Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  A man standing on the platform of Danesacre lighthouse could now see that the lamp behind him was diminished. The darkness had become opaque and as the beam entered this dull element part of its strength was sucked from it. The first veil had been lifted from the sea. The sky appeared less close to the earth. Now Sally woke and finding it still dark and her hand near her husband’s she slept again. Hervey Russell slept with her arm over her face. She was surprised to find herself able to rise on her toes like a ballet dancer. All her life she had wanted very much to be able to do this, and now without effort she was dancing turning on her toes like a leaf on its stalk, in an ecstasy of pleasure and lightness. The music to which she turned came from within her, yet was as strong and clear as a fine orchestra. She could pick out the different instruments, shuddering with pleasure when the great middle notes of the violins sprang through the centre of her body. With precision and lovely ease her body played through the third Brandenburg concerto while she spun on her toes across the waxed boards. Surely I have never been so happy, she thought.

  Chapter XXX

  June 1923

  1. They used to sell good linen

  Hervey took Richard to the gate of Miss Holland’s house. ‘Don’t come for me at twelve,’ he warned her. ‘A boy of my age can fetch himself from school.’ The day before was his eighth birthday.

  ‘Very well,’ Hervey said. ‘I’ll wait for you at home.’

  She did not go home then, but took the Guisborough road to the moors. The morning was clear and warm, with the softness and light winds of early summer. The leaves of trees and hedges were an intense pure green, and translucent, with the sun shining through them as though it shone through water. In the garden of a cottage tulips and wallflowers were as thick as paint. Before she reached the moor there were no more cottages. There was the dry moor, with the first fern leaves, and the peewits crying ‘Whereaway?’ like the ghosts of sailors.

  She walked quickly, until she came to the top of the moor. In front of her it ran north-east to the coast with its scanty villages and hard-set iron works. She turned her back on that and sat down looking towards Danesacre. The valleys were like the troughs of waves with the hill ahead rising in a great sweep as green as a wave to the other moors. ‘You’re a beauty, you are,’ she said, looking at what she could see of Danesacre. It was as much as anyone crossing the moor from this side on any clear day during the last eight hundred years would see. I ought to be glad to stay here, she thought. But she was not.

  She wanted to go back to London, a city which in other ways she hated, because she had there the sense of things happening round her and within the reach of her mind. She was too young to wish for anything better. Well, even a young tree can have deep roots, but it feels the wind more than an older one. In the moment that her heart lifted to the sight of Danesacre on a clear morning she thought, I am buried alive here, I hear and know nothing. Yet she thought, I shall always come back here.

  She put a hand into her pocket and drew out a letter which had come that morning. It was from Penn. His careless fingers had folded up with the letter a scrap of paper on which he had noted the various things he had to do in London. Half-way down the list Hervey read : Len 6.30 Marylebone Hotel. She was very roughly shocked and found it hard to think. She leaned up against the wall holding the letter, and after a moment or two she was able to think quietly, So he has gone to her again.

  He had agreed readily with Hervey that their situation would be unbearable unless he gave up this Len Hammond. She knows too much about me already, Hervey said to him: and I can’t face the prospect of your telling her that I have cried a great deal and been angry with you about her.

  She read through the letter for the third time. He has of course told her now that I cried, she thought. To quiet herself she said out loud: ‘He wasn’t able to give her up because he wanted her to think well of him. He had to put himself right in her eyes.’ She knew that was not the whole story but it was enough. For the rest, she was forced plainly to know that her needs and wishes meant very little to Penn. She had needed time to recover some confidence in herself: nothing so takes the pride out of you as being deceived, easily and for a long time, by an intimate. If I could have had this one promise to me kept, I should feel less humiliated, she thought

  A feeling of extraordinary bitterness seized her. She sat looking at her hands and thinking, I can’t put this right.

  She put her hand over her mouth. All my breast achesj she thought.

  Many sharp thoughts came into her mind as she sat there, and at the end she felt a quick exhilaration, unlooked for, but it comforted her. It was something to know where she stood, and that was alone. Thinking, I shall do something with my life yet, she lay down with her face to the ground.

  After a time she turned round and looked up at the sky. It was cloudless except for the small and lovely clouds out to sea. She watched a bird turn and stoop as a ship leans over to the water. ‘Whereaway, whereaway?’ she mocked it. A strange happiness filled her. She stood up and looked once more at the two lovely valleys before turning home. She had come to no decision about her future, and she was alone as she had never been, yet had in her mind a feeling that something would soon happen.

  In the early evening of that day she walked to her mother’s house. Mrs Russell was on the moment of going out to buy new linen and she turned and went with her. They were going to an older part of Danesacre, where Mrs Russell had her first house as a young married woman.

  ‘I bought my first sheets at Peirson’s,’ she said. ‘They were plain fine linen. That’s twenty-seven years and I have them now. I worked an R in red cotton in the corner.’ She looked with remote staring blue eyes at a young woman drawing a needleful of red cotton through white linen. The years of her life, children, foreign harbours, a dead son, grief and happiness, were still folded in the sheets tumbling from her knee.

  ‘I had scarcely any money,’ she said suddenly. ‘Your father was out of a ship for half a year after I married him. I couldn’t bring myself to buy poor linen, so I took what money I had and went to Peirson’s and asked for old Mr Peirson. I told him that I would buy two pairs of their fine sheets if he would take half the money now and the rest as soon as I had it. He said “ Choose your sheets, honey, and pay me when you like.” I chose the finest and he brought them to the house himself.’

  ‘That was kind,’ Hervey said.

  ‘I suppose my mother had spent hundreds of pounds on linen in his shop,’ Mrs Russell answered, in the dry voice she used in speaking of Mary Hervey. ‘The linen cupboards were one woman’s work. There were there a hundred and thirty-eight shelves, of cedar wood, each marked with a date when that linen on it was bought.’

  She pressed her lips tightly over the words. Glancing at her, Hervey saw that two pairs of Mr Peirson’s finest linen sheets were the symbol in her mother’s mind of that vast cupboard, just as her six Chippendale chairs stood for the solid and great dignity of Mary Hervey’s house. In everything she did, Mrs Russell had had that inachievable grandeur in view. It had burned up her life.

  They were walking between the harbour and a row of tall faded houses. The life had ebbed from this part of the town, and the gardens of the houses were like stagnant pools, filled with pampas-grass and laburnums, and their narrow paths edged with shells brought from the seas at the other side of the world.

  In the harbour the tide was far out, and gulls stepped delicately on the grey mud, their wings flashing as they rose, to settle again on a post or a grounded cobble. Across the other side of the harbour the oldest houses stood up in that bright air with the clearness and fineness of the shells. At the water’s edge Garton’s shipyard was sunk into its old decay after a flicker of life during the War. Danesacre people had put money into it then, to lose it. It was a vain enterprise. Life has gone too far past all such fine places, where men lived in what they made.

  As they climbed the steep street towards Peirson’s, Mrs Russell had to stand still to rest
. Her lips were blue. She could scarcely stand. Hervey looked at her in an agony of fear. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, except that my heart is getting old,’ her mother said.

  ‘Well, you should rest,’ Hervey said. She was almost angry with her mother for feeling worn.

  They went into Peirson’s shop, where Mrs Russell could rest. As they waited, a smile, pleased and expectant, softened her face. The man brought out bundle after bundle of sheets, spreading them out over the counter. She fingered one after another in dissatisfied silence. Her mouth worked, as it did when she was losing patience. She had so little patience with imperfection.

  ‘Are these the best you have?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘These are the best we stock,’ the man said. He looked at the sheets anxiously as if to incite them to do him credit.

  ‘But I used to buy very good linen here,’ Mrs Russell exclaimed. The corners of her mouth came down, and her eyes started at the offender. At these moments her voice was overbearing and sarcastic.

  ‘We should have no sale for anything better than these; it’s quite good linen,’ the assistant answered. His manner showed that he was afraid of her. Hervey was sorry for him.

  ‘We’d better leave it,’ she said in a low voice to her mother.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I must,’ Mrs Russell said. She relented her manner a little towards the assistant as she rose, but left him scared. Outside, she stood looking at the faded familiar houses, made unfamiliar by time, and time’s accomplice. ‘I never would have thought it,’ she cried. ‘Never.’ She gripped Hervey’s arm. ‘In those days,’ she said, ‘every captain’s wife knew a piece of good linen when she bought it.’

  ‘You can send to London for your linen,’ Hervey said.

  ‘Ay, and pay London prices,’ her mother retorted. She tossed her head. There was no one to recognise young Sylvia Hervey in the gesture. ‘Nay, I’ll make out with what I have. I daresay it will last my time.’

  2. A chipped saucer

  Hervey had no confidence in herself as a writer. She could not believe that money earned by writing novels was as safe as the money her grandmother Mary Hervey had made out of ships. The builders of good ships were, except in a Crisis, sure of their livelihood. Not so the writers of books. Between one novel and-the next you could lose your wit or your audience. It was a chancy life. It was unsound, the one quality in a man’s work or way of life Hervey Russell could not do with. A vagabond in spirit, she despised vagabonds.

  She had finished writing her third novel and had begun laboriously to type it from the nearly illegible manuscript. Her money was almost done and she was little comforted to think that she would receive a hundred pounds when she sent the MS to Charles Frome. What is a hundred pounds to a young woman with ambitions and a son?

  The more she typed the more cruelly certain she was that this novel would fail. There was not a tear in a dozen chapters. This was because her last novel had fountained tears. She was now so ashamed of it that she had thrown sand over all her emotions and written a book as dry as a desert.

  She sat typing eleven hours a day. Her back ached. When she stopped for the day her thoughts typed themselves in her head. On the eighth day, when she had done typing and correcting, she carried the script to the post. It was seven in the evening. There was a veil over the heavens, with the feeling of thunder coming from the land.

  She put Richard to bed, all the time thinking, I’ll have a good cup of tea. Penn said once that if she were dying and one said, Hervey, here is a good cup of tea for you, she would sit up and take it.

  She carried the cup into the garden. The veil was now lit over the sea by the downflowing sun. A strange heavy light lay over all, so that on a distant hill each tree and moving creature was as clear as a threat. It was now high tide and the estuary was full of water, but a breath had covered the surface of the water so that it reflected nothing, no bird shadow or cloud.

  So waiting, Hervey turned her saucer round in her hand and felt the chipped edge. At once, as if the chipped saucer and the fear were the same thing in her mind, she thought that Richard might be ill, and though it was absurd, since she had just seen him fall swiftly and softly asleep, she ran back into the house to look at him. He was asleep and well: all she had for her trouble was the moment of certainty that nothing so beautiful could escape.

  She sat down. He was ill, she thought, in this room, and I had a chipped saucer for his night-light. There was a tiny circle on the floor and another on the ceiling. It might be a room or a cave, and the darkness beyond it concealed either Danes or country lovers idling past, and always at one moment or the next, by this or that sudden stroke, death. (She looked at the window. It was open, and the first knocking had begun in the distance. The storm is at the other side of the moors, she thought. She bent her head to listen.) He had diphtheria lightly, she thought; but the anxiety she had felt was not light. It sprang from a deep source. A clap of thunder reminded her of the shells she had heard crashing into the town from the German ships. A sharper terror flowed in over the old and she thought, If there were another war I couldn’t save him. She felt a mad fear and anger. So must the woman in the cave, she thought, have felt, when, crawling back after the raid, she saw the smoke lipping the lintel and the blood the mess the thing done which cannot be undone, the end.

  Rousing herself from this nightmare she went downstairs. On the table was the letter from Evelyn. It had lain there three days, while she typed. She took it up. In this letter Evelyn offered her five pounds a week to work for her as secretary, but a secretary of a particular kind. She must come between Evelyn and the tiresomeness of her friends, write to one, find out books for another, meet and send away satisfied persons whom Evelyn could neither offend nor endure. So, wrote Evelyn, you will save my reputation and my health, and write better books yourself for knowing more of the world.

  She pulled a long face over the letter. This five pounds a week is too good to pass, she said to herself. But she distrusted Evelyn. And to have to do with many people exasperated her. They set her in a quiver. They pulled her mind to pieces with their monkey’s fingers and put her to the trouble of assembling it again. Yet despite this she knew that she would take Evelyn’s offer. She had not the hardihood to refuse. It gave her the margin of safety she needed for her son.

  He has outgrown Miss Holland, she thought: I shall find a better school for him near London. Her thoughts flew so far ahead of her that she saw a tall young student walking with books in his hand across some green quadrangle in Oxford. With such a forehead he will be a scientist or a statesman, she thought.

  The light had changed. Now from a clear sky the last rays of the sun blessed the earth. A multitude of clouds, coloured like tropical fishes, swam in the depths of the sky. The storm has passed over, Hervey thought.

  She went out and walked in the field by the estuary. I shall write a book every year and make money which I shall save for Richard. I shall have a fine house. But she detested houses, and the thought of owning one crushed her down with despair.

  It was for Richard that she would have one. Everything was for Richard. In her bitterness against her husband she would not deny him the right to share their house, but she would not welcome him. He is seeing Miss Hammond now, she ithought. Her hand flew to her breast, to the ache there. Every intimate memory she had of him was flavoured by the thought that he had once deceived her. She could not think near him without coming on this hidden bitterness. It poisoned their life. I shall never look at him again with pleasure, she thought. At once she was sorry for him—because he had ruined himself with her. Poor Penn, she said to herself. Whatever else had died in her, the familiar need to comfort and reassure him was still there.

  She had the honesty to say aloud; ‘You once hoped he Would leave you.’

  It is true that if you think with sufficient energy about an event it will at last happen, not (as you might suppose) because you have created it, but because it was
all the time in your nature. But the logic of the mind has one fatal flaw. It starts in a wish. And so the moment an imagined event emerges into the real world, time seizes on it and gives it a twist that deforms everything. A spring you had supposed dry overflows, the imagined ground gives way, and down you go. How could I have guessed that I should cry every night for a year? she said. Jealousy is a disease which we should catch as seldom as possible. It is probably incurable—but all the same one gets over it. What is important is to remember that no one is to be trusted. To trust yourself to a human being is only to ask to be betrayed. She lifted her head, smiling. Oh if only I can remember that, she said.

  She went in and went to bed, and slept, but dreamed of Philip. They were together in some place and she had to go away, to leave him there. She told him over and over that she would come back. She wanted to make him think that she was not leaving him. It’s only for a time, she repeated. She told him that she would rather live with him than with anyone, and he only smiled, kindly, with disbelief and love. She woke, and found that she had cried as she slept.

  3. Death is an incident in life

  In the morning an extraordinary thing happened, and for a few hours she believed that her life had changed.

  Her grandmother Mary Hervey wrote asking her to come, and to come at once, since she was old and there was not a great deal of time but there was only a little time. The letter had been sent on, her address found by Mrs Hervey’s lawyer. For a moment, as Hervey read it, she was the ashamed clumsy schoolgirl, begging Mary to take her into the firm. Whatever her mind could say to it, her body had not forgotten that frightful humiliation. She felt as though it had happened yesterday.