The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘Don’t quibble.’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘But we are never to be together?’

  ‘No,’ he said very low.

  ‘I can think of reasons, but I want to know your reasons.’

  He said with the stiff severity of a youth: ‘I’m sorry to be tiresome, but you are Jack’s wife.’

  He looked sadly at her bent head with large blue eyes that repudiated, admitted and deplored his hint of moral criticism.

  ‘You think I forget it,’ she said presently.

  ‘No, no,’ he hastened to say. ‘At least, no—but you seem—I don’t know … you make it difficult.’

  ‘Difficult to remember?’

  ‘Yes. For me, I mean,’ he muttered.

  ‘Oddly enough,’ she said, lifting her head to smile at him, ‘the first time of meeting you was the first time, for me, of having to remember that I was Jack’s wife. Can you recall that dinner party?’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘The first time,’ she said, ‘of looking at one another and saying good-bye. Not that you took that in—or not for more than a moment. You were all in pieces. But I was happy, whole—or so I thought. You were a terrible shock for me: like having a bad accident at the start of a hopeful journey. Just my darned luck, I thought.’

  ‘That was a hellish evening.’ A spasm of distaste twitched his forehead. Then he added in a naïve way, as if recalling a simple moment of astonishment: ‘There was a moment at dinner when I suddenly found myself wishing I could go to bed with you. I do remember that. But I thought that was just one more sign I was going off my head. I wasn’t drunk.’

  She turned round again as if to examine the decorous Lilliputian Arcadia disposed upon the mantelshelf; and speaking into it said presently:

  ‘When I first married I was seventeen. My husband was a boy from my home town—we were a small-town boy and girl in Georgia. He turned out to be an alcoholic. In the end he shot himself. It sounds too glib and fictional, doesn’t it?—the story’s turning itself out at mass-production level. Afterwards I went to New York and starved for a while before I started to get on my feet. By the time I met Jack I was a girl on her own who had made good. I was running a radio serial feature and editing a Personal Problems page on a women’s magazine—answers to intimate female queries—you know, the up-to-date psychological angle. I was also having another tough time in my private life: the man whose mistress I had been for five glorious years had just walked out on me. Well, what he had done was to find Salvation: he had turned R.C. and re-married the wife he had divorced. And the result was that all my jerry-built superstructure of being an independent career-woman with a successful love life on the side began to crack. I wanted to throw my hand in—resign: anything for security, for a reliable protector. And Jack seemed sent by the Lord for just that purpose. The good Lord was as sorry for me as I was for myself, so he sent me Jack. I never have understood why Jack fell for me, but he truly did. Instinct told me to grab him, I was on to a good thing. I grabbed him. And then, you know …’ She stopped, brooded, continued with no alteration of her flat, narrative tone: ‘Something new began to happen to me. The cause of it was Jack’s sheer goodness. For the first time in my life I got a notion to try cutting out the thing in myself that was my enemy—the hard core of being always on the make … also in the know, because I was so smart—a real smart girl always a jump ahead. And then so honest in my dealings: whatever they were, their honesty never could be called in question. From my vantage point of drawing dividends on Jack’s investments—that’s really what it amounted to, though of course it was all wrapped up in fancy wrappings—from being a profiteer I began, as I said …’ She broke off again, frowning, then faintly smiled: ‘Did you ever read The Woodlanders?’ Do you remember the last page—Marty alone in the churchyard, speaking to her lover in his grave: “You was a good man and did good things”? When I read it just a few years back I thought that could be written on Jack’s tombstone. I had come to see how real he was—his kindness real, his loyalty, his sense of honour. Looked at one way, he is quite a tough old battle-axe; but he has what most people don’t have—he has a developed heart. He doesn’t need to watch it or take thought to educate it, as I do: which means that mine is naturally an inferior organ. His works like a kind of intelligence through all his actions. Well, you know all this. You are one of his oldest friends.’

  He nodded; said after a pause: ‘Exactly.’ He gave her averted cheek and lowered eyelids the same look as formerly—watchful, measuring her with pupils shrunk to pin-points. ‘Since you know all the reasons, and express them so admirably besides, why have you got to try and drag them out of me?’

  ‘They are not the last words,’ she said. ‘Not to my mind.’

  ‘Well, they are to mine. I’m not prepared to prove to our satisfaction—yours and mine—that if we did him an injury he would be magnanimous. Or is he not to find out? Or if he does, is he to be lied to? Or am I to say to him: “It’s only too true, old chap. I knew you would forgive us.”’

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ she said quickly. ‘He’d not forgive anyone a dirty trick. I’ve managed not to put him to the test, but I’m sure of it. He’s got an edge inside him that cuts through mess. His first wife was a tricky little bitch, if you remember. When he discovered it he cleared her out. No, I’d never play common tricks on Jack.’

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said, curt. ‘There’s nothing I need add.’

  She went on musingly: ‘He’s not worldly enough to be a shrewd picker; it’s too bad, considering he’s a born husband. Almost any woman he truly concentrated on would be apt to forget within six months that she had ever had a maiden name. But he picked me. Even after I began to feel committed, I still had to go on remembering to make acts of surrendering my bachelor life. I haven’t a generous nature … And then not belonging to the Club …’

  ‘What Club?’

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, suddenly bitter and impatient, ‘the Club of all of you!’

  ‘What do you mean? Were we unwelcoming? Surely we couldn’t have been. We all took to you like—like hot cakes.’

  ‘Oh, you were all very kind. I can’t say you were high-hat. None of you made me feel you were deliberately withholding any initiation rites. And I’m not unteachable: I learned to be a respectable Honorary Member. But what used to rile me’—again her voice swelled indignantly—‘was the assumption, the unquestioning assumption, the Best Club attitude of mind, the lack of curiosity about … I may as well say it, about me, what I was, where I came from …’ She checked herself. ‘I’m not including Jack, of course: any moment Jack might have made—might make—a dignified decision to resign. And you were never included. The moment I saw you I felt naturally more at home with you than anyone. Because there was something about you that suggested …’

  ‘What?’ he asked stiffly.

  ‘That something was going on in you that might end in your being—well, requested to resign.’

  ‘Was that your well-known perspicacity? Or were you briefed? I suppose so.’

  ‘No. At least, not till later. But I wasn’t referring to that. That’s too particular for what I mean. I mean something intrinsic, general—the same as in me.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. Enough, he thought, of this web-spinning round and round the nature of his nature: why must she so persist? Since it had been agreed that there was nothing to be added, why did he feel that she still held a skein and was coming closer and closer, deviously winding? Yet he saw her looking up at him with an uncertain smile; a vulnerable creature, sad, young … as he had now and then caught Dinah looking at him in those far-off days when, confronting her in one of their blind alleys, he had found her weaponless, against the wall.

  ‘Were you lonely?’ He felt irrationally remorseful, as if realizing too late a responsibility he should have shouldered.

  ‘Yes. Sometime
s. But that was inevitable, in the circumstances. People like me never manage to get planted. Wherever one goes, even if one settles down, even if one is protected, one is always aware of something one is deprived of—one’s sense of the past perhaps, one’s own instinctive one. The instinct of other people for it can be understood, but not incorporated. Children would have helped, but I didn’t have any. Other people’s children did not help. As far as Jack’s relations are concerned, I have gone on being the foreign woman, divorced—and barren.’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about in-laws,’ he protested with anxiety. ‘They’re a problem everybody has. Not that I speak from experience. Mine were angelic, I adored them.’

  ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he hastened to say. ‘No indeed. At least he is, not she—Madeleine’s mother. I can’t think why I used the past tense—except that I’ve seen her so rarely—oh, for years now, worse luck. I love her as much as ever and I think she … But you see, it got awkward. She being Dinah’s mother too.’

  The silence seemed to hum between them. Georgie said finally:

  ‘That’s the one name I have never heard you speak before.’

  ‘Well, it’s out at last.’ A flush ran over his face. ‘Oh yes, it was murder.’

  ‘Poor Rickie.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘It doesn’t trouble you any more?’

  ‘Oh—yes and no. No, never. Yes, always, for ever. But …’ Again he shrugged his shoulders; adding in a light hard voice: ‘I’m simply inadequate. Perhaps as a result. Or perhaps—more probably—as you suggest, my inadequacy was the prime cause. I’ve often felt it was.’

  ‘Everybody is inadequate.’

  ‘Some more than others. And some who are don’t care to admit it. So these crimes get themselves committed.’

  His colour had faded, leaving him so ashen that she exclaimed:

  ‘Rickie, what about that doctor? You should go.’

  ‘Yes, I should.’ He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘I shall be exactly one hour and a half late.’

  ‘Shall I call him?’

  ‘No, don’t bother. Georgie, good-bye.’ This time he drew her into his arms, clasped her close and kissed her lips. ‘Little one, precious,’ he said, ‘forgive me. You mustn’t think I don’t remember some things—just a few. I always shall.’

  ‘Would one of them be …’ Heavily she sighed, her face hidden on his shoulder.

  ‘Be what?’ He drew her closer, with a sort of desperation that gave her the impression of being asked to help him in his resolution of silence. She went on, however:

  ‘That day in 1940, you sent me to the country, and I wouldn’t promise to stay there. Do you remember why I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Drawing apart from him she said: ‘It does seem only like a string of words, the way things have gone. But it also is a grain of comfort that words don’t always quite disappear. Well, take them away with you again. I said I wouldn’t promise, because a promise made to you I would always have to keep.’

  ‘God bless you, Georgie. Then will you, won’t you promise …’ She looked at him, expectant; but with a sharp intake of breath he shook his head.

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ he said in a distraught way. ‘At least, if I can. I’ll try.’

  ‘I am not to ask when?’

  ‘It won’t be so long this time. It shan’t be.’

  But now everything, these sighs, his staring look, his tone of distraction seemed to her suddenly hollow and theatrical. She saw him gone already, tearing down the street. She covered her face with her hands and her voice came through them thin and elegiac.

  ‘Ah, it’s no use. We are back at the beginning. That day at Kew was out of time, I suppose. We knew we were lovers then, didn’t we? But we never will be lovers. And I don’t want anything else with you. I never did—you know that, don’t you? At Kew there was no need to say it. I thought the only reason why we didn’t go home together that night after that day was that we were war-time casualties of love, we had no place to go. You living at your club, and I … Perhaps you don’t remember, do you?—walking half over London in the blackout after supper, taking me back to that God-awful flat I was sharing then with Jack’s romping great clown of a niece in the Ministry of Food. We knew it must end at my front door with her sitting up for me, you bet, in her Jaeger dressing-gown the other side of it; but that only made it more credible, more true to life—to the human condition. At least, I said that, you just nodded; and then you said, was the human condition always frustration then? And I said yes, but could be like The Three Sisters or that story The Dead—the kind that starts echoes afterwards, backwards and forwards for ever wherever you strike it—one echo picking up another till the whole thing sounds out like a fulfillment … I said I would move soon into a house, and you said good, please do. I know you went abroad soon after; you called me to tell me so. I said you would have my address when you got back. I wrote it to you but you didn’t answer. As time went on it occurred to me you might have decided to run out on me. Believe it or not, I was incredulous. I called you twice at your office, but you were out; I left my name but you didn’t call me back. I thought: well that’s the pay-off. But when I came up the steps this evening and saw you standing there, I thought at last you had come back, at last. It was all so blindingly simple again—to myself, I mean. But things don’t happen like that, we know. As well they don’t, you’ll say. You don’t need to remark what a lot of grief and pain has been saved all round: if you do I shall never forgive you. Don’t come back. I don’t want to give you news of my husband or hear how your wife is. When I listen to us shooting that line I want to say: “Mind your own treacheries, and I’ll mind mine.” How dare you offer them to me so blandly, trying to force me to agree they are acceptable? You trust me unwarrantably, Rickie: I was not at your public school. Now listen—you can listen, what I am telling you is posthumous. I have always been in love with you. I don’t want an affair with you. I want to live with you. Now go.’

  She listened to the sound of the front door closing after him, swerved sharply to prevent herself from seeing him go past the window, ran upstairs and fell upon the bed. She lay there prone, her eyes upon the ceiling, her arms along her thighs, legs straight, feet crossed; withdrawn into her own stripped outline and making herself an effigy, formally pure, anonymous, inviolably exposed among the tasteless crowding intimacies of the life of another woman: life of an old sterile woman, she thought bitterly, who has jettisoned these fragments of her human history and run away to save her fruitless skin.

  She said aloud, with pride: ‘At least I did not save my pride.’

  The night came down, nothing flowed in to fill her emptiness, she dozed; started awake with the howl of the sirens in her ears. She waited for the guns but nothing followed. An immense silence swung her off the bed and on to her feet while she still lay flat, without a movement, and in darkness; and in intent expectancy. Presently she heard what she was waiting for: someone’s rapid footsteps, louder, louder on the pavement, stopping at her door. Someone rang the bell, a long imperious peal. She was downstairs ahead of her own conscious impetus, and opened the door to Rickie.

  Under the narrow downward shaft of light from the shrouded electric bulb in the ceiling they confronted one another. She saw the sweat on his forehead: this and something fauve in the aura emanating from him made her think of a fugitive, a hunted animal. But there was no panic in his voice and no appeal when he said after an immeasurable moment:

  ‘I had to come back.’

  It was a statement, definite, unemphatic. The slant of the light obscured his eyes, so that she had the impression of being scrutinized by two scooped-out sockets under the brow’s wide faintly illumined ledge.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she breathed. ‘Not expected.’

  He shook his head, t
hen nodded, with a kind of indrawn sigh. The house began to vibrate—tremor of falling bombs?—or distant gun-fire? … He took her by the shoulder, and swung her round, pushing her firmly backwards with him.

  ‘Come along down at once,’ he ordered her. ‘It may well be about to be very noisy. Where’s your basement? Lead the way.’

  She went before him down a short twisting flight of stairs to the room from which earlier in the evening she had emerged by way of the area to greet him. Groping, holding him by the hand, saying, ‘Mind your head, it’s a low ceiling,’ she drew him to the far inner corner and switched on a brass table-lamp fitted with a faded green silk shade and set on a brown tin trunk beside a camp-bed piled with old rugs, and topped with a couple of cushions in holland covers.

  ‘Dismal, as you see,’ she said. ‘Enormous locked receptacles for skeletons and camphor. Look at that parrot cage. And those volumes of God knows what I cannot even lift. It should all be obliterated; but not with me underneath it, please the Lord.’

  She sat down on the bed and watched him pace to and fro examining his surroundings in his customary padding noiseless way. He put a hand up and knocked on the ceiling with his knuckles; frowned; stepped over to the area door that stood ajar, pushed it wide open, stooped to peer out, drew back again.

  ‘You act like a sanitary inspector. Leave that door open, you must. It’s my escape hatch.’

  He brushed some flakes of plaster off his jacket and came and sat down beside her on the bed.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she said.

  Without a word he put an arm round her, drawing her to lean against him till her forehead rested against his cheek. Presently with his free hand he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face. She felt him tremble.

  ‘You are shivering,’ she said. ‘This vault … Why do we stay here? Please let’s go upstairs.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not yet, we’re better off here, honestly. And anyway …’

  She heard what he had left unspoken: the necessity he was under to take no more thought or action. He had reached her by a hair’s breadth.