For the first time that evening, she was impelled to look at him; and saw a face that she was never to forget: face, re-emerged, of the boy aged twelve, in fear, perplexity and suffering. For a second she told herself that this had been all a nightmare: she had awakened to find him as close to her as in the time of their first love, with its first mutual surrender of old secret pains and shames. But next moment she said bitterly: ‘Your mother is a spoilt, greedy, sentimental woman. She’s been the ruin of you. She’s pretended to be so devoted to me but she’s always hated me. I hate her.’
‘Oh, you exaggerate, I think,’ he said with a sigh. ‘On every count. Poor woman, she’s had a raw deal. She wanted to marry again, you know, after the war, but the chap let her down. She didn’t think I knew, but I did. I wasn’t really much good to her by that time. She won’t like this at all … However, that’s beside the point. Naturally I’ve thought a lot about the boys. But you’re a very good mother. And Nanny’s all right. I fancy at their present stage they won’t miss me much, or for long: it would have been harder for them if they were a bit older. Of course I hope you—can find it in you not to condemn me—well, too explicitly, to them: I mean of course for their sakes. I’d sooner fade out as far as they’re concerned: to have a disgraced father is worse, I should imagine, than to have a dead one. However, that’s up to you. I’m not quite so megalomaniac as to attempt to lay down rules of conduct for you.’
Volcanoes of invective and abuse boiled up in her towards explosion—sank down again, leaving her inert. It was his detachment that paralysed her power of initiative, whether in attack, defence, or counter-attack. He was not challenging her: he was merely announcing to her that since he had decided to retire, the fight was off, the field was hers. But for the fixed cold shadow in his eyes—that and his pallor—he seemed his everyday collected self. She told herself that what she was observing was a mental breakdown: he had gone quietly mad and must be humoured. While she was debating, if so, how to do so, he spoke again:
‘As for divorcing me, I imagine you’ll want to start proceedings as soon as possible.’
‘I shan’t divorce you,’ she said in a stunned voice.
‘Oh … Are you certain about that? I should have thought you’d want to get shut of me at once—or at least I should have advised it. I shall never come back.’ He paused: ‘You’re not under the delusion, are you, that the law allows me to marry Dinah? No, you can’t be.’
‘No.’
‘She and I do both perfectly realize we’re in the wilderness—we’re—what’s it called?—social pariahs, for good and all.’
‘And oh,’ she said in the same flat way, ‘how she will enjoy that. Root up! Destroy! Burn your boats! Throw off your chains! All for love. Or rather all for her. What a thrill. But you won’t enjoy it for long.’
He seemed to listen, to reflect, then shook his head as if what she was saying made no sense; or as if, she told herself, stiffening in her chair, he was perfectly indifferent to the sense or to the lack of it. It was all over. He was gone. She was alone with a stranger, or with a madman, or with a dead man out of whom emanated looks, words, gestures of grey ashes settling thick, thicker on him, on her, and coating greyly all the room’s familiar continuities: the material objects they had owned together, waiting in simplicity around them for tomorrow and tomorrow.
He returned in a business-like way to his plans. Probably the best solution for everybody would be for him to take Dinah abroad as soon as possible. She, Madeleine, had her marriage settlement; and he proposed to hand over to her a lot more capital; financially at least she would be very comfortable. And there would be other compensations he said, heaving himself out of his chair and starting to pace slowly up and down. She had plenty of friends and would not be lonely. And she would certainly be able to count on an enormous amount of sympathy.
‘Sympathy!’ she gasped, galvanized at last. ‘I don’t want sympathy.’ He looked at her with his ashen eyes, as if to say: What did she want? She said: ‘I want my life.’ He looked at her again, with curiosity. ‘I love you,’ she said. He stopped in his pacing and looked round the room. It seemed to her that for the first time something in him was returning to contemplate what he had done to it. He said:
‘That’s the first time you’ve said that.’
Instinct deserted her again; she expostulated, flustered:
‘What did you expect—at a time like this—considering what you’ve said? Did you expect me to go down on my knees to you?’
‘No,’ he said with the ghost of a smile. ‘I didn’t expect that.’
‘As if you didn’t know it …’
‘Know what?’
‘That I love you.’ It was harder to say it this time; it sounded unconvincing. It choked her.
He considered; then he said:
‘I think if it was true you’d have said it sooner.’
An icy cramp descended on her. The return had been a spurious one: he was really gone. He had gone into a world where he alone proposed, disposed—the self-elected Judge and sole protagonist. She was condemned, without appeal, for reasons stated, of having convinced him that she did not love him.
‘Rickie, you’re saying terrible things.’ She could scarcely raise her voice above a whisper. ‘And you’re going to do something terrible.’
He turned and looked at her once more; and if she read, as she thought, despair in his face, she knew she read nothing else: no faith, fear, pity, remorse or cry for help. He had damned himself and given himself absolution; lost himself; washed his shriven soul.
‘I’d better go now,’ he said.
‘Is she expecting you?’
‘Yes, she’s expecting me.’
‘You can’t go …’
It sounded feeble; and still she could not get up, even to stand before him, let alone put hands on him to stop him. He said, almost with regret:
‘Oh darling, don’t, it’s no use.’
‘Don’t go.’
But he had left the room. A few minutes later she heard the front door bang.
It was midnight. He rang the bell of Dinah’s flat. She put her head out of the window on the third floor, called softly: ‘I’m coming’; and after a lifetime, no time, let him in.
‘Dinah,’ he said under his breath.
She gave him her hand, and in silence they went up together. On the second landing she suddenly let his hand go and dropped behind him. He walked up the last flight with the last breath squeezed out of his chest, seeing light stream towards him from the open door of her sitting-room. As soon as they were inside and the door was shut she looked at him, a dwelling look, and said quietly:
‘Well?’
‘Here I am,’ he said.
She was silent a moment.
‘You’ve talked?’
He nodded. The next thing she said was unexpected. What she said was: ‘Mother rang me up this morning. She’s awfully worried.’
‘What about?’ His heart gave a lurch.
‘About you. She says she’s sure there’s something quite terribly wrong. She thinks you must be either in trouble or sickening for something or other of the gravest nature. She and Papa find you so changed, she said.’
After a pause he said irritably:
‘Why should she say it to you?’
‘She wondered,’ she said, after a glance at him, ‘if I’d seen anything of you while Madeleine was away—if I had any clue. She said it was really to ease Papa’s mind that she was ringing up. He’d been worrying and worrying: he’s so devoted to you, she said, and you’d been so different with him, and he gets so easily depressed.’
‘Different? I wasn’t different with him,’ muttered Rickie. ‘I could take my oath on it.’ The hours he’d spent sitting with the old man … What next? ‘If she was so worried about me, why couldn’t she ask me what was wrong?’
The silence was a long one.
‘Oh, don’t you see?’ she burst out, though without raising her voice. ‘She’s guessed. I’ve suspected she’s always guessed, though she’s never even hinted at it. She must be really on the war-path—this is her way of telling me. She’s coming up tomorrow—to do some shopping. She’s asked me to put her up for a couple of nights. Dying to have a good long chat, she said. That’s another thing she’s never asked me—to give her a bed. She’s always preferred to go to Aunt Lilian. Never even been in for a cup of tea—always insisted on meeting me in a bun shop. I guessed she wanted to steer clear of the aroma, the aura … Then I’m to go back with her to see Papa. I couldn’t say no. Could I?’
He threw himself speechless on to the settee.
‘Has she spoken to Madeleine?’ he presently inquired.
‘I shouldn’t think so. No, I shouldn’t think so.’ Glancing at her, he saw irony in her eyes and lips. ‘Surely you’ve got the idea by this time? Or haven’t you ever realized? She and Madeleine are two matrons, with identical views on marriage and all that. Things are taken for granted, not discussed. She would talk to Madeleine about housekeeping, about the children, their bringing-up—never about you. She’s not going to talk to me either—not unless I force it. At least, that’s how I see it. You know her. Anything ticklish is always under cover. But she sees her duty clearly.’ A smile crossed her face. ‘When she smells danger she lies doggo. When she sees it really operating, she acts.’
‘You really think …’ He broke off. He was beginning to feel in a turmoil, as if the vacuum he had been suspended in had begun at last to be invaded by cross-currents, winds, tides, that might sweep him anywhere, independent of his own volition.
‘How did it go—with Madeleine?’ She sounded diffident, almost apologetic.
‘It went ill—as it had to. It’s over. There wasn’t any noise. Or anger.’
She moved, and in passing him lightly touched his hair; went on into the kitchen. When after a few moments, she came back he said:
‘Will you come away with me at once?’
She looked at him without hesitation; without yes or no; without a query.
He got up and began to pace, then went to the window and looked out; and she came and stood looking out beside him. It was a perfect night, starry, windless. He thought about his mother-in-law.
‘You’re feeling caged up,’ she said. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
They left the flat, picked up a taxi and got themselves dropped by Battersea Bridge. They walked eastwards slowly, arm in arm, in a world of stone and water, of light and light’s splintered exhalations; in a world of muffled and diminished evidences of the presence of humanity: One that coughed on a bench; One that whistled a tune in the distance; One that laughed with a companion; One that stopped to light a cigarette and sent the match spinning; in a world where presently the landscape they advanced through seemed not so much to thin out around them as to shrivel, then to vanish, as if touched by an enchanter’s wand. They were in a desert, dry, limitless, bleached and blackened; banal as grief or death. They came as if by tacit signal to a halt, and went to lean against the parapet, looking down into the river’s fire-dappled, somnolent, molten obsidian mass. She said:
‘It will never change. Hundreds of years back, hundreds of years to come. But every fraction of a split second it is changing: it’s never the same. Not for the fraction of a split second.’
He murmured assent. He had such an overwhelming impulse to jump and be gone for ever into this ever-dissolving permanence that he took her by the arm and pulled her back. She said:
‘So what shall we do now?’
They hailed the next cruising taxi and went back to Bloomsbury. He was so exhausted that when he got upstairs he reeled and stumbled on his feet. Sleep kept falling upon him in irresistible waves; and she put him into bed as if he were a child. By the time she slipped in beside him he was out, unconscious, totally unresponsive to her whisper and her touch.
Next day was the day that a great deal happened.
He woke up late, his limbs like lead, his head in a fog, and found Dinah afoot, making breakfast; and found Dinah changed. She brought him coffee in bed, and when he said he couldn’t manage it, sat by him and quietly urged him to try to get it down. She was automatically gentle and remote, as if she existed with elementary functions only: such as, to glide about as if on domes of silence, to bring him hot drinks and take them away again, to turn his bath on and when he was in it peep through the door from time to time and ask him if he was all right. He said yes, of course he was; and though getting out of the bath and drying and dressing needed the most careful expenditure of energy and resources, he accomplished all these labours. He had just gone back to the bedroom to dial TIM when he was seized with an appalling attack of giddiness and, dropping the receiver with a crash, collapsed face downwards on the bed. Presently he heard her voice in the distance saying:
‘It’s all right, Rickie.’ She was holding him. ‘Just wait a few minutes. Then we’ll get you back to bed.’
But he assured her it was nothing, the bath had been too hot, with a bit of fresh air on the way to the office he’d be perfectly all right. Presently she ceased protesting, put a brandy flask in his pocket, gave him a last searching look and sent him off, saying:
‘Come back at lunch-time. I’ll have a meal for you. And if you feel in the least peculiar between now and then ring me up. Promise. I’ll come at once and fetch you.’
He promised; but he pooh-poohed the idea of having another come-over. He put his arms round her and gave her a long unimpassioned kiss, and went downstairs, into the street, towards the Tube. Almost at once the pavement started to heave and whirl and, just in time, he hailed a cab and sat inside it leaning forward, taking deep breaths from the open window, cursing himself, bewildered. Could it be food-poisoning? Not drink: he had had nothing except one beer the night before. He tried, and failed, to remember what he had eaten at his last meal with Madeleine. Arsenic in the soup perhaps … Could he be sure she was incapable of it? He heard himself laugh.
About midday, drenched in icy sweat, having dictated several letters to Miss Matthews, he got up from his desk, took a step, and pitched headlong in a dead faint. When he came to he was alone, but then she was kneeling beside him, pressing a glass of water to his lips and calling: ‘Mr Masters! Mr Masters!’ He pushed the glass aside, wiped the spilled liquid from his collar, and with her agitated assistance dragged himself to a chair and sank in it with his head between his knees.
‘Oh, Mr Masters, just stay exactly as you are. I’ll run and fetch your uncle. Just keep as you are. I’ll fetch Sir Godfrey to you.’
Galvanized by this threat, he said in quite a strong voice: ‘No. Don’t fetch anybody. Not Sir Godfrey on your life. I’m all right. Sorry.’
He opened his eyes and saw her kneeling on the floor beside him, her face mottled, her eyes behind pebble lenses glaring consternation. They looked at one another. He made a statement: ‘I’m in trouble.’ This he was always to regret. She nodded slowly once, twice, thrice, with total comprehension, and put her hand on his.
‘You’ve looked shockingly seedy for a long time,’ she said. ‘I’ve been quite worried. Oh dear. Well. Never mind.’
He sat upright and said with an approach to his usual tone with her—a compound of delicacy, sexual dismay and humorously formal deference:
‘My dear ridiculous Miss Matthews, what a waste of worry. Never fitter. Only this morning … Ate something that disagreed. Must have.’
He remembered the brandy flask, extracted it from his pocket and swallowed half the contents.
‘Lucky this wasn’t broken in the crash.’
‘Mr Masters,’ she said. ‘Do you really think you ought? Till you know? You might be in for something internal, mightn’t you? I’m sure I was taught in my First Aid Course that spirits
can be very dangerous. Should there be bleeding, I mean, or anything.’
Reviving further, he stared at her and grinned.
‘I haven’t been run over,’ he said. ‘Unless you trampled on me while I lay stretched unconscious at your feet.’
She was not amused.
‘I do earnestly beg and implore of you,’ she said, permitting herself a scolding note, ‘to get along home at once now and pop straight into bed. And if you take my advice you’ll see a doctor. It may be nothing serious but with a nasty faint like this you never know. Shouldn’t I—should I ring through to anyone and warn them?’
‘No thanks,’ he said, appalled. ‘Don’t you do any such thing now, promise me. If you do, I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Just as you please,’ she said, with what he feared to be another significant look. ‘The last thing I would wish is to seem officious.’
‘Perhaps I’ll take your advice though, and go home. I seem to have a splitting headache. You may well say this is a hangover, Miss Matthews—only in fact it isn’t. Be all right tomorrow. See you then. You’ve been extraordinarily kind—can’t thank you enough.’
‘Are you sure now you can trust yourself not to have another turn?’ More and more tartly maternal. ‘I do really think it might be advisable for me just to come with you to your door—I really do.’
The Echoing Grove Page 16