The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘Lie down,’ she said.

  Obediently his body fell back, till his head rested on a cushion; still holding her, he stretched himself out along the rug. The wire springs sagged, grinding under their weight as he drew her down beside him.

  He fell asleep at once and she lay with her ear against his very slow heartbeat, listening to that and to his loud shallow breathing. With infinite precaution she managed to loosen his tie, undid his collar, pulled it from beneath the back of his neck. After about fifteen minutes he woke up with a little groan, part apologetic protest, part relief.

  ‘Darling, have I been asleep? Sorry. Manners.’ He raised his head a few inches to look at her, touched her cheek with his lips, said: ‘Beautiful,’ and lay down again.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘If you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you take my collar off? Thank you. Clever girl. What a couch to lie down on with my love.’

  ‘You chose it. Would you rather move?’

  ‘Sh! No.’ He shook her shoulder lightly. ‘If you don’t mind. Poor Georgie. Horrid rough blankets for you. Pretend we’re on the battlefield.’

  ‘We are.’

  They turned towards one another, exchanging words of endearment against one another’s lips. But before long he broke the trance in which they were beginning to lapse together, turned away from her again and lay on his back, staring sombrely at the ceiling.

  ‘What is to be done?’ he said.

  She felt, or heard, his heart beginning to race as if in nervous anxiety, like an inexperienced boy, and put her hand on it, letting a moment or two go by before making a sound of soothing query.

  ‘I want,’ he said, his voice hard, toneless, ‘to make love to you more than anything in the world. But you won’t be able to believe it. Because also I want not to. So what is to be done?’

  She laughed softly to reassure him and to cover her mixed feelings.

  ‘How can I answer questions that don’t make sense? If you want me to say I do believe it, I will; and that I understand why not, I will. There! It’s said, it’s meant. Forget it. Only stay with me. Everything is all right.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ he said gratefully, at once relaxed, responsive. ‘You won’t—you’ll let it be? You won’t explain me to me?’

  She shook her head. It was her turn to sigh, but too inaudibly for him to hear.

  ‘When I opened the door and saw you,’ she said, ‘that moment, there was nothing left for me to want. Was coming back an impulse? Or is that part of what I’m not to ask?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He rubbed his nose vaguely with one hand, pushed his fingers through and through his hair, till it stood up in a crest. All his gestures and inflexions had suddenly become young, spontaneous, confiding. ‘Oh, the moment I’d gone, I wanted to come back. I suppose I knew I would really, but …’

  ‘The doctor, you saw him? What did he say?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see him. He must have left, there wasn’t any answer.’

  ‘Oh dear …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Though I do feel rather bad on his account. I went back to my flat in case he’d telephoned a message, but he hadn’t.’

  ‘You’ve got a flat?’

  ‘Oh, just a beastly thing in a warren off Russell Square. I share it with another chap who comes and goes, like me.’

  ‘You come and go.’

  ‘Well, I’m sometimes away, and sometimes on night duty.’ He yawned. ‘Thank God, not to-night.’

  ‘Thank God I’m not fire-watching either.’

  ‘Do you wear a tin hat? I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘Did you have some supper?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t hungry. I had a sort of gnawing, so I drank a glass of milk. My intake of milk these last seven years or so would float a battleship.’

  ‘It hasn’t made you fat. I wish I could look after you. I’d cook for you—so well, too. Won’t you come and stay with me?’

  His arm tightened its clasp around her shoulder, slackened. She thought she heard him utter another rapid: ‘Sh!’ After a moment she said:

  ‘So after that, what did you do?’

  ‘I went out again. I walked … I was trying to decide—I couldn’t. I simply started walking across London in your direction, hoping for a sign. I was just about to turn into your street or pass it without turning when the Warning went. So I did turn, double quick.’

  ‘That was the sign?’ It was half a question.

  He said in a helpless way: ‘I couldn’t bear to think of you alone. But after I had rung the bell I was terrified. With no light showing, one never knows … You might have gone out. Or guessed it was me and been too cross to let me in. Did you guess?’

  ‘Yes. I knew. I was lying down, and the Warning woke me; and then I began to expect you. I was certain you would come—but I still cannot believe it. I thought men never came back of their own accord. I thought they went for good. Not that I was thinking in those terms—they had no relevance.’

  ‘Why hadn’t they?’

  ‘Because I had entirely relinquished you.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said at once, in simple agreement.

  ‘You might have waited for the rest of your life. I would never have called you back.’

  ‘Ah, the rest of my life …’

  She raised her head to discover his expression. His lips, whose sensuous distinctive modelling had long been stamped, like an obsession, upon her tactile memory, looked peaceful and severe. He gazed at the ceiling with transparent eyes that seemed to her unfathomable.

  ‘Procrastination comes natural to me,’ he said, as if puzzled, or impressed. ‘So this sort of current running so strong, all of a sudden, the other way …’

  ‘Do you think it’s ominous?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t help wondering.’

  ‘You mean to-night? Here? Both of us?’ Her arms tightened round him and an icy sweat broke out on her and trickled over her stomach, down her back. Next moment the uproar of guns burst over them, enveloped them to roll them round and round, as she thought, against the inner side of a roaring giant funnel, a Wall of Death on which they were to circle, pinned, till in a thunder of suffocation, pulped obliteration, any moment …

  But: ‘No,’ he was saying, patting her shoulder, his voice level above the fading reverberating snarl as if he had barely noticed it. ‘No. Don’t be afraid, darling. We’re not going to be killed.’

  At once the trap became a private fantasy, ignoble. She said, slightly abashed:

  ‘I’m not generally so scared. I’ve been in it alone and with strangers and with friends and acquaintances—and never much doubted I would survive. It ought to seem like a pushover now we’re together, but it doesn’t. I’ve never felt responsible for lives before: yours, mine because of you. They are too precious to be lost.’

  He turned his head on the pillow to look at her and smile; yet, at the elliptical angle from which she watched him, the structure of his face seemed to express more of austerity than tenderness, his almost closed eyelids less of union than of separation, distance. Her fear started again; different, aching, like a pang of labour.

  ‘I had a very silent uncle,’ he said presently. ‘A queer old chap, a bachelor. He used to come for long visits and I don’t remember that he ever spoke. Till one day he arrived unexpectedly at tea time, and his tongue was loosened. And instead of being cramped and sour, he was a dear amiable old buffer with a chuckle. He never stopped, it was a perfect torrent … Mamma was alarmed; she thought he was drunk. And then she thought he must be sickening for something. He must have been. He died a few days later.’

  She swallowed, waited; her voice shrank as she asked:

  ‘What is it you are feeling?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ T
hen flippantly: ‘Couldn’t rightly say, and that’s a fact. Don’t know no more than the dead.’ He put his free hand up, spread out his fingers and examined them. He had a strong, finely turned hand that never looked less than conspicuously clean.

  She cried: ‘But this always had to be!’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘This—us. I told you. You knew it too. You told me, you said you had to come back.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose so. Yes.’

  She told herself that the fight was not over after all; that she was losing ground.

  ‘Only it’s strange still,’ she said. ‘It is for me, too. We can’t be expected to get accustomed to it yet.’

  He made a patent effort, saying: ‘It’s more …’ then checked himself.

  ‘Tell me, if you can.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly strange. It all seems—sort of inevitable. But so peculiar. More than anything else, a feeling amounting to conviction that—that I can’t afford to wait.’

  ‘Is it—does it seem to be—connected with me—with us, this feeling?’

  ‘Could it be?’ he asked apologetically; adding: ‘Poor Georgie. You see what an unsatisfactory lover I should have been.’

  Now she was seized with such petrifying apprehension that her heart missed a beat. Regretful, helpless, he was offering her himself in the past indicative; he was asking her to accept him in that tense.

  ‘This trance,’ he said, ‘I’ve been in such a horrible long time …’

  ‘And now you feel it’s broken …’

  ‘Well, something like that.’

  The stone in her chest contracted, bled out a heavy drop. There was nothing to share, but she must follow his experience; shadow him while he moved about in worlds not realized.

  ‘I love you,’ she said; an uninflected affirmation, disregarded, whether heard or no.

  ‘It’s like bracing up for the high dive. Were you ever simply unable to go? Getting to the edge—but you can’t: you find suddenly you’re nothing but a hollow cylinder stood upright, you’ve left your impetus behind you. You can feel yourself still attached to it, but separated from it, which is such a humiliating feeling that you can’t look back. You teeter on the edge, and rock the board a bit to test the spring, and lean out a fraction pretending to mark the exact spot where you mean to hit the water: all this by way of preliminary for the great dramatic moment, the dive of your life, of all time … But you’re paralysed: head first or a jump feet first equally inconceivable. Not even the nasty expectation of a belly flop: simply, the water has become so huge, so deep and dark, so infinitely far away … and you have become so—weightless, an object without gravity … Nobody, nothing is what’s down there where you were just about to launch yourself. You’ve realized it in the nick of time. No sensible chap would risk even bouncing the bloody springboard. So you stand dead still, with your hands on your hips: a balanced chap in a calm attitude … entirely impotent.’

  Another volley of gunfire opened out beyond his cut-off voice: this time more distant, less dangerous, more ominous.

  ‘But now you’ve gone?’

  Faint, dizzy, downward, she shot his endless arc with him; yet stayed rooted at the point of his departure, seeing him wheel and vanish.

  ‘I didn’t go. I mean, there wasn’t a moment of going but it seemed to happen.’ He paused, corrected the statement, as if intent on accuracy. ‘It seems to have happened. If that makes sense. I suppose not.’ The snort he gave, part helpless, part self-mocking, brought him once more just within her orbit. ‘Can you imagine it at all?’

  ‘Of course I can.’

  He said rather crossly: ‘Where am I then?’

  ‘Inside yourself.’

  ‘Oh, am I?’ He considered. ‘Well, I never! … It seems to me more like—I don’t know … Being in space. Too much of it.’

  ‘It’s that too. Don’t worry. It’s real.’

  ‘How do you mean, real? You could call madness real. But I don’t feel mad. Madmen never do, do they?’

  ‘You’re not mad.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said defiantly. ‘I was mad once—or on the verge of it. I got back by the skin of my teeth.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oddly enough, that night when we first met.’

  She nodded; and he said sharply: ‘Why do you nod? I suppose it’s no surprise to you—you’re such a clever girl. Or was it fairly obvious?’

  ‘No. But I couldn’t help—recognizing you, the moment I met you. I fell in love with you, if you prefer that term.’

  He pulled one arm from beneath her shoulder, crossed it with the other behind his head and lay silent, looking backwards into what, as she lay beside him, was only communicated darkness.

  But he was seeing clearly: himself and party—late party, the latest place, place of lugubrious eroticism, sexily spot-lit, shaded, choking with fatigue and expensively procured hangovers and cigarette stubs, with vacuous puppets shuffling to the compulsive whipped-up rhythms of impotence. Suddenly in the thick of all these ambiguities, graffiti, innuendoes, he saw Sex; and he was terrified, though he concealed it. But She recognized him; and picking him out from the whole gaping roomful made him sing Sex with her in the old cavern of her mouth. Everybody sniggered. So after that there was nothing for it but to flog himself round and around the dance floor. He was half shouldering, half dragging a lead sarcophagus: he was inside, crammed in, preserving himself. No collision could jar his shrinking flesh through that dull thickness; no filthy sight, sound, stench offend him through so much opacity and weight. All the same he gasped, he ached, he burst with groans. He must set it down, must be set down; he must be disconnected. He became disconnected. He was now an automaton, a man-machine, enabled to record but not to correlate, let alone feel, a variety of sensory impressions. For instance, two curiosities: Madeleine stretched a peahen neck and pecked at his dry heart. The wrenched-off head of Dinah swirled away, a papier mâché mask washed down by never-to-be-wept torrential tears. Avoiding trapdoors, trick mirrors, dummies—particularly a jigging Negro drummer with a conniving leer—pretty obscene that one, even for a show like this—he stalked out into the crooked streets all shadowing his shadow, or running ahead of it to lose it.

  ‘No,’ he said loudly in Georgie’s ear, ‘that couldn’t have gone on. I’d have had to end it. It was touch and go.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  He laughed to himself. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed when I left the party …’

  ‘I did notice.’

  ‘I went to look for someone.’

  ‘Dinah.’

  ‘Yes, Dinah.’ He dropped the name out simply, in absent-minded corroboration. ‘But I didn’t find her. I mean she wasn’t where I—I’d got it into my head she still might be.’

  She said after a pause: ‘Well, that makes one appreciable difference.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t find her that time. You did find me, this time.’

  ‘Oh, I see … Oh, but the whole thing was different. That was all a nightmare. I was only tracking down the cause, the core of it because I bloody well had to: that’s what you do in a nightmare. In fact I was relieved in a way when I found she’d gone. The sheer emptiness gave me something to hold on to. I mean I saw everything was so to speak in order, just as I’d thought when I left her earlier the same evening—until this explosion, brainstorm, started up.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘Oh, then …’ He sighed rather helplessly, like a questioned child. ‘I went home and apologized to my wife for behaving like a cad. She was very nice about it—extraordinarily nice. I got into bed with her in the end. The result of that was Clarissa.’

  ‘You must have been tickled to death.’

  ‘We were rather. Though a thought disconcerted.’

  He sound
ed sardonically amused. She scrutinized the picture so trustingly presented: confession, reconciliation, gratification in its somehow comic outcome: a ruefully intimate, caught-out, philoprogenitive couple. Later perhaps, when the two-way time traffic in possessiveness had begun, it might be that such satiric outlines would grow human, all too human, such innocence be called in question. Better to find out now what she had often asked herself.

  ‘Do you still go to bed together?’

  ‘Oh no, never. In fact,’ he added with detachment, ‘after that occasion by tacit consent we turned it in. It was never a star turn—my fault, I expect. We were too young when we married. Poor Madeleine.’

  ‘Has she had lovers?’

  ‘One—I think only one. She’s had one for—oh, some years. At least, I believe it still goes on. She never mentioned it to you?’

  ‘She did tell me someone had been a support—no names—that time I went down after Anthony was killed. I didn’t ask questions. She’s kind of reserved by nature, isn’t she? Or else she has never trusted me. That was the time she asked me to see you as often as I could.’

  ‘Did she indeed?’ He raised his eyebrows, mildly surprised.

  ‘She was worried about you being lonely.’

  He remained silent; and presently she said:

  ‘You don’t mind about this lover?’

  ‘No. I’m glad she’s got someone to keep her cheerful. I can’t do anything.’ He sounded rather fretful. ‘I don’t know the chap—it’s a different world—he might not be quite my cup of tea. Not that that is essential in one’s wife’s lover. The accent, I gather, is on culture— lots of slim vols in the house now; and classical gramophone records. Very nice, of course, no harm in it at all. Clarissa thoroughly approves: it seems it was due to his coaching that she was top last term in Musical Appreciation. So she told me. She flourishes his name about with almost tedious lack of inhibition: I dare say that’s normal. Colin used to mention him a good deal too—he doesn’t any more. That’s normal too, I dare say. He was Colin’s contribution in the first place, you see—he was keen on Bach fugues, like Colin. Poor boy.’ Still the note of irritation predominated. ‘Oh, I don’t want to poke my nose in—let alone inspect the chap personally. I only hope he won’t let her down, that’s all. Don’t know why he should …’ He jerked his hands apart from beneath his head and started picking at paint blisters on the wall beside him. ‘I feel it’s none of my business,’ he finally declared, ‘and yet I feel responsible. You may think it a conventional point of view, but I’d feel happier if he seemed to want to marry her … if they’d sounded me, at least, about a divorce. Of course they may have excellent reasons for not doing so. Principles. I doubt it somehow.’