The Echoing Grove (31 page)

She listened to the sound of the front door closing after him, swerved sharply to prevent herself from seeing him go past the window, ran upstairs and fell upon the bed. She lay there prone, her eyes upon the ceiling, her arms along her thighs, legs straight, feet crossed; withdrawn into her own stripped outline and making herself an effigy, formally pure, anonymous, inviolably exposed among the tasteless crowding intimacies of the life of another woman: life of an old sterile woman, she thought bitterly, who has jettisoned these fragments of her human history and run away to save her fruitless skin.

She said aloud, with pride: ‘At least I did not save my pride.’

The night came down, nothing flowed in to fill her emptiness, she dozed; started awake with the howl of the sirens in her ears. She waited for the guns but nothing followed. An immense silence swung her off the bed and on to her feet while she still lay flat, without a movement, and in darkness; and in intent expectancy. Presently she heard what she was waiting for: someone’s rapid footsteps, louder, louder on the pavement, stopping at her door. Someone rang the bell, a long imperious peal. She was downstairs ahead of her own conscious impetus, and opened the door to Rickie.

Under the narrow downward shaft of light from the shrouded electric bulb in the ceiling they confronted one another. She saw the sweat on his forehead: this and something
fauve
in the aura emanating from him made her think of a fugitive, a hunted animal. But there was no panic in his voice and no appeal when he said after an immeasurable moment:

‘I had to come back.’

It was a statement, definite, unemphatic. The slant of the light obscured his eyes, so that she had the impression of being scrutinized by two scooped-out sockets under the brow’s wide faintly illumined ledge.

‘Wonderful,’ she breathed. ‘Not expected.’

He shook his head, then nodded, with a kind of indrawn sigh. The house began to vibrate—tremor of falling bombs?—or distant gun-fire? … He took her by the shoulder, and swung her round, pushing her firmly backwards with him.

‘Come along down at once,’ he ordered her. ‘It may well be about to be very noisy. Where’s your basement? Lead the way.’

She went before him down a short twisting flight of stairs to the room from which earlier in the evening she had emerged by way of the area to greet him. Groping, holding him by the hand, saying, ‘Mind your head, it’s a low ceiling,’ she drew him to the far inner corner and switched on a brass table-lamp fitted with a faded green silk shade and set on a brown tin trunk beside a camp-bed piled with old rugs, and topped with a couple of cushions in holland covers.

‘Dismal, as you see,’ she said. ‘Enormous locked receptacles for skeletons and camphor. Look at that parrot cage. And those volumes of God knows what I cannot even lift. It should all be obliterated; but not with me underneath it, please the Lord.’

She sat down on the bed and watched him pace to and fro examining his surroundings in his customary padding noiseless way. He put a hand up and knocked on the ceiling with his knuckles; frowned; stepped over to the area door that stood ajar, pushed it wide open, stooped to peer out, drew back again.

‘You act like a sanitary inspector. Leave that door open, you
must.
It’s my escape hatch.’

He brushed some flakes of plaster off his jacket and came and sat down beside her on the bed.

‘What do we do now?’ she said.

Without a word he put an arm round her, drawing her to lean against him till her forehead rested against his cheek. Presently with his free hand he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his face. She felt him tremble.

‘You are shivering,’ she said. ‘This vault … Why do we stay here? Please let’s go upstairs.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not yet, we’re better off here, honestly. And anyway …’

She heard what he had left unspoken: the necessity he was under to take no more thought or action. He had reached her by a hair’s breadth.

‘Lie down,’ she said.

Obediently his body fell back, till his head rested on a cushion; still holding her, he stretched himself out along the rug. The wire springs sagged, grinding under their weight as he drew her down beside him.

He fell asleep at once and she lay with her ear against his very slow heartbeat, listening to that and to his loud shallow breathing. With infinite precaution she managed to loosen his tie, undid his collar, pulled it from beneath the back of his neck. After about fifteen minutes he woke up with a little groan, part apologetic protest, part relief.

‘Darling, have I been asleep? Sorry. Manners.’ He raised his head a few inches to look at her, touched her cheek with his lips, said: ‘Beautiful,’ and lay down again.

‘Are you happy?’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘If you are.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you take my collar off? Thank you. Clever girl. What a couch to lie down on with my love.’

‘You chose it. Would you rather move?’

‘Sh! No.’ He shook her shoulder lightly. ‘If you don’t mind. Poor
Georgie.
Horrid rough blankets for you. Pretend we’re on the battlefield.’

‘We are.’

They turned towards one another, exchanging words of endearment against one another’s lips. But before long he broke the trance in which they were beginning to lapse together, turned away from her again and lay on his back, staring sombrely at the ceiling.

‘What is to be done?’ he said.

She felt, or heard, his heart beginning to race as if in nervous anxiety, like an inexperienced boy, and put her hand on it, letting a moment or two go by before making a sound of soothing query.

‘I want,’ he said, his voice hard, toneless, ‘to make love to you more than anything in the world. But you won’t be able to believe it. Because also I want not to. So what is to be done?’

She laughed softly to reassure him and to cover her mixed feelings.

‘How can I answer questions that don’t make sense? If you want me to say I do believe it, I will; and that I understand why not, I will. There! It’s said, it’s meant. Forget it. Only stay with me. Everything is all right.’

‘You’re sure?’ he said gratefully, at once relaxed, responsive. ‘You won’t—you’ll let it be? You won’t explain me to me?’

She shook her head. It was her turn to sigh, but too inaudibly for him to hear.

‘When I opened the door and saw you,’ she said, ‘that moment, there was nothing left for me to want. Was coming back an impulse? Or is that part of what I’m not to ask?’

‘I don’t know.’ He rubbed his nose vaguely with one hand, pushed his fingers through and through his hair, till it stood up in a crest. All his gestures and inflexions had suddenly become young, spontaneous, confiding. ‘Oh, the moment I’d gone, I wanted to come back. I suppose I knew I would really, but …’

‘The doctor, you saw him? What did he say?’

‘No, I didn’t see him. He must have left, there wasn’t any answer.’

‘Oh dear …’

‘It doesn’t matter. Though I do feel rather bad on his account. I went back to my flat in case he’d telephoned a message, but he hadn’t.’

‘You’ve got a flat?’

‘Oh, just a beastly thing in a warren off Russell Square. I share it with another chap who comes and goes, like me.’

‘You come and go.’

‘Well, I’m sometimes away, and sometimes on night duty.’ He yawned. ‘Thank God, not to-night.’

‘Thank God I’m not fire-watching either.’

‘Do you wear a tin hat? I couldn’t bear it.’

‘Did you have some supper?’

‘No, I wasn’t hungry. I had a sort of gnawing, so I drank a glass of milk. My intake of milk these last seven years or so would float a battleship.’

‘It hasn’t made you fat. I wish I could look after you. I’d cook for you—so well, too. Won’t you come and stay with me?’

His arm tightened its clasp around her shoulder, slackened. She thought she heard him utter another rapid: ‘Sh!’ After a moment she said:

‘So after that, what did you do?’

‘I went out again. I walked … I was trying to decide—I couldn’t. I simply started walking across London in your direction, hoping for a sign. I was just about to turn into your street or pass it without turning when the Warning went. So I did turn, double quick.’

‘That was the sign?’ It was half a question.

He said in a helpless way: ‘I couldn’t bear to think of you alone. But after I had rung the bell I was terrified. With no light showing, one never knows … You might have gone out. Or guessed it was me and been too cross to let me in. Did you guess?’

‘Yes. I knew. I was lying down, and the Warning woke me; and then I began to expect you. I was certain you would come—but I still cannot believe it. I thought men never came back of their own accord. I thought they went for good. Not that I was thinking in those terms—they had no relevance.’

‘Why hadn’t they?’

‘Because I had entirely relinquished you.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said at once, in simple agreement.

‘You might have waited for the rest of your life. I would never have called you back.’

‘Ah, the rest of my life …’

She raised her head to discover his expression. His lips, whose sensuous distinctive modelling had long been stamped, like an obsession, upon her tactile memory, looked peaceful and severe. He gazed at the ceiling with transparent eyes that seemed to her unfathomable.

‘Procrastination comes natural to me,’ he said, as if puzzled, or impressed. ‘So this sort of current running so strong, all of a sudden, the other way …’

‘Do you think it’s ominous?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t help wondering.’

‘You mean to-night? Here? Both of us?’ Her arms tightened round him and an icy sweat broke out on her and trickled over her stomach, down her back. Next moment the uproar of guns burst over them, enveloped them to roll them round and round, as she thought, against the inner side of a roaring giant funnel, a Wall of Death on which they were to circle, pinned, till in a thunder of suffocation, pulped obliteration, any moment …

But: ‘No,’ he was saying, patting her shoulder, his voice level above the fading reverberating snarl as if he had barely noticed it. ‘No. Don’t be afraid, darling. We’re not going to be killed.’

At once the trap became a private fantasy, ignoble. She said, slightly abashed:

‘I’m not generally so scared. I’ve been in it alone and with strangers and with friends and acquaintances—and never much doubted I would survive. It ought to seem like a pushover now we’re together, but it doesn’t. I’ve never felt responsible for lives before: yours, mine because of you. They are too precious to be lost.’

He turned his head on the pillow to look at her and smile; yet, at the elliptical angle from which she watched him, the structure of his face seemed to express more of austerity than tenderness, his almost closed eyelids less of union than of separation, distance. Her fear started again; different, aching, like a pang of labour.

‘I had a very silent uncle,’ he said presently. ‘A queer old chap, a bachelor. He used to come for long visits and I don’t remember that he ever spoke. Till one day he arrived unexpectedly at tea time, and his tongue was loosened. And instead of being cramped and sour, he was a dear amiable old buffer with a chuckle. He never stopped, it was a perfect torrent … Mamma was alarmed; she thought he was drunk. And then she thought he must be sickening for something. He must have been. He died a few days later.’

She swallowed, waited; her voice shrank as she asked:

‘What is it you are feeling?’

‘I don’t know.’ Then flippantly: ‘Couldn’t rightly say, and that’s a fact. Don’t know no more than the dead.’ He put his free hand up, spread out his fingers and examined them. He had a strong, finely turned hand that never looked less than conspicuously clean.

She cried: ‘But this always had to be!’

‘What did?’

‘This—us. I told you. You knew it too. You told me, you said you had to come back.’

‘Yes. I suppose so. Yes.’

She told herself that the fight was not over after all; that she was losing ground.

‘Only it’s strange still,’ she said. ‘It is for me, too. We can’t be expected to get accustomed to it yet.’

He made a patent effort, saying: ‘It’s more …’ then checked himself.

‘Tell me, if you can.’

‘It isn’t exactly strange. It all seems—sort of inevitable. But so peculiar. More than anything else, a feeling amounting to conviction that—that I can’t afford to wait.’

‘Is it—does it seem to be—connected with me—with us, this feeling?’

‘Could it be?’ he asked apologetically; adding: ‘Poor
Georgie.
You see what an unsatisfactory lover I should have been.’

Now she was seized with such petrifying apprehension that her heart missed a beat. Regretful, helpless, he was offering her himself in the past indicative; he was asking her to accept him in that tense.

‘This trance,’ he said, ‘I’ve been in such a horrible long time …’

‘And now you feel it’s broken …’

‘Well, something like that.’

The stone in her chest contracted, bled out a heavy drop. There was nothing to share, but she must follow his experience; shadow him while he moved about in worlds not realized.

‘I love you,’ she said; an uninflected affirmation, disregarded, whether heard or no.

‘It’s like bracing up for the high dive. Were you ever simply unable to go? Getting to the edge—but you can’t: you find suddenly you’re nothing but a hollow cylinder stood upright, you’ve left your impetus behind you. You can feel yourself still attached to it, but separated from it, which is such a humiliating feeling that you can’t look back. You teeter on the edge, and rock the board a bit to test the spring, and lean out a fraction pretending to mark the exact spot where you mean to hit the water: all this by way of preliminary for the great dramatic moment, the dive of your life, of all time … But you’re paralysed: head first or a jump feet first equally inconceivable. Not even the nasty expectation of a belly flop: simply, the water has become so huge, so deep and dark, so infinitely far away … and you have become so—weightless, an object without gravity … Nobody,
nothing
is what’s down there where you were just about to launch yourself. You’ve realized it in the nick of time. No sensible chap would risk even bouncing the bloody springboard. So you stand dead still, with your hands on your hips: a balanced chap in a calm attitude … entirely impotent.’