The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘She told you she’d been borrowing?’

  ‘No, not that.’ He started pacing again, the glum look heavy on his face. ‘She wouldn’t let on. When I raised the subject she sort of set her lips and thanked me with great formality—said she was managing perfectly well. But Edwards told me she took to borrowing from Selbig. That was so incredibly unlike her—nothing could have brought it home to me more disagreeably that …’ He stopped.

  ‘She’d folded up?’

  ‘Mm. Given up hope. Demoralized. I felt quite sick.’

  She rolled over on to her side and lay with one elbow propping her cheek, in a meditative attitude.

  ‘And in the end?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, in the end his nerves got bad. Somehow he didn’t fancy telling her to clear out, but she got him down so he started walking in his sleep—or talking, I forget which. They’d certainly left him with a sense of grievance, those broken nights of his. But the very end of it was he got browned off again. Cut the painter. Did a bunk. She’d bought it, hadn’t she? … Bought it, paid for it, wrapped it up and taken it home.’

  ‘Did he leave her there?’

  ‘He left her fast asleep. Very sensible I think, don’t you? She might have made a scene.’

  ‘Leaving her with Dr Selbig,’ she said reflectively.

  ‘Yes. He was there I suppose. History doesn’t relate.’ He sat down again listlessly, scratched his head. ‘As you know when he finally came back there was no room, no Dinah and no Selbig … The only thing that goes on bothering me is …’ He brooded.

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Whether that might have been what she came to tell me, that last time. Whether it had already bust and she needed help and I—failed to make it possible for her to say so. She looked … I think there was something on her mind—more even than could be accounted for by the obvious awkwardness of the occasion. I left her in a taxi to be taken to wherever she told the driver. She wouldn’t tell me … merely said she was expected back, there was someone waiting for her.’

  An infinite boredom seemed to be invading him.

  ‘Maybe there was,’ said Georgie, still propped on one elbow. ‘I should think probably.’

  ‘Ah well …’ He yawned. ‘It’s not a fruitful subject for conjecture. If she was in straits there was Dr Selbig, as you say. Perhaps he looked after her. I hope so.’

  ‘The missing link,’ said Georgie.

  He looked at her vaguely, puzzled; and she went on slowly: ‘The one person she could go to after you left her. No one you need be jealous of. I guess that wasn’t Mr Robert Edwards she had in mind.’

  Not light, but a look of nullity, collapse, smoothed his face suddenly. He said without apparent curiosity: ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Don’t be mad at me,’ she pleaded.

  ‘She’s putting up another candidate,’ he remarked, ignoring her, addressing himself or no one. ‘Selbig the missing link, not Edwards … Well, she may be right. I hadn’t thought of it. Or had I? No. But she’s a clever girl … It wouldn’t be singular, would it, if such a clever girl was right?’

  She lay down again flat on her back.

  ‘I haven’t been lying here,’ she said after a silence, ‘with my subtle smile, seeing it all quite clear from the beginning; casting my line and seeing you swallow the bait. It’s just that I’m … Oh, can’t you see? I have to feel the pull, I’m hooked as well as you. Tied up in all the lines. Oh, I pray I never meet her! I’d be too tempted to wind her in.’

  His mouth opened; but as if something in her voice had suggested second thoughts, or an attempt at making contact, he said quite kindly: ‘There’d be no need.’

  ‘My needs are not yours, alas for me. Never mind all that.’

  He hesitated, looking at her now.

  ‘You think she had this foreign chap in tow?’ His tone conveyed open-mindedness. ‘Got him up her sleeve perhaps, all the time?’

  ‘Perhaps. But you know what a stickler I am for my own hunches. Total sceptic about other people’s. Or maybe it can just be put down to wish-fulfilment. It would seem more on the side of life, if you understand—kind of counter-defeatest more … Well, let’s say more natural. Whether it turned out an asset or not I wouldn’t know, but I guess she had something more positive than Edwards in the bag when she went to Stepney.’

  It was her turn to address herself to no one in particular. She put her arms behind her head and lay with her eyelids almost closed; as he had seen Dinah lie a hundred times.

  ‘I place myself in her shoes,’ she presently continued. ‘Re-united with you on that shore … situation fraught with happiness, intensest happiness … All the same, not a situation to give her total confidence. She was a girl in a precarious position. She had had it proved to her—not once but twice—that she was one of that class of girl that is rejectable: acceptable until getting on for zero hour, but then rejectable. She was to have it proved to her a third and a fourth time; but twice is enough to make any girl suspect she may have to scratch for good from the mixed doubles. Or put it another way … That going together to the seaside the way you did, that was not—life-like—was it?’

  ‘I suppose it was pretty crazy,’ he said, conceding the point dejectedly but fully. ‘Like everything we did. Considered as a piece of folly it was certainly a high spot.’

  He stopped abruptly, startled by what had suddenly appeared to him: the figure of a girl in a bright blue cotton frock, bare-legged, honey-brown, streaming with wind and sunlight, turning to hold up a bunch of wild flowers: tiny split-second image seen through a stereoscopic lens. ‘Quite mad. Mad, bad … And considered as …’ But once again he stopped, hearing the words just uttered circling her vanished image as they left his lips. Sad … mad … bad … sweet … An entrail-piercing cry, like seagulls.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Georgie, putting her hands up and pressing her eyeballs hard with her finger-tips. ‘Like our Kew Gardens, if you will forgive the analogy. Not for human nature’s daily food. She knew it, you knew it, both of you: you were compelled to say so: though you would have preferred more delicacy. If you lost, you were still—not unacceptable, to someone, as a partner. But she had nothing, no one: not Edwards—he’s not in the match at all—or not playing on any court anywhere she knows of. He’d disappeared. Not Edwards: not her sister … If this girl is to survive,—and she will survive, she’s a determined girl, she hasn’t lost her passion for adventure—she must go on, further and further, to get—oh, anywhere near home again.’

  ‘You’re very cryptic,’ he said wearily. ‘I can’t say I follow.’

  ‘Well, let me see … In that conversation you spoke to me of having, that kind—deep questioning—men wish women would refrain from, you were admitting to one another, weren’t you, your secret knowledge that you—hadn’t reached, together, the—the point of no return? In case of need—and the need was a sad certainty—you would go out separately, by different emergency exits. You had yours in reserve. And she had hers. It’s only my hunch, as I told you, backed with a little circumstantial evidence, that Selbig was her point of no return. Something, someone, final to fall back on. Not a substitute lover. Maybe a kind of father figure? I’m only suggesting it. We realize that’s what he was to Edwards. Protector, admired comforter, one true friend. Maybe it’s purely subjective and irrelevant, but I keep on investing his personality with mystic symbols: The everlasting Arms, The Hound of Heaven … Waiting. Shadowing them—in and out of the picture, in and out of the room—Dinah as well as Edwards. If that makes him even more of a mystery, even more unreal than before as a person, it seems to me to make his rôle—this rôle I am assigning him—more possible, more plausible. The one person left for her to go to. His crazy set-up the place where one thing anyway was certain: she’d get off the merry-go-round for good.’

  She opened her eyes and sat up, then swung her legs down to the floor and sat on
the edge of the bed to search under it for her bedroom slippers. Fallen beside one of them lay a piece of folded paper; the letter from Rob Edwards. Let drop absent-mindedly by Rickie? Forgotten about? … She screened it carefully with one bare foot; heard him remark, from a long way off, over his shoulder:

  ‘Be done with love, you mean.’ His voice was hard and flat.

  ‘Oh, that would be too sweeping: though I guess at the time she may have felt that that would be salvation. I just mean one kind of love: passion … Romantic love, perhaps. We do know, don’t we, that though she never came back, in the end she was all right—she made a happy marriage?’

  Thrusting her foot beneath the bed, she touched the dropped paper with the tip of her big toe, pushed it a fraction further in. Then easing her heels into the crimson mules, she got up, crossed the room and went to stand on the threshold of the open door, taking breaths of fresh air into her lungs. After a moment he came and joined her. They stepped out and stood together in the narrow well of brick and stone, in the loaded silence of blacked-out London at four o’clock in the morning.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ she murmured. ‘Something is going on.’ With her mind’s eye, she discerned his profile above her, lifted, sniffing the dark. ‘I wish the skies would fall. I wish we could see Christ’s blood stream in the firmament.’

  He put his arm round her waist and held her close against him. She thought she heard him say faintly: ‘Hush!’

  ‘Wait for the All Clear,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t sounded, has it? Surely we can’t have been cut off even from that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what’s happening …’ She could feel him busy with matter-of-fact surmises, calculations.

  ‘What is it? Robots? Are you informed about the nature of the secret weapon? Are your lips sealed? Shall we be saved?’

  ‘Hush,’ he said again, gently patting her hip. ‘Don’t worry. I expect we shall soon know a lot more.’

  ‘Honestly, is it going to be a little more than we can bear?’

  ‘No, no, that’s one thing certain. Whatever it is, we shall get over it—find the answer to it, I mean. There may be a nasty patch before we do: it’s bound to take time. But nobody has any doubts. Do you honestly not see that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, surely. It’s only the suspense. Not knowing precisely what to stiffen up our sinews for.’

  ‘We shall be told,’ he said, mild, reassuring. He lifted his head to scan the sky. ‘It almost looks as though …’

  ‘As though what?’

  ‘I was going to say, if anything has started, not much of it seems to be getting through. But I may be dead wrong.’

  He reflected carefully on what, by pure chance, he had seen go over, extraordinarily low, at the exact moment when he had emerged into the area two, three, how many?—hours before. An aircraft with a tail of fire, like a streaking comet. An aircraft engine with a thrumming and buzzing note—a clockwork sound. He had been keeping half an ear strained ever since for its return, but he had not heard it again. He considered whether to mention it to Georgie now; decided not to. Time enough. If she had not said all those hours ago when he came back: ‘I thought you’d gone to Dinah’—fantastic nonsense!—he would have described it to her.

  The thought of the work facing him in the Admiralty was beginning to weigh heavily on his mind: a particularly tough day ahead, and he was in no shape for it. He had begun some time ago to long to be back at his desk; had, regrettably, been unable to give his whole attention to the important subject they had been discussing. He must leave her now.

  Contrite, he took her invisible face in his two hands, tilted it up to cover it with loving kisses.

  ‘I must go,’ he said, not liking the sound of the words as soon as they were uttered.

  Something more was obviously expected—more adequate, more personal, more … What on earth? Quite beyond him. But he wished very much not to leave her with too disappointing an impression of him. He tried.

  ‘So you think that’s what happened. She went to Stepney to find Selbig … Oh well, he’s dead now. We shall never know.’ It sounded in rather poor taste, almost jaunty. He tried again. ‘Perhaps he had the answer. She was always after it: but I never knew what the question was, let alone the answer … Yes, she was all right in the end. She married this nice chap—from all accounts—in Stepney. Don’t know how that came about. Nor did Edwards, of course. She didn’t marry Selbig, did she? Whatever that proves … or doesn’t …’

  He could only hope that the ground had now been more or less completely covered, because he couldn’t, really could not go on. There was nothing left in him except for this compulsion, so fatal, so familiar to say that he must go: nervous compulsion of the departing traveller wishing to show a creditable last-moment spirit, but already in transit, busy seeing himself out. His expectations, such as they were, lay all ahead of him: but here she stood, silently holding out to him the load (rather heavy for her, take it, hurry)—the question there was never time to answer.

  ‘It’s getting light,’ he said. ‘What time is it, I wonder? My watch stopped hours ago. Precious, go back to bed, and get some sleep. I can see your face, it’s a ghost. And oh, you’re shivering! What a selfish brute I am.’ He drew her to him, wrapped his arms round her and kissed her lips hard, long, once. ‘My darling, thank you for everything. I must go.’

  ‘I must see you to the top,’ she said, following him as he went up the steps. They stood on the pavement in the greying street where nothing stirred.

  ‘Thank heavens I can see you now,’ she said, able to smile. ‘This is my third resurrection.’ But he was inattentive. She could just discern him in silhouette looking up, down the street and at the sky.

  ‘Not a cat or a dog …’ she said. ‘Dogs will be in the shelter still, I guess. There are several regulars who bustle along the moment the Warning goes and don’t stick their noses out again till the All Clear. I wish there weren’t so many children in this street. But I suppose if anything is going to start they’ll be evacuated again.’

  ‘I hope to God they will. And double quick,’ he muttered. ‘I must say I wish you weren’t in London. If I were to telephone and suggest your leaving if you could, what would you say?’

  ‘I’d say I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. If I were to telephone and ask you to come back and see me soon, what would you say?’

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said, in a hurry again. ‘I shall be absolutely up to my eyes for the next few days, but I promise I’ll telephone. I’ll come as soon as I can.’

  The singing began in his ears. Giddy. A bit sick too. He must get going, start at once. He looked down at her and her face seemed to have gone far away, to be a paper mask. His lips opened to speak; but he was dumb; seeing hollow eye sockets, nostrils, mouth, stare back as she receded …