The Echoing Grove (33 page)

‘Oh, that’s the last thing!’

‘Yes. Sooner or later it’s what men always say to women. So it must be what they want.’

‘We certainly want to keep women in their proper place. That’s a well-known aim of ours.’

‘Yes, you do. But it’s not so well known as it should be—you see to that. I’m not altogether blaming you—you start at a disadvantage. It
is
kind of unmanly being carried around the way you are all those nine months. And then having no choice but to submit to all those female processes—being born, fed and all the rest. It must be a big humiliation—confusing too. No wonder you’re scared you may be women in disguise.’

‘Perhaps we are.’ His voice had become cheerful. ‘It’s the kind of loose talk, you know, that goes on in clubs.’

‘You don’t have to tell me. That’s just the reason wives always urge their husbands to go to clubs—you must have noticed. They love to think of them being able to relax and let their hair down and compare notes. The only thing that gets us irritated is the silly look on your faces when you come out again. The fatuous self-important smirks.’

He twisted round and propped his head on one elbow to look down at her. When she raised her eyes she saw that he was smiling broadly. He said:

‘Does Jack think you’re funny?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He’s quite right.’

‘He thinks all women are funny. He’s a great tease.’

‘Ah! there’s not enough of that—hence all these bills we can’t meet
—
trunk calls, drink bills, sleeping tablets … these shocking little objects chaps find in their pockets next morning—tiny sopping handkerchiefs, I mean.’

‘I promise not to add to your store of those.’

‘Oh, couldn’t you possibly? I’ve so few—it makes me feel inferior I know a chap who keeps a special drawer for them, all different initials. What’s so touching, he says, is the different scents still lingering in them even after they’ve been to the laundry and had the tears and lipstick taken out … No, my trouble is I’m always the one to cry: it’s embarrassing for both parties. Promise not to make me cry.’ Between phrases, he was showering light kisses on her face. ‘That’s the only thing I’d ever mind about,’ he said. ‘Someone else teasing you. The laughing together. One can’t leave someone who … I don’t mean laughing
at …
God, the time we’ve wasted to-night! Darling, you are so silly. You think I don’t want to make love to you, don’t you? How am I to stop you talking? If I did all the things that keep on occurring to me, I might go too far, and then where would we be? But we’re not going to die together in one another’s arms—so don’t flatter yourself, see? We’re not going to die together.’

Later—how long later?—he raised his head from her bare shoulder and listened attentively to the silence.

‘What time is it?’ she whispered. ‘Is it still the middle of an air-raid? Could we have missed the All Clear?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past us. But I doubt it.’

‘What kind of a raid can it be? Does it seem to you it’s a new kind?’

He sat up beside her, then swung his legs down and started to pick his clothes up off the floor. She watched him pulling on shirt, socks, trousers, adoring the lazy peaceful grace of all his movements. When he was dressed he looked down at her with a smile that calmly embraced all of her known unknown body, bent to kiss her, saying: ‘Don’t be cold, my darling,’ covered her gently with her wrap. Gazing at him, she was hit suddenly by a great wave of giddiness; a blinding conviction. The eyes shining on her with such unearthly brilliance stripped her body of its identity; not
Georgie
lay exposed to that look of tender coldness—not she, but another … Dinah … Madeleine … or any woman.

‘Stay where you are,’ she heard him say. He padded across the room to the area door, stooped and disappeared through it. Next moment another stupendous crash of anti-aircraft gunfire split open the marrow of the world. She stretched herself out, pinioned beneath its mounting gigantic tension; dissolved into the uttermost spasms of its release; lay limply with closed eyes. It had come about as he had told her; they would not die together. He was gone, hurled into limbo; and she alive, alone.

Feeling an imponderable weight above her, she opened her eyes to see him bending over her, then lowering himself to sit on the edge of the mattress. She found a thread of voice to say:

‘Did you arrange that?’ He raised an inquiring eyebrow, and she added: ‘I thought you had been blown up.’

‘Don’t be so silly. There’s nothing dropping. The searchlights are carving up the sky like mad, but whatever they caught, if they did catch anything, they’ve lost it, or I didn’t see it.’

‘Blown up,’ she persisted, ‘or else gone to
her
…’

‘To whom, for Christ’s sake?’ He took her by the chin and turned her face round to meet his.

‘You know.’ He looked at her dumbfounded. ‘
Her.
Your love.’

‘You must be mad,’ he said, his easy affectionate manner suddenly cut off.

‘Well, maybe it’s infectious.’ Tears started to roll down her cheeks from under her closed eyelids and she felt him watching them with a bewildered frown. ‘This dimension you have been mentioning
—
maybe I’m in it too. I see no cause to scold me. If you’re not crazy, I’m not. If you are, I am.’

‘What is it?’ he said presently, with paternal patience. ‘Tell me what’s the matter.’

‘Only that … since we made love, I don’t know who I am.’

Two or three dry sobs shook her frame and he uttered a rather perfunctory, soothing ‘Sh!’ Then after a pause:

‘Darling, wasn’t it all right for you? What did I do wrong?’

‘Nothing wrong—nothing you can do anything about. Only—I thought we had found one another at last. But afterwards—just now—when you were standing over me, looking down at me … No blame, no reproach … but what happened?’

‘What did happen?’ His voice was blankly stubborn.

After a long silence she said:

‘Nothing.’

‘Darling, you’re being dreadfully difficult,’ he said, with mixed gentleness and impatience. ‘Didn’t you see me go out just then? I’m so sorry if I gave you a turn.’

‘Yes, that was it,’ she said after another pause. ‘Being unexpectedly alone all of a sudden.’ She sat up. ‘All I remember is … you were looking down at me so beautifully, and it crossed my mind to wonder, as one does—if anybody else—who else—how many others had made your face shine so.’ He interrupted her with another, this time violent ‘Sh!’ and she continued: ‘Yes, I know. One doesn’t say these things. But they’re not meant as questions, I’m just telling you what happened. Whom were you looking at? That’s not a question either. But who is it we look at, speak to, if we only knew? Whom are we trying to find? Well, it’s just that—I thought I did know suddenly. But I can’t explain. Rickie …’ She put her arms up and drew his face down against hers. ‘No. My love. Anonymous … You’ve tied your tie in a revolting knot.’ She reshaped and straightened it. ‘Long ago I knew a girl who was not a virgin when she married. Her husband knew she had had a lover—she didn’t deceive him. It had been a big experience. One night on her honeymoon when she was almost, not quite, asleep, she said this lover’s name by mistake instead of his. She could have bitten off her tongue a second after, but it was too late, the damage was done: this boy she had married was most deeply shocked and hurt. As he saw it, he was married to an adulteress: this lover had invaded their marriage bed. She knew it was not so: she really loved her husband, she didn’t miss the other guy one jot. But after that lapse she could never reassure him or trust herself to go to sleep. The result of their joint efforts was the first guy, who had been duly laid below and—not forgotten, that was self-evident, but totally sterilized and incapacitated—this guy got kind of raised. It was terrible: there got to be a third person in the bed. She tried everything—all sorts of interesting experiments, and jokes, and twin beds, and psychiatry, but it was no use: nothing worked for long. The marriage was destroyed. The husband started drinking and in the end, as I told you before, he shot himself. He was a self-pitying type—emotionally adolescent, so I guess if it hadn’t been one thing it would have been another; but at the time she bitterly reproached herself. Now she knows it was a thing that might happen to anyone. But equally she knows that if it happened to her—was done to her, I mean—she would be terribly piqued.’

‘It won’t be done to you.’ His voice was light but hostile. ‘Speaking from my somewhat limited experience, I doubt if it is one of the things men do. In spite of their being, as we know,
capable
de
tout
…’ He turned a disagreeable look and smile on her adding: ‘I wonder what you’re getting at in this somewhat oblique fashion.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, struggling. ‘Can I be jealous? I think I must be.’

‘Jealous? Who on earth of?’

‘Dinah, I suppose. Yes, Dinah. I always have been.’

After a dead silence he said quietly: ‘I told you I never think about her.’

‘“Never and always” is what you said.’

‘Oh well … perhaps that’s my ham-handed way of describing my quite outstanding ineffectuality as
a
feeler.
I came to a dead end once, you see, and there I’ve stayed ever since. Propping up the wall at the end of the dead end.’

‘But you are not there now,’ she cried. ‘Not any longer, Rickie: you’ve said so. Don’t unsay it because it wouldn’t be true and I wouldn’t believe it.’

He shrugged his shoulders lightly as if to say: ‘Just as you please.’

‘Though maybe I deserve it,’ she went on. ‘The last thing I meant was to try and pull a fast one, but I guess that’s what I’m doing the way you are talking to me makes me know it. Listen. The truth can’t be more dangerous now than hiding it. This is what happened. We were looking at each other, at the whole of one another … and all of a sudden I saw you, thought I saw you—not with me. Free
—i
n a different way from what I’d expected, from the kind of freedom I had been sharing with you. I saw you with—with the last trick up your sleeve. And playing it. Behind your loving face your look was so—triumphant. This is what seemed to come out of it to me: “Now I can say good-bye to her at last”.’

He only looked at her, but with curiosity now, the patient look wiped out.

‘To
her
,’
she repeated. ‘Yes, to me perhaps—but I thought—to the other. Or were we interchangeable? She and I. All of them. The Loved One: good-bye to the entire experience, the whole wonderful appalling, impossible idea.’

After a moment or two he slightly shook his head. He looked very much at his ease, sitting bowed forward with his knees apart and his hands loosely locked between them. The ear she could see, well-turned, flat against his skull, struck her as functional, a simple instrument made for impartial listening. Her words would be recorded, not interpreted.

‘What comes next?’ she said, addressing no one in particular. ‘The love of God?’

‘Oh, does that mean something to you?’ he said with polite interest.

‘No, but it might.’

‘Yes. I suppose one can’t be certain … I mean, that one might not suddenly get the hang of it. Another faculty one has simply not noticed was dormant even. Or like beginning to understand music, or a problem in higher mathematics. But that takes concentration, doesn’t it? Damned hard work, and something to drive you on. A longing … But can you even conceive of becoming convinced one has been let into the secret?—if there is a secret. One would have to go mad; or else one would have to be absolutely simple.’

She said under her breath:
‘Go love without the help of anything on earth.’

‘What’s that?’ He bent his recording ear towards her, and she repeated into it the words, adding: ‘Something Blake wrote. A poet called Blake’; to which he replied with a nod: ‘I’ve heard of him.’ Presently he said: ‘Clarissa’s absolutely simple. She believes in God; she finds no difficulty.’

‘Do you think about her a lot?’

‘A fair amount.’

‘Worry about her?’

‘Oh, I worry about everybody I’m responsible for. Bad habit.’ He reflected. ‘Yes, I do worry about her.’

‘I bet she worries about you too.’

‘Why should she?’

‘Well … that’s the effect you’d be likely to have on an impressionable young girl.’ Her voice was dry. ‘The handsomest man in the world and the sweetest—and then something so kind of sad about him … She would set herself an aim in life: to be your ideal woman. I guess she already has. I guess you have ruined her life.’

‘Shut up! You’re the beastliest woman I’ve ever come across.’

‘Don’t you dream now and then of going down the vale of years, a resigned distinguished figure of a widower, hand in hand with her?’

‘Certainly I do.’ His faint grin, directed at the floor, was appreciative. ‘Oh, the whole works. Already I detest her lovers. They’ll make her unhappy and—the thought upsets me. We won’t go into
that
if you don’t mind. The imagination boggles. At least mine does, I’m sure yours preserves its equanimity … Quite right. She’ll do better without my guiding hand. Poor little …’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Oh, she’ll be all right, she’s as sound as a—sound apple. Cox’s Orange. She’ll be a hostess in
a transglobal
airline, tending tired business men on the long hop.

‘You’re nothing if not consistent.’

He cocked an eyebrow.

‘If there’s one type more than another that could give a tired business man cleansing subduing thoughts, it would be those ministering, well-groomed, airborne girls. One hears that they do marry. But I never have believed it. They seem so immaculate and plucky. So at ease with their bright restful personalities.’

She saw the planes of his profile begin to alter in amusement; but next moment they fell once more into their fine-drawn lines and hollows.

‘I wish …’ He stopped. ‘I hope you’ll see her some time.’

‘I might get on better with your son.’

‘Colin …’ he considered. ‘Nice chap. Reliable, intelligent. Madeleine thinks he’s on the dull side, but I think he’ll add up one day to more than she imagines. Hope so. He’s the only male of this generation either side.’