The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Death wish. Birth trauma. Narcissism, sadism, masochism: the terms of reference were all available. The games ceased, or went underground, after the young man, the young lover, Jocelyn, came forward to embrace her; returned with excruciating variations after the young man, the young son lost his life … Oh but there were no words for the cat and mouse game that went on then. But whoever appeared and vanished in her nights, it was never Rickie. He seemed to have retired for ever from the scene, leaving no travesties of himself as legacy, no reminders behind the keyholes, in the cellars. Why should he spare her? Why should Anthony, her best-beloved, hunt her so ruthlessly? She was not guilty towards him—had never destroyed his confidence or let him down; except perhaps twice, but in such minor ways … Once at the swimming baths when she had publicly rejected him because among other people’s fearless children he was the only one to be a coward, a humiliating child; once—rather worse—when he had come upon her weeping in her bedroom and asked her why, and she had answered because Daddy had been unkind to her. Bad that, of course—a classical example. On both occasions he had received the shock in the same way: a look of chill exhaustion, a lid half-lowered, veiling an eye gone dead … as if he had been given a hypodermic shot. She had been scared, telling herself that this, already, was his method, the way he dealt with suffering imposed upon him. Out of this, murmured a voice in her, would come the means and method, one day, of imposing it. Could anybody’s heart break if they weren’t careful? Yes, Anthony was going to be careful, unless one was careful, never to let his own heart break.

  But who could define heart?—how was it to be measured, where did it reside? Cold poets who fed on hearts—the true, the false—and spat out the remains, they celebrated it. Practitioners in psychology had other terms for it, Jocelyn, with his turn for paradox, insisted that heart was never a commodity exchanged in that least disinterested of all human phenomena, the passionate idyll. ‘What do you mean, Jocelyn, by a passionate idyll?’ ‘You should know.’ Radiantly he smiled. Pinning down heart, qualifying, separating kindness, disallowing generosity, he concluded at last that it could best be defined by considering its opposite, the void: it was the reverse of the void in the being’s centre; nothing to do with a code of morality, by no means always recognizable in good conduct. It was a residue, an essence … something more like grace. Not unselfishness, but the capacity for freedom from self—the void-containing self. He more than suspected himself of lacking heart. ‘But why?’ Because he was capable only of passion; only of self-torture, not of suffering; only of intensity of soul, not of expansion. If she did not believe it now, she would discover it one day: a treat in store for her.

  ‘And what about me, Jocelyn, my heart?’ ‘Ah, you! …’ Radiantly he smiled. People with hearts could die of them, he said; they could not petrify or shrivel. Age was the final testing time, the time of resurrection—or of none. Lying in his arms she entered a dark maze where, lightly, he and Rickie set to partners, each holding her by a hand.

  ‘Strong passions from a child but not much heart.’ Whose well-known voice of summing-up resounding in her ears? Her mother’s. Pronouncing verdict on her eldest child. But when pronounced? Never in my hearing, thought Madeleine; certainly never repeated to me. What then? Mere morbid self-accusation, self-begotten … Yet it went on sounding, with an authentic note, as if it were the record of an ultimate judgement never delivered, locked up, so the judge had fancied, to die with her; yet in her last unconsciousness she had exhaled it; and I, thought Madeleine, received it … but never heard it until now? When I sat with Dinah by her bed in the nursing home a month ago, when I saw Dinah face to face at last, when we knew she would not rally: then was the moment when from her fading mind she yielded it up and I received it. When all was over I broke down and said: ‘I wish she’d known we were here together. Do you think she might have known? Surely she must have.’ Dinah, also in tears, doubtless thinking me hysterical and childish, went on holding my hand but did not answer. We were reconciled.

  But it should have been brought about on the living side of their mother’s lifetime, and it had not been. Why not? Why not? At last she had tracked it down—the cry torn out of the pit of her with her waking. It was her fault, her failure of heart and no one else’s.

  A matter chiefly of procrastination; a matter not sufficiently important to warrant the effort, the emotional disturbance bound to be involved. Time enough, time enough to see which way the cat jumped. She had been rescued from despair, snatched from the core of the furnace; she was reprieved, she was safe at last, but still so vulnerable that she must be given time to relax, to consolidate herself; she must be allowed to care only for one person, the one to whom she owed her life given back to her, who needed her at last as much as she needed him. Anybody likely to interfere, to ask questions, to give an opinion on the relationship must be set at a certain distance for fear of some contagion. Anybody who might with one finger touch her security and set it rocking; might smile, secretive, with a stretch of the nostrils, a twisted eyebrow; might come again to the door, a waif, mysterious, in straits, on the prowl, on the make, but seeming to be the one with no demands to make because she had taken steps to corner all the answers … Or, worst of all, if one came again to her door, palms icily sweating, lungs paralyzed from terror, determined as before to swallow pride and be less pardoner than suppliant, bent on offering terms of surrender so rare, so honourable that they would, they must be freely accepted and adhered to; only to find, as before, so grotesque a discrepancy between one’s preconception of the drama to be unfolded and what had actually been played out; to be caught out in fact once again by the unforeseeable, seen … seen this time by Dinah, as Dinah had once been seen by Madeleine: double-faced.

  The door had opened to admit her; she had walked straight upstairs, intent on saving Rickie, walked straight into treachery. Found two, not one, awaiting her. Rickie betrayed.

  That was how she would be seen by Dinah if she came holding out the olive branch; came unaccompanied yet with someone doubtless visible to Dinah behind her shoulder, turning her face and Dinah’s towards the ambush where once more Rickie would be hidden and Rickie would be betrayed.

  The taxi deposited her and drove off; she cast a tense and furtive glance upwards over the high dingy peeling façade of the building that on one floor or another concealed the actual form of Dinah; and mounted the steps towards the front door. A dog in the basement set up a shrill yapping. On her right a row of starveling privet bushes flanked a segment of wall truncated, crookedly slanting, seemingly sinister, like a portion of a surrealist film set. A stunted tabby cat without a tail shot out of the area, leaped the railings and vanished along the narrow pathway between this wall and the side of the building. An unfamiliar square, a drab secretive part of London. Curious to think of Rickie approaching it so many many times, hurrying up these steps, closing this dark door after him in lively anticipation—freeman of a second area of domesticity, more private, more tempting than the one on the other side of the park, where also he was expected, to which sooner or later he would return, wrapped in the cloak of a double life—rank cloak, invisible. She bent to examine the four bell buttons each with a card above it on the left of the door, then straightened up again, opened her handbag and rapidly surveyed herself in the square of mirror, taking courage from the flawless mask that gleamed back at her from behind a finely-spotted black veil. Very becoming, these veils; a disguise she had come to rely on for self-confidence. For a second she wondered whether this growing dislike, mounting to phobia almost, of exposure to full daylight, could be connected with the psychology of rejection; whether if she had a lover …

  She started to ascend, her tread echoing round the steep well of the uncarpeted stone staircase, her imagination stiffly apprehending fragments of Dinah’s actual, unsubjectivized identity. She was going to confront the person who was at home here; she was going to break in on this person’s independent social life: an orderly l
ife, not the life of an adulterous dipsomaniacal waif awaiting rescue willy nilly by the sister she had wronged.

  On the second floor landing, her breath caught in her throat, her pulses hammering, she stopped dead, relinquishing a project that now seemed to her insane. A door, above her opened, closed again, someone came winding with a measured tread down the last short wooden flight, emerged before her: elderly stoutish man, dark, sallow, foreign-looking, dressed with a certain dandified distinction—grey suit, silk shirt, lavender bow tie; something about him—his eyes?—not ordinary or reassuring. His face, an engrossed one, closed as it took the shock of this unbargained-for encounter; the sunken eyes searched hers, were quickly lowered. With a murmured ‘Good evening. Excuse me,’ he passed her deferentially and continued his descent. Who? Who possibly? Doctor? Professor in exile? Representing what further portion of the now terrifying identity silent, hidden just above her head? Murderer? Dinah strangled on the bed or with her throat cut … Dinah having a few friends in for a drink … Anything was possible, all possibilities equally appalling. But now there was no turning back. She went on, found herself before a door painted canary yellow, touched a bell.

  Almost at once the door was flung open. A young man in grey flannels and black polo-necked sweater stood staring at her, a smile that seemed at first both welcoming and teasing fading sharply as he took her in. Behind him, out of sight, a voice, Dinah’s, called out in a tone—familiar, lightly mocking—to match his smile: ‘Come in, come in. What have you forgotten this time?’

  Still blocking the entrance, the young man said quickly: ‘It’s not him.’ Dinah was well guarded. Next moment, while Madeleine with a sense of final loss of bearings began to stammer: ‘I came—I wondered if …’ Dinah appeared behind his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Cold nasal languid voice after a moment’s pause. ‘What a surprise.’ She put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and added: ‘Come in.’ She elbowed him gently aside, turned her back, and Madeleine followed her into a low rectangular room decorated, it seemed to her stupefied sense of vision, with an effect of brilliant splashes of colour against darkness; a full room, a lived-in, book-strewn yet not untidy room, original and charming.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Dinah, giving a small armchair a perfunctory push. Madeleine sat down. Everything that was happening was mechanical. Dinah stood looking down at her, her hands in the pockets of a black overall tied tightly round her fragile waist, her hair falling thick, lopsided over one eye and loose on her shoulders, her face a spectral mask. And what can mine be? thought Madeleine, trembling.

  ‘Well, what’s happened?’ said Dinah in the same voice.

  In dumb query Madeleine looked up. ‘Accident?’ drawled the voice. ‘Illness? Or what?’ Then suddenly, metallic, strident: ‘I said, what’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing’s happened.’

  ‘Oh. I thought perhaps you were a widow. With the chic veil. Do push it up or something. I feel at a disadvantage.’ She laughed, a brief impertinent sound; then as Madeleine with one scornful gesture removed hat, veil and all, turned brusquely away, walked to the mantelpiece, took a cigarette from a packet and lit it with deliberation. ‘We thought,’ she continued, keeping her head averted, ‘it was Selby back for something he’d left, didn’t we, Rob?’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed the young man who had remained standing by the door, his blank eyes fixed on space.

  ‘Selby’s a very absent-minded man. Did you pass him on the stairs? You must have.’

  ‘I did pass somebody.’

  ‘How funny! He’s a friend of ours, of Rob’s at least—Selbig his name is really, Dr Ernst Selbig. Oh, my manners! I haven’t introduced you. This is Rob Edwards. Rob, this is my sister, Mrs Masters.’

  The young man now advanced to wring Madeleine’s hand, saying: ‘Pleased to meet you’ in a stylized way. His grip drove the rings into her flesh, she was unable not to wince from pain. It seemed less a clasp of greeting than a violent muscular spasm. His appearance was extremely striking: pale yellow hair, a shock of it, straight, silky, a long face of curiously perfect cut and finish, and biscuit-coloured, as if carried out in thick glazed china, with prominent cheek-bones and sculpturally modelled lips; the eyes put in last—yellow-green glass, transparent.

  ‘Should I fix a drink?’ he inquired of Dinah in a transatlantic accent of the bonhomous-host type, strangely at odds with given circumstances and with some other half-throttled more natural mode of speech.

  ‘Not for me,’ Madeleine said hastily. ‘I can’t stay long. I …’ She added: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, come on, we shan’t poison you,’ said Dinah briskly. ‘You’re not on the wagon, are you? If you’re considering me or Rob it’s quite all right. We were both on a bend up till recently and we did have to lay off, didn’t we, Rob?’

  ‘That’s right.’ A faint transparent smile crossed his expressionless face.

  ‘But now we just drink in a mild domestic way and take turns winding up the gramophone. I cannot think why you’ve come, but I suppose you’ll tell me in your own good time.’

  Waiting till the youth had withdrawn, she hoped with tactful timing, through the door towards the kitchen, Madeleine burst out in angry wounded protest:

  ‘I haven’t had much chance yet, have I? This isn’t any easier or pleasanter for me than it is for you. I realize it’s a shock for you, my coming, but at least give me credit … I don’t propose to bounce you into seeing me. If you refuse to talk, just say so and I’ll go. But stop slicking it up into cheap melodrama. I haven’t come for hush-money. And I’m not from the Rescue and Preventive.’ She was conscious of the dark flush rising to scorch and settle in her cheeks.

  Raising her eyebrows and assuming the expression of one who remarks: ‘The little spitfire!’ Dinah emitted a long pseudo-appreciative whistle. The door to the kitchen opened and the youth came in with his light tread, stopped in the middle of the room and stood like a peaceable animal at home with but indifferent to man.

  ‘None left?’ inquired Dinah. Leaning against the mantelpiece she smiled at him.

  He shook his head. She lifted the cover of a small white and gold porcelain bowl beside her, took a pound note from it and held it out to him.

  ‘There you are,’ she said in an oddly formal yet encouraging voice. ‘Be back soon if you can, and fix us a drink.’

  ‘O.K.,’ he said, without expression, pocketing the note; then to Madeleine, amiably: ‘So long’; and was noiselessly gone.

  ‘How long will he be?’ asked Madeleine nervously, glancing at her wrist-watch.

  Dinah appeared to ignore the question. Her stance suggested both abstraction and intentness, as if her ears were following some other, remoter, auditory line. The front door was faintly, clearly heard to bang. She came slowly then and took a chair facing Madeleine—a low Victorian nursing chair upholstered in a rich bright tapestry of wool and beads against whose high scalloped back her presence seemed designed, disposed, with deliberate economy and grace, as if she had become a portrait of herself. Then, while Madeleine cast about through a wave of physical nausea, through the drum-taps of the silence, for the true start with the right words, she remarked as if to herself:

  ‘He won’t come back.’

  ‘You mean—not till I’ve gone? I thought …’ She stopped. It seemed unsuitable to suggest that she was expecting the refreshment so recently offered.

  ‘He won’t come back at all. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Why not?’ Alarm gripped her; she glanced at Dinah thinking that perhaps Rickie had been right: Dinah was far gone indeed. But though once more ignoring a straight question, Dinah said presently, in a normal manner:

  ‘What did you make of him?’

  ‘He’s frightfully good-looking,’ said Madeleine with caution. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Incredible looks, aren’t they? I’ve never seen their equal.�
� She sounded pleased; meditated; then continued with a characteristic sniff: ‘It’s a handicap he won’t surmount—everybody will see to that. He’s a working-class character, one of the ones Bruce Corder picked up and did no good to. You may remember Bruce: he took to cocaine and killed himself a year or two ago. I’d lost sight of Rob. Bruce used to bring him to parties, and I never remember an evening it didn’t end in tears—oh, the hell of a shindy, boo-hooing and bashing and smashing.’ Her reminiscent smile broadened; all of a sudden she burst out laughing as if at some irresistibly comic memory; then her face set again, rejecting its moment of relaxation. ‘I thought it was a shame. Rob was all right—not awfully bright but lovable. We always got on. His jokes amused me … He’s from Nottingham …’ Her eyes clouded, her jaw dropped slightly; she let her head fall back lifelessly against the chair. ‘I don’t know why I … This doesn’t interest you,’ she muttered.

  ‘It does,’ said Madeleine timidly. ‘Truly it does. Very much.’

  But nothing in the image of utter fatigue and melancholy confronting her responded. After some moments, however, the lips opened to say:

  ‘Why have you come?’

  ‘I’m not absolutely certain—now—yet …’ Madeleine could not suppress a quavering laugh. ‘I’m sorry. I do know really, I’m not trying to … But I can’t start till it starts coming in the right way. If you don’t mind my staying a bit longer …’