The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  So he rang up Corrigan and told her, briefly, that he would be along that evening. He came along, and she opened the door to him; he saw again without one glance at her the overpowering bosom, the buttocks in dirty slacks, the caramel eyes rapacious, cringing on him, waiting to reassume control of his emotions. He heard her give one of her great windy sighs and felt her about to lay a strong comradely hand upon his shoulder. He said, looking over her head:

  ‘How is she?’ and was conscious of her pause for readjustment before she answered with imitative curtness:

  ‘Expecting you. Be careful, won’t you? She’s still sedated—mildly of course.’

  ‘On whose instructions?’

  ‘The doctor’s,’ she said, haughtily; adding: ‘I haven’t left her day or night.’

  ‘Well, leave us now,’ he said.

  She stumped ahead of him, opened a door at the end of the passage, said softly, brightly: ‘Dearie, here’s your visitor,’ and carefully shutting the door, withdrew.

  He did not know what he had most feared to be confronted with: white waif, prostrate, in effigy, after the style of the death mask of the drowned girl of the Seine which a man he’d known at Oxford had had laid out on a black velvet catafalque on top of his bookcase; or worse, a piece of rubbish thrown away, unrecognizable, abject. He did not expect what in fact he saw: a dear little soul with freshly combed hair sitting up in bed in a striped silk pyjama jacket, listening to a dance band on a portable wireless. This she switched off, then held out loving arms, smiling in joyful welcome. He went and gathered her to him, lost in another surge of tenderness, remorse and gratitude. He kissed her cheeks and lips, and begged her not to cry, and drew up a chair and wiped his own wet eyes. She said:

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve missed you horribly.’

  ‘Don’t you suppose I’ve missed you?’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about what’s happened.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I was crazy. You needn’t be afraid—I’ll never do it again.’ Comically grimacing, pointing towards the door, she said in a stage whisper: ‘Might she be listening?’

  They waited, ears pricked. He shook his head, murmuring grimly:

  ‘I think I settled her hash.’

  ‘Were you distant?’

  ‘Very.’

  In a moment they heard the front door bang, and she leaned back, and said: ‘She’s gone out—she promised she would. You’ll stop, won’t you, till she comes back? I’m all right, but when I think I’m alone in the house I get claustrophobia.’

  She held out a hand and he folded it in both of his, telling himself that it would be unwise in the extreme to say that he had promised to take Anthony fishing before supper.

  ‘The poor old cow,’ she remarked with a sigh. ‘I’ve given her a pasting. She’s been incredible—marvellous to me. I’m grateful. It’s hell having to be grateful to someone you loathe.’

  He said shuddering: ‘I can’t bring myself to look at her.’

  ‘I know. Poor Rickie, poor darling. All my fault.’

  ‘Nothing has been your fault,’ he said for the hundredth time.

  ‘God knows,’ she said very much in her old clipped pseudo-magisterial manner, ‘I’ve read enough about the behaviour patterns of psychotics: I ought to have applied it. If you choose to embark on a relationship with a psychotic, you must expect what’s coming to you. I got it.’

  It flashed across his mind that, whatever Corrigan had expected, Corrigan had got something too. Aloud he said ruefully: ‘She’s a psychotic, is she? Is that the same as psychopathic?’

  She let this pass. Presently her face lit up. She said with sparkling eyes: ‘And what do you think? She’s through with painting, she’s taken to lit. She’s writing a play.’

  ‘What about?’ he exclaimed in simple horror. ‘Us? I bet it’s about us.’

  ‘God knows. I should think it’s more than likely.’ She beamed with malice and amusement, indifferent to this unnerving aspect of Corrigan’s activities. ‘She taps away on her typewriter into the small hours. I can hear her. I’m not to read it till it’s finished. Don’t you see how it all fits in? She would. Bet you she’ll deliver the goods too—she’s no fool. Oh, I see it all! “At last a play that looks contemporary problems squarely in the face, burking no issue, pulling no punches, but informed withal with infinite wisdom and compassion” … Oh, and bits of poetry and philosophy thrown in, and some Freud as well. And the cleverness of her! Shall I tell you what will happen? She’ll make a bee-line for les Boys, the Big Boys—and Bob’s your uncle! You’ll see: they’ll dine her and wine her and dress her up to kill and take her down to their cottages for cosy week-ends. They’ll give madly funny imitations of her behind her back, but never mind, they’ll dote on her. What’s more, with that deadly instinct of theirs, they’ll know what they’ve hooked and they’ll respect it: the real rare Box-Office-busting matriarch, the real McCoy! She’ll go galumphing straight to her apotheosis on the first night, she’ll make such a packet! I do hope so.’

  Was she perhaps a little overwrought, he wondered, a little wild and over-voluble? He took a look at her, this week-old suicide, his victim, Corrigan’s, and saw her in a glow, twinkling, never in better spirits. There was no end, none, to his bewilderment about women. He would have liked to enter into the fun, but he could not help a feeling of discomfiture, due possibly to his surroundings: this cramped bedroom with its aggressive walls painted in panels and strips of brilliant colour—turquoise, acid yellow, magenta—and further covered with largish specimens of Corrigan’s abstract period; its small window, its general appearance of having been tacked up roughly in cheap material over a framework of scrap iron and packing cases. This bed she lay in, under a Paisley rug … clean, of course, but so poor, so narrow … He wiped his forehead.

  Presently her contented expression faded, and she asked abruptly, in an agitated voice, what news there was from her mother. He reassured her, and she said, taking several big breaths:

  ‘Thank God. I haven’t written once, I couldn’t, what will they think of me? I did send a cable … It was the last straw, being punished like that by—both of you …’

  ‘Punished?’

  ‘Yes, locked in the schoolroom with Aunt Lilian pushing my bread and water in and croaking at me through the keyhole. Aunt Lilian! She was so delighted to tell me you and Madeleine had charged her to keep me taped. I couldn’t be trusted, of course, to come in on decent terms at the death of my own father, I must be shown where I belonged …’

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t! It wasn’t like that, not meant to be …’

  ‘No. But if you’ll forgive my saying so, what a show-up. I’ll never forgive her … So she flew out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Coming back when?’

  He told her, and she relapsed into silence, holding his hand tight. Then she said: ‘Look here, Rickie, I’ve never asked you for help, not really, have I? I’ve never asked anyone for help—my damned pride, but it’s broken. I do need a bit of help now.’

  He stared at her pretty hand that he adored, bent down and put a kiss on it. Help. Help. In a moment it would be too late, it was too late already, to take counsel with that truly sensible man he so often felt to be his second self, or his only temporarily absent twin.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked sadly.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I’m not asking much, I promise. Nothing with secret clauses in it. Just something to tide me over. Then I’ll be all right.’ She swallowed. To see her in such straits caused him mixed sensations—pity, embarrassment, protectiveness, and behind these a kind of cold triumph and curiosity: she was not free of him, she was at his mercy. ‘It’s this,’ she went on, swallowing. ‘Will you take me away for a little holiday? Ten days—a week even. I cannot stay here, she’
s driving me nuts. I know she’s saved my life, but imagine what it’s like lying here after everything that’s happened. And I know I’m not quite ready to go back to—living alone without a little break. You’re the only person, the only person I can bear to be with while I’m still rather shaky. If I could be by the sea, somewhere quiet, for a short time alone with you, I know I’d—be healed in no time. And after that you’ll see—I’ll be no trouble.’

  So he agreed at once. What else could he have done? It was a cry from the heart, it must take precedence, on pain of something he was not prepared to face—his own heart’s atrophy. At once she relaxed, grateful, happy as a child. His pity, fear, remorse went underground; his pity, fear, remorse, crushed out of shape, revived: put forth fresh shoots, a wild growth, rampant.

  There was no trouble about his taking a little holiday. Obstacles fell away with that smooth complicity, the co-operative subservience which characterizes obstacles conspiring towards the fatal act. Two days later he stopped his car at her door, and she emerged, pale in a lime green linen suit, and took her place beside him. They drove west by easy stages, stopping in cathedral towns they had never visited, exploring them together, she enthralled, intent on history and architecture, he fired by her enthusiasm. Each night it was he who lay awake an hour or so, listening to her quiet sleep beside him.

  By the afternoon of the fourth day they had reached the north coast of Wales; bare outlines harmoniously interlaced and modulated, low broken promontories of rock, broad sands; colours subdued—grey, greenish, tawny, azure, silvered, violet: an early Christian, holy coast. They had been recommended, in the last town, to try the farm opened only a few weeks previously as a guest-house. Whitewashed, with blue shutters, it squatted almost on the sand’s edge, looking towards the sea, the islands and the setting sun. Miraculously, a vacant double room, fresh, pretty, comfortable. Going about their tasks, the young maids spoke in Welsh to one another: it was like being abroad, as she said, and like a dream; it was the place she had been dreaming of, she had seen it, this very bay, in a dream, she recognized it.

  They walked hand in hand, bathed, picnicked, prawned; in a few days they were tanned, salty, ravenous. Before the week was ended he was hopelessly in love with her again; seeing her run barefoot over the sands, turn laughing in the sea and swim towards him made his attentive heart turn over. On the last day they walked along the coast for miles; she made a collection of wild flowers and taught him their names; when he forgot or got them muddled she rehearsed them with him over and over again. They sat in a coign of the cliff with the gulls circling and complaining over them. They saw, quite close inshore, a school of porpoises go in their procession round the headland, hurled and set wheeling from below, it seemed, like oceanic weapons in some archaic ritual game. Never was such a seaside idyll. How right, how easy to love one only, and therefore to be at peace with all creation.

  That night they went for a last bathe by moonlight before going to bed. She was the stronger swimmer and went ahead of him, driving on steadily, in silence. He would never catch her up, she would never wait. Suddenly depressed, exhausted, he turned for the shore, stumbled up the beach over the cobbles, dressed again in their shallow cave under the cliff-face, sat down on a rock to wait for her.

  Presently dread began to grip him. She had left him deliberately, never to come back, she would swim on, on until she could swim no more, then give up and let the waves close over her. It would be like her; like her to go without a hint to him, without a word of warning, a last word of love. Heartless, fanatical, inhuman … What was he to do now? The pinch closed under his ribs, he had to hold both hands there, hard against the scaffolding of bones.

  When next moment he thought he saw, was sure he saw, the dark sphere of her head bobbing serenely back towards him in the moon’s wake, he got up quickly and stalked away. He heard her coo-ee once, twice, and strode straight on into the house, up the stairs, ignoring the friendly young manager hovering as usual in the deserted lounge for a good night chat and a glass of beer. Dragging his suit-case out from under the bed, he started to fling things into it; until, hearing her voice, her step downstairs, he hurried to the bathroom at the end of the passage and locked himself inside. When after several minutes he emerged and loomed in the doorway, she was standing in front of the dressing-table, drying her hair with a rough towel. She saw his reflection in the mirror and turned sharp round.

  ‘Rickie! What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ He took a cigarette from the packet by the bed and lit it with deliberation.

  She came up to him and laid a hand on his hard-pressed ribs, searching his shuttered face.

  ‘Did you get cold? You’re pale. You feel cold. I called to you but you didn’t hear. Or did you? Why didn’t you wait for me? What is it?’

  He tried shrouding himself and binding the shroud with ropes until it seemed to himself he must be visibly encased, stiff, blacked-out, knotted, mutilated; he tried loosening a rope to lash her with the end of it. She fought him off without turning a hair, fought step by step towards him; and suddenly she touched him, and darkness and bonds all fell together. They dissolved one into the other, drawing breath and speech from one another in a world of the senses never before apprehended. They were one, they could not live apart, they knew it. In the morning, before he left, they agreed upon their future course. He would await Madeleine’s return, then at once, straightforwardly, tell her that his mind was made up, he was going away with Dinah. Where? Never mind that now. Some island on the other side of the world … Why not? Or travelling from enchanted place to place together, over the whole globe, out of reach of regret and execration. He would settle all the money on Madeleine and the children, leaving only just enough … Meanwhile he must get back to the office. Dinah would stay on here another fortnight, eat, rest, get strong, occupy herself by starting to write the book for children she had long meditated.

  All was clear, solid at last, resolved. They parted in exalted peace of mind. He drove back through a day of impending never-breaking thunderstorms to the home of these women’s parents and to his sons.

  His relatives returned from their long journey. He met them at Victoria from the boat-train and drove them down to the country. He did what he could to enter into the spirit of family reunion; but when he saw the children, delirious with rapture, rush out of the front door towards their mother, his spirits sank to his boots and he had to go away. Later, at dinner, Mrs Burkett remarked that he looked thin and tired; and where was his appetite? This was in passing, for her true eyes were only for one—that frail, shockingly altered man her husband. He was almost relieved to hear her throw the comment off so briskly. She was a woman with antennae: he told himself that if she had detected anything amiss she would have refrained from drawing attention to his appearance. But they were all tired, and went early to bed. He had not long composed himself between the sheets when Madeleine appeared in her dressing-gown, looked at him with stony eyes and said:

  ‘So you’ve been seeing her.’

  He answered yes.

  ‘I knew the moment I saw you. Before I left I knew what would happen. There’s only one thing I want to say to you tonight: will you kindly assist me to preserve a front till Monday? I must insist on this. My parents have been through enough—we’ve got to put a face on it.’

  He said certainly, he also had thought of this aspect of the situation. She was not, he implied, the only one with consideration for others.

  ‘And perhaps you will kindly keep Monday night free. We shall have to review our situation.’

  Feeling that her language was unnecessarily formal, not to say stagey, he answered that that had all along been his intention. She left him without another word. It was a great strain getting through the next two days; but what with neighbours dropping in, and most of Sunday on the golf links, the time passed.

  Monday evening saw them back in Montagu Squar
e, among the shimmer of new chintzes and cleaned brocades, the glint of polished wood, glass, silver, in the pervasive aroma of turpentine and beeswax. They dined together—a silent meal—then betook themselves to the book-room, where, at once, they had the show-down. He told her fairly truthfully and quite without emotion the whole story, beginning with Dinah’s attempted suicide right through to the end of their holiday together. He said he had intended, had tried to break with Dinah: he had failed to do so. There was nothing he could do or wished to plead by way of excuse or justification. All he could say was that if he remained any longer in an impossibly false situation, three lives would be ruined—hers, Dinah’s, and for what it was worth, his own.

  Madeleine appeared calm and said she took it then that he was totally indifferent to his children and their fate. He replied that on the contrary he loved his children.

  ‘You realize,’ she said, ‘that you would never, never, never set eyes on them again: at least until they are grown up and out of my control.’

  He said that this he must accept: she had the right to keep them from him if she felt this course to be in their best interests. It was difficult for him to judge, he said, how much boys suffered from being brought up without a father. He himself had been twelve years old, as she probably remembered, at the time of his own father’s death in action in 1914. He had always known, and knew more clearly the older he grew, the irreparable damage to him, let alone the loss. He was haunted still by his mother’s grief, by her broken voice telling him that he was all she had now, they must live for one another.

  ‘I was twelve,’ he said. ‘My last year at my private. I told her I’d look after her. She told me I was her little son who was going to be a man now for Father’s sake. With my head on her shoulder I told her yes, that was how it would be, for Father’s sake. I went and lay on my bed face down, and told myself yes, now that Father was dead I must be a man. But the more I went on insisting on it the less I’—he paused—‘the less I seemed to know what to do about it. I had to be one, I’d promised, but I couldn’t think what it was that I—what responsibilities went with the title. My father had been—more than just my great pride and admiration: it seemed from the letters and all that that he’d been everybody’s: gallant, handsome, brilliant, honourable, and dead for England. I’d got to make it up to my mother by being like him, taking his place. I didn’t know how to. I was afraid. I knew if I ever did anything disgraceful … I’d see his avenging ghost.’