The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘Yes, I did give him the money,’ agreed Dinah with slow cold satisfaction. ‘Thank God for that anyway—I didn’t prevent him. If anything brings him back, that will.’ She looked fully across the gulf at Madeleine. ‘You see, we hadn’t run out of gin. There’s two-thirds of a bottle in the kitchen. We didn’t hide it or pour it down the sink or lock it up. We’d got to the point of being able to look at it together.’ This time her laugh held a hint of rueful avowal in it: part of the void became a human area. ‘You little know what drunks get up to—their ruses and stratagems. The thing is, the moment I called him in the park and he stopped, and didn’t run away—the moment he came towards me was—well, saved’s a word I avoid—cured say, temporarily cured. I had good and sufficient reason to do what I preferred—snap out of it. But it wasn’t the same for him. I was just the offchance he saw of giving himself a breather. And then the offchance we neither of us mentioned that … However, that takes more than an act of hope on one side—which is all that it amounted to. Real hope isn’t like that, is it? It’s a state. For instance, being pregnant is a state of hope, real hope; but knowing it’s on the cards one might become so isn’t. He’d simply gone to earth. Men do that more than women, perhaps you’ve noticed. Isn’t it queer to sleep in a shroud with someone? Perhaps you never have; but if you have by any chance you’ll know one can’t be said to have a lover in one’s bed. That’s the answer to your inquiry.’

  ‘I didn’t inquire,’ the other murmured. ‘It’s not my business anyway.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, but I don’t mind telling you.’

  But I mind hearing, thought Madeleine, shrinking from the revelation. Such sexual confidences they had never, even in the old days, attempted to exchange. She curled herself sideways in her chair, one elbow propped on the arm and her chin in her hand: look and pose of a schoolgirl, nonplussed, chagrined, with flushed cheek and thick-lashed eyes cast down. I haven’t much experience, she thought, abashed, uneasy, knowing that what Dinah had so violently exposed would germinate in her, pushing up wild shoots in territories fallow now for years; never to be explored, since her sole tenant, to whom she was still bound, disturbing once the virgin surface, taking the thin sweet-and-sour-tasting crop, had left her soil unhusbanded. Null sleep she knew, the neutral double nights of unembracing, casting no light or shadow; not folded, not released … Not in a shroud: not what they meant, not the level that they pierced, those words half understood that haunted her: youth pined away, snow-shrouded virgin; fiend; rose; sick rose; invisible worm.

  ‘The dark night of the senses,’ said a strangled voice: out of the corner of her eye, she saw white hands clench in a black lap. Then: ‘He’s my brother,’ said Dinah, uttering in a voice almost gone dumb what seemed a sudden cry.

  ‘Then he hasn’t gone,’ answered Madeleine as if hypnotized.

  ‘Why not? Brothers do go.’ Her dry laugh cracked, broke off. ‘The unexpected apparition of yourself’—she held a hand up—‘that’s not meant to be sarcastic—it shook him. You see, he hasn’t any roots. Anybody, anything almost, breaking in from outside could blow him in another direction. You blew in like a breath of fresh air.’ Not hostile, her eyes teased Madeleine.

  ‘I didn’t feel like one.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t understand about being in a trap. Forgive me if I sound high-hat—I don’t think you can possibly understand it. Directly he came back without the bottle I knew he was announcing he must be off. Naturally I had to make it easy for him. He hasn’t a bean.’

  ‘What do you think he will do?’

  ‘Couldn’t say. Oh, drift round the pubs, I dare say, pick up some cronies—get stood a slap-up dinner and a comfortable lodging … How should I know?’

  ‘But what about his things? He must have left some clothes here?’

  ‘Oh, those.’ Her face lit up for a moment, as if the question tickled her. ‘You’re always practical … Well, yes. Yes, I did buy him a couple of shirts and a toothbrush. His wardrobe is an intermittent sort of affair—quite extensive sometimes. This is a slump period. I suppose he might need the shirts. It depends on his luck.’ She meditated. ‘He might send Selby for them. I should hate that. I wonder if he’s gone to Selby … No, I doubt it. But sooner or later he will; or Selby will track him down. He always does. That’s why I asked him round this evening—to show him how safe and sound Rob was.’

  ‘Why? Is he responsible for Rob? Who is he?’

  ‘Selby now … Selby is a middle-European character who is interested in Rob. Also in me. He’s interested in types. No, that’s not strictly accurate. He does really love Rob, I think: he comes pounding and tiptoeing after him like the Hound of Heaven. The nosy old bastard … Or could he be a saint? In actual fact he’s some kind of a philosophical psychiatrist, Jewish of course, who left Germany for a number of good reasons; and he lives in Stepney in a large derelict hulk of a house with a grand piano in it and a picture he claims is a Caravaggio and might well be, and some Persian rugs and not much else—except bugs, I suspect. He owns this house and people seem to stay in it rent free—it’s like a kind of crazy raffish Mental Home and slum tenement combined. He looks after these people—patients—treats them, rehabilitates them, God knows what—and a rare ripe lot they seem to be from what Rob tells me. Selby merely calls them a typical cross-section of humanity. I don’t know what principle he picks them on, or how he sets to work on them: it seems everything from stammerers and bed-wetters through drunks and thieves to maniacs; with a sprinkling of financial down-and-outs with nowhere else to be. They come and go … Oh, I can’t make out what he is or what he’s up to.’ She frowned, rapt in the contemplation of a problem of personality; again the schoolroom seemed to project around them its former furniture and climate. ‘How he picked up Rob,’ she went on, ‘is a mystery I’ve never solved; but Rob had a room there when he first came to London, and I know he can go back there whenever he feels—cornered. He took me there once some time ago when he got a fit of the horrors in the middle of a party. Such a room!—I still can’t be sure I didn’t invent it.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Low, dark, red. Suffocated with vast blocks of furniture: a Victorian dining-room suite—monstrous great sideboard and table, carved black varnished oak; four chairs with the stuffing bursting out of torn leather. A sour red ink smell from the Turkey carpet, and a smell of dry rot. Red plush curtains. Wallpaper—ah, the wallpaper!’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘A smother of red roses, life-size, romping up trellis work, complete with particularly brown thorny stems and luxuriant green foliage …’

  ‘Goodness! Had he chosen it?’

  ‘I think not. I think it was there and he decorated up to it. He was devoted to it. He said it made him feel he was living in a bower, those roses were so real. The furniture he’d bought in one lot at an auction when he first came to London—that was the time he was thinking of marrying a pure girl of sixteen from back home, and he felt it was real class—homey yet voluptuous. He has a very domestic side, has Rob.’ She fell into a brooding silence. ‘Then he took me downstairs to call on Selby. Selby had gone to bed but he got up and let us in and made coffee and we talked. And then Selby played the piano. He told me he’d had a fashionable practice—as a specialist in nervous diseases—once in Germany; he had a hospital; but his methods were unorthodox; and he was one of the first to fall under suspicion of nameless Jewish crimes … He got out of Germany in the nick of time.’ She stopped again, frowning. ‘He seems to have money … He seems to be expiating something … What? Something Jewish, terrible for him. Perhaps he left his family in trouble. Perhaps they’re all in concentration camps, or dead. Rob says he never lets anything drop, not a word.’

  ‘Do you see him often?’

  ‘He turns up now and then, to check up on me. He gives me the feeling that he wants to find out something from me … as if he was testing, putting me to the proof
; not me personally, not exploiting me emotionally for himself … but using me all the same, working something out through me, to reach some conclusion or other …’ Throwing her head up with sudden vigour, as if she had at least discovered her own meaning, she added: ‘Some foregone conclusion of his own.’

  ‘I shouldn’t fancy that at all.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. I don’t think I do. Did he look at you? What did you make of him?’

  ‘I thought he looked—well, foreign. Interesting,’ said Madeleine with caution. ‘Queer eyes. We nearly bumped into each other on the landing. He looked startled—as if he hadn’t heard me coming—I’d heard him, of course. Startled out of being too sunk in thought to hear me.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Dinah with an overtone of satisfaction. ‘He’d be preoccupied. He always is. He’s a metaphysician. You never know where you are with them. Yes, you must have been a shock for him. He’d take you all in: another highly significant factor for him to weigh in the situation.’

  ‘Why highly significant?’ said Madeleine with annoyance, seeing herself scrutinized by an eye at once ungentlemanly, addle-pated and omniscient, and with Dinah’s smug know-all connivance. ‘Why can’t seeing me unexpectedly give him a bit of a jump? Why pitch it up into a situation—cosmic?’

  ‘He wouldn’t pitch it up. That’s what I was trying to explain about him. He doesn’t manipulate—he simply arranges his material in an orderly scale of values. Whatever he is—and I’m still not sure—he’s not a phoney middle man. He sees life in terms of moral or spiritual drama. It’s a point of view. As for you—don’t you see he knows enough about this set-up to know that whoever you were coming up the stairs—friend, foe, stranger—he couldn’t discard you as casual or immaterial?’

  ‘Then all I can say …’ began Madeleine; but what she could say she was unable to; and weakly, in disgust, she added: ‘I wish I’d never run into him. It was most unfortunate.’

  Her own mission, she felt, had been one of sufficient difficulty and high-mindedness; she had not presented herself on the landing to play her appointed rôle in a moral universe of this outsider’s, this foreigner’s construction. And how familiar this gradual transference of power and glory, this imposed suggestion that all problems of real importance lay always elsewhere—always within Dinah’s sphere of vision, just beyond her own.

  ‘Perfectly maddening,’ agreed Dinah. ‘Such a sell for me. We’d had quite a pleasant hour, the three of us. I invited him to come to Brighton with us. It would have been a tough day for me, considered as a jolly outing—I’ve never known anyone relax with such intensity. But worth it to see him doing the Pier and playing darts in the pubs with Rob. Ah well … I must ring him up, I suppose, and tell him it’s off for the present … No, I won’t!’ she exclaimed, springing to her feet. ‘How can I? And anyway he’ll know by now. By now he’s on the watch again. Ugh! I’ll keep out of the whole mess. After all this, let me get you a drink.’

  Without awaiting yes or no, she went swiftly out of the room and presently returned from the direction of the kitchen carrying a bottle and two tumblers. ‘What do you like in yours?’ she said, without a glance at Madeleine. ‘I haven’t much in the way of dilutions. And the more dainty cocktail glasses seem to have got broken.’ Then as Madeleine shook her head and made as if to rise: ‘No? Why not? Do you mind if I do?’ She filled one tumbler half-way up with gin, swallowed half of that, and sat down with the glass in her hand. ‘It’s Rob’s, this bottle,’ she said. ‘But he won’t mind.’

  ‘I must go,’ said Madeleine. She got up.

  ‘Must you really?’ She looked aside for a moment, her eyes flicking as if blindly round the room. She drained the glass and wiped her lips on the back of her hand.

  ‘Unless,’ said Madeleine, ‘you’d like me to stay.’ Avoiding Dinah’s, her eyes went hunting for a focusing point and came to rest on a spot on the wall, on the drawing of Rickie.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, thank you.’

  ‘Will you—why don’t you come back with me? Come home. It would be quite all right, I’m alone. I’d like it so much. Please do. I don’t like …’

  Dinah’s eyes widened, came to dwell on her, a blank enormous look.

  ‘I think I’d rather not,’ she said after a moment. ‘Thanks all the same. I’ll be all right. I shall have a good sleep. Selby left me some more dope. That’s one blessing about being in the hands of a foreign medical man. He’s very free with it. I don’t make a habit of it, you know, but I like to know it’s available.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Madeleine nervously. ‘I’ve got something I take too—quite mild and harmless. At least I did when I was sleeping badly …’

  Suddenly, simultaneously, their ears began to strain. Someone started to come up the stairs: a free step, bounding, echoing. Then it was cut off. On the floor below, a door slammed.

  ‘Besides, he might come back any moment,’ said Dinah, rapidly, in an unreal voice.

  But Madeleine now was silent, biting back what rose, insistent, unformulated, to her lips. He won’t come back: don’t think it, get out of this: don’t let him … Words to that effect. And when presently the theme’s last variation, final resolution, broke out of Dinah, causing her to say:

  ‘But he knows, I suppose, there’s nothing to come back to. I’m nothing. It’s not him I want here. He’s known it all along …’—it was still impossible to answer.

  ‘Well, good-bye then,’ continued Dinah without getting up, without a smile. ‘Thank you for your kindness.’

  ‘There’s—isn’t there anything I can do?’

  ‘Well, actually yes,’ said Dinah, in the voice of one struck by a bright idea. ‘Could I touch you for a smacker? I’m stony broke, for the moment.’

  Eagerly, apologetically Madeleine dived into her handbag and laid on the table beside the gin bottle the contents of her wallet; five pounds.

  ‘All that? Sure you can spare it?’ said Dinah, squinting at the flame of the match with which she was lighting another cigarette. ‘Much obliged.’

  Making shame-faced for the door, Madeleine stopped. Something important had been forgotten. She strove to remember what it was; remembered.

  ‘I—there’s one thing. I shall never tell—anyone—anything about this. Not even that I ever did this—came to see you. I don’t want him—I very much don’t want it to be known. So far as I’m concerned it never will be. I swear it. I told you it was my own idea: it was. But I might be asked … Though I don’t think I will be. If you should ever be asked, would you—will you do the same?’

  Curt, final, Dinah’s answering nod dismissed her.

  And so far as she was concerned, the door that let her out, that shut in Dinah on that evening, had never been reopened. In her inward eye Dinah remained closeted, waiting for two, or for one, or for no one, with a sketch of Rickie to look at, and Rob’s bottle in her hand, and some pound notes of Madeleine’s that she would have picked up later and spent on drink perhaps, or perhaps used frugally as pocket money; or perhaps torn up and pulled the plug on. That was the last encounter until they had met across the death-bed in the Nursing Home, with Dinah in the flesh. She, Madeleine, had hurried down into the freedom of the streets and re-entered that sufficiently going concern, her home, leaving Dinah sealed off in her high-up, empty room. Even under sore temptation, she lay reminding herself, under the onslaught of Dinah’s last monstrous, so nearly victorious offensive, she had kept their pact unbroken; even at that pre-ultimate moment when she could have pushed Rickie like a voyeur to the keyhole, forced him to discern the ambiguous goings-on, the compromising positions: Dinah in the alcove, abandoned in a smother of red roses, tangled with a young man cold and shining; and an old one, hot, in a voluptuous dressing-gown.

  What had held her back? Loyalty to Dinah? Rickie?—to the fine codes and manners of an irremediable lady? Fear of Rickie?—Dinah?—of their contempt and m
ockery?—of playing straight into their hands, playing up Dinah’s mysterious duplicity, Rickie’s mysterious jealousy; his surrender, part appetite, part self-pity, to the innocent criminal, the drifting waif in her? Intuitive certainty that it was too late, that he had already slipped from her grasp, flowed out of the house, was being carried on or under a full flood tide towards that room awaiting him, even while the shell of him stood upright before her?

  Yes, all that had been enough, more than enough, to hold her back. It was only years later, in rooms with Jocelyn, that she guessed or suspected the possibility of another motive—the card up her sleeve she had always shut her eyes to guessing that she held: motive of profoundest self-protection, planted in still undirected impulse, rooted in a quite unacknowledged premonition: one day she too would find that traitor she was looking for, would require a concealed place in which to lay out with him what Rickie had given her to spend. Buying Dinah’s future silence with her own. Premonition … or willed event-to-be?

  And how had that ended, if it had ended, that affair of Dinah’s? What had Rickie known? What had become of Rob? What would become of herself and Jocelyn? Where was he at this moment? She had only to lift the receiver by her bed to reach him in London where he was spending the week-end. He was not going away, he had told her so. She could call him out of sleep—not yet, perhaps in two hours’ time. She imagined the number ringing, saw his crested head turn on the pillow, blinking, frowning, as if incredulous, his hand going out reluctant for the receiver. She heard his characteristic ‘Hello?’—cautious, appealing, musical. ‘It’s me,’ she would say, as usual. His voice would break into a smile, expand to welcome her. Perhaps round about eight o’clock … or nine … she would give herself this pleasure. Perhaps not? … Several times during the last year when he had declared his resolution to stay locked in his flat and get some work done, his plans had changed unexpectedly at the last moment: conscience pricking him, he had gone down on the spur of the moment (he had explained later) to stay with his boring married sister or his maniac father. Then the number rang, rang, rang, hollow, rasping her eardrum till the operator’s voice said briskly: ‘No reply.’ Horrible. More than once it had been worse in a sense than no reply. He had sounded—not pleased but the reverse: put out; had said: ‘I thought you weren’t going to telephone till this evening.’ Exasperated. ‘Yes, of course I want to talk to you, but I thought that’s what we arranged. You arranged it yourself.’ As if caught off his guard, claws out, a snarl before he could stop himself. She had been astounded, wounded, frightened most of all. After a period, long or short, of torture by silence, he had rung up penitent and cajoling with a plausible explanation: trouble in the office, one review scrapped by his editor, another promised not delivered in time for press, he had had to write both the damned things himself and rush them to the printers and then stay up nearly all night squaring the outraged inebriated contributors, both his friends.