The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  She saw Clarissa in the attic, a big fair-skinned Nordic type of a girl, brushing out a mane of hair with vigorous perfunctory strokes, looking not into the mirror but out of the window while she shook it back. The time is coming, she thought, when we shall meet. I can advise—no, make only the most cautious suggestions, to help her keep her relics and discard them. She might give me devotion—I the black sheep, unmentioned member of the family, natural object of romantic interest to the young. Presumably she knows of my existence. What can she have been told?—or what conjecture? … The situation is tricky, almost anything I say might cause her to admire me more than would be acceptable to Madeleine. The young take sides, she’d take mine, it couldn’t be prevented … In no time, we should be conspirators. Feeling her heart begin to thump, she lit a cigarette and lay back, drawing deep breaths, seeing again that photograph staring at her from Clarissa’s table: the face of a tired man, good-looking, his hair a little thin, grey round the temples; Clarissa’s father, sacred relic not to be breathed upon. It was only in corrupt literary fantasies, in the world of steel-true waifs and blade-straight wantons that daughters made pacts in their wise grave childish way with the Woman in Daddy’s Life.

  Let it alone, it’s dead and everybody’s dead except Madeleine and myself. It’s a patch of scorched earth, black, scattered with incinerated bones. Whatever she’s digging for will not turn up: there’s nothing buried alive. What does she fear? … He fathered her breathing children in lawful wedlock; and in the lawless dark another: mine; spilt seed, self-disinherited prodigal; non-proven proof, stopped breath, rejecting our and the whole world’s complicity. What of it now?

  ‘Oh! … It’s not breathing.’ Puzzled, matter-of-fact. Not a tactful thing to remark in that tone of voice to a woman just through labour. Before that, with my eyes fast shut, I’d seen her, Corrigan, pick it up out of the tumbled bed. ‘It’s a boy.’ Just what I’d expected to have: three normal words. I felt my huge smile flood through me, burst out of my spent body like the huge irradiated backwash of the final wave of birth. A boy. Under my shut eyes I listened, peacefully waiting for what was only to be expected—the sound of newborn crying. I wasn’t worried by the silence: in all those hours I hadn’t had a moment’s fear; and, bound to me in our unreality, nor had she. I was travelling first class and taking her along for the privileged hell of it: wild country but de luxe conditions. Poor old Corrigan, she’d never done anything in style, she thought we were initiating her. We bamboozled her. She was an old clown doing her damnedest, born to the game, condemned to it, assiduously tumbling in the ring; we were the glamorous artistes doing the new sensational trapeze act high up among the lights with a roll of drums. Breath-taking acts, drama and suspense. Danger? Not for such star performers.

  Her movements creaked, breathed round me while a timeless age went by. ‘It’s dead I think.’ Flat statement. My lids lifted, she was holding him up, I saw his blood-stained human head. She’d cut the cord and tied it; she was clever with her hands. One couldn’t say she’d lost her head … It was just bad luck. Or it had gone on too long, we’d thrown our hands in without telling one another we knew the game was up. Thinking back afterwards, I realized there was a moment about half-way through when the intimation reached me that … something biding its time from the beginning had stepped from ambush and taken charge. The enterprise was moving to its predestined outcome. But one is never prepared for what one has prepared to bring about. Her bulky figure blocked the low-ceilinged room, solid between lamplight dying on the table and pewter snowlight through the pane. Dawn. Some time in the small hours the blizzard had drawn ahead of me and emptied itself out. There was a cry then, animal, and it was mine. It trailed its length out of the window and died in the nine-days-hanging shroud of the dead world.

  Presently, as the morning whitened, the men from the farm began to clear the lane, digging us out for the third time in ten days, hailing our dumb door as they dug towards it. They were full of rum and very jolly. She ran down and called to them, I was beginning to die by then. Distinctly I heard her say: ‘I think she’s dying.’ That was the last thing I heard for a long time … All the wires were down, the milk van crawled five miles on chains to the doctor. What a freak of climate in Cornwall at the end of February: only once before in living memory, fifty-eight years ago. What a grotesque disaster, all of a piece with the rest. All of a piece to stay in an isolated cottage at the bottom of a Cornish lane in winter when you’re eight months pregnant. They told me later at the hospital that it was just one of those things, unaccountable, the heart fails suddenly in transit, nobody could have saved him; but I never have believed it. If I hadn’t fatuously lain there thinking myself triumphant and past effort, if I’d sat up and given her some simple sensible instructions …

  No …

  Next thing, I was being lifted into the ambulance. Seeing her face mottled, in pieces, I said aloud: ‘Your face is a smashed plate.’ I saw her hand a sort of parcel wrapped in white towelling to a public Statue of Justice in a dark blue veil who placed it somewhere, with tact, out of my sight. I said: ‘What a balls-up,’ but nobody answered, so I thought they were shocked at my language, I’d better keep quiet. I felt hot-water bottles being pushed in all round me, her icy fingers on my pulse as we set off. I thought I’d try a medical approach and said, with calm: ‘How can this haemorrhaging be dealt with?’—but there was still no answer, so perhaps I only thought I said it. Then I went on dying until I began to live again in a different place in the middle of the next night. ‘Your husband has come, dear …’ Kind voice, later less kind, suspicious. I opened my eyes and there was Rickie, who had driven for fifteen hours through thaw and snow to reach me when he got her telegram. What a blue blaze of love and grief his eyes poured over me to draw me back. What tenderness, what self-reproach and consolation … Which suffered most then, of the three of us? Not I, perhaps … I played the lead, and it was big stuff; supporting rôles are less rewarding. I was prostrate, absolved, pure tragic principle in the cathartic state. What they got stuck with was the guilt and conflict, clogging their vitals, not to be expelled. That’s what in other words she told me later; but again I was unprepared … While she raved and wrung her hands, while she accused and cursed me, I began to dream of shaking it all off, the love and the hate, the treachery and the fidelity, the humiliation and the reconciliation, the fear, the reassurance … the whole claustrophobic world of the emotions where truth and falsehood exchange their masks for ever and for ever. I began to conceive of loss as liberation. But only as a moment’s wild surmise, or a sudden failure of instinct in the chase. Meanwhile I heard her say she could find it in her to be sorry for Rickie, under my influence he had lost all sense of right or wrong; and sorry, damned sorry for Madeleine and she had to say so; far be it from her to judge or be censorious, but she simply had to. And revolted as I was by her dishonesty, I felt compunction; she’d gone the whole way to find that the taste of me was ashes. I’d fed her raffish power addiction, her snobbery, her temperament of a good sort cum procureuse. The responsibility was mine. I wasn’t in the category she’d so far catered for, poor devil: I hadn’t borrowed her money and drunk her gin and come to her for the abortionist’s address and relied on her to see me through the botched dark deed. I was bound for a private room in the District Hospital: when my time came I’d be safe there with my layette and wedding ring. It was just bad luck that my time was premature; he had less chance by far than the snowborn lambs all gathered in and tended. He was to have saved her: a cottage in the country, a love-child, not her own, to dedicate her life to. The best of her was her nurse-mother instinct, and she’d always wanted to adopt a child. We were to have committed ourselves, somehow, to the future—constructively, religiously you might say. No more anarchy and squalor.

  And then we foundered—on elementary facts. For her it was the crack-up. Poor wretched old Corrigan who from the highest motives blew the gaff on the delinquents … What of it now? I
never saw her again, I heard of her death by chance. Some pair of queens or other took her to Mexico and she died there, years ago.

  It was a time that couldn’t be sustained. Time of enormities. Madeleine’s still got it under her skin. She’s partly stuck in it still, and thinks I am, or should be: Why, says her bright stare, should she—not I—feel guilt for crimes not hers but mine?

  All of a piece without,

  Thy chase had a beast in view,

  Thy wars brought nothing about,

  Thy lovers were all untrue …

  A long time ago now that burden had faded out of earshot. Once my head was a gong, beaten on day and night: all of a piece thy chase, all of a piece thy wars, thy lovers untrue, in view, untrue, gone away, gone away … Day in day out the stamping bold refrain; then intermittent, bursting out and fading; bad days, the beast at bay; bad nights, beast running in the jungle; then slowly, by dint of unremitting labour, with sweat, blood, tears—months, years of them?—I passed out of this circle; I gave birth to myself and entered into life. My head was purged, my hearing was absolved; my eyesight … If I looked backwards, I saw only one of those old dim scenic paintings, featuring histrionic crag and precipice, leopard-concealing forest, storm clouds, zigzag lightning, distant prospect of lit water; and in the foreground a few figures, important in relation to the whole conception yet unemergent, kept in their proper place; dark, or transparent almost; standing or sitting for ever in repose.

  But before I was made free of such a landscape, before I could arrest the flux, compose it, I had had, of course, to die. Not one coup de grâce, but three; and all in the same day: remarkable. One: Rickie; two, Rob; three, the third one, the last, the finisher … But that enormity was still unperpetrated the last time I saw Rickie.

  That time when I summoned him, the very last time, I still had it in my mind to … What did I have in mind? … to place myself under his protection. My brother-in-law: what more suitable? If when I telephoned he refused to see me, I told myself I intended to go straight to my sister Madeleine: an unequivocal appeal this time. ‘Look, for God’s sake,’ I would have said, ‘surely you know I’m honest? Surely my having kept my distance, silence, all these months—when after all one could say I had rights, seeing that Rickie had chosen to leave you and come to me, seeing that I did, so to speak, deliberately relinquish him and hand him back—surely that earns me the benefit of the doubt? Listen,’ I would have said, ‘I’m in trouble, I’m not up to anything; I’m frightened. I’m in the hands of crooks, thieves, perverts, murderers. I’ve been living in dreadful lodgings,’ I’d have said, ‘in Stepney. A working-class boy that I befriended—he spun me a hard-luck story … He’s taken all my money, and my valuable cigarette case (yes, Rickie’s present, but so long ago, it’s of no consequence)—and vanished. Question is, what am I to do? I can’t inform my landlord because he’s a German Jewish refugee … because he thinks better of me than to think I’d mind … because he’s not my landlord but Nemesis overtaking me … because he said all along that Rob was a stillborn soul and must be left in peace, not tampered with; and I did tamper, break in on what had to be everlasting twilight … because in the crackpot Scheme of Things he is constructing, in which each individual soul is a world or an atom to be split—thereby releasing limitless potentialities of spiritual energy, thereby progressively creating God or the Myth or the spiritual universe—factors of moral and material order such as H.M. Police Force are false, unreal … I’m telling you these facts,’ I’d have said, ‘because they’ll help you to realize what I’m up against; how badly I need authoritative protection. Some male person of importance, such as Rickie, must return with me to Stepney, stand guard while I collect my property—what’s left of it, repel intruders with the threat of Law, pay from his well-stuffed wallet what is owing, drive me away in his expensive car.’

  This speech was not made. I betrayed no one. I got Rickie at the office, curtly made my request. Shocked pause; appointment curtly granted. I had five shillings left, I went to the Grand Central Hotel, St Paneras, and had a bath; with my last shilling saw a News Reel, watching the programme round and round; at five went along to the flat, let myself in with the keys, hoping but failing to pass unnoticed by Mrs Lilley in the basement. She nosed me out, she came up carrying her mongrel bitch in her arms to give it a bit of a change. We discussed its heart attacks. I made loud bright chat with many a Cockney quip and crack thrown in. I’d been abroad, I said; was off to the country now for an indefinite stay. Come to clear up, clear out, the lease being up. Mr Masters (yes thank you quite himself again) would be along later to settle any bill outstanding and make arrangements for the furniture. When the van came would she be a duck and keep an eye on the stuff that was going into store? To keep her sweet I made her a present of my crocks and saucepans, which with marked nonchalance she accepted—thinking me barmy or else there would turn out to be a catch in it. She was sorry to see me go: she’d miss me, so would Spot: I was quite a favourite with Spot—eh, Spotty, love? Her eyes, with snakes’ tongues darting out of them, appraised me. Well she knew that my status had declined; that I was no longer wealthy gentleman-friend’s young lady-friend, walking illicitly, securely, demurely, on the sunny side of the street. A thrill for her; but all the same …

  She hung about, seeming to feel uncertain; presently remarked she must be popping down, her old man would start creating. In one of his wicked old moods he was, the sinner. What with the grumbling all day and the lifting all night, she sometimes felt she’d as lief be in her grave. Still he was grateful in his way. ‘You pore old cow,’ he’d come out with only yesterday. Ah well, one blessing, not having the use of his legs he’d never play her no more tricks: she’d got him now, where she could lay her hand on him and serve him right. He’d been a devil in his day. But there, it was a woman’s lot: give ’em the best years of our lives, the more fools us. What good, she said finally, did fretting ever do? Any girl that got herself deceived should ought to say good riddance. Plenty more fish where that one got hisself hooked, the joker … Ah well, she wished me luck. She lifted Spot, held Spot stomach upwards, manipulating one nerveless paw in my direction. ‘Bye bye Auntie, all the best,’ squawked a ventriloquist’s dummy’s voice.

  I went on packing, turning out, filling the waste-paper baskets. Punctually at 6.15 Rickie arrived. I said hullo and got straight down to business. He was co-operative. Telephone? Gas? Electricity?—all paid up. Just one account from the wine merchant. ‘Give it to me,’ he commanded, stretching out his hand, pocketing it without a glance.

  Last the keys. ‘Ah yes.’ He would look in tomorrow at the estate agent’s, give formal notice, hand them in. Nothing simpler. ‘Anything more?’ … I didn’t, I said, want any of the furniture, only my own pictures, and a few French pottery jugs and plates I’d bought myself. ‘Just as you please, of course. It’s yours to keep or dispose of.’ ‘I don’t want to sell it, simply be rid of it.’ In that case he would, of course, arrange to have it removed and stored; or put in a sale. ‘It isn’t much anyway.’ ‘No, not much.’ He glanced round at it. He had a patient expression; business adviser at the end of a tiring day, prepared to listen and advise but wishing to be gone. ‘Oh, and your links,’ I said. ‘I found them in that drawer when I was turning out.’ He took them from me, jingled them in his palm, closed his hand on them; then slowly his hand fell open. When presently he moved it to smooth, in an automatic way, his hair, I saw the cuff-links lying on the arm of our big chair. I watched all this; I saw when he shut his eyes. Had seen him do this a dozen, dozen times by the family hearth—never before with me. Had decided to my own satisfaction what it meant, in psychological terms; not tension, not active boredom—simply negativity. I’d often wondered how it struck her, if at all.

  ‘Tired?’ I said at last. He opened his eyes and sent a rapid blinking smile in my direction, a sort of grimace, apologetic, and said yes, no not really, he’d had rather a long day of it and
then this damned pain, indigestion or whatever, had started up again. Since my telephone call, I thought, perhaps. He ought, he said, to be getting along now, he was preposterously late already: one of his words, preposterous. I noticed he was a bad colour, and drawn round the mouth. I saw how he might look in middle age. Heaving himself out of his chair, he walked to the window, stood there looking down into the street. How heavy his broad shoulders … I sat on, and, from where he’d let them fall, the links stared glazed, thick, like eyes dropped out from broken dolls’ heads. Already they looked incriminating—clues dropped, forgotten, in the room that saw the murder, objects the sleuth picks up, examines, pondering in his hand their weight of evidence. On an impulse I leaned forward, snatched them up, stuffed them in my pocket. He turned slowly from the window and looked round the room, laying a look of lead on every object. I knew that look—it meant he had resigned. It was a look I’d seen very recently on another man’s face, in another room. The only difference was that Rob had laid it on me—marking me UNTOUCHABLE; Rickie laid it on every cherished property of the small space we had enclosed for our domestic love. Home no more home to me … But he, of course, he was not homeless; he was expected back. I wasn’t. Not anywhere. Whichever way I turned, my possessions were a few fag ends of human occupation: one or two suitcases, some hairpins in a drawer, a pound of tea, an empty milk bottle. Such things can spell despair, deadliest of the seven deadly sins. I kept telling myself this was after all what I had come for, after all: the final pay-off, the practical one that always has to be gone through when there has been a death. That’s how I’d put it to him on the telephone, to persuade him after all these months of silence it was safe to meet me. But I knew I’d doubled back in panic terror to pick up, if I could, an old familiar trail. And didn’t he know it too? I did not find out.