The Echoing Grove (30 page)

‘Darling,’ she said softly, ‘it’s no use. Knock it all down and begin again.’

She heard her own words drawn out of her on a plane of meaning beyond her conscious control; and on the same plane he answered:

‘It’s too late.’

‘Don’t be scared, Rickie. Why are you so scared?’

He said with a smile:

‘I’m not. Why should I be?’ But his tone reminded her to keep her place, make no assumption. And firmly he added: ‘I really must go
.
’

‘If you must you must.’

‘Georgie,
good-bye.’ He put his hands on her shoulders, stooped to kiss her cheek; then his fingers tightened, he shook her. ‘Yes, I am scared of you,’ he said.

She put her arms lightly round his waist; but he threw his head back saying:

‘I don’t know how to behave, you told me so. I’m telling you if it is so, it’s much too late to learn. I never did know what to do about women.’

‘Oh, they’re hell, we know.’ Her long fingers wandered over his chest, brushing off invisible specks, twisting a button on his jacket, straightening his tie with a touch as light and intimate as tender mockery. ‘What is a simple Englishman to do? His Mom has learned him to respect them. His Pop has advised him to take a cold sponge if he has trouble with his sex glands. It all adds up, doesn’t it, to
keep them at a distance.
They never, never can be up to any good. When a crisis threatens, fly, fly,
fly.
’

He uttered a brief laugh. ‘What rubbish. You don’t understand anything. And I don’t care to be put into one of your boring pigeonholes and labelled a simple Englishman.’ Then with a slight change of tone: ‘Not to mention other impertinences.’

She dropped her hand and moved away from him, saying after a silence: ‘Forgive me. I stick needles into you because … to see if the anaesthetic is total. Because I cannot bear it that you have come again and looked at me and said good-bye for now,
Georgie,
thanks for a pleasant time. Now I suppose you will put me out of mind again for—how long?’

‘I don’t put you out of mind.’

‘Don’t quibble.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘But we are never to be together?’

‘No,’ he said very low.

‘I can think of reasons, but I want to know your reasons.’

He said with the stiff severity of a youth: ‘I’m sorry to be tiresome, but you are Jack’s wife.’

He looked sadly at her bent head with large blue eyes that repudiated, admitted and deplored his hint of moral criticism.

‘You think I forget it,’ she said presently.

‘No, no,’ he hastened to say. ‘At least, no—but you seem—I don’t know … you make it difficult.’

‘Difficult to remember?’

‘Yes. For me, I mean,’ he muttered.

‘Oddly enough,’ she said, lifting her head to smile at him, ‘the first time of meeting you was the first time, for me, of having to remember that I was Jack’s wife. Can you recall that dinner party?’

‘I can.’

‘The first time,’ she said, ‘of looking at one another and saying good-bye. Not that you took that in—or not for more than a moment. You were all in pieces. But I was happy, whole—or so I thought. You were a terrible shock for me: like having a bad accident at the start of a hopeful journey. Just my darned luck, I thought.’

‘That was a hellish evening.’ A spasm of distaste twitched his forehead. Then he added in
a na
ïve
way, as if recalling a simple moment of astonishment: ‘There was a moment at dinner when I suddenly found myself wishing I could go to bed with you. I do remember that. But I thought that was just one more sign I was going off my head. I wasn’t drunk.’

She turned round again as if to examine the decorous Lilliputian Arcadia disposed upon the mantelshelf; and speaking into it said presently:

‘When I first married I was seventeen. My husband was a boy from my home town—we were a small-town boy and girl in Georgia. He turned out to be an alcoholic. In the end he shot himself. It sounds too glib and fictional, doesn’t it?—the story’s turning itself out at mass-production level. Afterwards I went to New York and starved for a while before I started to get on my feet. By the time I met Jack I was a girl on her own who had made good. I was running a radio serial feature and editing a Personal Problems page on a women’s magazine—answers to intimate female queries—you know, the up-to-date psychological angle. I was also having another tough time in my private life: the man whose mistress I had been for five glorious years had just walked out on me. Well, what he had done was to find Salvation: he had turned R.C. and re-married the wife he had divorced. And the result was that all my jerry-built superstructure of being an independent career-woman with a successful love life on the side began to crack. I wanted to throw my hand in—resign: anything for security, for a reliable protector. And Jack seemed sent by the Lord for just that purpose. The good Lord was as sorry for me as I was for myself, so he sent me Jack. I never have understood why Jack fell for me, but he truly did. Instinct told me to grab him, I was on to a good thing. I grabbed him. And then, you know …’ She stopped, brooded, continued with no alteration of her flat, narrative tone: ‘Something new began to happen to me. The cause of it was Jack’s sheer goodness. For the first time in my life I got a notion to try cutting out the thing in myself that was my enemy—the hard core of being always on the make … also in the know, because I was so smart—a real smart girl always a jump ahead. And then so honest in my dealings: whatever they were, their honesty never could be called in question. From my vantage point of drawing dividends on Jack’s investments—that’s really what it amounted to, though of course it was all wrapped up in fancy wrappings—from being a profiteer I began, as I said …’ She broke off again, frowning, then faintly smiled: ‘Did you ever read
The Woodlanders
?’
Do you remember the last page—Marty alone in the churchyard, speaking to her lover in his grave:
“You was a good man and did good things”
?
When I read it just a few years back I thought that could be written on Jack’s tombstone. I had come to see how real he was—his kindness real, his loyalty, his sense of honour. Looked at one way, he is quite a tough old battle-axe; but he has what most people don’t have—he has a developed heart. He doesn’t need to watch it or take thought to educate it, as I do: which means that mine is naturally an inferior organ.
His
works like a kind of intelligence through all his actions. Well, you know all this. You are one of his oldest friends.’

He nodded; said after a pause: ‘Exactly.’ He gave her averted cheek and lowered eyelids the same look as formerly—watchful, measuring her with pupils shrunk to pin-points. ‘Since you know all the reasons, and express them so admirably besides, why have you got to try and drag them out of me?’

‘They are not the last words,’ she said. ‘Not to my mind.’

‘Well, they are to mine. I’m not prepared to prove to our satisfaction—yours and mine—that if we did him an injury he would be magnanimous. Or is he not to find out? Or if he does, is he to be lied to? Or am I to say to him: “It’s only too true, old chap. I knew you would forgive us.”’

‘He wouldn’t,’ she said quickly. ‘He’d not forgive anyone a dirty trick. I’ve managed not to put him to the test, but I’m sure of it. He’s got an edge inside him that cuts through mess. His first wife was a tricky little bitch, if you remember. When he discovered it he cleared her out. No, I’d never play common tricks on Jack.’

‘Very well, then,’ he said, curt. ‘There’s nothing I need add.’

She went on musingly: ‘He’s not worldly enough to be a shrewd picker; it’s too bad, considering he’s a born husband. Almost any woman he truly concentrated on would be apt to forget within six months that she had ever had a maiden name. But he picked me. Even after I began to feel committed, I still had to go on remembering to make
acts
of surrendering my bachelor life. I haven’t a generous nature … And then not belonging to the Club …’

‘What Club?’

‘Oh,’ she cried, suddenly bitter and impatient, ‘the Club of all of you!’

‘What
do
you mean? Were we unwelcoming? Surely we couldn’t have been. We all took to you like—like hot cakes.’

‘Oh, you were all very kind. I can’t say you were high-hat. None of you made me feel you were deliberately withholding any initiation rites. And I’m not unteachable: I learned to be a respectable Honorary Member. But what used to rile me’—again her voice swelled indignantly—‘was the
assumption,
the unquestioning assumption, the Best Club attitude of mind, the lack of curiosity about … I may as well say it, about
me,
what I was, where I came from …’ She checked herself. ‘I’m not including Jack, of course: any moment Jack might have made—might make—a dignified decision to resign. And you were never included. The moment I saw you I felt naturally more at home with you than anyone. Because there was something about you that suggested …’

‘What?’ he asked stiffly.

‘That something was going on in you that might end in your being—well,
requested
to resign.’

‘Was that your well-known perspicacity? Or were you briefed? I suppose so.’

‘No. At least, not till later. But I wasn’t referring to that. That’s too particular for what I mean. I mean something intrinsic, general
—
the same as in me.’

He shrugged his shoulders. Enough, he thought, of this web-spinning round and round the nature of his nature: why must she so persist? Since it had been agreed that there was nothing to be added, why did he feel that she still held a skein and was coming closer and closer, deviously winding? Yet he saw her looking up at him with an uncertain smile; a vulnerable creature, sad, young … as he had now and then caught Dinah looking at him in those far-off days when, confronting her in one of their blind alleys, he had found her weaponless, against the wall.

‘Were you lonely?’ He felt irrationally remorseful, as if realizing too late a responsibility he should have shouldered.

‘Yes. Sometimes. But that was inevitable, in the circumstances. People like me never manage to get planted. Wherever one goes, even if one settles down, even if one is protected, one is always aware of something one is deprived of—one’s sense of the past perhaps, one’s own instinctive one. The instinct of other people for it can be understood, but not incorporated. Children would have helped, but I didn’t have any. Other people’s children did
not
help. As far as Jack’s relations are concerned, I have gone on being the foreign woman, divorced—and barren.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about in-laws,’ he protested with anxiety. ‘They’re a problem everybody has. Not that I speak from experience. Mine were angelic, I adored them.’

‘Are they dead?’

‘Oh no,’ he hastened to say. ‘No indeed. At least
he
is, not she—Madeleine’s mother. I can’t think why I used the past tense—except that I’ve seen her so rarely—oh, for years now, worse luck. I love her as much as ever and I think she … But you see, it got awkward. She being Dinah’s mother too.’

The silence seemed to hum between them.
Georgie
said finally:

‘That’s the one name I have never heard you speak before.’

‘Well, it’s out at last.’ A flush ran over his face. ‘Oh yes, it was murder.’

‘Poor Rickie.’

‘Not at all.’

‘It doesn’t trouble you any more?’

‘Oh—yes and no. No, never. Yes, always, for ever. But …’ Again he shrugged his shoulders; adding in a light hard voice: ‘I’m simply inadequate. Perhaps as a result. Or perhaps—more probably—as you suggest, my inadequacy was the prime cause. I’ve often felt it was.’

‘Everybody is inadequate.’

‘Some more than others. And some who are don’t care to admit it. So these crimes get themselves committed.’

His colour had faded, leaving him so ashen that she exclaimed:

‘Rickie, what about that doctor? You should go.’

‘Yes, I should.’ He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘I shall be exactly one hour and a half late.’

‘Shall I call him?’

‘No, don’t bother.
Georgie,
good-bye.’ This time he drew her into his arms, clasped her close and kissed her lips. ‘Little one, precious,’ he said, ‘forgive me. You mustn’t think I don’t remember
some
things—just a few. I always shall.’

‘Would one of them be …’ Heavily she sighed, her face hidden on his shoulder.

‘Be what?’ He drew her closer, with a sort of desperation that gave her the impression of being asked to help him in his resolution of silence. She went on, however:

‘That day in
1940,
you sent me to the country, and I wouldn’t promise to stay there. Do you remember why I wouldn’t?’

‘Yes.’

Drawing apart from him she said: ‘It does seem only like a string of words, the way things have gone. But it also is a grain of comfort that words don’t always quite disappear. Well, take them away with you again. I said I wouldn’t promise, because a promise made to you I would always have to keep.’

‘God bless you,
Georgie.
Then will you, won’t you promise …’ She looked at him, expectant; but with a sharp intake of breath he shook his head.

‘Will you come back?’

‘Yes, I will,’ he said in a distraught way. ‘At least, if I can. I’ll try.’

‘I am not to ask when?’

‘It won’t be so long this time. It shan’t be.’

But now everything, these sighs, his staring look, his tone of distraction seemed to her suddenly hollow and theatrical. She saw him gone already, tearing down the street. She covered her face with her hands and her voice came through them thin and elegiac.

‘Ah, it’s no use. We are back at the beginning. That day at Kew was out of time, I suppose. We knew we were lovers then, didn’t we? But we never will be lovers. And I don’t want anything else with you. I never did—you know that, don’t you? At Kew there was no need to say it. I thought the only reason why we didn’t go home together that night after that day was that we were war-time casualties of love, we had no place to go. You living at your club, and I … Perhaps you don’t remember, do you?—walking half over London in the blackout after supper, taking me back to that God-awful flat I was sharing then with Jack’s romping great clown of a niece in the Ministry of Food. We knew it must end at my front door with her sitting up for me, you bet, in her Jaeger dressing-gown the other side of it; but that only made it more credible, more true to life—to the human condition. At least, I said that, you just nodded; and then you said, was the human condition always frustration then? And I said yes, but could be like
The Three Sisters
or that story
The Dead—
the kind that starts echoes afterwards, backwards and forwards for ever wherever you strike it—one echo picking up another till the whole thing
sounds out
like a fulfillment … I said I would move soon into a house, and you said good, please do. I know you went abroad soon after; you called me to tell me so. I said you would have my address when you got back. I wrote it to you but you didn’t answer. As time went on it occurred to me you might have decided to run out on me. Believe it or not, I was incredulous. I called you twice at your office, but you were out; I left my name but you didn’t call me back. I thought: well that’s the pay-off. But when I came up the steps this evening and saw you standing there, I thought at last you had come back, at last. It was all so blindingly simple again—to myself, I mean. But things don’t happen like that, we know. As well they don’t, you’ll say. You don’t need to remark what a lot of grief and pain has been saved all round: if you do I shall never forgive you. Don’t come back. I don’t want to give you news of my husband or hear how your wife is. When I listen to us shooting that line I want to say: “Mind your own treacheries, and I’ll mind mine.” How dare you offer them to me so blandly, trying to force me to agree they are acceptable? You trust me unwarrantably, Rickie: I was not at your public school. Now listen—you can listen, what I am telling you is posthumous. I have always been in love with you. I don’t want an affair with you. I want to live with you. Now go.’