rash of me, as it turned out—but there you are.’

  Such dreadful words, Hervey thought. She pressed her hands on her chest. ‘You could have given her up when you were demobilised.’

  ‘Yes, I could have given her up. I suppose I didn’t want to.’ He looked at her to see how she was taking it.

  Hervey sat down. She pressed her hands on her knees to hide their state from him. ‘It was worse,’ she said. Penn came across the room to her. ‘Oh Hervey, I was mad,’ he said quickly. She smiled to keep him from touching her.‘Nothing of the sort. You couldn’t stay mad for three years. Or make so many neat plans.’

  ‘If I’d known I was going to risk losing you through it—’

  ‘You haven’t lost anything,’ Hervey said instantly. ‘You threw it away.’ This phrase comforted her, but not for long: running back and forth, her mind snatched a straw from the vast heap in front of it. ‘That man you made me ask here—who was your sergeant. Did he know that you were—that you had her then?’

  ‘In Canterbury? Yes he knew.’ Penn hesitated. ‘I couldn’t help that. When we moved to Lympne she came to my room sometimes.’

  The words started up a dozen frightful ideas in her.‘When you were in Canterbury, you asked me to stay with you one week-end,’ she said, trembling.

  ‘You enjoyed it,’ Penn said.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t gone,’ Hervey cried. She sprang up. ‘It’s too much. I think he must have smiled. The next week-end it would be your—your concubine.’ As red as fire she rushed out of the room.’

  Her own room had a chill empty look, as if she had been away from it for a long time. It has changed, she thought. She began to walk up and down. She arranged the curtains. She set the chairs at a fresh angle. She looked into books and pulled drawers open.

  But this was what her mind had been doing since yesterday. It had dragged out so much that there was nothing now but a litter of old dresses, books, broken shoelaces, letters, pieces of torn ribbon, between this moment and the one nine years ago in which she had said—it was growing dark and they had been quarrelling, and she had offended him—‘I love you, Penn. Didn’t you know?’ Poor Hervey, he had said ; and seized with shame, she thought, It was all a mistake, I shouldn’t have said it. She could scarcely see him, but in the darkness they touched; she did not kiss him, she was too clumsy, she bent her head awkwardly and felt his touch, there, on her right temple.

  ‘But don’t come in here, not into this room,’ Hervey said aloud. She walked quicker, she was almost running, to shake off the awkward young creature. It was useless. She came in, she listened, she saw what had happened. But she understood nothing. She supposed that it was happening at the same moment as the other scene, and she suffered as if her lover had turned from her to the other woman that evening, under her very nose.

  Hervey ran to the shelf where she kept her unfinished novel, tore out a blank page, and began to make notes of her feelings. She wrote down what she had said and felt. As soon as she had finished and laid the paper away, she burst into tears.

  Another thought jumped into her mind. She dried her face on her sleeve and ran into Penn’s room. He was standing looking through the window with an unhappy air. What can he be looking at? she thought. She tugged his arm. ‘You didn’t come straight to me when you were demobilised. You stayed with her first. How long?’

  Penn cleared his throat thoroughly. He blinked at her. ‘About a week, I think. Does it matter?’

  ‘Why didn’t you write to me that you were falling in love with her? I would have come—yes—and argued with you.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Penn said.

  ‘Running to a person called Len, behind my back,’ Hervey sneered. She spoke in a loud rough voice. ‘How was it you didn’t warn me?’ He is a stone, she thought; he has no kindness for me.

  ‘You said—you must remember, Penn?—you would tell me certainly and instantly.’

  ‘I know I did. But it isn’t possible. And I believed you were very pleased with your life. One doesn’t reason these things out, you know.’

  ‘There must,’ Hervey said, ‘come a moment when you decide.’ The past rose in her again and choked her lungs. Your enemies are much kinder to you than your friends, she thought—you expect treachery from them and sometimes you get something better.

  ‘Oh no,’ Penn said. ‘Oh no. Dear me, no. By that time it’s a great way too late to reason about it.’ He saw her face and said hurriedly: ‘You know, you’re capable of it yourself, poor Hervey.’

  ‘Not of such careful meanness,’ Hervey cried. She looked at him, not troubling to hide her agony—it had made her look old, with blotched wrinkled eyelids.

  ‘I thought it would be all right to have her when you weren’t there.’

  He did not know what to say to her. This is getting me down, he thought. He watched furtively her hands, trembling and the palms pressed over her knees.

  ‘You must have been much in love,’ Hervey whispered.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, my dear. I loved her very moderately.’

  Hervey was struck with despair and surprise. ‘You didn’t lov
e her and you let her do this to me?’ she said, staring. ‘What a lot you must think of me!’

  He saw that she had lost the last remnants of her sense of reality. He wanted to help her—he was in need of help himself, this was very painful to him—but she was beyond help. He felt sorry for her. He moved closer and tried to put an arm round her shoulder. ‘I’d give anything to undo this,’ he said. There was a great deal he could have said, he had thought about it, but he saw she was not in a state to listen. He tried.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of what happened. There was nothing mean about it—about my feelings for her. If you’re imagining anything like that—I didn’t pretend that I wanted to marry her. She was happy to have me on any terms, and I suppose I was too. But if I’d thought for one moment that you would find out, and be hurt, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with her.’

  ‘How can you go on talking when I’m feeling like this!’

  ‘I think you’re taking up a wrong attitude to it. I haven’t very much respect for conventional morality.’

  Hervey’s mind gave a short blind jerk, like a laugh. ‘Were you defying herd morality?’ she cried. ‘You didn’t achieve much except herd immorality, did you? It’s not unusual.’

  His anger flared up for a moment. ‘I’m delighted you feel like that about it.’

  She had punished herself. ‘Yes, it’s usual enough,’ she said in a low voice. She tried to become calm. ‘Yet I suppose all women think, It won’t happen to me. I suppose men feel the need for changes. I myself—I felt it myself. It’s a pity. It spoils things.’ She smoothed her dress. ‘Isn’t it queer? I’m poisoned with jealousy.’ After a moment, she said: ‘I can’t help knowing that it would have been better, easy to bear, if you had told me. Being startled or disappointed is one thing—women should be able to face that, I think. Being lied to and deceived is something different, worse.’ Looking at him, she felt in herself a flow of hatred and bitterness. She wanted to hurt him, to humiliate him for ever and ever. At the same time (it was her mother’s harsh voice) she thought, There never was a fool but found some woman ready to be a bigger fool.

  ‘I’ve always respected you, my dear.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Hervey said. She felt a contempt for him. ‘You don’t respect anyone you’re so easily able to deceive.’ They must often have laughed together over me, she said to herself. Her heart seemed to nip her—she thought for an instant that she would faint. Her sense of humour awoke in time to save her: well, you are a pretty figure of fun, it said. At once, as soon as she thought it, she saw her mother standing there, in a ruched dress. She was angry. ‘To go out,’ she said, ‘to swing on the gate, deliberately, on the Sabbath. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I should think you’re the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood.’ And we believed it, she thought, half laughing, half pitying the heartsick child.

  ‘It’s in your own mind,’ Penn said.

  ‘You don’t know what’s in my mind.’ She looked at him, pulling at her mouth. ‘I might, you can’t tell, can you, be thinking about the first time you were with her. Did you think of me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Penn said.

  Hervey felt deathly tired.

  She stumbled away from him to her room, this time locking the door, and went to bed. Lying down was like falling into a cloud of blackness. She fell, down, and down. The darkness was as deep as the sea; it lay all round, above, below her. She could hear Penn speaking outside the door. His voice was an immense distance away. She was not being stubborn, she would have answered it, but she was not able to move. She lay bound hand and foot on the floor of the sea. Soon she heard and saw nothing.

  In the morning she felt her mind clear and empty, except for a core of hardness. She wrote a brutal letter to the girl’s mother. Searching the letters, she had come on the right address, and she took pleasure in placing her sentences like a row of stones. She carried this letter as far as the post office, hesitated, and tore it up.

  She felt relieved when she had done it, and yet angry, since she had wanted to harm the girl. But it was no use. She threw the pieces of the letter into a gutter. Women should be kind to women, she said to herself. This gave her no comfort. She was vexed that she had thought it. She stamped her foot, and imagined the girl disgraced (by some other hand), and coming to her for help. She would behave with generosity, yet without mitigating her scorn.

  2. For a time Hervey behaves badly

  A week later she climbed a flight of uncarpeted stairs to the lawyer’s office and entered an anteroom and then a room of the austerest shabbiness and gentility. He was a dry kind man. The kindness was as impersonal with him as his boots. It was impossible to believe that he had any life outside this room in which he sat to hear confidences.

  He made Hervey sit before him in an armchair covered with black leather, not to show the stains. Now and again he smiled. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It was like talking to a stuffed man.

  There was a clerk seated at a desk in the other corner. He was making notes of her answers, and from time to time he bent down and scratched his leg. She felt empty, as though her life were running out of the corners of her mouth. ‘Where were you living at that time, Mrs Vane?’ The kitchen of her house in Liverpool came and with a ludicrous flapping of clothes hung drying in the garden, vanished, and its place was filled by another room, and another, and another. And in each of them she was living still, as, and with the same impulse, she would until she died, and fell from her mind into the earth. ‘When did you suspect that something was wrong?’ ‘Have you always lived happily? ‘If I could answer that, Hervey thought, I should have an answer to everything in my life.

  ‘How did you gain possession of these letters?’

  ‘I stole them.’

  The lawyer smiled very slightly; a propitious and unnatural smile. He turned over the pages of the letters. ‘Letters of this kind are all alike,’ he remarked. He handed them to his clerk, who tied a length of pink tape round them. ‘I must tell you that they’re not evidence against your husband, Mrs Vane, although they were written to him. They’re evidence only against the writer.’

  He explained to her that—such was the law—she must write to her husband and ask him to live with her again. (But he has never left me, Hervey thought. She stared straight before her, her face wooden.) Mr Vane, the lawyer went on, would do what was expected (he coughed dryly) of a husband in these circumstances. What is that? He would refuse to return. ‘I shall ask you to write a draft letter to your husband, and to let me see it.’ ‘What shall I say?’ Hervey asked him. She hid her alarm. ‘Just use your own best words,’ he answered: ‘I don’t want to put words into your head. That would destroy the spontaneity.’ And then? ‘Then we shall bring an action against him for restitution of conjugal rights; he will decline to comply with the order—giving you fresh evidence of adultery. Then we shall begin the action for divorce.’

  ‘Conjugal is a dreadful word,’ Hervey said. She moved to the edge of her chair, and only then noticed a large splash of ink on one stocking. You will be the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood, she thought. She got up.

  ‘Is that all?’ It was like dropping a stone into a shaft—she listened to it to hear the echo in herself. ‘You mustn’t see or be seen with your husband,’ said the lawyer. He walked with her across the room, and steadied her when she knocked her awkward ankle against a chair.

  There were two flights of stairs, bare, worn hollow in the tread of the stair. She placed her foot carefully in the centre of each smooth dip, to be like all the others who had come here. With a dreadful clarity she saw that she was to blame for everything. I have been selfish, arrogant, disloyal, she thought. I have failed through unkindness. To have had so much—days, nights, hunger, ecstasy, cold on hands wet from washing clothes, plans, money in a thin purse—and to see it tied round carelessly with a bundle of papers, as if it were nothing. It was indecent. She thought of Penn. My love, you are no more to blame than I am, she cried. She was f
illed with dismay at the notion of turning him into the street. It was too callous. It was troublesome.

  At the foot of the lawyer’s stairs she turned. No one had been following her.,

  She went on, and trotted about the streets for a long time, then went home. Penn was there, waiting for her to warm coffee for them on her gas ring.

  He listened with a defensive smile, then said gently: ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘No,’ Hervey said. There was so much to say she could not say it. She held her tongue.

  ‘Don’t send me off, Hervey.’ He sat down. The very way he sat was an appeal.

  She felt—but she had felt it in the lawyer’s room—that she had no heart for this scheming and lying. But she would not put Penn at his ease at this time. She was afraid, cold. I must be very sensible and calm, she told herself.

  She felt too deeply ashamed to admit her weakness to that dry lawyer. She thought he would despise her. In a short time he sent her a copy of some long document he called her proof. She did not read it, only looked in it to see whether it was recorded that she stole the letters. It was not. In a note the lawyer reminded her that she was to draft a letter for her husband. Now was the time to say, I can’t go on. He will laugh at me with the clerk, she thought. She drafted the letter imploring Penn (he was in the next room) to return, and submitted it.

  A day later she had it back—two of her phrases had been corrected in pencil in a pinched hand. She felt sharply mortified. It seems there is a style in these letters, she thought.

  She put the letter aside. If she could have forgotten it, forgotten the whole, by losing a finger, she would, at this time, have cut it off. The days passed, with no ease for her—since a part of her mind was beside itself with jealousy. She did not call it that.

  She forced Penn to tell her what had happened between them. ‘Where did you stay together?’ She avoided the girl’s name.

  ‘Which was the first time?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Did you talk of me?’ She thought that if she knew everything, the intimate details, of his life with the other girl, she would cease to be humiliated by it.