The Echoing Grove

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘Very strange,’ murmured Mrs Burkett; then conclusively: ‘You should have sent it. It was a splendid opportunity lost.’

  ‘I debated. I opened the envelope and scrawled at the end: “I wrote this before knowing he was dead.” But it looked so fishy I tore it up. She wouldn’t have believed it.’ Lifting her hand, she spread the long fingers and through narrowed eyes examined their outline of lucent rose against the light of the lamp. ‘And if she had believed it she wouldn’t have cared for it.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Well, don’t you see, the dream …? I’d described it. My idea, of course, was to suggest that so far as I was concerned there was nothing now to prevent a reconciliation. But under the circumstances it looked as if I was suggesting the opposite.’

  ‘I do not follow.’

  ‘How could I tell, she might have felt it as—one last thrust I’d always bided my time for. She always thought everything I did so typical of me. How could I be sure it wasn’t?’ Then seeing her mother still groping, frowning, she added impatiently: ‘Oh, don’t you see—the pay-off? My little way, don’t you see, of letting her know that Rickie and I were—in contact, together, when he died?’

  ‘Telepathy!’ exclaimed Mrs Burkett. She looked suddenly grave: then wistful, dreamy.

  ‘I’m not saying so,’ said Dinah, getting briskly to her feet. The immaterial sounding-board between each generation and its off-spring threw back an echo neither was aware of: she had assumed her mother’s voice. ‘It was odd, I grant you, but probably pure coincidence. After all, one dreams often enough of people who aren’t dying or just dead.’

  ‘True. Yes, coincidence perhaps,’ said Mrs Burkett. ‘And perhaps not. Who knows? He was unconscious for hours. Who knows where the mind wanders at such times? Last words are often so very curious.’ She picked up The Times and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. ‘It would not seem to me beyond the bounds of probability that Rickie should have thought of you: it is open to you to decide whether or not you could have picked the thought up. A dying man might well remember the woman he had loved.’ Opening the door and noting with satisfaction that Griswold was streaking up the stairs ahead of her, she added: ‘You must know that nothing now could give me greater pleasure than to see you and Madeleine reconciled. Mind you, I am not asking it for my sake. It will come about one day. It is merely that I would be pleased if it were to happen in my lifetime.’

  But what with one thing and another it did not happen in her lifetime; or rather, since in so far as it could bring her pleasure or its opposite her life was over, she was not present at the reunion of her daughters.

  ‘Why not? Why not?’ cried someone, tearing Madeleine out of sleep. Her heart was racing; she craned her neck to see the luminous clock on the bed-table beside her: five-thirty, a bad time of the morning to wake up; still totally dark. She lay down flat, struggling to plunge, to burrow back down again below this rocked and splintering level into which she had been hurled. What had happened? This was no way to wake to face a difficult day. Why difficult? She cast about, remembered: Dinah was in her house. For a split second it seemed so unlikely that she was tempted to get up, cross the passage, open the door opposite and discover—yes, the head of Dinah darkening the pillow with a blot of silence; not the head she might have seen, had seen so often when she slipped in to wake him in the morning; saw always with the twofold vision of a person in love: tranquil intensity of recognition doubled with astonished joy. Each time, she found him flung into a non-consciousness so total that the very bed seemed to say: touch me not; each time, when finally she touched him he woke up at once, looked at her in surprise, then with delight.

  She strained her ears for some actual repercussion that might have roused her—the dog worse, perhaps, or asking to be let out, Dinah creeping downstairs; but nothing was astir. Uneasily her mind ranged from room to room after the manner of women whose children are away; wondering which of them? what pain or nightmare?—before remembering that their beds are empty.

  She did not often greatly miss her children; indeed, since she had had a lover found herself disposed at times to be thankful for their absence; but now she felt a tugging hollow in her diaphragm, longed to be able to place them within earshot, under her eye, as they had been when she first came here … centuries and a moment of time ago: the boys sharing the room at the end of the passage, Clarissa in the midget room next door; above, the attic, a jolly sort of place where they retired to smoke cigarettes in secret, so they imagined, to play the gramophone, read magazines or simply lie about squawking with laughter and doing nothing at all for hours on end instead of taking healthy exercise. That was family life; and now she had none. She had kept it going as long as possible; it had survived the beginning of the war—even blossomed and solidified after Rickie had vanished abroad in 1940 on a secret mission; the boys still safe at Eton, Clarissa’s nursery-governess-turned-cook-general married and departed, herself learning to cook, to wash and press, to plant vegetables, raise chickens. ‘More fun these holidays that I ever remember,’ Anthony had written. He had praised her ironing of his shirts; Colin, rightly more critical, had preferred to do his own ironing. Cursing Clarissa for her weight, they had pedalled all over the countryside with her on the carriers of their bicycles, taking turns. They had taught her to jump her pony; and at harvest driven a tractor for a neighbouring farmer. Gone out with their guns at Christmas … What a happy time! A halcyon interlude in spite of all. No Anthony the following summer, except for one brief leave: he was an officer cadet by that time (not as tall as he had promised to be, and though such sweet looks not splendid like his father and his grandfather); but Colin, emerging at last from round-shouldered doughy puberty and developing an original face, a taste for chamber music and a désabusé wit, had worked again in the harvest and brought home a young schoolmaster called Jocelyn Penrose one evening for supper: agreeable chap, not a bit like the usual run of beaks, rejected for the Army because of infantile paralysis in youth. But only when he was tired could one detect that one leg dragged a little. He was tanned, fair, shortish, muscular, ripe corn colour all over: romantic ploughboy looks, except for the nervous fineness of his hands. Angry to be teaching, not to be in the Army, he worked fiercely in the fields, on the ricks, in the apple orchards, working off his rage. He liked music, he read modern poetry. He had an attractive rather sad quiet voice. He took to Colin. He eyed Clarissa and teased her and she blushed. He dropped in often to supper. He left his lodging in the next village and came to stay for the last week of the holidays, and met Anthony. They had all hoped that Rickie might get away from the Admiralty for at least one night, but at the last moment he was prevented. All through that week, under his eyes that flicked, glided in their sockets like a pair of shining green-flecked fishes, she felt her beauty flowering, serenely flowering. A family affair. Colin and Clarissa went back to school; he had one more night before his own term started, so he stayed one more night. He came to her room and into her bed and was her lover. She was a woman in love at last, she was unfaithful to her husband.

  Rickie was dead, and Anthony dead, Colin in South Africa; Clarissa with a set jaw had transferred herself lock stock and barrel to the attic. When her school friends came to stay they had the boys’ room, which had been redecorated to make it less of a reminder. Jocelyn still came to stay, she was still in love with him, he still made love to her; leaving her round about dawn to sleep for a few hours alone in the room opposite; but since he never put his imprint on it, never left behind so much as a book with his name in it, the room remained what it had always been—anonymous. Yes, Rickie’s dressing-room of course; but under that title it could never, even in Clarissa’s eyes, have assumed a sanctified identity. Rickie had occupied it so little; after Anthony’s death, she could count on the fingers of one hand the times he had come to share the house with her. Could he have guessed about Jocelyn? She never knew, he gave no indication. He had
seemed—something else as well as bereaved and over-tired … Rather distrait? Not so much that, not exactly indifferent; kind, friendly as ever, not in the least hostile or suspicious: simply more detached, more shadowy than seemed natural. Because of this she had not confessed as she had meant to … As the months went on he had seemed one might say to prefer to stay in London. He was glad enough to see her when she went up every ten days or so to lunch with him; but the only week-ends he ever jotted down were those of Clarissa’s half-term holidays. To these he never omitted to accompany her: unreal interludes in a chintzy Tudor-style hotel not far from the school grounds, country house atmosphere, period décor, old-world latches on the doors, Clarissa and several polite best friends for lunch and tea … The strain, the rain, the draughts, the tepid bath water, the boredom, the dreaded yet welcome hour of departure on Sunday evening, the farewells artificially alleviated on both sides with Mars bars and jokes and home-made rock cakes in a tin, the sadness of the school hats stuck on at the last moment, of the hands waving out of the over-loaded taxi, Clarissa’s loud final ‘Write!’ coming out of the dark with a note of desperation, to cause unformulated remores, each time, in the night watches … But Rickie had seemed always to relax, amused and sympathetic, playing any card or paper game suggested, watching and listening to Clarissa, his manners gratifyingly courteous to her self-possessed accomplices.

  When he came across the lawn that morning she was in the garden, picking peas into a basket. She knew it when she saw him. Anthony had been killed. She said so, and he nodded, and took the basket from her and led her into the house with his arm round her shoulders. He gave her a stiff brandy and helped her pack a bag and put her into the car, and they went first to Eton to pick up Colin and then straight down to Clarissa. Then they went on, all four of them … she was never quite sure where. Seven days in a little house on the banks of the Wye, lent to them, staff and all, by a friend of Rickie’s in the Admiralty; the last time they were ever together as a family; Rickie had arranged it all. They did everything as usual: fished, walked, picnicked, made jokes; motored one day to St David’s and looked at the fabulous cathedral. They cheered the landing (with Rickie’s assistance) of Clarissa’s first salmon. They talked about Anthony; and again and again when Clarissa broke down, when Colin’s anguish … when Rickie and I clasped but could not comfort one another. No, it was not supportable, either then or now; only it had had to be lived through. They had had to improvise a method for doing so, and somehow it had worked: the best their kind of family could do under the circumstances, to help each other to commemorate. Their strong determination—to be brave, to be unmorbid and unselfish, to go on living as usual for Anthony’s sake—had accomplished something: held them as it were out of time for those seven days, exposed yet cradled, hand in hand: a breathing space in which to begin to look for the materials that must be found to build a bridge. On the way back they stopped in Bath and Rickie took Clarissa to the cinema, and she and Colin visited the Abbey and the Roman ruins. Leaving Clarissa at school was a bad moment; and then Colin went back to Eton and Rickie to London; and she went to her mother. After that, the hours became more and more difficult to live through. She collapsed and was put to bed for three weeks in a dark room, under sedatives. When she recovered, she returned to the cottage and Jocelyn came to see her. He helped her in the garden and read aloud to her and slept with her in his arms, comforting her with tenderness, patience and compassion. Rickie came for a long week-end at the beginning of the next holidays; Colin had a fortnight before he was called up. In September, Clarissa having gone to stay with a best friend, she went with Jocelyn to a farmhouse in the middle of Dartmoor. Fathoms deep in love, she scarcely gave a thought to her family. Rickie in any case had left London on another secret mission and was incommunicado. Very rarely during the remainder of the time left to him before his death did he return to the cottage. It was as if—she thought now suddenly, her heart turning over—he had been relinquishing his stake in it; by gradual stages, with no word said, vacating it.

  There was one time she could not place when she had telephoned to tell him she was going to Clara for a few days’ rest. When she came back she found a friendly note from him: he had been given a week-end unexpectedly, too late to let her know, in any case wouldn’t have wanted to upset her plans, hoped she’d had a good rest as he had—he’d slept pretty well the clock round, got Mrs Dobson in to cook for him, read a bit, walked a bit, got some letters written. Darling, he headed it, and at the end: Love, darling.

  She had not failed him … not fundamentally. It was not as though he had been even curious about Jocelyn, let alone suspicious: the name had come up many times in the children’s conversation. When Clarissa blew faint doleful blasts on her recorder and told him it was a birthday present from Jos he had merely looked amused; and if he guessed the clue to her own revived interest in poetry he never gave a hint. She had stuck to the job for which he counted on her—the preservation in the midst of chaos of a base, a place of security from which his children could, when they must, depart; to which they might, if they could, return. His trust in her for that had been complete; she had not let him down. He would not have minded about anything else; had long forfeited any right to expect from her physical fidelity; and for the rest was generous enough to welcome any comfort or companionship she might turn towards to alleviate her loneliness and heal her grief. For all she knew he had had somebody himself in London: that might well have been the reason for what she had sensed in him—that aura of shadowy withdrawal. Secretive by nature, he preferred secretiveness in others … Feline, taut, wary in his passions, swiftly abashed, made poor by poverty of welcome … Yes, but also the obverse, which she knew in that second, that ghost-self of disjoined marriage who lies embraced for ever with its former partner, continuing to generate those once-conceivable forms they slew or failed to fertilize—the obverse also: swiftly responsive, rich, triumphant in delight, pride, passionate gratitude … as Dinah knew, none better, in her flesh and blood; as once in one split second of blind prevision she had known, known certainly though not believed, that Dinah was going to know. Not that it mattered now. Don’t think about it. Stop.

  She tried; but all the same the ambushed image sprang.

  Anthony suddenly appeared fondling the hand of Dinah, crying with ardent love: ‘Your cherry hand!’ He was three years old.

  ‘Nose, cherry nose,’ corrected Rickie, smiling, while Dinah leaning towards the little boy said in soft mockery: ‘Cowslip cheeks.’

  At this he had looked first gratified, then perplexed, touching his nose and cheek and then the hand he held in both his own, saying finally, with loss of assurance:

  ‘Not nose. And not those red kind of cherries. That other sort—what’s in the dining-room.’

  He watched their faces anxiously, awaiting revelation. Then:

  ‘Ah, white hearts,’ said Rickie, lounging on the arm of Dinah’s chair, also leaning forward, his shoulder pressing hers, to tweak his son’s ear. Then as if on an idle impulse he picked up that hand of Dinah’s, polished, waxy, edged with a half-transparent coral flush, turned it over, examined the pronounced, delicate structure of its bones and joints, said low:

  ‘Cherry. Yes, I see. Clever little boy.’ Then holding out the hand to him, in a provocative whisper: ‘Bite!’

  Anthony’s eyes opened in wild surmise; Dinah with uncharacteristic brusqueness pulled her hand away. All over. Innocent pretty fooling, meet for children’s hour. Rickie’s glance slid towards me, he came over to the sofa and stroked my forehead. I was convalescent from the birth of Colin—sharper-eyed perhaps than usual. I saw Rickie turn Dinah’s hand towards me to show me what lay coiled inside its palm … but I told myself nonsense, neurotic fancy.

  All over, all painless now; images, words without power or colour, their meaning within meaning long ago exhausted … No, not all, not over, never to be over. She turned on her side, awaiting what was now ineluctable
: apparition of the child, bursting again without warning through yet one more crack in time, focused dead centre against toneless shadows, blazing with inextinguishable terror; pity; searing a shaft down into limitless naught; infinitely removed yet always near, clear and exact—Anthony in the very flesh and hair, the clothes, the mood and gestures of whatever hour he arbitrarily selected to present himself. The voice called pipingly: ‘Your cherry hand!’ Or wailed: ‘I dreamed you lost me’; or asked: ‘Could anybody’s heart break if they weren’t careful?’ Or: ‘Flowers can have a sick smell,’ it said in a knowing way; or in a way of anguish: ‘Must we be dead?’—such things as children say. The voice piped its own dirge, the words wove a little shroud of pathos to contain them, dwindled and crouched down harmless. The words stirred, bred, the shroud convulsed grew great, it groaned with swelling symbols, with proliferating echoes, the voice burst through and split the world.

  She waited for this to happen; but this time she was spared. He vanished quietly in his white blouse and buttoned-on pants and scarlet slippers; leaving behind him his customary offering—a taste of poison, the old one with the new fashionable name. Angst; more popularly known as guilt.

  Quite a common thing; as common, so one heard, to humanity as having a father and a mother. One day, perhaps, she would give up and go to an analyst to discover who it was who played this claustrophobic game with her—Grandmother’s Steps or Looking Back; or the game of the Stalker Stalked. Creep up, creep up, one step and then another; pause; risk a little run; pause, big step forward; TOUCHED! She crept, she was crept up on; she stiffly ran and stopped; she heard through her crawling spine that wing-beat sound, pounced on it just in time or rather just too late; in time, too late was pounced upon … But who was the other player? Who called: ‘Back to the beginning!’—or faceless fled away back beyond recall? What panic echoing what desire could possibly engage with her in such equivocal sport?