The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Silence. The dog moved uneasily, but with Dinah’s hand rhythmically stroking his head, refrained from further vocal effort, even when, presently, a distinct commotion arose from the direction of the paddock: horses brushing and stamping over grass; an equine snort; a muffled whinny.

  ‘That’s that ghastly Gertie,’ said Madeleine with indignation. ‘Clarissa would beg the farmer to put her in with Jasper for company, but it couldn’t have turned out worse. She works on his emotions in and out of season: she’s a neurotic frustrated shrew. Whenever I go near him she comes tearing up and bares her teeth at me. I complained to the farmer but all he said was if she offers to bite just hold your hand out to her, she’s only having a game with you … I ask you!’

  ‘Is Jasper the bay?’ asked Dinah, sounding amused. ‘He’s handsome.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a good pony. He was Rickie’s present to Clarissa the last Christmas before he died. He scoured five counties to find just what he wanted for her.’

  ‘Does she ride a lot?’

  ‘Yes, she loves it. Thank God, though, her ardour for the Pony Club is wearing off: two years ago it was positively religious. But now she’s got a decadent local boy-friend who’s down on all forms of competitive professionalism, I quote her very words. They take long cultural rides together and visit old churches and rub brasses and photograph effigies and fonts … Couldn’t you stay over to-morrow and have a ride? He ought to be exercised.’

  ‘Wish I could, but I can’t. Anyway I’d fall off, I haven’t ridden for years.’

  ‘Clarissa urges me to mount, she feels it would do me good—but I can’t start again, I’ve lost my nerve entirely. Jocelyn occasionally … when he comes—came—for the week-end … But he wasn’t … He’s not …’ Her throat constricted. Past, present, future twisted for a moment, gripping her like locked snakes. ‘Clarissa’s got a natural gift,’ she went on stumblingly, ‘the only one of the family, like Rickie. He was wonderful on a horse—if you remember …’

  ‘I don’t, as a matter of fact. I don’t remember ever seeing him on horseback. I’m sure I never rode with him. Not once.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you? We used to—when we were engaged. Not much after we got married. But then living in London … and I was never really mad about it—not like you. You were, weren’t you? You were much better than me, I was always too nervous … It was a pity he …’

  She stopped, afraid of her own voice and what she heard it saying. But silence was more frightening: something, something must quickly be declared. ‘Sometimes I think it was all a mistake,’ she heard herself declare. Without looking, she saw Dinah’s face turn towards her, stay arrested, a pale spheroid in its shawl of rug. She went on: ‘I mean, not staying in the country. I think we ought to have gone on in Norfolk and made our life there. This—this that’s happened to me, which I never expected—I mean preferring the country, would have happened sooner, that’s all. And with Rickie and the children to …’ She choked. ‘To make more point … It would have been a damn sight better for everyone, that’s putting it mildly. How could I know? Why didn’t I know? It was Mother who was so sure I was hopelessly unfitted … She saw me shining … Well, I didn’t shine. Still, it’s stupid to blame her. She only had a dream of my having the sort of brilliant social life she would have liked to have herself. Rickie was to shine too—in politics perhaps, the Diplomatic being out. Poor Rickie, he didn’t want to be a star. I don’t think anybody—any kind of woman—wife—could have managed to push him on in the world. He had an innate resistance to furthering his own interests. Anything with a whiff in it of asking a favour or getting influence exerted on his behalf made him absolutely neurotic with anxiety. That’s why he couldn’t bear the Uncles. They thought the world of him in the end; to hear him talk about them he might have been a guilty thing surprised.’

  A faint snort perhaps of laughter came from Dinah; and she continued:

  ‘Yes, I know, but it wasn’t that: it was simply his horror of career-making. All the same you know, I believe if he’d lived he’d have—done something. In spite of me … and you … we can say that now, can’t we? … and everything that went wrong. I don’t quite know how; but if you think he was done for when he died you’re wrong.’ Her voice sharpening, she added after a pause: ‘You did think so, didn’t you? I know Mother did.’

  ‘Why should you suspect me of such impertinence?’ said Dinah pleasantly, but on her dignity. ‘If you got that impression from Mother, you must have misunderstood us both.’

  ‘Oh, she may not have said so.’

  ‘She neither said nor thought so. He was a person she very much admired—as well as loved.’

  ‘Yes, yes, she did love him,’ agreed Madeleine, contrite, but as if deprecating her own contrition. ‘She adored him. And she did feel—what did she feel? … anguish about him, I know she did. And I could never tell her, I can’t think why I never could tell her …’

  ‘What?’ The word thrust with a sharp point of bitterness; of warning. When Madeleine next spoke, it was more carefully, more simply.

  ‘I wanted to tell her, but I wasn’t sure enough. Besides, she always made me shy. She thought I neglected him, but I don’t really think I did. It isn’t—terribly—on my conscience. He didn’t want me: he wanted me to look after the children and keep away; which is what I did. The thing is, he didn’t want anybody any more. But not out of—apathy. He was one of those people who takes a long time to find himself; but that’s what he was doing—emerging somehow. I felt it for quite a long time. It wasn’t just that he was doing a very responsible job superbly—though I dare say that was part of it. No, it was more a feeling he gave me that he was beginning to be—at home with—well with himself. As if he’d made up his own mind about something or other—about what he thought was important.’

  ‘I thought he would,’ said Dinah under her breath.

  ‘What’s that? What did you say?’

  The speak-up-I-can’t-hear-you insistence in the tone of voice resurrected the youthful Madeleine comically, pathetically in Dinah’s ear: schoolgirl echo of the person still urgently, crossly seeking to be confirmed, or contradicted, in her point of view.

  ‘Nothing. I was thinking … what you said about him reminded me of how he behaved the last time I ever saw him.’

  ‘Oh really? How did he behave?’

  ‘It’s hard to describe—though nothing could have been simpler—more elementary—on the face of it … As if he was sure of himself; of what he was doing; though what he was—outwardly—what he was doing was—simply nothing. So far as I was concerned, he wasn’t in the room: he was an empty shell. But at the same time I was conscious that something—inside him—that I’d never suspected—was somehow releasing a lot of weight. If that makes sense to you …’

  ‘Oh, perfect sense!’ said Madeleine bitterly.

  ‘But it wasn’t like resistance,’ corrected Dinah, as if the tacit parallel had been explicit. ‘There was no need for that. He hadn’t got to extricate himself—it was all over. He did impress me,’ she suddenly added, as if talking to herself.

  ‘When was it?’

  ‘Oh, ages ago, of course,’ said Dinah absent-mindedly. ‘I can’t pin it down exactly to a date. It was after I’d gone to live in Stepney. I asked him to meet me at the flat I had: it was in his name, I don’t know if you knew, and I was clearing out of it. It was a brief encounter.’ Her voice became sardonic. ‘He had to make it snappy, I remember—you were dining out.’

  ‘Oh yes …’ She stopped short; but Dinah was still preoccupied and failed to notice the corroboration.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s only occurred to me this minute, but what he seemed to have was—space round him. It made him look sort of disguised—a disguised personality. Like someone prepared to go over the frontier, travelling incognito. With feelers out in space in case he’s stopped. But he won’t be.’ Madeleine c
ould guess her expression as she added: ‘I know I’d been hoping very much he’d look smaller than I remembered. But he didn’t. Quite the opposite.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madeleine after a long pause. ‘I think I know what you mean. I noticed it when I saw him after he was dead. With a space round him; filled out; but blank. Perhaps all dead people look like that.’

  ‘He had something in him that didn’t need human beings,’ went on Dinah, busy pursuing her investigation. ‘Although he was so gentle. An explorer personality—don’t you think? That extra abstract dimension. He might have been one? … I would never have been surprised to hear he’d gone off somewhere in the end.’

  But: ‘He looked so majestic,’ was all that Madeleine said; and Dinah found nothing to reply. They sat motionless, straining their eyes into space, as if from the prow of a ship at sea they were scanning the dark waters for targets; rocks and shallows; or for something that had seemed to float, glimmer unexpectedly across their line of vision; might rise, signal again. Garland of foam? … Wraith fatally beckoning above the foundered wreck? … Or a man drowning, his arm flung up in what might be a last farewell, or dumb imploring cry, or exhortation; or final gesture of acceptance of a man surrendering life.

  ‘When Papa died,’ said Madeleine, breaking a long silence, ‘Mother wrote to me. I couldn’t come, Clarissa was just born. She told me she had covered him with her wedding veil. I remember what she said: “He looks so majestic.”’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dinah, ‘he did. I saw him.’

  ‘Do you suppose it was a sudden inspiration? Or did she keep it folded away all those years for that? Is that what brides did with their wedding veils once upon a time? … I wish I’d had the sort of life that would have made me able to do a thing like that. It would mean an achievement—something carried through: like what I was saying might have happened if Rickie had stayed put in Norfolk and made me help him. Really, it should be drummed into one in youth, the importance of living so as to be able to face one’s memories when one’s old.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to blame yourself about the place,’ said Dinah. ‘From the way he used to talk about it to me, he didn’t miss it.’

  ‘Oh, he did talk about it to you? He never did to me—at least I can’t remember it. Why can’t I remember ever talking about it afterwards? Did we have a sort of pact, really, not to mention it? And was that the reason—one of the reasons—why we had less and less to say? How did he talk about it to you?’

  ‘With great detachment,’ said Dinah cautiously.

  ‘How do you mean? Politically? Did he discuss it as a piece of social history?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought perhaps he might have, to you. He might have seen himself as a social or historical anomaly or something. You were violently anti all that weren’t you? Landed gentry, ruling class, inheriting property—what you call Debrettery?’

  ‘Not violently,’ said Dinah with an effect of determined equanimity. ‘You make me sound like a Hyde Park tub-thumper. However, perhaps he did talk about it to me in the way he thought I’d expect him to talk. He may have felt I wouldn’t understand—or anyway be sympathetic’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t have been would you?’

  ‘All I meant was,’ said Dinah, still resolute, ‘he never gave me the impression that he looked back on the decision as a great mistake. A major crisis.’

  ‘Well, it was one,’ said Madeleine vehemently after a moment of reflection. ‘It must have been. It couldn’t have been simple for him. As if places, homes, responsibilities could be shelved like old cricket bats, sold like one’s out-grown bicycle …! No, it was all a muddle. As a matter of fact I never, never would have minded being poor, whatever you may think. It was he who minded at the time: he couldn’t bear the thought of living in a small way, not keeping up a style. He had such lavish conceptions; and he’d flung money about at Oxford; and then when he came of age he found all the estate affairs had been mismanaged—to put it politely and draw a veil, as everyone did, of course. Between them, his mother and that Colonel Something, that trustee of his she was in love with—his dearest father’s dearest oldest friend—had simply played fast and loose; more out of idiocy on her part anyway than crookery. But imagine letting that bird-witted feather-pate have any control! Oh, what an awful woman! I couldn’t stand the thought of her moving bravely out to live near by and plant her poisoned honey darts in everything I did. I loathed her everlasting widow act and her sweet thin smiles and all the insidious mother-and-son humbug with Rickie. Oh, how she got him down!—specially over his father’s anniversaries that he was always well-nigh breaking her heart by forgetting to go to church on. “Our Beloved”—that’s how she always referred to his poor father. She was like a sour pickle with a coating of marshmallow … And even apart from her, I felt I couldn’t cope: I saw myself falling down on the responsibilities—I always saw myself falling down on everything. I suppose we both needed more support than we could give each other: or both secretly too unsure of ourselves … You were never unsure, were you?’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘Do you think you could have made a go of it if you’d been married to him instead of me?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t have made a go of being married to him, or to anybody else in those days. Besides—oh well …’ She gave a sniff, then laughed. ‘It’s an unreal question.’

  ‘Is it? I wouldn’t have said so, considering.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you see? … It was bound to be you, not me—well, anyway, bound not to be me—he fell in love with, wanted to marry, when he did. He would never have thought of me then. In fact, he didn’t think of me—he told me so more than once. What happened happened because …’ She paused. ‘I suppose a number of things contributed to it.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Propinquity. Hysteria. Escapism. Sense of failure. Impulse of self-destruction. Me. You, Rickie …’ She sniffed again; then sighed. ‘Can’t think of any more.’

  In the darkness Madeleine could be seen to rub her eyes and forehead.

  ‘I suppose,’ continued Dinah, ‘my jealousy of you had gone on growing. I couldn’t compete in your world. And you made it so plain I wasn’t really acceptable. I don’t mean you particularly—all of you.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense! Anyway, you were the one; you despised my friends. At least you behaved as if you did.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ Her voice was brisk. ‘They didn’t like me. I tried so hard too! They simply couldn’t stomach me. Plain, highbrow and intense …’

  ‘You weren’t plain. You can’t have been. You were always very attractive. Much more attractive than me really—anyway, to men.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Simply more business-like. More determined not to fail. I was bound to feel more competitive, with a handicap like you know who.’ By the tone of her voice, Madeleine discerned her broad characteristic smile.

  ‘My handicap seemed big enough, God knows. I don’t know why, it always was so.’

  ‘Everybody starts by feeling unfairly handicapped.’

  ‘I was always afraid to look … I don’t know what at. At myself I suppose. Or sex—particularly sex. But seeing I was considered so very pretty, I blindly hoped I might get by. Or rather it was a double thing: I assumed I would; but all the time I was convinced I wouldn’t. If you really want to know, the whole damn thing was one long horrible dream: stuck up, I was, on the platform of something like the Albert Hall with my big aria to sing and no voice at all, and no inkling of how it ought to go. I bet you never felt like that.’

  ‘No,’ said Dinah after a pause. The smile stroked her voice again. ‘I couldn’t afford assumptions. I knew I’d got to work hard to pass the exam at all. I took a good look at sex at an early age. And the more I looked the more extraordinary it seemed. Fascinating, I thought.’

  ‘You weren’t afraid—ashamed of it?’

  ‘N
ot in the least, at first. Simply curious.’

  ‘How very—very—odd.’

  Another silence fell. They gazed at the sky, watching the moon’s shoulder begin at last to push off shreds and fringes till, disentangled, the whole unfleeced globe slid clear, on to illimitable floors of polished sapphire. As if the world had lightened audibly as well as visibly, their ears caught now, from nearly a mile away, the weir’s drowsy, pulsating, ethereally singing breath; and miles away, the diminishing rumble of the last night train from London as it ran over the railway bridge to draw into the station.

  ‘Not at first,’ said Madeleine, slowly. ‘Do you mean, afterwards, you were?’

  ‘Yes. More and more.’

  Silence again.

  ‘Well, it is terrifying,’ said Madeleine in an expiring voice.

  Against her high fur collar her face, turned upward, seemed to lie with an unanchored look, like a floating plaque of lustre with moon-like open lips, distraught yet dreaming, painted on its surface.

  ‘You must be dead beat,’ said Dinah softly, having looked at her.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t understand. You mean after you started actually going to bed with people you started being afraid?’

  ‘Oh no. I liked it very much. At least, on the whole I did. I actually’—she gave the word a lightly teasing stress—‘ceased to be a virgin rather prematurely for a girl with such a good home and careful bringing up. They say a woman never forgets her first experience. I can’t say I ever give mine a thought.’

  ‘Was it—did you …’ began Madeleine delicately; then plunging: ‘Charles, I suppose? Charles Mackintosh …’

  ‘Oh, the barrister, my fiancé!’ She chuckled briefly. ‘What became of him? I’d forgotten his existence. Horrid man.’

  ‘I thought he was rather nice.’

  ‘You were quite wrong—we both were. I’d also assumed he would be, he had such a gentlemanly appearance—so clean-cut and magisterial. And such an eligible bachelor—one had to agree with him on that important point. But nice he was not, in bed or out; particularly after he’d decided to honour me with his hand in marriage and I confessed my past to him in all good faith and innocence. He said I was no better than a tart. I said I didn’t want to be better than a tart, men seemed to like them. It was a term of opprobrium, I said, I’d never understood. Priggish! … I was a prig.’