The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘Who lived here before you?’ she asked.

  Madeleine was not sure. She believed a retired naval officer and his maiden sister had inhabited it; but it had been empty for months when they bought it. She thought it had had a number of owners; luckily the building itself had never been touched; but everybody had done something to the garden and made a mess of it. Faintly she frowned, contemplating the area of her labours, seeing what should have been, what could be done. Her eye was for the land, for the last flowers in the border, the frost-blackened dahlias that must be lifted, the rose bed that must be pruned, the apple leaves drifted on the lawn. The other stared at the windows, thinking they looked uncommunicative. Upon what terms, she wondered, did they and Madeleine agree to contain, to release their mutual and separate lives, their ghosts and substances? It was a house for a quiet couple, or for someone in retreat. Could Madeleine really have retired in her prime, become a country woman on her own, her days plotted by the seasons, evenings alone with books and wireless, or writing letters to her children; a friend occasionally for week-ends perhaps? Strange, it was she, Dinah, who had dreamed always of living in the country, of running a small farm. Madeleine had been the Londoner, in the swim, never unaccompanied, never without new clothes, shored up with layer after layer of prosperous social life. Now though still expensively dressed and carefully made up she was no longer soignée. Her hair was going grey, her face had hollowed underneath the cheekbones, the tremendous vitality of her youth had faded out … no, rather sunk down in her. In her youth it had spilled out all over the place, brilliant but not warm, and rather avid, even when playing with her babies. Now she had a glow from within, like an autumn rose. Yet the years just behind her had dealt her cruel blows: her firstborn, Anthony, killed; then Rickie’s death. If she had been, as she must have been, adrift in wilderness, she had planted herself again in something … more likely, someone? Yes, more likely than the soil or the community or intellectual interests or God.

  They went out of the gate and took the elm-bordered lane that ran down past cottages, past the Dutch barns, past the church towards the river. The early November day was windless, blooming with a muffled lustre; weak sun drew out of the damp ground a haze within whose grained iridescence shapes and colours combined to create a visionary landscape, consuming its heart of honey colour, lavender, rose, dark amber, russet, jade and violet. From the polls of the stripped willows sprang sheaves of tapering copper wands, each one luminous from groove to tip. The river lay in its crescent loop entirely without movement, an artifice of green-black liquescent marble, inlaid between the banks’ curved and scalloped edges; solider far than the dematerializing forms of earth around, above it. Flat fields unearthly green, dotted with grazing cattle, stretched into the distance on the side they walked on; the other side was broken, hillocky, and patched with unkempt plantations of smouldering beech and hazel. With intermittent yelps of hysteria, Dinah’s dog tore along full pelt, plunging into the pitted banks, blowing rough snorts down holes and cavities, launching himself madly into treacherous rushbeds.

  ‘What do you do with him in London?’ asked Madeleine, watching a startled moor-hen skitter out across the river.

  ‘Take him to work with me,’ said Dinah. ‘I insinuated him gradually and now he’s more or less in control. There’s quite a lot of competition to exercise him in the lunch hour. One girl brings him her meat ration. Another’s mum queues Thursdays for offal for him. Everything is gratefully accepted. His food is rather a problem. He looks fit though, doesn’t he?’ She stopped to gaze with indulgent pride at his tranced and quivering stern now sticking up out of a tangle of alder roots beneath them; adding: ‘I’m looking after him for someone. His master had to give up his job and go and live in the country—he got ill. He was given this puppy by a farmer in the Welsh hills. But now he’s too ill—he’s in a sanatorium. He asked me if I could look after him till he came out, so I went down last Spring and collected him. But I don’t think he will ever come out … He’s worse. So there we are.’

  ‘You’ll have to keep the dog?’

  ‘Of course. I should miss him dreadfully anyway. He’s very intelligent and affectionate. Very pleasant company.’

  Suddenly she called to him in a sharp tone: ‘Gwilym! Come out of it, there’s nothing there. Come out, you ass!’ At once, all simple optimism and goodwill, the dog emerged and bounded off in another direction. She followed his course with a dreamy look, remarking that he was very obedient.

  ‘How long have you been living where you are now?’ asked Madeleine. The address was in the Holborn district; it sounded shabby, dismal.

  ‘Oh … years,’ said Dinah lightly. ‘It’s a big room and fairly cheap. Only one bathroom in the building but the other tenants refrain from baths till Saturdays, so it’s not too bad. Still, the stairs are endless and there’s not a square inch of garden to let him out in. I might move now.’

  By the terms of their mother’s will, apart from particular legacies to her two sons—prospering one in Canada, one in South Africa—the jewellery and furniture had been divided between her daughters; her own capital—her handsome annuity ceasing on her death—she had left to Dinah. The income to be expected, from safe investments, was about two hundred and fifty pounds a year. It was to this that Dinah referred by implication.

  ‘You live alone?’ said Madeleine, rather awkwardly.

  ‘I live alone.’

  ‘And your job?’

  ‘What about my job?’

  ‘Well … what is it exactly?’

  ‘Oh, I see. I work in a bookshop.’

  ‘Do you really? Just selling books?’

  ‘Selling them and wrapping them up and making out the bills for them.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘Very much.’

  Turning over in her mind rumours that had reached her through the years of Dinah’s advanced political views, Madeleine paused before asking in a delicate way:

  ‘Is it that place that got started in the thirties—I used to see it—called The Socialist Bookshop or something like that?’

  ‘No. It’s called Bryce and Perkins.’ Dinah looked amused. ‘It’s simply a jolly good bookshop. Not a big one.’

  ‘Highbrow?’

  ‘Middle to high. It does cater for what’s called the cultivated reading public—and for specialists.’

  ‘Specialists in what?’

  ‘Oh, various branches of literature. Art historians. Foreign research students. It’s got quite a flourishing foreign section even now; and a second-hand one. Mr Bryce deals with the bibliophiles—he’s one himself. He’s an authority on early printing and types and title pages. I find all that a bore: I don’t have anything to do with it of course. He’s nice; a hard taskmaster but I like that. He won’t employ anybody who trips up on his standards—of culture, I mean, and education. Every employee is made to take authority in some department. It’s assumed you have an area of special knowledge.’

  Her voice awoke in Madeleine echoes of a series of ancient exasperations: Dinah authoritative about something or other always—the drama it might be, the dance, psychiatry, wine, Negro sculpture, dirt-track racing, Egyptology, Buddhism, jazz composition, boxing … Dinah airing her latest piece of serious research … Not that she showed off exactly: she was always unaggressive, courteous in argument, not exactly dogmatic, never smug. That made it worse. She had simply made up her mind from the beginning.

  ‘What is your area?’ asked Madeleine.

  ‘Oh, political history, economics—Marxist chiefly.’

  ‘I see.’ They stopped and looked out across the river at one fisherman anchored midstream in a stumpy green punt: motionless abstraction, double image, half air-borne, half reversed in water, pinpointed through the lens of a coloured dream. Watching him, Madeleine continued in a vague and level manner: ‘I didn’t realize that would be your area. It absolutely isn�
�t mine. But then I haven’t got any area …’

  ‘Well, you’ve never wanted one, have you?’ said Dinah as if passing judgement, not unsympathetically, on a self-evident case of human nature.

  ‘How do you know?’ Her voice sharpened.

  ‘Your brain is as good an instrument as mine. Better, probably.’

  ‘You mean, I haven’t used it.’

  ‘I didn’t say so,’ said Dinah, mild. They turned and walked on slowly. ‘No … I mean it’s just another way of life. For one thing, you haven’t been obliged to earn your living …’

  ‘God knows what I’d have done if I had,’ burst out Madeleine, the prey of violent and obscure emotions: suspicion, indignation—a complex wish to lay the blame on someone and at the same time defy the critics of unearned income as a way of life. ‘The ridiculous education I was given.’

  ‘Mine was the same,’ said Dinah, inexorably mild.

  ‘I could have got a job in the war. I was offered a decent one, in the B.B.C.—translating French—Rickie wouldn’t let me. He said I must stay with the children.’

  ‘He was perfectly right.’

  ‘God knows I worked as hard as any working-class housewife.’ She flushed darkly, to her forehead. ‘I slaved.’

  ‘I bet.’ Dinah was sympathetic.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh … various things. Nothing spectacular. Worked in rest centres mostly. Taught some children drawing for a bit; some of the evacuated ones who came back. I had a huge class in the end—in a cellar in Stepney. I enjoyed that. They were brilliant, some of them.’

  Suppressing another burst of querulous resistance to the idea of this huge drawing class, Madeleine merely said:

  ‘You were in London all the time?’

  ‘Yes, right slap through.’

  ‘I suppose you were called up.’

  ‘Would have been.’ Dinah stopped and lit a cigarette. She smokes, thought Madeleine, like a chimney. ‘Being a widow with no home ties. Actually, I volunteered.’

  There was a silence; then the other said nicely:

  ‘You must tell me where your bookshop is. I’d like to come in, next time I’m in London.’

  ‘Yes, do,’ said Dinah, cordial. ‘You look so stunning, you’d raise my prestige.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound—from what you said—as if it needed raising.’

  ‘Then I must have given you a false impression.’ She stopped again on a small bridge with white wood railings to watch a pair of swans glide from the main stream into a meandering reedy willow-bordered backwater. ‘My capacity is a very humble one. I’ve no particular qualifications, worse luck. What I do know I’ve taught myself. At least, Jo started my education …’ The swans slid out of sight, making for some known evening haunt in the creek’s upper reaches. ‘If only,’ she said with sudden eagerness, ‘I could be a whole-time student for a year or two! Go to Oxford or Cambridge. Get a degree. How I’d work! How I’d love it! … I might, you know, now. I might be able to afford it.’ Her lifted profile, regular, delicate, looked rapt.

  They strolled on again.

  ‘What do they pay you in this job?’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Five pounds a week.’

  ‘That’s not all you—what you’ve been living on?’

  ‘No. It comes to a bit more than that. I get a small bonus at Christmas—and a guinea or so for an occasional article here and there. And then of course I’ve still got that hundred a year—at least it’s less now but it does make all the difference: what we both had from Papa when we were twenty-one.’

  Doing sums in her head, Madeleine thought ruefully of the hundred a year. She had forgotten all about it, was uncertain whether it still came in, whether Rickie had long ago reinvested it, or long ago helped her to spend the capital it represented. He had had a regardless way with money in the first years: a lordly way, a generous way, as Dinah might remember … Hush, stop, for shame, she told herself. Here was the truth: Dinah a frugal wage-earner, managing on a few hundreds: she herself comfortably provided for. She had feared a possible clause in Rickie’s will: something left away from his family, for Dinah, something to mark his sense … to say sorry, to say remember, to say love. But no: absolutely nothing.

  The dog bounded back with a stick, and Dinah took it from his jaws and threw it for him, far, like a boy, from the shoulder. She said:

  ‘Seeing that Jo was killed in the Spanish Civil War and not the Second World War, I don’t, of course, get a pension.’

  She seemed to throw the words after the stick, letting them go with simplicity and ease.

  ‘I suppose not,’ murmured Madeleine, thinking this was not the time … All she knew was that in the end Dinah had married a man, a Jew, called Hermann, killed fighting in the International Brigade. ‘My sister, Mrs Jo Hermann.’ Strange.

  Observing what they took to be a bull in the next field, they turned for home. Talking of relatives—kept up with by Madeleine, by Dinah lost sight of—they recrossed the old toll bridge with its rosy picture postcard cottage and garden brightly patched with the last Michaelmas daisies, the first chrysanthemums; and walked up a slope towards the rambling village. On their right lay the rectory, a glum neo-Gothic building girt with laurel, ilex and other dark nondeciduous shrubbery. Beyond it the church raised a fine untouched fifteenth-century tower above the remainder of its injudiciously remodelled structure. A group of poplars, still topped with lemon-coloured turbans, stood beside the gate: and crammed with nettles, long grass and lurching headstones, the neglected graveyard ran down in rough terraces almost to the river’s bank.

  ‘Anything exciting inside?’ asked Dinah, stopping.

  ‘There’s an effigy: the Lord of the Manor prone beside his wife, and twelve midgets kneeling under them. Jacobean. Rather fascinating. Come in and look at it. There’s just enough light.’

  ‘Sit,’ said Dinah to the dog in the porch. He sat. ‘He’ll stay put till I come out,’ she said.

  They examined the effigy, the memorial brasses, ancient and modern, in the walls, the Tudor font, the Edwardian altar cloth, the brass-bound Bible on the lectern, the parish notices pinned up inside the door. It was chilly in the church. They came out again. The dog was no longer sitting in the porch.

  Whistling and calling, Dinah went this way and that, between the graves and then behind the church. She was astonished, and said so. She said several times that he had never done such a thing before.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Madeleine. ‘You told me how obedient he was.’

  ‘He must have seen something,’ said Dinah with decision.

  ‘Perhaps a ghost?’

  On the heels of this suggestion a shape of silence, planing stealthily from nowhere, crossed the churchyard: a huge cream-coloured owl. Ravished, startled, they watched the apparition wave up and down, up and down, with rapid wing beats, low above the terraces; then, leaving a long wake of deeper silence, swoop away out over the river.

  ‘He’s always here,’ murmured Madeleine, ‘about this time of day.’

  ‘Listen!’

  A medley of disagreeable noises broke upon their ears: whimperings, maniacal moans, hoarse growls and chuckles: then staccato crescendo a volley of imperious barks. Darting forth, chin out, in the direction of the back of the tower, Dinah said madly: ‘He must have seen a badger.’

  But it was a rat. Down in the ditch beneath the churchyard wall; half curled on its side, as if reclining in dreadful ease, and facing its opponent: flea-bitten, sodden, its belly blown; and all of it watchful, still, grey as damnation.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ said Dinah, unsteady.

  ‘We go away,’ said Madeleine. ‘We simply go away. He’ll deal with it, won’t he? It’s cornered, isn’t it? He’s a sporting dog, isn’t he?’

  The dog continued to tread the ditch, forward and back as if setting to partners i
n The Lancers, sobbing, trembling from head to stern.

  ‘It’s his first rat,’ said Dinah. She lit a cigarette, puffed, let it fall to the ground.

  ‘Is he frightened of it?’ asked Madeleine. ‘He seems frightened of it. No wonder.’ Again she said: ‘We’d better go away.’

  But horror-struck, they continued to stand watching.

  ‘It’s too big,’ said Dinah. She swallowed; then making her voice resolute, she croaked out: ‘Good boy, Gwilym. Good boy. At it. Good boy. Go on. Attaboy.’

  Thus encouraged the dog pounced, caught the rat by the nape, shook it, dropped it, caught it, dropped it again.

  ‘There,’ breathed Dinah, pale as the marble angel adorning a Victorian tomb beside her. ‘That’s got it. He knows how …’

  But the rat began to run along the bottom of the ditch, blood on its back, its tail gliding sinuous, obscene, over the matted ivy and dead leaves. The dog went after it; and after the dog went the frantic voice of Dinah, repeating on a full chest note:

  ‘Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!’

  ‘This is devilish,’ said Madeleine.

  She hurried to the gate, looked up and down the road. Help, help! … But help there was none. Dusk, opalescent, was beginning to enfold the empty pastoral scene. Behind her, hysteria now clamoured from a different direction. Loath to look back, she looked, and saw Dinah staring through some spiked iron rails enclosing a large square block of monumental masonry, wiping her face with her handkerchief. The dog was charging these rails with fatuous bravado, plunging his nose between the bars, and barking without intermission.