The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Once, on one of the former occasions when we had made an end, saying good-bye he said: ‘I give you my life. If ever you need it, come and take it.’ Wild words, meaningless, I told him; but I kept them locked in me, and after all the time had come to remind him, to bring him to the proof. But I didn’t remind him. He was totally beyond my range at last: my body and mind, all known, loved once and offered back to him, anachronistic weapons. ‘Rickie, help me …’ He knew I was saying that and he wouldn’t hear. The coward … But even from the last ditch, from my contempt for him, he cut me off. He was a coward, but not a coward then. His shut eyes seemed to hold authority. He had decided to resign without consulting me, he was not ashamed of it. He stopped me dead in my tracks.

  Did he? Did he? Was it something deliberate—a choice a person capable of love might make? A person of integrity, one become wholly responsible, within his limits, in the realm of moral action? A person who had begun to face, before I had truly begun to in spite of all my fine words and gestures, the lifelong consequences of a choice that, once made, is made to be adhered to with no soft option, not even a dying grace-note to echo on in the ensuing void? Or was it merely that he had become indifferent?

  No, not indifferent I know, because—I know. To resign, to be indifferent, are not synonymous. On the other hand, not to resign, to remain predatory, are also not synonymous … And why accord such honour or what is, after all, a self-defensive impoverishment of self? I hadn’t resigned, that’s all; obviously not, because I felt, suddenly, an escape of pure pity for his shoulders, for his stance by the window, for his looking so dully down, then all around the vacancy: look, stance of the disinherited. So I knew I was connected still; a posthumous nerve, but irreducible, intact survival. So then I was able to say: ‘It’s all right, Rickie.’ I think that’s what I said; meaning … oh, many things. He let his eyes come to rest on me at last; they didn’t brighten, but he smiled faintly. Eyes of that blue are the most vulnerable: in anger, pain, grief, sickness, the pigment drains away. His had become wall eyes … not quite that … transparent. A ghost gaze rested on me. So then we left the room. He went ahead of me. He had a way of running downstairs that always gave me pleasure because it made me see him as a schoolboy, practising to bring it to a fine art: an unbroken skidding run from top to bottom of the staircase, back straight, knees and ankles loose. He had charming hangovers of this sort from boyhood: accomplishments, tricks he had never quite put away. It’s an upper-class thing: ways they invented in youth of playing with their ease of mind and body, decorating bored leisure with a flourish. He did it now, and it struck me with a pang that what I witnessed was a man dividing: a schoolboy giving me the slip went hurrying down ahead, improving his technique; abandoning upstairs a stock-still man with heavy shoulders. In the void of this split husk he left me cancelled … I wonder if he went on practising in Montagu Square … here in this house … at the Admiralty in 1944, with death running downstairs after him, as Madeleine had described tonight. Picked up unconscious at the bottom, rushed to hospital, a burst duodenal ulcer, too late, a few hours later he was dead.

  On the pavement we hesitated, pausing for a final check-up, making sure that nothing had been left undone. It was a tepid washed-out June evening, grey, steamy after a day of thunder showers; the air was penetrated with the smell of exhausted strawberries and pinks and stocks from a barrow on the corner. The person who strummed every evening upon a twanging piano in a house across the road was playing scales. A group of children burst out of the alley-way behind us, dragging an orange box screwed to a pair of rusty iron wheels. In it sat two tiny Negro children, twins, boy and girl, in magenta flannel jackets. Their faces, black, tender, designed in harmony with the skull’s perfect globe, had an extraordinary abstract dignity. They tore past us brushing our legs, on up the street. Behind the opaque glass windows of the pub on the opposite corner shadows passed and re-passed. Everything looked expectant, supercharged, dramatic: opening shots in a French film, camera turning on doors, pavements, lamp-posts, street-vistas, housefronts, on selected figures; sound track picking up the thin invisible piano, the screech of a rusty wheel, shouts, motor horns and running footsteps, all intermittent between loaded silences, all to build up the atmosphere for what would happen. Anything might happen. Who would slouch shady from that narrow passage, on the heels of that penny-for-the-guy prelude, that flurry of infant mummers? Whom would the swing-swinging pub doors reveal at last, solid against the phantoms? When will they move, that pair of lovers? What are they muttering, their lips stiff, looking hard at each other, then away? She wears her hair shoulder-length, rolled under, she wears a mackintosh and carries a shabby suitcase: clearly she is the heroine. He has a virile sensuous distinction, a prosperous suit of clothes. Upper-class philanderer caught in a fatal net with waif? … Why does that taxi crawl along the street, slow down beside them? Watch now, the plot is about to thicken.

  ‘God, I’m late,’ he exclaimed, consulting his wrist-watch. ‘I don’t want to cut this short but …’ He hailed the taxi. ‘I’ve got to dine out and there’ll be ructions. Can I drop you somewhere?’

  ‘No thanks. Where I’m going would be quite off your beat.’

  ‘Well he can take you on—wherever you’re going.’

  ‘No thanks. I don’t fancy dropping you at your front door.’ Off-hand voice contemptuously underlining my detachment, his lack of curiosity.

  All of a sudden he changed, he was black and blazing.

  ‘Get in. If you think I’m going to leave you on the pavement with that bloody bag … Go on, get in.’ Savage voice. He wrenched the bag from me, pushed me before him into the cab, jumped in, slammed the door, leaned forward to slide the glass partition back and give his address, then flopped back into his corner. I in mine.

  ‘You can make up your mind as you go along where this machine is to deposit you. It’s at your service. I shall get out before we reach my front door.’ Savagely he pushed at the bag with the toe of his shoe. He hadn’t noticed when I picked it up in the flat and carried it into the street. I sat up rigid in my corner, feeling his anger explode, impotent, against me. Presently he put his warm, dry hand over mine and said without expression: ‘Dinah.’ We bowled along hand in hand as so many times before; only, the nerves in our meeting palms were dumb.

  So then I said: ‘Don’t leave me, Rickie. You, you only, know the worst of me. Don’t let me go. Where I’ve got to go back to if you do is much too terrible. No light, suffocation, scorching emptiness, like Hell. I told you I am expected; but in fact there is no one. The person who was there has gone.’ So he took me in his arms for ever and we drove on, on, on …

  We said not another word. He stopped the cab on the far edge of the square, jumped out in a hurry, gave the driver a ten-bob note, told him to take me wherever I said, didn’t look at me, went running towards his house. Never once looked back. Hurried to Madeleine waiting for him behind that door, already dressed for the party, frowning and fidgeting, preparing ructions.

  I told the driver Paddington, I had to tell him somewhere. He was very genial after Rickie’s generosity. He gave me a tip for the Derby when I got out; for which with a beaming smile I thanked him. I was still a pretty girl accustomed to consider myself precious. Where could I go? I could go home: catch the 7.48, be there by nine. What a joyful surprise for them. On the platform I started to have hallucinations: smelted the lime blossom in the garden, heard Bruno bark as I came up the drive. I got confused. The train was sinister, full of people sitting like ordinary people sure of where they were going, all silent, all watching me, waiting to rise and push me out if I attempted to join their ranks. I was paralysed with terror. Then I clearly saw Rob lying on the bed in the other room, the red one, waiting for me. So I made for the escalator and took the Tube and went back to him as fast as possible. He was not there.

  Around midnight there was a tap on the door and in came—that final one. The last one, at last; ha
ving known his time would come, and bided it. Selbig was his scarcely ever spoken name, Ernst Selbig, Jewish doctor with a cut-off European past he never mentioned, with eyes like pits and hairy hands … Saint, corrupt saint. Thank God he’s dead too: suicide, just before war was declared … He came to make me cry and make me drunk, and he did both. Oh, how drunk I got and cried, how I soaked his coat! The things I told him … He wished to make me free of his rotting humourless world of wisdom and understanding, of pity for incurable humanity. Ach! Sometimes I think cynics do less harm. He came to tell me Rob would never come back; he came to initiate me into the human condition, into freedom. Oh, I couldn’t understand his mystic bunk … But the more I drank the more it seemed like truth, salvation. Oh, I was drunk. Drunk, drunk … Macerated with the tears of all humanity! As good a way to make an end as any other. Whirling, dissolving with the floor and the ceiling and the mad red roses of Rob’s wallpaper and that dark breathing bulk coming down silent on me with a reek of brandy to invade my free, my free-for-all body … Going, let go, pass out, well over the plunging edge now, all of us bubbles flying, floating all of us, all gone, all drowned together—I, my lost lovers, Selbig … someone moaning.

  Not once looking back, Rickie reached his house, ran up the steps, let himself in, slammed the door, called out:

  ‘Darling!’

  There was a pause; then, from the first floor, Madeleine’s voice came down on precisely the anticipated note. ‘There you are.’ Tense, querulously inquisitive. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Sorry, I was kept.’

  ‘Do you realize we’ve got to start in ten minutes?’

  ‘I do.’ I do, you bet I do.

  He went on into the dining-room and opened the cupboard of the sideboard. He heard her come swishing downstairs, her voice: ‘Where are you?’ Her head came round the door in a familiar gesture—peering on the threshold, goose-like, stretching her long neck as if to search out the lie of the land before advancing. Exasperating habit. ‘Oh, that’s where you are.’

  ‘This is where I am.’

  She watched him swallow half a tumblerful of whisky, opened her lips, drew in a sharp breath, said nothing. Out of the corner of an eye he took in her appearance, thinking she looked a bit garish: petunia pink evening frock, a colour he disliked, white fur wrap, diamond clips and earrings, make-up overdone, blue-shadowed eyelids between frowning forehead and hard anxious stare. She was beginning to plaster it on, he thought, like all the rest of them. All but one. One pale one. White moth among Painted Ladies, quite out of place in this our life. Brush her off, let her fly or fall … Too late. Can’t be done. Impaled, look, wing-stretched, stiff, a long sharp pin through her … through me, impaling me.

  ‘Very pretty, very nice. Not quite sure about the colour. Nice, I think. Yes. New?’ Tumbler in hand, he slightly jerked his head towards her.

  ‘This thing! Heavens no. Really, Rickie! You’ve seen it half a dozen times.’

  Glancing again, he saw her deliberately start to alter her expression, replace it with a patient mildness.

  ‘What kept you?’ she pleasantly inquired. ‘I couldn’t make it out when you knew—I finally rang the office. I couldn’t get any answer.’

  ‘Couldn’t you make that out? There’s nobody on the switchboard after five-thirty, have I never told you?’

  ‘No, never. At least I don’t remember—perhaps you have. Did you go to your club?’

  ‘No, the old man’s. He collared me just as I was leaving. Kept me jawing for an hour and a half, blast him.’

  ‘What a nuisance. He is inconsiderate. Didn’t you—couldn’t you get a taxi? Or did you? I didn’t hear one stop. Darling, for goodness sake do hurry. We shall be hideously late.’ He nodded, swallowed down the last of the whisky at a gulp. ‘Tired?’ She searched his face, the tumbler, all of him with controlled intensity, frantic, he could feel it.

  ‘I had a twinge or two this afternoon. Nothing much. Had to bolt my lunch, that’s why.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ She bit her finger, barely able to muster even a false show of sympathy. ‘I wish to God you’d see Drysdale again. You are a fool, Rickie, to drink spirits—that amount too, neat. You know what he said.’

  ‘I know what he said and to hell with it. If you want me to get through this f— evening, leave me alone, for Christ’s sake.’

  He saw her close her lips in long-suffering wifeliness. She turned away and said in a thistledown voice:

  ‘I’ll give Clara a ring then, tell her we’ve got to be late. You know what she is.’

  ‘I know what she is.’

  At the door she hesitated, then said nervously: ‘If you could just say how long you’ll be I’ll have a taxi waiting.’

  He said with compunction:

  ‘Fifteen minutes, darling, to the second. Must have a shower. I’ve been in a muck sweat all day, this weather’s horrible.’

  She sighed and nodded.

  ‘Shout to the boys, they’re just gettting into bed. Anthony’s been asking for you, he’s stuck with his Meccano, but don’t let him hold you up. I’ve put your clothes out—soft shirt, but I didn’t know what links. Where are your jade ones? I couldn’t find them.’

  Almost, not quite imperceptibly to her, he gave a start; his hand moved towards his pocket, checked.

  ‘They must be around, I had them—oh, the other day. Never mind, I’ll find them. Thank you darling. Kind girl. I’ll be with you. If Clara squawks, tell her to boil her head.’

  He bolted for the door, catching as he passed her a whiff—too strong—of her expensive French scent, swerving blind through the dumb query which held her gripped, watching him; ran for the stairs, heard her voice pursuing, then cut off:

  ‘I hope they didn’t get left in a shirt and sent to the laundry, because if so …’

  On the half landing he stopped, searched rapidly through all his pockets. Not there. Not there. Left where?—where? He felt her cold hand dropping them into his. Without warning the trap sprang, bit his heart; anguish, physical, bursting his chest, kept him pinned by the long landing window.

  Look out: down: at an angle across the square to the opposite corner where the cab stopped. Look, it’s still waiting. Run to it. Run for your life.

  For five seconds he looked out, bewildered, into the vaulting branchy, green-swell of a surge of plane trees; let his gaze travel in hope and terror over the hallucinated square. The corner swam, appearing and disappearing through a screen of privet mixed with lilac; but by dint of focusing with a vast last momentary effort he thought he saw what he expected: nothing.

  When he came down she was standing in the hall. ‘On the dot,’ she said, and turned to open the door. ‘Taxi’s waiting.’

  Her smile now—surely her smile was triumphant, mocking, sly?

  Or was he going mad? Smiling she led the way towards the black box on wheels, towards the impassive driver, seen in profile. Thick neck, eye and nose bulbous, grizzled walrus moustache—the very same. He smelt a rat. Dinah was inside, in ambush, hugging herself with laughter, preparing with Madeleine’s connivance to disclose herself. In another moment he would be stripped, raked by their deadly crossfire. Strident voices would pierce him, claws seize him, drag him to and fro. The driver turned his head, was youngish, dark, cleanshaven. Rickie gave the address, opened the door of the cab, Madeleine stooped in, he followed her.

  ‘Such luck,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘I just happened to see it cruising past. I’d rung three ranks.’

  ‘Trust you!’ He sank back, reprieved, staring ahead of him, pulling himself for God’s sake now together. ‘When have you not so happened? If in the whole of London there was but one sole solitary taxi, you’d be bound to collar it.’

  But luckily there were at least two taxis in London: such luck. He suddenly laughed.

  ‘I don’t collar,’ she protested with light petulance, e
ncouraged to foster this auspicious banter. ‘It’s all a question of the correct psychological approach. I place myself in a state of total passive expectancy. Then the object of my desire materializes.’

  ‘Does it indeed? It never does for me.’

  ‘You don’t concentrate enough.’

  He suddenly laughed again, so loud that she glanced puzzled at him. His forehead was beaded with sweat. She took his silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, and with gentleness wiped away the starting dew. At this a little sound, part groan part protest, broke out of him; he gently took the handkerchief away from her and held it crumpled in his hand. She put her own hand tentatively out and laid it over his. He did not respond, he let it lie there, thinking: ‘Hand of a woman in my dead one, twice in the space of an hour …’ and turning a screw down tight on the appalling thought. In close sad separation they went bowling towards Chester Square.

  ‘You know …’ She stopped.

  ‘What do I know?’

  ‘This is the first time we’ve dined with Tim and Clara—sort of in style—since we got going again.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said in a courteous acknowledgement. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’