The Echoing Grove (35 page)

‘I think it’s still there.’

Unfastening the stud of an inner flap, he pulled from one of the compartments a sheaf of rather crumpled papers—snapshots, several letters, torn-off flaps of envelopes with addresses scribbled on them—sorted them through with a faint frown. ‘All sorts of junk,’ he murmured. His frown deepening, he pushed them back, peered into another compartment, drew out a piece of notepaper, grubby, grey, folded in two, opened it, rapidly doubled it up again. The paper stared at her from between the thumb and first finger of the hand hanging loosely flexed between his knees. In the other hand he held the wallet, which he closed, then opened hesitantly again as if uncertain of what action to take next.

‘Fairly incriminating document,’ he said. ‘Unmistakably my own handwriting. Well, there we are … I wasn’t even sure if I still had it. But I remember now debating—shall I, shan’t I burn it?—at the time of the big burning—letters, you know, photographs; and not being able to bear it. Thinking with scarcely any hope, that it was my last grain of hope: there was no knowing,
one
day it might germinate. One ought always to bear in mind, in times of destruction, that it’s wise to give the last word of all the benefit of the doubt. Save it, just in case it’s got it in it to acquire virtue somehow again, some day. You never can tell. It’s the great thing to impress on people when they’re in trouble. It does seem odd to think I’ve carried it on my person without giving it a thought for years and years. This wallet was a twenty-first birthday present—from I’ve forgotten who. Stood up well, hasn’t it? Best pigskin.’ He looked down at his hand. ‘It could go now. Where’s your waste paper basket?’

In one unbroken movement she swiftly leaned forward, took the folded paper from between his fingers and slipped it into the pocket of her dressing-gown. This he observed absent-mindedly; made as if to put away his wallet; then with a faint start reopened it.

‘Yes … Here’s an odd thing.’ He rummaged through the contents, pulled out a sheet of flimsy, cheap-looking notepaper. ‘From a chap called Edwards.’ He peered at the few lines of pencilled script; an uneducated, backward-sloping hand. ‘Almost too faint to decipher. Over a year I’ve carried this about, according to the date.’

‘What is it?’

‘Polite note I once had from someone, thanking me for a pleasant evening. I kept it because—well, because I can’t bear destroying letters from my boy-friends.’ He pursed up his lips and whistled a few faint bars of a popular cabaret song.

‘Does it tie up with anything you’re saying?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, it might be said to. Here’s where the story acquires a touch of drama. Can she bear any more? She can? Yes, easily. Well now, let’s see … One week-end I got away unexpectedly and went down to the cottage. Madeleine wasn’t there. I knew she’d gone away—I rather wanted to be alone, so I didn’t let her know I was turning up. On the Sunday afternoon, I went for a long walk along the river. Coming back, I saw a chap, a sailor—able seaman—standing in the road looking at the church tower, which is a rather nice one. I passed the time of day with him, and he asked me one or two questions about the place—date and so on: he seemed to take an intelligent interest in architecture, which I thought surprising. In fact I felt surprised altogether: he had a striking face: in fact I never saw a better-looking chap; and his voice was unexpected somehow … and the whole thing seemed to ring a very, very faint bell. Presently I asked him where I’d seen him before. He gave me a queer look, then shook his head. Then he hesitated and said his name was Edwards: but that meant nothing to me. Then he said he’d served in a certain ship about six months before: was he right in thinking I’d been aboard and if so would my name be—what it is? He never forgot a face—sometimes wished he could, he said with a bit of a not very cheerful laugh. He had a frozen sort of face—when he laughed it didn’t brighten up. I said I was rather the same … I thought perhaps I might have spotted him sort of subconsciously. But all the time I knew that wasn’t it, and I knew that he did too. It was as if spurts of electricity were running between us … And he went on standing stock still beside me, not a muscle twitching. I asked him if his home was in the neighbourhood and he said no, he’d lived in London before the war but the whole street where he’d hung out had bought it in the blitz: he’d been along to look for his old lodgings but there was nothing left, only rubble. He’d had some very nice furniture of his own, a smashing suite, he said, it had upset him losing it. What with one thing and another he wouldn’t be sorry when his leave was up. He’d come down this way on foot, and thumbing lifts, to look up a lady he’d once made the acquaintance of, to explain something he’d done that might have left her with the wrong impression. I heard myself saying if he had nothing better to do would he care to come in for a drink? My wife was away for a few days, I told him, and I was on my own. He accepted very promptly and we strolled up the road and into my house. There wasn’t much in the way of spirits in the cupboard, but—with a little help from me—what there was he put down in no time. I never saw such a thirst. He loosened up bit by bit, and started talking. I thought he was one of the shrewdest, most observant chaps I’d ever come across. A born story-teller—a natural, with this poker face he had, and a quiet voice—slightly nasal, flat, rather mournful. God, he made me laugh! He had opinions of his own too—about politics, and the war, and the way things would go afterwards. I don’t say he was a deep thinker, but he was no fool. He’d acquired his point of view the hard way, and nothing would shake it. Sour, tough, cynical—formidable in a way. As cold as … It crossed my mind …’ He stopped. ‘It crossed my mind there might be murder in him—something abnormal anyway. But the point is I never felt more drawn to anybody in my life. I’m not a pansy—did you realize?—never felt even a touch of queerness since I left school—well, Oxford to be strictly truthful—but my sensations about him were very peculiar.’

‘What about his for you?’

‘I don’t know.’ His voice was rueful. ‘I didn’t pursue the matter. I’ve always regretted it. Don’t laugh.’

‘I’m not laughing.’

‘Dinah would have laughed. She’d have been fascinated; and it is rather fascinating if you’ll kindly listen quietly and not interrupt. We’d been drinking and talking for about an hour when he said suddenly: “It’s funny it’s turned out like this. I was positive in my own mind you’d be away or I wouldn’t have intruded. It was your wife I was wanting to see really.” He let this drop in the most casual way as if it was a perfectly natural remark to make … I’m not sure to this day whether he was putting on an act or not. But I don’t think he was. As he saw it, the whole thing had gone swimmingly. He’d entered my house at my cordial invitation, and our relations were entirely satisfactory, on a basis of mutual confidence and drinking. Anyway, I know
I
felt: “This must be accepted in the spirit in which … and so on.” So I said rather feebly: “I didn’t know you were a friend of my wife.” “More of an acquaintance,” he said. “It’s some years back now that I had the pleasure. She might recall the occasion or she might not. It was Dinah introduced us.”’

He held his head up as if requesting her to refrain from comment; then presently:

‘Story’s too long,’ he muttered. ‘Cut it short … He explained he was referring to an occasion when my wife had gone to call on Dinah. He opened the door to her when the bell rang. My wife now, she was his idea of a really beautiful woman: the way she carried herself and her taste in dress and all: smashing. And her gracious manner, I remember that expression. He’d never forgotten her. He hadn’t stayed long with them—slipped out and left them chatting. The fact is, he’d gone on a blind that evening and not come back at all. He came round to find himself I think it was at Brighton. Took a fancy to the south coast and stayed down there all summer: fell in with a chap with a smashing yacht, got taken on a cruise all down the French coast. Fact is he was browned off with London just then, didn’t care if he never saw the place again or anybody in it—except for just one friend he had, a foreign chap. That stuck in my mind because when he spoke of this exception his face did alter, for the first time. It gave a sort of spasm; and I was interested to detect what appeared to be a sign of strong feeling … However, that comes later … Then he said: “You may be like me, you may not, when it comes to living with a woman, but there’s times I have to cut and run.” I agreed I’d had the same temptation once or twice. “They suck your marrow,” was the way he put it. Then a certain amount more in the same vein, not highly original, but a bit unnerving because it was so—so scientific. One’s heard chaps in their cups cursing women, but it’s usually
one
they’re bashing at—one unfaithful wife or mother; and generally dripping with self-pity or self-reproach or disgust or some other form of twisted love. This wasn’t. He didn’t want me to sympathize, or corroborate, or contradict, or help restore his confidence in women—he was just passing on the results of his clinical investigations. Plague-carriers—that’s how he saw the fair sex: either that or diseased—infected. He struck me as a pretty serious case himself, I must say: in fact he seemed to me to have the look of an Incurable … that kind of unnaturally separated, fastidiously sterile sort of aura. Weak stomach. You saw him pushing his plate away, or throwing up what he couldn’t swallow—which was the human race in general, women in particular. With one or two exceptions—morbid cravings: my wife for one! What could she have represented? Some kind of fare that had never come his way, I suppose, the one thing he could have fancied—wholesome, really tempting. The other he mentioned—that one friend he’d had, his special diet, was also unobtainable: he was dead. The one person, perhaps, who could have persuaded him not to become a chronic case. As it was, there was nothing left but to pass the time dissecting other people’s antics. And
yet
there was such sadness in him—the sadness of a creature in the Zoo—irremediably displaced … Yes, I know I’m a romantic: but why shouldn’t there be these creatures to be met with, classified as human beings but … well, living at a different level? As if they hadn’t quite made it—the human status—or else side-tracked it—or risen above it, maybe? Anyway, when you come across one you feel disquieted: partly you feel the creature’s dangerous … partly that he’s at your mercy. There’s something you ought to do for him—but what? Some place you ought to send him back to, or send him on to, where he’d be at home—but where? Social problem—biological deviation—anything you fancy.
He
only wanted to be let be to be a misfit. But oh, I did feel so disquieted, I did feel so at home with him!—more and more so because of habits of speech he had that seemed familiar. I can’t describe them—turns of phrase I’d heard her—Dinah—use that time I took her to the sea-side, the last time we were together. And something she said then that I wasn’t aware I’d remembered suddenly surfaced and exploded in my face. We were discussing love
—o
ur expendability, you know; whether, if we parted, we could ever love again: one of those honest conversations chaps wish girls wouldn’t start. I said I supposed—knowing myself—I’d go back to Madeleine and make do with her. She didn’t like that—and to tell you the truth nor did I—for different reasons. Suddenly she said there was one person she could, would go to, if I left her. She wanted to tell me all about him, but I didn’t want to hear. She volunteered that it was nobody I knew, and nobody I need be jealous of. I wasn’t. Women
d
on’t understand how discreditably unjealous men can be. Yet what she said did obviously stick: because here he was, the missing link, all those years after, and I was on to it—not like a knife exactly, but well before he handed it to me. He handed it without any fuss: and the only shock I had was a social one: I mean his absence of class-consciousness
vis-
à-vis
myself—and Dinah. “You walked out on her too, didn’t you?” he said. He didn’t blame me: of all the shockers he’d ever come across she took the bun, in his opinion. The trickiest bitch that ever set herself to eat a man alive. She’d properly shagged him out. I did get a pang then, a nasty one, in my competitive instinct, but only for a moment: because he went on to explain with great indignation the total technical impasse he’d been in every time he found himself in bed with her. So I realized he was using the expression in a … shall I say spiritual sense. I understood his feelings, but that had never been my trouble.’

‘Did you tell him so?’

‘Well, I didn’t stress it. It didn’t seem quite fair—the chap was upset.’ He shot an equivocal glance in her direction. ‘No, and I didn’t compare notes either. Men don’t, you know: they’re not like women.’

‘So I’ve heard. This impasse though—he felt it was her fault?’

‘Oh yes, entirely.’

‘He explained that to you?’

‘Not in so many words. He had his reserves: in fact in some ways he seemed to me rather delicately spoken: or oblique where I wouldn’t have been … and contrariwise. For instance, I couldn’t have said one thing he said …’ He paused. ‘He said: “Of course I knew it was you she was after all the time, though she pretended not. She’d cry in her sleep. That used to rile me.” I couldn’t have said that … I didn’t at all like hearing it.’

‘It made you miserable.’

‘Horribly. But pity wasn’t a word in his vocabulary. He thought women who cried in their sleep were a bloody nuisance. All the same, she did make him miserable. What he couldn’t say—couldn’t find words for—was this feeling she gave him that she took the virtue out of him.
He
thought, or decided to think, she was—well, no good at her stuff: and he was fairly explicit about his tastes and types. But I saw what the trouble was—the thing that caused this sexual humiliation it nearly choked him to remember. But I couldn’t tell him because I was afraid of him, see? Because he was lower class. It would have taken—oh, years to reassure him … No, I never could have
—
any more than Dinah could have; we were both his enemies. I bet nobody could have been more
careful
than poor Dinah to treat him as an equal; but I bet too, not a day passed that she didn’t show him she took her superiority for granted. Quite unconsciously, of course, on her side, quite subjectively on his. How could he pity her? And how could I tell him to put his shirt on pity for his enemies? It takes a lot of experience to conceive of
that
as a gamble with any point to it; and he was browned off with experience. What he was really saying was that the whole thing wasn’t
natural.
In fact, he was shocked by her. She had ought, as he saw it, to have stuck to her own sort and left the likes of him alone. He didn’t give a fig for her disinterestedness, her social conscience: or rather he didn’t credit the possibility of their existence. Most of the upper-drawer rag-bag stuff he’d sampled—he’d pretty well got their measure: they were, to be preyed on. But what was
she
up to? A real killer in disguise she must be—a real female
Dracula.
I even think he half suspected she might be after hiring him to blackmail me or stick a knife in Madeleine. Pathetic, isn’t it? In a manner of speaking we were akin, you see. Both orphans of the storm. That word
bourgeois
… we’d both been tipped the wink it was a term of abuse, but, secretly, as rude words go we didn’t mind it. Our orbits had touched—though all unknown to me. We had come out together in Society—and a fine pair of twittering debs we were, I must say, scared stiff of cutting a dash—or of not cutting one. He said he’d seen me once or twice with Dinah—I hadn’t noticed him. He must have been one of the Ace glamour boys; but I incurably only noticed the girls—or rather just the one girl. The point is we neither of us took kindly to the goings-on. We were out to better ourselves, but we were both too respectable. We agreed we had that old-fashioned feeling about sisters—we wouldn’t have cared to take along our sisters, let alone see them enjoying themselves in that company. “I bet your wife didn’t fancy those kind of capers,” he said. Right he was—poor Madeleine. But Dinah did fancy them—she seemed perfectly at home; and this upset us both for rather different reasons. As regards
amount
of jealousy, inferiority complex, there couldn’t have been much to choose; but it worked in opposite ways. He didn’t want to touch her, he wanted to send her back to what she was busy cutting herself off from—to where good girls, ladies, didn’t get seduced by common chaps, and the lower orders knew the form and kept their distance. I wanted to possess her: the more she gave me the slip the more I wanted her. In fact we were all hard at it deceiving ourselves and cheating one another. Dinah too—Dinah most of all. God, she was terrible—what a girl! She would
not
accept we were no use to her. She claimed if only we tried we could be truly strong; but we wanted to be truly weak. That was a disappointment and a puzzle, but she tried to take it. Poor sweet, she was so humble—so set on learning—
learning
to be wiser, truer than anybody else; and oh dear, oh dear!—stronger into the bargain. We saw her bracing up to be strong for two; and it was beastly of us, we were not grateful. We didn’t say all that to one another, I’m just making you a present of it for your casebook, darling. Neither could we have been said to come together in the spirit of two mourners clasping hands at last in yearning and remorse over the one romantic grave—though I know you’d be happy to think of us in such an ignominious pose. We didn’t so much as mention love. It’s not a word he would have sanctioned, and I should have hated to embarrass him. Pity, isn’t it? Poor Dinah! Aren’t men brutes? Not even able to admit we’d both loved the same woman …’