The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Very bad.’

  ‘He was a good chap? She was happy?’

  ‘Very happy.’

  I took her letter from my handbag and offered it to him; he hesitated, then accepted it. I showed the child a picture book while he went over to the window and read it with his back turned. Well I remember that dreadful document, setting out firm bald reasons for marching on breast forward, never doubting—placing the enlargement of my political horizon before her private grief … Dinah has never learnt to express herself in an adult, educated way. Very curious. She had excellent governesses, also the freedom of the library; yet give her a pen and she cannot be trusted not to express herself in clichés, like a schoolgirl with a smear of the popular slick journalist. But she is mal entourée, hobnobs with riff-raff, people with opinions and no breeding, always has—so odd … As if composing a primer for the indoctrination of a housemaid she set down for me that poor little man’s odyssey, her hundred per cent backing of it, his life laid down to prevent—to bring about … Ah, and in spite of because of her strident brave trumpet-blasts I admired her, prayed for her faith and his. It gave her comfort when I said how right he was, how gallant, admirable … So he was. But oh, the waste. She had settled down at last. An extraordinary choice but they were suited, I saw that. ‘Whatever becomes of me,’ she wrote, ‘however hard it seems at present to live without him, I shall go on working for the Cause. I have his torch as well as mine to carry now, and I shall always be proud to think I married a true pioneer of the future, one of the heroes of the new People’s Democracy that is going to be born. Fascism will be defeated in Spain in spite of all the bombs and tanks of the Dictators, in spite of the British Government’s iniquitous nonintervention policy playing into the hands of Franco’s abominable reactionary conspiracy’—and so on and so forth. ‘Jo wrote in his last letter that if only I could see for myself the spirit of the Spanish people and the International Brigade I couldn’t have the shadow of a doubt. He had none. He was absolutely happy. He loved life more than anyone I ever knew, and more fully than anyone I ever knew he was prepared to lay it down. He chose. He was a hero.’

  Rickie pushed the letter back into its envelope. Standing above me and Clarissa on my lap, he said:

  ‘Her letters are always so—I suppose they’re like her in a way but …’

  ‘Disappointing. Not the best of her,’ I said.

  ‘Well, yes. These Good Cheer messages from Supreme Headquarters. And the worse things go the more confident the pep talk.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘I suppose she’s got to do it. Poor girl, poor Dinah. She never could bear to be in straits. Does she believe all this, do you suppose, or is it to make you feel less upset about her? She’s so generous in all her impulses …’ He tapped his chin with the envelope. ‘I hope to God she—I wish … There’s nothing I can do. I can’t imagine what we’d say to one another now if we did meet. She must have become extremely formidable.’

  ‘She hasn’t changed,’ I said.

  ‘Well, she must be even more formidable than she …’ He handed the letter back. ‘It’s damnable,’ he said in a voice of compassion. ‘This Jo must have been such a good chap. I’m glad she found someone with the guts to go all out for what he believed in, someone—well, whole, to take the whole of her along with him. She was always looking for that. A hero … I hope she may be right about the rewards. Seems to me heroism is like patriotism, not enough. But she wouldn’t agree.’

  Then Madeleine came in. I said: ‘I have just been telling Rickie that Dinah’s husband has been killed in Spain.’ She shot him a look, which he did not meet, and said in a sincere voice of shock and sympathy: ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ He quietly turned the subject.

  Now Rickie too was dead. If ever a man laid down his life for his country it was he. Most unpretentious, unspectacular of casualties, how preposterous he would have considered any tribute. ‘But he was a hero,’ she whispered fiercely. Perfect self-sacrifice; no less, no more than Anthony’s. No brand of ideology could make a corner in heroes any more: that was one blessing about the war, she would say bitterly to Dinah … No, no, she would not, unthinkable, the very idea of making a remark with such poisoning possibilities; of giving Dinah an opening perhaps for argument, comparison between … of analysis of what went to make a hero. Heroes chose their deaths, she would say; were not imposed upon. Anthony chose no death. He had been ordered, simply, to enter the vast duped ranks of youth with no prospect of a future: he had shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. Had not Rickie chosen? Rickie?—Good heavens, no! Not thrown his life away? Ah, but not positively!—not with a summing-up, a creed, a testament. Thrown up the sponge, bled out his life or rather let it bleed, dead beat, indifferent … The voice of Dinah with its disquieting edge (her nerves are in a bad state, she should be forced to rest, give up) seemed to ring in the silence like a humming wire. Hero, it twanged, hero: fanatical reverberation.

  Was there nowhere left in all the world for the dead to lie down brotherly, equally defeated?—equally innocent, triumphant?

  She snapped the book shut and laid it back in its place and locked the drawer. She was trembling. It was merely that she was tired: it had been an ordeal describing to Dinah the village gathering in Norfolk for the funeral. The brunt of this, practically speaking, she had had to bear, his poor tiresome mother being dead, Madeleine bewildered, and all the men of the family too busy or abroad. Staring in the mirror she noted her thin discoloured hair, the bright single rose of age, ephemeral, flaring in her cheeks, her eyes brilliant in their sunken sockets. Posthumous youth: out of grief by memory. Nobody living cared much now what she in her own identity might want or could remember. This rose revived was out of time and season. She would be expected to think only of his widow, of his orphaned little daughter; she must not call for sympathy herself. It was not comme il faut in the old to expect great personal consolation: they should be accustomed to bereavement. And I do not expect it, she told herself, going downstairs again to tell Dinah to keep her feet up and have her supper on a tray; my life has passed beyond such tensions and fluctuations, death is the next experience, I must make the best of it. Above all, and at once, I must shed this load of sour hostility towards Dinah, this corroding wish to tell her, teach her—what?

  But Dinah did say, after supper:

  ‘You’ll miss him dreadfully. He was so fond of you.’

  She could not at once reply and Dinah went on, as if amused: ‘Of the three of us I think he liked you best. You’d have suited him best, too.’

  It was easier to speak then, assuming the dry tone that was part of the game—the particular type of backhand volley they practised enjoyably together.

  ‘Thank you. The subject never arose, I cannot think why. Perhaps because I found myself reasonably well suited by your father.’

  ‘Always?’ Dinah shifted lightly on the sofa to get a less oblique view of her, where she sat knitting and bespectacled on the other side of the hearth. ‘From the very dawn of romance to the very end?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Well, I never! What astounding luck,’ said Dinah after a musing silence.

  ‘I would not call it entirely luck. There has never been a marriage, however thoroughly consolidated in appearance, that has not been found to be steered for the rocks—at a certain moment.’

  ‘Yours was found to be so?’

  ‘Mine was no exception.’

  She knitted swiftly on. Dinah lay back again on the cushions and lit a cigarette.

  ‘You have given me quite a turn,’ she said presently. ‘It only goes to show … It takes two, I suppose, at the tiller when the moment comes?’

  ‘Not always. As a rough and ready rule it takes the wife. I am not suggesting that this applied in my own particular case.’

  ‘I bet you’d have left Papa if he’d been really unsatisfactory.’
/>
  ‘Oh, very possibly. But he was not really so. We made allowances for one another.’

  ‘Is it true,’ asked Dinah in a voice of girlish delicacy after another silence, ‘what one hears—that men have a funny time?’

  Mrs Burkett shot her a suspicious glance; but Dinah was looking meekly at the ceiling.

  ‘Men are different in certain circumstances and respects. It is a matter of physiology. The sooner this is faced in married life the less trouble for everybody concerned.’

  ‘Considering how different men are, it seems so curious that it is always women who have to face it. One never hears, does one, of a man facing his difference? It would almost seem that his instinct was to turn his back on it.’

  The tension in Mrs Burkett’s features underwent a sudden relaxation; she let her knitting fall in her lap and leaned back, feeling something flutter deep inside her, like the intimation of one more quickening of the sense of life; as if after all there could be no such thing as loss without replacement. But how irritating to see this perpetual cigarette in Dinah’s lips or fingers: ugly, unwholesome common habit; she would speak her mind about it.

  In the silence Dinah’s nerve-ends crept, contracted, listening for the guns, the sirens. Absurd: this was the heart of Berkshire; outside this pleasant cottage which Madeleine and Rickie had found for her mother when war broke out, was a cherry orchard, beehives, nightingales in the thicket just beyond; farther, a village pub, a store, church, vicarage, manor, farm; still farther, torrents of aromatic foam of wild parsley in the banks; and all around, the architectural masses and perspectives of the Downs, sheep-cropped, thymy, spattered with juniper bushes, cut with immemorial chalk tracks. In widening rings she placed the night-folded features of the landscape. She began to hear a steady giant pulse. The old woman from the village who obliged for Mrs Burkett had told her earlier that when Victory Day came the beacons would be lit from ridge to ridge as they had been for the Armada and for Bonaparte. Yes, she had called him Bony.

  Her mother took up her knitting again and critically examined it. It was an ambitious work—an entire frock for Clarissa, whose measurements and other physical characteristics her grandmother now discussed; with comparisons leading on to recollections of her own childhood and of her children’s childhood.

  ‘I suppose,’ mused Dinah, ‘if ever a generation knew its own strength it was yours: or rather didn’t know it, as the saying goes, meaning it’s so tremendous it hasn’t got to be consciously considered, for good or ill. We inherited your Juggernaut momentum; but of course not your sphere of operations.’

  ‘Indeed!’

  ‘That started to be blocked. And we seized up. Rickie must have known it in his bones long before we did. We weren’t conditioned like him, not deeply, by ruling class mentality. You needn’t get on your snobby-horse’—for her mother had snorted—‘I couldn’t be more thankful for the good sound upper-middle stock I come of. It’s meant a sort of solid ground floor of family security and class confidence that’s been a great stand-by. But Rickie hadn’t got it. He was a romantic orphan boy, irrevocably out of the top drawer. He was never at home in his situation, was he?—I mean the contemporary one, the crack-up—not just the general human situation of wondering why you’re born.’

  There was no answer. Mrs Burkett polished her spectacles.

  ‘Coming down in the world must cause as many strains and stresses as going up in it,’ continued Dinah, inhaling and blowing out trails of smoke. ‘I’ve sometimes thought, if Jo had lived and we’d had children, they might have felt it.’

  ‘Ah, you compare the alliances,’ said Mrs Burkett on a formidably unprejudiced and deferring note. ‘Poor Colin and Clarissa, dear me! To think they do not appear to recognize what they might well feel.’

  ‘I merely meant that Madeleine and I both married out of our walk in life,’ said Dinah in a voice which sounded to her mother intolerably patient, condescending. ‘Only a degree or so in her case—drastically in mine. I know you’ll resent my saying it, but Rickie and Jo did have something in common: a sort of frailty, as if they had no compost round their roots … Jo would have got bedded down, if he’d lived; but Rickie … You see, Jo had the advantage of a trained political mind. He knew where we were, in history. He taught me to see ourselves historically.’

  ‘Ah, in that case,’ said Mrs Burkett pleasantly, after a pause for counting stitches, ‘you are certainly more advantageously placed than most of us. What can one hope to do without training? Only one’s duty according to one’s very narrow lights.’

  Suiting action to words she briskly rose, drew the black-out curtains across the window, switched on two darkly shaded lamps and returned to her chair.

  ‘I don’t mean to give the impression,’ said Dinah, ‘that Jo looked on our marriage as a social experiment.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ snapped Mrs Burkett. She pressed her lips together, then added: ‘As you know I only met him once. He appeared to me to behave like any nice young man in love—the usual excess of humility, the usual over-estimation. I didn’t see him in terms of the potting shed, I must admit: but then I never noticed Rickie’s difficulties in the matter of manure. I simply felt he—Jo—was genuine. I liked him very much.’

  Her thoughts travelled back to the day when he had turned up without warning in a battered two-seater, and announced his intention of marrying her younger daughter. Spring 1936 it must have been? A dark plump glowing little man with intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a bright pink shirt, a loud check jacket and easy manners. Excellent teeth. Face expressive, mouth a shade too mobile. Hands cared for, sensitive. Warmth in his voice to compensate for the Jewish-Cockney twang. His father was dead. He and his mother ran a big bakery in East London, he spoke of her with endearing pride. An affectionate boy, a good son, a taking little man. Interested in literature, in education: these they had discussed, not politics. What she remembered best were his shouts of laughter once she had got over the initial shock and put him at his ease. A laughing little man. ‘Aren’t you a duchess, though!’ he said. His eyes teased, admired, delighted in her. ‘I don’t mind telling you I wasn’t looking forward to this interview—though I’d made a vow I’d go through with it on my loney-own. I thought you’d be sure to come it over me, in spite of Diney saying no, not on the whole you wouldn’t, not if I played my cards right.’ A shout of laughter. ‘But aren’t you lovely? Diney did say you were a classic but I got the picture wrong: I took it from those old-style musical comedy favourites—you know those picture-postcard photos, Edwardian Beauties, the ample type as you might say, all bust and fuzzy fringe and a face like a love-sick spaniel mooning at you.’ Another shout of laughter. ‘I’ll tell Diney she’s not a patch on you for looks. Not that she isn’t what I call perfect in her own way. It’s a funny thing, she doesn’t take after you but I’d know you were related: your skeletons ’ud be the dead spit of one another.’ How tender and serious when he talked of Dinah, what admiration, also what shrewd perception; also what pity, what humour. ‘God bless you,’ he said at parting, wringing her hand till her fingers ached.

  ‘What an act you put on for me, didn’t you? Gorgeous. I’m common—that’s why I appreciate it.’ Another shout. ‘I wish you could meet my mother and her you—you’d hit it off. I’ll bet you’ve never bounced anybody in your life and nor has she. And wouldn’t she revel in a place like this!—she loves nice things. Her and Dinah get on a treat.’ His last words sober: ‘I get your point of view, don’t think I don’t. It’s a facer for you, in a way. But there’s one thing Diney needs as things have turned out for her—two things rather: one’s to stay where she is because she believes in what she’s doing: the other is someone to look after her, someone that wants to, mind you, because he believes in her and she helps him to believe in himself. I’m the guy that wants to, and what’s more I’m going to.’

  She had told him that she too believed in him. Sh
e had never seen him again. A week or so later they were married at a Registry Office in London: by friendly consent it was not made a family affair. Jo’s mother and his aunts and uncles still practised the Jewish faith; and what with this, and her own Anglicanism—still potent in her though not formally professed except at Christmas and at Easter—and the aura of dogmatic atheism or of dialectical materialism (whatever that might be) around the bridal couple, there seemed no common meeting ground for the ceremony of marriage. They were married, they were happy in two rooms in Stepney. Dinah went on with her job—clerical work it appeared to be in some local clothing factory—and wrote that they would love to come and stay for a few days in September when they had their fortnight’s holiday. Presently she wrote to say that she had left the clothing factory to take on an organizing job for the Spanish Republican cause: unpaid, it meant real poverty, but that was nothing. And they did not come in September. By then Jo was in Spain with the International Brigade. He did not come back, he did not look after Dinah. Waste, tragic folly, criminal waste and folly.

  ‘What I meant was,’ said Dinah with the harping persistence of one who has felt a dig, ‘it must have been more of a wrench for Rickie than we realized, selling up his estates and going into business. He’d been brought up to be landed gentry like his fathers. It was a whole way of life gone—not just his own personal one: all his racial memories, you might call them. He couldn’t have helped feeling he was letting down a lot of people—tenants and retainers—shrinking his responsibilities. One shouldn’t underestimate that sort of dislocation.’

  ‘So you have remarked before,’ said Mrs Burkett, thinking: what a prig she is becoming, a pedantic spinster, nothing but views, no man would stand for it—no proper man. ‘Since I am not equipped for these discussions, let us stick to the particulars, let us stick to simple economic facts.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Dinah in a tone of mannerly encouragement.

  ‘Rickie, I take it,’ began Mrs Burkett rapidly, ‘inherited a certain property and like most of what you term the landed gentry—indeed so do I but without feeling called upon like you to impose a particular inflection upon my vocal chords—found himself crippled by taxation, whether justly or unjustly is a matter of opinion though I am sometimes tempted to consider it more a matter of taste—and being a young man of foresight, intelligence and initiative, and luckily empowered to break the entail, he came to a sensible decision.’ She paused for respiration, and disregarding the ‘whew!’ that Dinah uttered on a long whistling note, drove on: ‘And above all wishing to marry young, for love, not money …’