The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Too bad, a thousand pities … Not in her sense of course, ridiculous precious Georgie … Nobody’s fault but again too bad that she hadn’t had a child. Many a time he had envied Rickie those splendid children. One of them gone now missing presumed killed in North Africa in that botched counter-attack, that failure to relieve Tobruk. Blackest hour of the war. Fine boy. Devilish luck. With misery Jack recalled Rickie’s brief answer to his letter of condolence: Good of you to write. We can’t get much information, probably never shall now. He was seen to fall, shot through the head—whether killed outright or finished off later we don’t know—He was searched for later, but he wasn’t found. Thank your lucky stars you have no sons. No pathos, no attitude of pride or pity; not a word about the boy’s mother. Flogging himself stoically along a bit further to the lonely finish. Was it morbid to feel now that that was how it had been; and that Georgie in the course of her theoretic excavations had perhaps struck her spade on something solid, something that gave back a hard hollow ring? … Too late to mend, any of it. Georgie had written that she’d seen him for a brief evening in London. He had aged, lost weight, gone grey, a tired man obviously but otherwise seemed normal. He had shown her a cute picture of Clarissa and they had talked of old times and old friends and had a few jokes as well. She hadn’t tried to approach him and he had referred only indirectly to the tragedy by asking her to spare the time to go down and visit Madeleine in the country. He was too tied, he said, to be able to be much good to her.

  So, on a subsequent short leave from her Ministry, Georgie had gone down to their cottage in the country and spent a day and a night; found Madeleine friendly, calm but haggard, rushing from vegetable garden to hens to cooking stove; drugging herself with a housewife’s physical tasks. ‘But after all,’ Georgie had written to him, ‘they’re real in their way, they do make ground under your feet, you’ve got to go on doing them. She doesn’t talk about gardening in a green-fingered way, but practical, tough, like a labourer almost. The same if you watch her prepare a meal: there’s a kind of coarseness comes out in her that’s encouraging. She’s bent, I think, on growing a different kind of sensory equipment. Maybe she will, and it will save her. I see that if you can’t break down into humanity (she’s far from that) the next best thing would be to break down into a piece of country and primitive forms of contact like fetching the milk and planting lettuces and rearing pullets: better for convalescence than taking to gin or parties or lovers. That really might end in atrophy, but this, what she’s doing, seems more like a sort of earthing up. It needs courage and she’s got it. She treated me like a body to be fed, aired (a five-mile tramp) and bedded; it was refreshing, I’m pretty tired and over-conscious. I could tell you more about her if I’d seen her with the children, but Colin is at Sandhurst and Clarissa visiting a grandparent. She talked about Anthony’s death quite unemotionally, asked me if I had any kind of religion, she had none; said she supposed that was a pity, but since the worst thing that could happen had happened and God still seemed irrelevant she must be a case of complete tone-deafness to God. The one personal thing she said was rude, and that also was rather encouraging: “I always thought you were the sort who pulled fast ones on other women. You reminded me of someone I once knew who did.” (Query her sister?) “But I think now I was wrong. Perhaps I was wrong about the other one too. I’ve got a jealous nature.” She said she wasn’t lonely, the only trouble sleeping rather badly and worrying about Rickie. She felt she ought to go to London and look after him. “But he doesn’t want me to. I agree with him my job is to keep a country base going for the children; still I wish—I wish there was someone some good to him.”’ And Georgie had concluded: ‘She kissed me when I left, said she was glad I’d come, said: “Do see Rickie when you can.” Oh, Jack! All they can give each other is remorseful pity—gift of the one sad friend. Such cold comfort.’

  At the time he had thought her language fanciful. But a knock like this, your best friend’s death, gave a jar to your routine outlook: all kinds of buried relics, making up a now futile but essential sum, pushed up and showed their faces, insisting now that it was too late on being looked at and preserved; on being dedicated without fear or favour to Rickie’s memory. So now in Libya he admitted at last the qualm that had crossed him—just come and gone—that jolly evening. He heard the tone of voice in which Madeleine, laughing with the rest of them at Rickie’s broadsides, had suddenly inserted a sharp comment … his ‘new transatlantic technique’ or words to that effect, which Rickie picked up with a pounce, rapping out with an odd look and smile, What, darling, precisely did she mean? And she: ‘Well … Groucho Marx. With a touch of Peter Arno?’—and laughed again, a loud laugh cut off, nervous. Yes, a qualm had crossed him; for a moment he had felt a chill, a claw; had envisaged—why?—the possibility of wandering lost again in the deserts of disunion.

  Then Georgie had looked at him, smiling their secret, across the dinner table.

  ‘You get the idea,’ remarked Rickie to his neighbour in a rapid undertone. ‘Bringing the sex war out into the open.’

  ‘Sure. Much healthier.’

  ‘Does it make you feel at home?’

  ‘Was that your intention?’

  ‘That was my intention.’

  ‘You are so courteous and considerate. But I guess you shouldn’t put out such an effort. I am at home. Wherever Jack is I feel fine.’

  ‘Ah!’ cried Rickie. ‘Aha! Is that so?’

  ‘It is so. Thanks all the same.’

  ‘Well, there’s no place like home. These great social reformers your country produces—they all stress that, I take it?’

  ‘Well … For instance?’

  ‘Well, my wife’s mentioned one or two. But she’s wrong about me. I’m not a Marx boy or an Arno-ite—I haven’t the necessary impetuosity. I’m on the parlour mantelpiece with Thurber’s undislodgeables. All good lads and true.’

  Madeleine caught the word mantelpiece, which puzzled her; saw Rickie brusquely turn away again, draining his glass; a moment later found herself being steadily scrutinized by Mrs Enthoven. Staring at one another, they broke into faint smiles. Then the eyes and smile opposite her passed on, came to rest on Jack, calmly expanded.

  Later in the evening, they went on to a night club, arriving in time for the midnight cabaret. A troupe of young ladies danced a can-can with good humour and a touch of condescension; a red-haired English woman did some clever imitations of theatrical celebrities. There was also a quite brilliant Hungarian conjurer with a new line in patter. Then a foreign woman with a guitar came trailing among the tables. Ravaged, her huge eyes burning out of a thick surround of mascara and cobalt eye shadow, she stopped in front of Rickie and sang straight at him out of the depths of the man-eating cavern of her mouth:

  La belle si tu voulais

  Nous dormirions ensemble

  Dans un grand lit carré

  Orné de taille blanche …

  Regrettable. It was one of Dinah’s songs, in the days when she sang to a guitar in a tiny pure and plaintive soprano, sitting intent and abstracted on the hearth rug before the drawing-room fire, singing to entertain Anthony; this, and Frankie and Johnnie and a song about a bull frog she had sung over and over again for Anthony tranced on Rickie’s knee, his face flushed, blank with total receptivity, at rest on Rickie’s shoulder.

  Dans le miton du lit

  La riviere est profonde …

  Rickie had been listening with an inexpressive face, his head bent down, but now, just as she was about to move on, he looked up at her and began half to sing half to speak the words with her, a murmuring bass accompaniment to the rocking, rocking harmony.

  As if in urgent taut mutually acknowledged communion, he with his perfectly expressionless face lifted to her, she with a semblance of deferring to him then picking up words, tune, beat, and leading him, her eyes observant on him but unprovocative, as if intent on compelling him to
acquit himself well in the duet, they sang to the last stanza’s dying close.

  Et là nous dormirions

  Jusqu’à la fin du monde.

  He got up and made her a bow, stiff yet unselfconscious, while amid clapping and laughter she dipped down before him in a deep curtsey, pulled a red rose from the bosom of her low-cut black bodice, offered it to him with formal grace, and on six-inch heels went swimming away.

  That was that. The lights went up again, the band burst out. The party complimented Rickie rather loudly, stressing amused surprise, concealing faint but definite embarrassment.

  ‘Congratulations, Rickie. Bravo!’

  ‘Almost in tune too.’ Madeleine felt her smile like a grimace.

  ‘You clicked that time, old boy, with a vengeance.’

  ‘Predatory type, what? Not quite my cup of tea. My word she knows her stuff though. That last thing fairly hits you in the midriff. What is it, Rickie?’

  ‘How come you know it, Rickie? What a sly brute you are—hiding your light under a bushel all these years.’

  ‘It’s an old French song. I learnt it in my cradle,’ said Rickie calmly. ‘I had a French nurse.’ He stuck the rose in his buttonhole.

  ‘Honestly, did you?’ cried Clara. ‘I think it’s divine.’

  ‘Very haunting,’ agreed Rickie.

  ‘What are the words? Can you say them? Could you write them down for me?’

  ‘It’s the most Freudian song in the world,’ said Madeleine. ‘I can’t think what the psycho-analysts would say to it. They’d burst.’

  ‘Freudian? How do you mean? I thought it was an old French folk song.’

  ‘It is,’ said Rickie. ‘All about being born and dying, so my nurse told me. All about sleeping in a deep, deep river, Clara, and floating in a deep, deep bed and being drowned till the end of the world. That’s the idea.’

  ‘Oh … How extraordinary.’

  ‘Isn’t it? And all the King’s horses—they mustn’t be forgotten.’

  ‘Oh … What did they do?’

  ‘Nothing. They couldn’t. Surely you know about them? In point of fact, this song says they could have. But they didn’t.’

  ‘Well, it sounds to me quite mad.’

  At this moment, to his extreme horror, something happened to him—a kind of snap or twang, like a snapped harp string, deep inside his skull. His head was invaded by a clangour, then by a noise like the soft anaesthetizing roar of a distant fall of water. Dinah’s face appeared, afloat on rushing darkness, bloodless, whirling away drowned, mouth open wide in the rigor of dumb anguish, like the mouth on a mask: the silent square-lipped howl on the mask of classic tragedy.

  What next! … This is It, watch out, beat it off, in a moment I’ll be mad! I’m going mad.

  He sprang up, throttled, and making a blind grab at what lay closest to his hand, caught Mary Wainwright by the elbow and pulled her to her feet, saying with a grin: ‘Let’s dance.’ He had ignored her most of the evening and in consequence she felt a twinge of gratified surprise. Romantically devoted to his image this many a year, she had disciplined herself never to hope to fascinate him. Sympathy was her strong suit; she felt, as she had felt in other cases while watching the tide of passion flow past and away from her towards this or that sister, cousin, bosom friend, that she understood the needs of his nature and could, would be if only called upon, his faithful confidante. She was always to remember dancing with him that night. They danced and danced, in silence, and she felt in his hand against her back, in the hand that held hers, a continuously vibrating tremor, and in sacrificial ecstasy received its indecipherable message, knowing it not for her. Close in his arms she observed beneath lowered lids the other couples of the party: Jack dancing happily with his bride-to-be, her husband volubly with Clara, Tim and Madeleine wearing the look of contented boredom suitable to old friends. Where then, what then …? Tim jostled them on a corner of the crowded dance floor, and Madeleine threw them a word in jest, making, thought Mary, an attempt—unsuccessful—to catch Rickie’s eye. Then as Tim guided her on and away, her glance slid to Mary, they exchanged smiles. Sly, dreamy, Mary’s sweet smile broadened upon her old friend Madeleine, hushing the tacit query, blunting the quest’s sharp nose—hers, Madeleine’s, everybody’s … Trusting her, as indeed he could and knew it, Rickie had picked her out to share his unknown secret. There, there, Rickie, no need for words … Any other woman—certainly that American woman—would have imagined that he was in the grip of well-nigh uncontrollable sexual excitement, and made officious movements of response or of withdrawal.

  When the band stopped playing, he waited with her on the floor, then when it started again put out an arm as if mechanically, encircled her and set himself once more in motion. He stopped trembling; but presently he seemed both to wake from a trance and to collapse. It was disappointing. His feet dragged, missing the beat, and suddenly he came to a standstill. With a sense, not unfamiliar, of bracing up for readjustment, she looked up at him and saw that he was yawning.

  ‘Sorry, Mary.’ He put a hand over his mouth in an exaggerated gesture of mock etiquette. ‘It’s this atmosphere. Miasmic, isn’t it? I must be getting old. I can’t stand asphyxiation the way I used to as a stripling.’ His voice was as flat as a voice on the edge of sleep, and his eyes looked extinct.

  ‘You’re tired, aren’t you? Poor Rickie,’ she said, brightly, feeling in her chest the sag of rejected self-abnegation.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Do you think that’s it? One can’t be tired at a party, can one? It’s so anti-social.’

  ‘Silly billy. It’s getting late. I expect it’s time we all went home.’ She simulated a yawn to outmatch his.

  ‘Oh, no. Surely not,’ he said vaguely, following her back to their table. ‘Surely, surely not. Thank you, my dear Mary. That was very pleasant.’

  ‘Sandy gets done in too at the end of the week,’ she said, all gentle pity for men. ‘He misses the exercise. I do think office life is bad for you all.’

  Jack and Mrs Enthoven were still dancing. Tim had just taken the floor with Clara, only Madeleine and Sandy were sitting at the table, chatting with an earnest air. Once more the two women exchanged smiles, to seal the handing-over—no harm done or dreamed of—of each husband to his lawful mate.

  ‘Well, well, well, Mrs W.!’ roared Sandy. ‘What about giving your old man a turn?’

  Facetious only with his wife, and that only in company, because she caused him to fear that he was not amusing, Sandy was a sterling fellow, entirely innocent of the aggressiveness which his bristling moustache and crest of ginger hair, his bawling voice appeared to indicate.

  Dismissing them with effusive nods, Madeleine and Rickie remained sitting side by side.

  ‘Light,’ said Madeleine after a long silence.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Could I trouble you for a light, please?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He whipped out the matches and lit her cigarette with care, his hand, he noticed, steady. They smoked, staring at the dancing couples, at the band, the waiters, at everything moving smooth and meaningless, two-dimensional like figures on a film screen, on the other side of the glass prison in which they sat together.

  ‘Fancy choosing nut-brown lace!’ said Madeleine loudly.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Mary. Brown lace, of all things, for a dance frock.’

  ‘Oh …’ He studied Mary for a moment as she passed. ‘It isn’t the height of glamour, I suppose. Still it suits her all right—it’s rather neat. She’s not a showy dresser, ever.’

  ‘Showy? … I wasn’t objecting on that score … However, I suppose she thinks she looks like a little brown bird—a dear little Jenny Wren. Have I ever had a penchant for showy clothes?’

  ‘Have you? I do hope not.’

  ‘You know I haven’t. Quite the reverse.’

  ‘Then we are a
t one.’ He looked stonily ahead of him.

  After another long silence, Madeleine said:

  ‘It might look better if we danced together once.’

  ‘Oh, would you like to? Right. Let’s dance.’

  To the strains of a curdling Blues they took the floor.

  ‘What do you make of her?’ asked Madeleine, more pleasantly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jack’s woman.’

  ‘Ah!’ He looked across the floor to where the bridal pair were dancing cheek to cheek. ‘Rather nice, I think, don’t you? Agreeable woman.’

  ‘Is she? I wouldn’t know. We’ve hardly exchanged a word. I don’t think she finds women as interesting as men.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Something about her … I think she’ll lead old Jack a dance.’