The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

‘I don’t suppose one would be likely to thank—one’s ex-lover—for being so magnanimous,’ she said after a silence.

  ‘I’m not magnanimous. It’s easy putting on a magnanimous act if you’re indifferent. But in fact,’ he said, curt, ‘I’m not.’

  She bit on this in silence, in almost physical pain.

  ‘No,’ he went on, ‘it’s my streak of realism. It generally operates too late. And neither of you ever appreciated it.’ He lightly pressed her hand again. ‘Not that I expect thanks—from either of you.’ His nostrils stretched, in self-contemptuous amusement.

  ‘I cannot bear it,’ she cried, ‘that you feel responsible for her. I cannot bear it.’ He was silent and, struggling for composure, she went on: ‘I know her better than you do. Twenty-eight years I’ve known her. She’s well able to take care of herself.’

  ‘I wish I could believe you,’ he said soberly.

  ‘She’s quite unscrupulous. She only cares about what she wants.’

  ‘What does she want?’

  ‘You, I suppose. Me out of the way—destroyed—and you at her disposal. Utterly … Don’t you see this is just another move in the same old game? She wanted to find out if you’d still come when she whistled. And you did. Oh, round you trotted. And now you’re on a string again. And off she goes, mysteriously, knowing you won’t rest now till you’ve found her. Which is exactly what she wanted.’

  He bent his head and meditated, as if debating the strength of this case against Dinah.

  ‘She didn’t behave as if’—he stopped—‘as if that was exactly what she wanted.’

  ‘How did she behave?’

  ‘As if she was’—he stopped again—‘in a bad way.’

  ‘I thought you said it was all very formal.’

  ‘Yes. She’s not usually formal. Why should she be like that? She’s so direct as a rule: not exactly informal, ever, but absolutely direct.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ she replied, with subdued but passionate sarcasm. ‘If that’s your considered judgement you amaze me. I think one of us must be confusing terms. To me, direct means honest, it doesn’t mean self-assured. I grant you she’s that. However …’

  ‘Mm. Yes. Honest,’ he repeated in a tone of preoccupied corroboration. ‘That’s what I do mean. That’s how I think of her.’ A spasm of distress crossed his face; as if what had passed between him and Dinah was at last beginning to take form, substance, colour, at last becoming evidence he recognized. He added: ‘She wasn’t self-assured. Quite the opposite.’

  ‘Feeling her way perhaps. A bit embarrassed. I can’t remember ever seeing her embarrassed but she may be capable of it.’ He looked at her with vague inquiry. ‘I mean, she was telling you, wasn’t she, she’d already—found someone else …’

  ‘Oh, that wouldn’t embarrass her,’ he said decisively. A look sardonic, indulgent, appeared on his lips: distasteful to observe, seeming to uncover secret vistas of experience sexually shared, imparted without guilt. ‘She never made any bones about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I suppose she played you up with—descriptions. I believe some women do.’

  The look altered sharply to a wary reticence, and then to blankness. ‘Oddly enough,’ he said with detachment, ‘I never minded what she might be up to. Yet I’m as jealous as the next man. Horribly jealous, in fact.’ He frowned in a surprised way. ‘I suppose she gave me confidence … It didn’t matter … I knew, or rather …’ He checked himself, then concluded: ‘Oh no, she’s freer than some in her—private life, but she’s not a bitch. She’d never get me round to cock a snook at me.’

  The tide was beginning to crawl in again: unpredictable tide that rose now and then from somewhere beyond the farthest point of ebb and swung them off the treacherous flats they stood on. She felt it start to lift her, stinging and cleansing the raw abscess in her breast. Hold on, she told herself, soon we shall be afloat, we shall have drawn one another in.

  ‘I have seen her unsure of herself,’ she presently allowed. ‘It’s when somebody whose opinion she values gives her a—real telling off. You didn’t, I suppose?’

  ‘Tell her off? Not in the least.’ He smiled a wintry smile. ‘No, the boot’s always been on the other foot. I’ve never been in much of a position to criticize.’

  ‘Nor has she, my God!’ she said indignantly, but without venom. ‘But I suppose that hasn’t prevented her. I suppose she’s been highly critical of you—and even more of me.’

  ‘No,’ he said after consideration. ‘She’s not a very critical person. At least, not censorious.’

  Admitting to herself, for what it was worth, the truth of this, she said: ‘You never criticize either. Sometimes I wish you did.’

  He threw his head back suddenly, and a sound that was laughter as dry and hard as sobbing came out of his throat.

  ‘Oh, I shall start now! I’m a reformed rake, you know. There’s nothing more censorious.’

  ‘Hush, Rickie, stop!’

  She sat up in bed, speaking low and keeping his hand in hers; but he jerked it away and flung up both arms, a gesture so uncharacteristic in its dramatic last-ditch surrender that she was shocked.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m nothing. That’s what’s happened. There’s nothing; do you hear? I can’t feel a thing. I’m done for. That’s how it all ends—loving—and the rest of it.’

  ‘It will come back,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody can stop feeling. Not for long.’

  ‘Can’t they? Can’t they? I seem to see them all round me, wherever I go, wherever I dare look. Dead people. Dead pans. Petrified.’

  She came to sit curled against his side and put her arms round him. He felt cold, cold.

  ‘Darling, I love you,’ she said. ‘I do love you.’

  Her cheek against his, her side pressing his, she listened with her whole body; but nothing stirred in him. She said:

  ‘You still love her?’

  He gave a sort of shudder, impossible to interpret.

  ‘You want to go to her?’

  ‘I told you. It’s finished. She’s gone.’

  ‘We can find her.’ She clasped him closer. ‘I’ll find her. She can’t have simply vanished into limbo.’

  ‘Oh, but she has.’ He sighed wearily. ‘I know now what hell is like. Not burning and howling. It’s seeing people you’ve cared about, hearing them ask for help, and not being able to give that …’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Not even giving a refusal. Just a mechanical needle scratching a graph. Record of human agony. It shoots up and down. You separate yourself from it and examine it. But it remains a black jagged crazy line on a chart. No meaning attached.’

  ‘Then she did ask for help …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said like lead. ‘I’m sure she did. Not in so many words. She was too far gone. And I was simply observing her—so she didn’t get a crumb of a chance. In the end we were both observing the needles scratching—each other’s—our own—I don’t know which …’

  They were both silent, breathing against one another, no more. Presently a light early morning commotion arose from above, the nursery quarters: voices, the sound of a curtain drawn back. They heard a thump, then one of the children ran rapidly across the floor. Day had begun.

  Rickie said in a slow matter-of-fact voice:

  ‘Somebody has given her a bad knock.’

  ‘Oh no, Rickie! … Are you sure?’

  ‘Certain. Looking back on it. Well, I knew it at the time, and that’s what stopped me ticking. It was written all over her.’ In the same level voice he added: ‘I know her.’

  ‘What can we do?’ Her clasp tightened round him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He fell against her, she drew him down on the pillows, and soon they lay with their arms round one another, cold and still. Almost at once he fell fast asleep; his heavy respiration fanned her shoulder in
regular beats. Lost-won, lost-won said his breath in her ear. Won. Won. Alas …The purest triumph, pain, loss of her life. Gone—where?—gone …

  She began to relax; a current of animal warmth started at last to flow between her drowsy and his unconscious body. Suddenly he roused up and without a word or a sign or a caress took her into an embrace, brief, violent, anonymous; then fell over on his side away from her and plunged into a yet deeper, more solitary annihilation.

  That morning Clarissa was conceived, and might, they were both separately inclined to fear during the months of pregnancy, have turned out any incalculable kind of a failed fruit—little mad thing, gross misconception, star-crossed waif, accusing ghost; but instead was born without a hitch, punctual to the day, the flower of the flock, a spanking ten-pounder with fists doubled and lungs open full stretch; so firmly planted in the earth, so squared for the attack that she seemed from her first hour a laughing matter, a child of fortune.

  It was during those months that he began to feel that if he was not careful to avoid unnecessary strain his health would become completely undermined: his family would have a crock on their hands, or—possibly?—possibly not?—worse—be left without a father. He began to be anxious about himself, and consulted the doctor of his own accord and followed his advice about diet, rest and medicine. When the pain nagged he thought about the relation between worry and his acid juices, and did his level best to stop worrying. He made a point of getting back from the City in time to play with the little boys before their bed-time, and this he quite looked forward to, though they sometimes made him feel irritable. After a tête-à-tête dinner with Madeleine, he was inclined to lie back in his armchair with his eyes shut. From the sofa where she lay reading her book, Madeleine could look at him occasionally and wonder if he had rather prematurely reached the age when men dropped off after dinner. His hair was thinner in front, he was fatter in the face: he had to drink a lot of milk. Did he miss Dinah? Think about her? Was he still unhappy? Could he possibly be seeing her? Unlikely: he was regular and domesticated, never went out without her in the evenings.

  Lapped in a quiescence part aqueous part vegetable she felt the memories of jealousy and anguish, of vows to cherish and console him push at her coldly, languidly, like the forms of fishes flicking the dark weeds, pushing the nebulous glass of an aquarium. Then he would open his eyes, smile faintly, suggest a game of piquet or a little reading aloud, or early bed for both of them.

  When about midnight one night that eminent gynaecologist looked into the book-room and said a girl, both splendid, he was pierced suddenly with such an unexpected pang of emotion that he could only grin and stammer and look away like a schoolboy to hide his brimming eyes. A little later he went up to the dressing-room and saw in a Moses basket on a stand his daughter. The nurse returned to Madeleine and reported that he was as pleased as a dog with two tails; and a little later still when he went into the still ether-laden room to see his wife, he kissed her and sat beside her bed with her hand in his; and they were both a little tearful and both delighted.

  Undressing in the spare room, warily testing his heart for the first time for months, he decided that he still felt different. Better. Hope had come back, or life; perhaps they were the same thing. He had heard said that nobody could go on living without any hope at all: he had wondered for a long time whether it was true. He told himself that now again he had a bit of something to live for, and promised his daughter love, and felt a stirring of tenderness and gratitude towards the mother.

  He got into bed and lay on his back, his arms crossed behind his head, thinking of his luck—the fine healthy offspring he had fathered. For the first time for months, Dinah’s real face appeared, looking calmly up at him; one of her real faces. When she wore it, she had been lying under blankets in a high narrow bed with an iron headrail and looking most curiously complete yet incomplete. Something had left her body yet was still informing it. With a sense of shock he told himself that his last child had been stillborn: his by Dinah.

  Bad business; fantastic; criminal, paid for with only agony. The tune began again: To make the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime … That refrain had pranced in his head, a mouthing Prance of the Madmen, for weeks, weeks, weeks, when all was over; yet once he had felt—or thought he had felt—no guilt or fear; only a kind of exultation in the thought of the child to be born, a passion of protectiveness towards his love; and nothing else, no room for anything else, except an occasional visitation or jet of positive irresponsibility, a compulsion to defy, to proclaim, to destroy, to be off at a gallop, headlong, anywhere, anywhere, away, away … Sad mad and bad. Who said that? How did it go on? But oh, how passing sweet. No, not quite right. And dangerous to know … How mad bad sad and sweet … and dangerous to know my Dinah dear … That also could be fitted to a tune: he hummed it over in his head, jazzed it up, trying out various syncopated stresses. Pot-pourri rag-time. Ha! Ha! Memory’s cracked bowlful of time-rotted debris.

  Failure of, loss of memory. Can’t remember must mean don’t want to, won’t: that much he suspected without psychiatrical assistance. And so he must have fixed it—and God! at what a cost to him—he must have consigned it to perdition: the true story of his love. Only true love of my life.

  Beginning of loss of memory had been—when?—yes, as if at a signal prearranged. It had started with that cryptic telegram, extravagantly discreet, not even signed—prearranged with Corrigan, the signal which was to be taken to announce that Dinah’s time had come, she had gone to hospital. Why, when it reached him at the office had he forthwith interpreted it favourably, in a slap-happy blur of emotional relief? All over, all well, thank the Lord, I’m coming, I’m with her, this is it—an uprush of hysteria on those lines; a last race, breathless, witless, blindfold, to get away with it, to outstrip Nemesis.

  Late afternoon, moon-coloured street-and-roofscape, lucent, pied with the snow’s last vestige of shroud, the shovelled stuff heaped greyish in the gutters, a spectral sky, green-tinged, an air he drank as he ran—ice water laced with fire; afternoon of a Friday, Madeleine gone to the country with the children (whooping cough convalescence) and not expecting him: God on his side as usual. He ran, he had packed a bag, was in the car and out of London before dusk, before he had even begun to use his loaf. But once an inky night had fallen, once well out on the first long lap to the south-west, and unable to make speed on the tricky though sanded roads—then he had time to reflect. The farther he went south, the harder to mitigate stark meteorological facts. Snow flurries swarmed, white bees, against the windscreen, whirled iridescent in the tunnel of his headlamps; and beyond this travelling gold shaft of energy and light, mile after mile the stiffening world unrolled its winding sheets.

  Where had he put that telegram? While with one hand he ransacked every pocket, the car made a dizzy glide across the road: a skid, a nasty one. This drive was going to be tough—insane perhaps. What had the infernal weather report been last night, this morning? Severe blizzard in the south-west, such and such areas cut off, warnings to motorists … No! … Ever since the accursed snow had started to take charge ten days ago he had turned an eye made blind on earth and sky, blocked fast his ears each time—dozens of times—that the weather hit the headlines. Seeing the last of London’s blizzard shovelled up yesterday, he had told himself that the wind had veered, thaw must be general. Where was the bloody telegram? What had that blasted woman put?

  Slight delay now safe at destination come

  That was it surely. Think now. What exactly did it mean? What sort of delay? And why? Come was the last word, certainly. Now why bother to put that, as if he needed telling, when it had been understood between them all he needed was the signal, by hook or by crook he’d be on his way. He strove to remember what formula he had agreed on the last time he had managed to get down to see her. That was on New Year’s Eve, he had got there by breaking and keeping promises all round. Weather like April, sof
t and sunny. Dinah looking suddenly anonymous, like any pregnant woman, in a loose coat and maternity jacket, touchingly disfigured, moving with a kind of undulation and extended rhythm like a small ship putting out of harbour under sail—in all physical ways the contrary of her normal discreetly defined and moderated self. They had joked, actually joked, inventing messages for every comical eventuality. Corrigan mercifully absent, they had spent two days and nights of tranquil domesticity, walking, cooking, sitting by the fire, discussing plans for the year to come. Once or twice something seemed to threaten … the drag of a claw, thrust of a beak in a dream: once or twice he looked at her in amazement, seeing them both in such straits as beggared all description, and she didn’t see it. It was not for him, who had brought her to this pass, to air his qualms. ‘I can’t help wishing, darling, you hadn’t so completely stuck your toes in about getting rid of this …’ A nice thing that would have been to come out with. Supposing she were to die in childbirth … What a scandal! How to break it to her parents, to whom he was devoted, let alone to Madeleine? But she wouldn’t die. As soon as she was out of hospital she was going to France with the baby and Corrigan. Somewhere in Provence they were to compose a unit dedicated to freedom, creative freedom and responsibility; Corrigan painting, Dinah writing, the child to be nourished on sun, milk, wine and happiness; Rickie to send funds—only the minimum—and come like a god at intervals, to shower down love and drink it back … Morally, socially, financially, it was all sewed up, there wasn’t a loose stitch anywhere. Of course it would be known, sooner or later, that she had had a child. What of it? She had always told her friends that she intended one day to pick a lover deliberately and have a child by him; no bourgeois bonds; no divorce court or registry office; life the pure gift out of desire from man to woman, freely offered, freely accepted; an act of entirely uncorrupted passion involving moral choice. People would say, of course … well, let them say; she was retiring, lips sealed, wasn’t she?—she was embarrassing nobody. As for her mother, she felt sure that when the moment of revelation came, Mother would surprise them all by giving the enterprise her sanction; reluctant, dismayed perhaps at first, not overt; but in the end whole-hearted. Mother was an old donkey in some ways, but she had a strong streak of unconventionality: she had declared more than once in the bosom of the family that every woman had the right to have a child. One thing was certain: even if in her secret heart she half suspected whose child this was, she would not only not inquire, but firmly resist enlightenment. As for Madeleine—oh, Madeleine would never suspect. She took such a disgusted view of Dinah anyway, said Dinah, that she would assume the child to be the result of some piece of casual promiscuity. She would be curious, no doubt, and … oh, sexually agitated; but chiefly she would decide to shrug her shoulders and sterilize the scandal by keeping it at one contemptuous remove … ‘And if you think,’ Dinah had said, teasing him, ‘That he’ll look like you, you’re wrong. I know. I can see him. He looks exactly like himself …’