The Echoing Grove (20 page)

‘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.’

Once more masking his horror he protested, thanked, reassured her, got away. Her last words were:

‘If I had my way, your doctor would give you a thorough overhaul at once.’

Not a bad idea, he said, as the lift gates closed between them. It seemed to him that the time was approaching, somehow, for his resignation. Then everybody else would have their way.

The very moment that yet one more cab deposited him at Dinah’s, the door opened and she was standing in the entrance.

‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘I was getting worried.’

He told her of his extraordinary misfortune. This fainting was utterly ludicrous, fantastic; he was telling her so, going upstairs with her arm supporting him and laughing weakly, when the whole thing started again: giddiness, black whirling sinking clouds of it, through which she struggled to bear him on. Stretched on the bed where, after removing his shoes and loosening his collar, she immediately placed him, he kept asking himself what the devil he could be playing at? There was so much that needed his attention—he couldn’t pack up like this.

But as the afternoon wore on there was nothing left but a Something of the utmost urgency, something incomprehensible, beginning to invade his whole body. He heard himself murmur:

‘Perhaps it was the brandy’; and heard her ask him, close to his ear:

‘What do you mean, Rickie?’

‘Worst thing for bleeding. So she said. Matthews.’ The memory of Miss Matthews passed over his dimming-out consciousness, and he had to laugh.

‘Why do you say that?’ She sounded scared, and this he regretted. She was holding his hand and he tried to press it to reassure her; but the truth was, it was he who wanted someone to give him a reassuring pressure, considering how dark the room was now. ‘Rickie, why do you say that? Bleeding …’

He shook his head. Presently he announced:

‘I’ve been ill for a long time.’ That sounded reasonable. He wished to God he’d said that, not the other, to Miss Matthews.

‘Rickie, love, what is the name of your doctor?’

He thought hard, groaned, suddenly remembered: ‘Murray.’ He added after another interval: ‘More Madeleine’s … children’s. Don’t know any other. Let it go.’

‘I won’t be a minute. I’m going to telephone from downstairs.’

He made a protest, it was so unkind of her to leave him, but when he opened his eyes she had left the room. He was in great discomfort, he would take the opportunity to get next door, to the bathroom. Once on his feet, he set himself with a will to cover the distance. He did it, he got there … or rather, he was aware that by this Something his body was conveyed. It got him there, to get him … get him once and for all.
Death.
Ah well … Death in the bathroom. He’d done all he could in the way of what was impossible, he could do no more. He cried out once, a loud long cry; gave up.

He was on the bed, flat as a flat fish, someone had taken away the pillows, someone had lit the table-lamp and covered it with a green scarf, someone was sitting beside him, some chap with a well-groomed look and an immaculate dark head brushed in two polished wings. This chap was holding him by his wrist, and his fingers felt cold like the touch of glass beads. He sighed and said: ‘Hullo.’

‘All right, old chap. Don’t move, eh? You’ll be all right. Don’t worry. Just keep perfectly quiet, just as you are.’

It was Murray, nice chap, great charm of manner, great cricketer, old Blue … jolly good when Anthony had that near shave, mastoid.

‘What’s the matter with me?’

‘Can’t tell you yet, old chap. We’re going to get you shifted soon where you’ll be more comfortable.’ He relinquished his wrist. ‘You gave us a fright, but you’re going to be all right. I’ll see you again in an hour or so.’

He had a virile pleasant authoritative voice, a chap you could trust to keep his head in a crisis. Pity he’d gone away. He felt lonely again and moaned to himself. Someone came towards him with a noiseless urgency and laid a hand, another cool one, on his forehead.

‘Try not to move at all, my darling. It’s important.’

‘Oh, Dinah.’ She said hush, hush, hush, with great firmness, and put arms round him. ‘I did try,’ he said, and felt her nod her head rapidly above him. A drop of something scorching fell on his cheek. Hot tears. Dinah’s.

‘What’s going to be done with me?’

‘You’re going to a Nursing Home, darling. It’s the ambulance again—your turn this time, darling. We don’t seem able to avoid it, do we?’ She joked in a thin light voice.

‘God,’ he said, disgusted. ‘What a lot’s been going on. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured. ‘Everything’s taken care of. Do you like this smell or hate it? Frozoclone.’ She was passing something icy, solid, pungent across his forehead.

‘Thank you.’ A fearful anxiety began to beset him: he became aware that they were not, as he thought, alone. ‘Who’s here?
She’s
not here, is she?’

‘Who, Rickie?’

‘That …’ He couldn’t say it, the name, the befouler, the rescuer.

‘Oh, Mother’s here,’ said Dinah quickly, cheerfully, as if stating what should be obvious. ‘You remember I told you she was coming.’ And immediately he heard the voice of Mrs Burkett saying:

‘Lie still, dear boy. Dinah, that was the bell. I expect the ambulance has come.’

He opened his eyes and saw her standing in the doorway. Dinah got up from her knees, hurried past her, vanished.

‘
You
here,’ he said. ‘This is a pretty kettle of fish.’

‘You’re going to that very nice Nursing Home Papa was in,’ she said, as if announcing a great treat in store. ‘You’ll be so comfortable
—
and such good nursing. Matron is really a most charming woman.’

He sighed, looked at her and said: ‘What about Madeleine?’

‘Of course,’ she said at once in her strong voice. ‘Don’t worry about Madeleine. Don’t worry about anything, dear boy.’

He gave up.

‘Well …’ he said. ‘You deal with it.’

‘I will.’

There was, next moment, a subdued but powerful display of energy around, beneath his person; he was being wrapped in blankets, lifted on to a stretcher and heaved down, down round turn after turn of the narrow staircase by two uncommunicative stalwarts in uniform. He turned his head once or twice to look for Dinah, but she was nowhere to be seen.

His little stay in the Nursing Home prolonged itself to four weeks. Duodenal ulcer was what he had; a haemorrhage was the Something that had taken his body by surprise that afternoon. In the small hours he had another, and was a goner, wife and mother sent for; but on the last stroke of zero a blood transfusion brought him back. He was neither thankful nor regretful, merely surprised, when they told him later what a close shave he’d had; but afterwards, thinking it over while he sipped his beastly milk, he came to the irrational conclusion that he preferred to be alive. Thanks to his excellent constitution he rallied steadily, and took a particular fancy to one of the night nurses, an Irish girl, plump, with a dark creamy voice. Madeleine came mornings and evenings for a short visit and read him light fiction; she was popular with the staff and much admired. When she took him home his household received him with so much joy that he was deeply touched. Nannie blanched, and shook like an aspen. Mrs Moon the cook burst into tears; she was from his old home in Norfolk, child of his grandfather’s head keeper, and had known him from a boy. Nannie had always preferred him to the children’s Mummy; many a time she had passed the remark downstairs that the Daddy’s was the sweeter nature. And his dear old friends rang up, dropped in to see him. Ah, and how nearly, unknown to all of them, he had shocked, rocked this entire structure, how recklessly jeopardized their faith in him. Well, there it was, they had been mercifully spared; they would never know what he’d put in their pipes to smoke on a certain evening last month; what transparencies, what bagatelles they had seemed who now so unquestionably were settling his hash; were bearing him along with the insensibility, the jolt-reducing purpose of shock-absorbers in the domestic bodywork. There it was. So much for moral choice.

He didn’t see Dinah again, he didn’t hear from her. When he was well enough to read his letters and Sister archly laid the whole stack beside him, asking him if he couldn’t spare some for less lucky people, his pulses well-nigh pounded him to pieces as he looked through them. Nothing. Nothing. Day after day he furtively watched the door of his room, fancying it about to open to admit her. ‘Your sister-in-law to see you, Mr Masters.’ What more natural? It didn’t happen. Nor was he told that a young lady had called to inquire, left him this bunch of flowers but hadn’t left her name, or any message. He would have got her message from the flowers she chose, from her arrangement of them; but she did not send them.

Madeleine took him to Bournemouth for a fortnight; and then he was more or less himself again and returned to his office, to confront Miss Matthews. But Miss Matthews’ father had had a stroke and she had left to nurse him; she had done him this last good turn. At Bournemouth he and Madeleine had had a talk, just one, conducted on a highly civilized level of goodwill and common sense. They had agreed to let the past be past, and stay together and rebuild their married life.

He never saw Dinah again, he never heard from her or heard her name mentioned—until the day she summoned him to meet her at the flat. Up to that moment he went on moving in a trance, apathetically dividing time into regulated lengths: to the next meal, to going out, to coming back, to bed-time. What was love? Guilt? Pity? Love? All equally nothing, articles without function, useless, and therefore without value. Dust and ashes. Which was it—conscience?—mere animal instinct of self-preservation?—that in the nick of time had totally invaded him, burrowing in his bowels to get at the tap to drain his life blood out … to bleed him of his sin? Strange how repeatedly the rhythm of this business had swung to physical disasters, the failure of the body: Dinah’s, her father’s, Dinah’s again, then this. He was fed up with the Nursing Home
motif.
Some chaps got out by drink, drugs, work, change of scene, religion, other women; an ulcer in the guts had got him out. It was laughable. Henceforth he would stay put, not move an inch to right or left. If that was what they wanted, that was what they’d get. He went on wondering, wondering about Dinah—a mental process in the nature of background music, exacerbating yet compulsively turned on again, again, to drown the silence.

He wondered; and when he saw her again that time she gave him his cuff-links and he lost them, he asked her, or tried to ask her how it had been with her. She did not answer. He felt that by inquiring he was only doing further damage: the image of a stone on a buried body rose to his mind; he was trying to prise it up and she to stamp it down and drag him from it. It was not to bare it and examine it that she had summoned him. She was looking for … asking for … There was nothing in him, he was no use to her, if she’d had any sense she might have known it. Yet how sad he had been to have to show her he had handed back his ticket; considered as pure sorrow it was the worst moment of his life, the very nadir. It caused in him such trouble as might have arisen from the apparition of
a revenant,
holding up before him all the stillborn freedom of his life.

He wished as he turned over and began to fall asleep that he could hear that her life had taken a really better turn. A turn for the better, as his own had. His house was silent, sleeping: baby, nurse and mother on the floor below him; the boys away in the country: not, regrettably, with his mother-in-law. A few hours ago when he had rung her up to give the splendid news she had told him she had been obliged to send them with Nannie to the seaside: Papa’s bronchitis was now pneumonia, yes, it was serious, but he was holding his own: on no account was he to worry Madeleine over it. Was Dinah with her? He hoped so. He couldn’t ask. She didn’t say so. He wished that everybody’s prospects were favourable, temperate, settled. He wished that things could so pan out that Dinah would come into his house looking amused and pleased again, as in the old days; and sit and gossip with Madeleine; and play with the boys, and sing her songs to this one too, to the baby daughter …

He turned over to fall asleep at last in the spare room. Dinah’s room in the old days of her visits; in the bed where she had been lying that far-off night; the night he had opened the door, closed it behind him like a thief, a murderer, a lover; and standing in the dark, called:

‘Dinah.’ Just above his breath.

‘Yes.’ She did not stir or switch the light on.

‘You’re not going through with this, you know.’ Her engagement, so recently announced.

‘I’ve got to.’

‘You can’t. You know why.’

‘Yes.’

‘Break it off.’

‘Yes.’

In suddenly enormous time and space he waited. Poised on the giddy steeple. Over, all over. Driving headlong, embraced with a bare monosyllable. Perfectly certain, perfectly cool and steady; perfectly vacant. Not one step towards her bedside, not another word. Turning from the threshold, swift the door open, noiseless closed again. Back along the passage to his dressing-room.

And so it had all begun.

Nightfall

And so all these years later, in another room in another house of his, vacated by him in perpetuity, lying awaiting no one in the bed, the same, in which she had once lain to be taken by him, bodilessly penetrated through the darkness and in separation at a given time by the long-awaited breaking of his silence, Dinah now turned away from him, rejecting—she could, she was still alive—his wistful thoughts of her; breaking resolutely—she must, life must go on—from the trap of his pursuing shadow.

Lament no more. These things are so
.

From the heart of nowhere, an elegiac voice tolled out the line.

Water, mist, moonlight, shapes of wood and stone … Dwell only upon these inorganic matters, assimilate them, deliver your shaken senses by composing them. Tomorrow I will start a picture of the tower. Yew tree. Headstones. Wall in the foreground at a certain angle. She placed the forms, relating each to each in her mind’s eye. A good way, the only satisfactory one, to cast that virus out, drop the rat for ever to the bottom of the river.

Rickie, thank God, was buried far from here. Another silent voice arose in her, spoke in the haunted, sterile room, evaporated.
‘He is humbled in the dust.’

She began to fall asleep; and yet another sprang without warning from some forgotten niche of time, remarking in her mother’s ringing authoritative Edwardian tone:
‘How is it I wonder that you have never learnt humility?’

Good joke that, coming from the person who had said it. When I went to see her after Rickie’s death she was in anguish. I saw her bow in a storm of sobs and leave the room. A shock to see such torrential passion break from the fountain-head of disciplined authority.

She slept. The shadow overtook her, accompanied her all night through labyrinths of the past and done with, not meaning any harm.

‘He was a good man. They are rare,’ said Mrs Burkett; but emotion choked her and she got up in a hurry and turned her back on Dinah; who, lying stretched upon the sofa, had the tact not to ask her to repeat herself, or to delay her as she hurried from the room.

Once safe in her bedroom, she addressed herself sternly, bathed her eyes, blew her nose; then opened a locked drawer in her bureau and took from it the vellum-bound book with gilt clasps in which at intervals during her life from the age of eighteen onwards she had copied out passages from her favourite authors. She read:

Then look around

And choose thy ground

And take thy rest.

took a pen and wrote under the quotation RLM, with the date of his death; thus dedicating it to Rickie for his epitaph.

It was not a broken life and not a failed one, she declared passionately to herself: he had chosen it with his eyes open and completed it … Cruelty was the one thing besides humbug that she censured, and cruel he had never been. Only weak; and she could pity weakness if it was not, as so often it was nowadays, given a moral not to say mystic sanction: as if to play fast and loose with other people’s lives took natural priority over duty and self-control. Dinah scorned weakness; Madeleine, confused by it—afraid of it perhaps—could not judge it with detachment.
Autres temps autres m
œurs
of course; her children ridiculed her code and gave her to understand that the facts of life were still concealed from her. One simple fact had never crossed their minds, the fools: she understood men and they did not. She had not lost the instinct for the art of sex, inherited from her mother and her grandmother. If she had not been able to hand it on as she had received it, it was not for lack of fostering tradition, precept and example. But nowadays they were bent, all of them, on fulfilling themselves with the aid of text-books: every bodily and mental function explained, explored and practised with business-like thoroughness and zeal.
All
very well, all very sensible … but oh! deplorable. So much frankness and obtuse perversity, so much enlightenment and atrophy, so much progress and
d
égringolade.

What they little realize, either of them, she told herself with a vicious secretive spurt of triumph, is that Rickie knew that he and I … that I understood him. No need to look facts in the face and call spades spades. We knew there was a link between us. Ah, why not acknowledge him—my spirit’s son, as the twins, sons of my body, had never been?—dear fellows, but frankly dull. Looking over Clarissa’s head on her third birthday: ‘She’s like
you
,’
he said, ‘I couldn’t be more delighted’; and his smile caressed my heart. Again we knew what we knew. That was the day I told him that Dinah’s husband had been killed in Spain. His face altered, he uttered an exclamation of distress.

‘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 clich
é
s, like a schoolgirl with a smear of the popular slick journalist. But she is
mal entour
ée,
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:

‘Yo
u’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.