The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  At intervals the thought of Dinah rose black and churning, choking him like a wave of nausea. Once or twice an image of her of his own projection burst upon his sight: she was lying flat on her bed, her hands crossed on her breast above the sheet, her face, severe, impassive, turned towards the wall … More disgusted looking than severe, more beaten than impassive. He was sick of seeing women lying in despair upon their beds. He had not telephoned to her.

  What was she likely to be doing? Could that repudiating profile be a prophetic vision? Had she decided to hand him once and for all his ticket? If so, was he relieved or—frightened? He must ring her up this evening somehow, because he’d promised to. How could he, without starting another row with Madeleine? He had promised her not to leave her today. Man of his word to both of them—it was farcical. What the hell did they expect? The whole business made him feel so utterly dead beat that he could only yearn to go off alone somewhere for ever and ever … Well, anyway, for a bit.

  This was in fact what he did. Lucky as usual, he scarcely had to work for his reprieve: within a few days it was handed to him. Perhaps Madeleine had been more active than appeared; he never asked, she never told him; only, when he announced the news, received it with unselfish enthusiasm. The uncles ordered him to Italy and Rumania for a month, on business for the firm.

  He did not ring up Dinah as he had promised—neither that day nor any subsequent day. On the following Saturday his conscience goading him to do what most he dreaded and avoided, namely to visit his mother, he went down by himself to Norfolk. Home; the soil and landscape and architecture of his ancestors. None of it remaining in the family now, except for the small Jacobean dower house which he had withdrawn from the market, furnished and given to his mother when he had sold his heritage. Here, along with two ageing retainers from the former staff, she continued piously, rheumatically to fade, fret, potter. From his bedroom window he could see the Park, and, through known tree-tops, the clock tower above the stable courtyard; could hear and name the cries of waterfowl haunting the unforgotten sedges, shallows, deeps of his lost lake. And his mother, once oiled and barbed with ostentatious unreproach, had become merely garrulous, pathetic, grateful for his company. The whole thing was painful to the point of trauma. From thence he wrote to Dinah a brief note saying he felt it best not to see her till he was less utterly befogged and shattered; that he thought about her practically the whole time and would write again as soon as he could. No more time now before post. On the Tuesday after this week-end as he was hurrying round the corner from the office in the lunch hour, she suddenly appeared from nowhere on the pavement beside him. This gave him a terrible turn. She said she was hungry and wanted a good lunch, and fitting her step to his swung along with him, shoulder to shoulder. She was even paler, but more animated, than usual; also she looked in her subdued way more chic, more delicately wrought than ever, in the kind of plain black figure-moulding frock that exactly suited his taste in women’s clothes. He congratulated her on it and asked if it was new. She said yes, off the peg in Kensington High Street, defurbished and remodelled by herself. They discussed where they should eat and settled on a small French restaurant in Soho; they hailed a taxi and drove to it. It was a long but not an awkward drive; they might have parted only yesterday upon the usual terms. She kept the conversation going on a light level, half impersonal, half intimate. He prayed not to see anyone he knew in the restaurant, and his prayer was granted. He asked her what she had been doing and she answered, oh, going out a good deal with various friends, going dancing in the coloured night club, thoroughly enjoying herself. Her energy, she said, had all come back at last. ‘You look remarkably well,’ he said rather stiffly, considering with distaste the night club and the kind of types likely to take her dancing there. He thought of saying he’d telephoned several times and got no answer, but decided better not risk the lie. He told her he had got fixed up yesterday to go abroad and had been about to write and let her know.

  She was silent then. Her whole face became suffused with that dusky flush it had shocked him to observe the other night. Madeleine blushed easily, brilliantly; Dinah like this, and almost never.

  ‘When?’ she said.

  ‘In a few days’ time … actually.’

  She sat staring at the tablecloth, breaking up toast with a hand that trembled. Part of him fled; part of him remarked with satisfaction that he had called her bluff. The silence prolonged itself while they swallowed chicken à la King and gulped vin rosé.

  ‘Whose turn was it to speak?’ she said at last, looking at him in what seemed to him a slightly dotty way, with a squint.

  He said he thought he had better be getting back to the office.

  ‘You were going abroad,’ she said, ‘without letting me know. Or perhaps a little scrawl was going to reach me the morning after your departure.’

  He denied this curtly, coldly.

  ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she said, blowing out a long trail of cigarette smoke.

  He got up violently; then hesitated.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said bright and brisk, ‘I haven’t enough money on me to pay the bill’; and he sat down again, observed with curiosity by Madame at the desk.

  ‘I told you,’ he muttered, ‘it would be a mistake to meet. At present.’

  ‘It isn’t a mistake.’ She lit another cigarette from the stub in her hand. ‘Come and see me tonight. We can’t talk here. Please.’

  He was silent; and presently she said: ‘If you don’t come to me I shall come to you. To your house.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You wouldn’t admit me?’

  ‘Oh … I couldn’t prevent your being admitted. But I wouldn’t be there.’ He signed to the waiter to bring the bill.

  She said in a quiet distinct voice: ‘Then if neither the one nor the other, I shall end my life.’

  He rounded on her fiercely, dumb.

  ‘Blackmail?’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘I see how it must strike you. I apologize, but I can’t help it. I do mean it—I thought I ought to tell you frankly. You see I’m quite calm, don’t you? I’m not an hystérique. This is a thought-out thing.’

  ‘That makes it sensible, I suppose,’ he said with cold contempt. ‘And helpful. And splendid and courageous. You’ve thought it out, so of course it must be. Right! It will solve everything.’

  After a long pause she said softly, as if with relief:

  ‘When you talk like that I know you’re still you. It’s this stone wall … Why are you afraid of me? I didn’t dream you would leave me like this in outer darkness. I’m in this too, aren’t I?—up to the neck. You can’t just—go to earth as if I didn’t exist. Or present me, some time or other, at your own discretion, with a fait accompli. What’s to happen must be my choice, my responsibility as well as yours. And Madeleine’s,’ she added.

  He said obstinately, sweeping breadcrumbs off the table into his hand and pouring them on to a plate: ‘I don’t see it like that.’

  ‘If you deny me my share of responsibility you deny me the basis of my life.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ he said. ‘However … I’ll come.’ It was not, he knew, said graciously.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘As soon as I can get away. Six at the latest. I’m afraid I shan’t be able to stay long.’

  Her face contracted; she said quickly: ‘I haven’t asked you to.’ But a moment after she looked at him with her broad melancholy humorous smile and said: ‘Darling, don’t look so sulky and distraught. It’s quite all right. I promise you it will be painless.’

  ‘Ah … That’s as may be,’ he said, and had to smile himself.

  ‘Now, please, if you’ve time, may I have a brandy?’

  He ordered two fines, and while they sipped them she exercised her wit to entertain him. She even made him laugh; he had not laughed, no, nor come anywhere near laughter for a week. Once she
caught his gaze fixed on her in sheer bewilderment and stopped short in mid sentence, her eyebrows up. He shook his head and looked away. He couldn’t tell her … Here they were sitting together in one of their old haunts, their hands touching, their voices caressing one another, everything solid, customary, following out its continuity; and at the same time all this had ceased to have a real existence. They were shadows, ghosts. It was all in the past, all over. He had stared at her bewildered, wondering why she, so sharp of sight, so hard to hoodwink, should be sitting blindfold opposite to him. She was his clear eyes, yet she did not see what he saw. Which of them was mad?

  He put a call through to Madeleine in the afternoon and told her he would be a bit late home: he had just discovered that his passport had expired and he had to get it along urgently to a chap he knew in the Foreign Office who had promised to expedite its renewal. Truth and falsehood. This, he told himself as he put down the receiver, was the last f— lie he’d ever tell her or anyone. From now on, open book if not clean sheet. Dinah could argue her head off: he had made up his mind to be resolute and say good-bye to her for ever. Lingering on in the office till the clock struck six, he read the evening paper from cover to cover. He was going to cut this interview as fine as possible: no point whatsoever in prolonging the agony.

  When he arrived he found her in a curious frame of mind, feverish and inattentive, garrulous, side-stepping the straight approach he had rehearsed. He wondered if she had been drinking, and when he saw her put back a double gin neat, and then another, he was sure of it. He loathed hard-drinking women and well she knew it. For the last two years and more, since their relationship had become, in its hidden, exposed, its ever-threatened way a total thing, a rock—no, no, a stake, oh, a stake driven into their hearts—she had led a regular domesticated life, away from her disreputable pub-crawling companions … apart of course from Corrigan. But to give her her due, the old bag wasn’t a drunk. He had been tempted to wonder once or twice whether, in the end, he would find himself according that sordid double-crosser a bitter gratitude.

  He drank the martini she mixed for him, but when she took up the gin again he sharply refused. Her face set stubbornly; she tilted the bottle towards her own glass and filled it; he snatched it from her hand, strode to the kitchen and poured it down the sink; strode back and came to stand over her, breathing hard.

  ‘Now give me another,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve had enough.’

  She laughed. He looked at her. Something in her expression—something insolent, malevolent—snapped his last thread of self-control. He took a grip on her arm, above the elbow, and shook and shook and shook her. When he let go she stared at him, a heavy unblinking stare—reptilian, he thought—then suddenly slapped his face. The blow was a well-aimed stinger, and the pain of it shocked him into a sort of calm. She saw that his eyes rested on her with an electric glint … His mouth, not made for grimness, remained grim. She felt a stupefied, fatuous admiration for them both. Crack, like a pistol shot, plumb on the jaw, the brute, it must have stung, he hadn’t winced … Hollywood trailer—Throbbing, Searing, Sensational, Dynamic! At one foggy remove from the dramatic action, she saw her head sink before the dangerous expression in his eyes. She started slowly to roll her sleeve back and exposed her wounds. When he saw the five marks of his fingers standing out dark already on her thin white arm he took a sharp breath.

  ‘You hurt me,’ she said; and after a pause: ‘I’m sorry.’ She buried her face in her hands.

  He turned away and began to pace up and down again.

  ‘Sorry?’ he burst out. ‘Sorry? Sorry? What have you got to be sorry about? You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with.’

  ‘I got drunk. I thought you weren’t going to come. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hate you drinking, I hate it. You know I hate it.’ He approached her with remorse yet with reluctance and put an arm round her. ‘Don’t do it, darling. Don’t. Don’t.’

  She flung her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately. Her lips were salty, gin-tainted, burning, and the tears pouring out of her closed eyes scalded his cheek. He drew away in uncontrollable distaste, wiped his face and handed her his big silk handkerchief.

  ‘I must go,’ he said. He was sick to death of the sound of these three crass monosyllables which he seemed always to be reiterating.

  She sat down, holding the handkerchief, and said feebly: ‘I wanted you to stay.’ Then: ‘I’ve got a headache.’

  ‘Do you want some aspirin? Shall I get you some? Where is it?’

  She shook her head, whimpering faintly.

  He had never seen her like this. It reminded him of his mother, of Madeleine, of every female association from which he had hitherto dissociated her. At one fell stroke she seemed to have lost her essential difference from all others …

  ‘You’d better go to bed,’ he said coldly, sharply.

  ‘I won’t go to bed. Unless you stay with me.’

  ‘I can’t stay, Dinah. I told you so.’

  ‘I want to talk to you. I’ve got some things I must say to you.’

  ‘I think you’d better not say them now. Another time.’

  She lifted her head, opened huge vacant eyes and stared at him.

  ‘When are you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said lying. ‘I shan’t know for certain till tomorrow. But in a day or so. There’s a hell of a lot to see to before I go.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Not long. About three weeks—a month, perhaps.’

  He waited a moment and nothing more was said. Well then, this was good-bye—not according to plan. He couldn’t say it. He said: ‘I’ll write to you.’

  He stooped to take his handkerchief gently away from her; and to kiss her cheek.

  ‘Please take care of yourself,’ he said. ‘Promise me … Will you? Promise me not to …’

  Still nothing more was said. He went away.

  That evening after a quiet domestic dinner spent in discussing plans for the summer holidays, he told Madeleine that he had seen Dinah. He said it quite calmly, sitting in his armchair, throwing aside the evening paper; and she, looking up from the petit point stool cover she was embroidering, received the news with perfect calm. He said, with truth, that he had not sought out Dinah, that she had waylaid him outside the office and insisted on an interview. He passed over in silence the matter of the lunch.

  ‘So I went,’ he said. ‘I didn’t go to see a chap about my passport. I went round to see her.’

  ‘How was she?’ asked Madeleine, sorting strands of wool.

  ‘Oh, not exactly …’ He shrugged his shoulders, not attempting to disguise his wretchedness. ‘As you can imagine.’

  ‘No, I can’t imagine,’ said Madeleine in a thoughtful drawl. ‘I’ve decided not to go in for that any more—I mean, imagining probable aspects of this situation. One doesn’t want to go off one’s head. If you were in my place you might see the point.’

  ‘Oh, very possibly,’ he said with courteous restraint. ‘If I were in your place I could dispense with imagining one aspect of the situation, couldn’t I? I’d know. I don’t say I would succeed, like you, in eliminating every probable aspect. Yet one doesn’t, as you say, want to go off one’s head.’

  She threaded a needle in silence; then said in a practical voice: ‘I rather wish you hadn’t—felt you must agree to go and see her. But perhaps—probably—you wanted to. How should I know? That’s your own affair, I suppose. What did she want to see you about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She raised her head from the work and sent him a look he did not meet but was aware of. He said:

  ‘I didn’t discover. She was in no fit state—it wasn’t any use. So I came away—as you were able to see for yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean, in no fit state?’ He did not reply, and she added: �
��Upset? Drunk?’

  Overcoming an inner spasm, after a moment he nodded.

  ‘I see. She’s difficult when she’s drunk. Argumentative—truculent rather.’ He slightly shook his head. ‘Or at another stage,’ she continued, maintaining the practical level, ‘low in her spirits. Tearful.’

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ he said, polite. ‘I haven’t had much opportunity myself of observing these various stages. I happen not to have seen Dinah the worse for drink—that is, not what you’d call absolutely inebriated.’

  ‘You know she drinks like a fish.’

  Raw, coarse, the words escaped, and hung between them offensive, ponderous as a hanged body. He got up in a leisurely way, stretched, his gaze travelling round with the look of one vaguely noting and dismissing objects before leaving a room—perhaps for ever.

  ‘Rickie!’ She found herself on her feet, confronting his inert figure and dead eyes. ‘Are you ill? Do you feel it?’ She reached for his hand and felt it cold and clammy. He drew it away.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  He did not mean to obey her, but found himself dropping heavily back, without volition, into his armchair. He was taking a stiff whisky from her and thanking her and hearing her say gently: ‘There, drink that, darling. Lie back. You’re tired, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m all right—except I’m in a muck sweat. I’ll have a shower.’

  ‘Presently.’

  She was kind, she was quiet, she was in charge. He focused his eyes on her and saw her at first through an effect of blurred vision, then distinctly, sitting in her usual place opposite to him, her elbows propped on her knees and her chin on her palms, leaning forward to scrutinize him with an expression of authoritative solicitude; a beautiful, kind woman, at once familiar and a stranger. They smiled at one another. She said: