The Echoing Grove (36 page)

‘The same two women …’

He burst out laughing. ‘What a farce!’ He shook his head, sank into silence.

‘How much did you say?’

‘Nothing, simply nothing. I decided it was the most gentlemanly way to protect everybody’s honour.’

‘But he was no gentleman.’

‘No. He was a cad. Also a bit of a prude. But he did love her just a little bit. There’s practically no doubt in my mind that he was trying to tell me so. So what came out should have made me want to kick him.’

‘You didn’t want to?’

‘No, I didn’t. Wasn’t too advantageously placed for that … No … I did rather want to once though: when he said he’d thought it so very friendly of Madeleine to come and visit her sister under the circs. The presumption of the twirp! How did he know what she’d come for?’

‘What had she come for?’

‘
God
knows … There was never any knowing what went on between those sisters.’ His voice had become loud, querulous.

‘You really don’t know?’

‘Oh,
I
was never told. Neither of them ever mentioned it to me. Oh, I suppose I did get hints … Oh well, that’s neither here nor there.’

‘I do see why you wanted to kick him.’

He said in a normal voice:

‘I wanted to kick the lot of them. Very unfair on my part, most uncalled for. I’m sure it never occurred to him that he was treading on my toes. He was really talking about himself, which he did for two hours without drawing breath, saying he too had had a lovely sister who’d stood by him, taking the rap from his drunken old sod of a father, but she’d died young. He envied Dinah … All the same I felt, quite unjustifiably, they’d all combined to make a fool of me behind my back.’

‘What makes you think he was trying to say he loved her?’

‘Oh … I expect that’s nonsense. I expect it was just booziness, and being lonely … I think it was chiefly the way he laughed about her, a
real
sound it was, a good long chuckle. And the way he said suddenly: “Poor old Dine, she was a silly girl.” Girl, not cow or bitch, sounded strange on his lips, like a compliment,—or a tribute rather. “Always a sucker. Give away her last sixpence without a thought for herself.” He himself owed her one pound, he said. It had been on his mind a long time—that’s one reason why he’d been so anxious to see Madeleine: he wanted Dinah’s address, to give it back. Why this one pound should prey on his conscience I don’t know. I bet he’d set her back considerably more than that. It must have stood for something in his mind: perhaps Madeleine had happened to be present at that particular transaction.’

‘Did you give him her address?’

He fingered the sheet of paper in his hand.

‘No,’ he said after a pause. ‘I didn’t. That’s rather on my conscience. I told him I wasn’t sure myself, I knew she’d moved, I’d send it later if he’d leave me his address; but he forgot to in the haze of the occasion. He wrote and gave me one a few days after’—he held the paper up, still folded—‘and thanked me for the only pleasant evening of his leave, he said. He was off to sea again, but he’d look for a word from me on his return. He didn’t return. He was killed in the Battle of Narvik—blown up with the rest of his gun crew, bombed from the air. I saw the whole report. I thought then I ought to write and tell Dinah the whole thing—but I somehow didn’t … I feel bad whenever I think about him. I couldn’t help being so relieved when I knew he was dead: I dreaded his coming back into my life—turning up again at the cottage for instance, and giving the whole show away to Madeleine. He was quite unaware of all the taboos attached to the situation—or impervious to them anyway. He’d have been the hell of a nuisance. On the other hand, I wanted awfully to do the poor chap a favour—such a simple one too—just send him an address he wanted. I couldn’t have let him down; but the thought of him sort of passing back to her through me appalled me. Almost like using my secret knowledge of her whereabouts to—to conjure with. Black magic … What wouldn’t I let loose? I told myself it was my duty to protect her from him. But I didn’t believe it. I knew I had it in my power to give her back something she’d value. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Hopeless predicament as usual. But he let me out—I was always let out somehow … I was curious to know who would have been informed as next-of-kin, so I checked up. The name was a foreign one: Selbig, that friend of his he told me about—the name that caused his face to twitch when he pronounced it. He must have written it in when he joined up, before he discovered there was no more Selbig. He said he’d knocked around the world for several years before the war—South Seas, America, all over the place—but he got back somehow in the September and enlisted in the navy straight away. And then what with being pushed about and one thing and another, he hadn’t found out for months that his friend had taken poison a few days before war was declared. Despair, perhaps … That’s me talking, not Edwards. Poor chap. I do hate to think of no one missing him when he went. So did he hate to think of it, I know he did. That’s why he wanted to find Dinah, and why … That sentence in his letter about looking for a word from me, that went on haunting me.’

He got up, stretching his arms above his head, then with a sharp gasp bent forward, doubled up; sat down again.

‘Rickie, what is it?’

‘Sh!—Nothing. Bit of a stitch. I get it sometimes.’ He reached for her hand, held on to it tightly for a minute or two, then took a deep breath and sat up straight again. ‘Gone now … I’ve sometimes wished I’d come across that Selbig. He was a doctor, perhaps a quack, anyway a perfect wizard, according to Edwards—nervous complaints his speciality. My ulcers come from bad nerves, in case you didn’t know. According again to Edwards he performed miracle cures. He had this Dostoyevsky-sounding tenement—lodging-house—clinic—I don’t know what, down Stepney way, where he treated people free. I rather think he wasn’t allowed to practise officially in this country. It struck me much later that it was through him that Dinah managed to get enough phenobarbitone to do herself in one time she tried to. Keep that under your hat along with everything else, but even more so.’

‘I’ll be discreet. When was it?’

‘Umm … round about the time we went to Wales. I was sent for suddenly … I had to take her away, try to get her on her feet again. She—she’d been played the devil with, left alone in London. I was no use to her, I’d … And then she took this blighter in and looked after him, and a rare rewarding job that turned out to be. What staggers me still is the cold-bloodedness—walking off as if he’d just dropped in for a bit of a sit-down in a station waiting room. Not once, but twice …’

‘Did she talk about Selbig to you?’

‘Never mentioned him. She wouldn’t let on to a soul where she got the stuff. Not that I pressed her … I suppose he was—well, part of her secret life with Edwards. Otherwise she would certainly have described the set-up. She loved curiosities, and loved describing them. And this must definitely have been one of the minor fun-fairs of our late blasted civilization. I still can’t picture her in it.’

‘Do you have to?’

‘It’s not imperative, but I do sometimes: merely, I mean, because that’s where she was. It was there that she retired with Edwards after I was carried off to hospital—I don’t know how long after … but there she was in purdah, while I lay spooning up my sops and seeing her skip over oceans and dance over lands … Yet I don’t know … It strikes me now, this minute, I may not have been so far out? Granted that you believe, and I do, in the possibility of telepathy, and that she was still—well, tied up with me, as I was with her, and trying, as I knew she would—ferociously—to root me out of her and tear me up … there must have been some moments—in her sleep perhaps—when she’d have been—oh, meeting tidal waves and lions and wandering through ruins and falling over precipices …’

‘How long did that go on, her life in Stepney?’

‘That I don’t know … Well, in a sense it’s gone on ever since. She never came back as you might say, to the West End. Very odd story, isn’t it? I’ve never understood what precipitated that leap to Stepney.’

‘Craving for the absolute,’ said
Georgie
reflectively. ‘Could it have been? Part of the pattern of her fanaticism. It does seem as if’—he looked at her suspiciously, but she went on: ‘as if she couldn’t break the pattern, couldn’t let it go. Always trying to get back to where she started. I don’t see her as that free independent breast-forward marcher you describe. I see her
driven;
trapping herself over and over again because she hadn’t found out her own enemy—the one inside herself …’

He looked glum, obstinate, and she added: ‘If that seems unacceptable, presumptuous, forget it. I know I’m inclined to type casting, as Jack calls it—it irks him too. But I can’t help identifying myself with her, a bit: suspecting our shadows might be the same shape …’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. You do rather remind me of her—in one or two ways. I suppose everybody’s more or less the same … with variations.’

Frowning at the carpet, he did not notice her expression, which was melancholy.

‘She was extremely domesticated,’ he said presently, in a constricted way. ‘More so than Madeleine: more like her mother. She wanted to settle down—she always wanted to. I know how it must sound to you, but she really did revel in—well, making a home for me. Whatever you may have heard about her reputation, she was a
settling
person.’

She said untruthfully: ‘I know nothing of her reputation.’

‘Oh, don’t you? She was considered promiscuous and unscrupulous. But you can take it from me, however reckless, misguided, ridiculous she sometimes was, she never was corrupted, never could be. No doubt a more ingratiating figure would have got away with more. She was very uncompromising—ruthless perhaps. It was her innocence.’ He jerked his head up, said with a look of exultation: ‘She burned in the flame.’

He did not observe the shudder that her body gave, or catch what darted at him from her eyes. All the same, when he spoke next, his tone, though stiff, was tentative.

‘I suppose she went to Stepney to make a home for Edwards. She always had a feeling …’ He stopped. A look of surprise suddenly broke up the aggressively triumphant mask he had been wearing. ‘Well, it might have been,’ he exclaimed in a natural voice, appreciatively amused. ‘I see what might have made her … This curiosity she had—great curiosity about animals. Non-human creatures. Respect for them, you might say. Pity. Rather what I felt myself about him … Wish to let him be himself on his own level. Make him feel
at
home, that’s more like it—acclimatize him to his environment or artificial habitat. Her naturalist’s—no, her
keeper’s
instinct. She was always inclined to treat people as if they needed
handling
… as if she were saying: “My poor fellow, you require a more humane approach than people realize. You may not even realize it yourself.” It was apt to irritate sophisticated people. And Edwards would have suspected a trick in it: it was too respectful, too careful, for the likes of him.’ His faint smile broadened to a grin, self-mocking yet not ungratified. ‘It suited me all right.’ Glancing at her in expectation of response and getting none, he sobered quickly; said after a pause: ‘I’m afraid it was what always caught her out. If you put it into people’s heads they may be dangerous, they’re apt to be so.’ Then, with a diffident inflection: ‘Is that what you meant by being one’s own enemy?’

‘Let’s not talk about me, or what I meant.’ She turned her face away.

An unaccountable nip in the air dismayed him. He said regretfully: ‘I’m sorry. It’s all very boring. You shouldn’t have let me go on.’ He took her hand.

After some moments of silence she said: ‘I like you to go on.’

He shook his head. Presently their fingers yielded to one another with a reconciling pressure. He shifted his position to take her hand more comfortably into his lap and began to stroke it in an abstracted, gentle way.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she said, knowing the question this time a safe one; seeing beforehand the way he smiled and started, like someone rousing from a pleasant dream.

‘Oh, wool-gathering,’ he said apologetically. ‘Matter of fact I was thinking about the country. My old home.’

‘Do you often think about it?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘Miss it?’

‘Oh always … I generally try not to think about it much because it’s rather painful. I mean I’ve never got over regretting that I sold it. At the time it seemed the only thing to do—my economic crisis was acute. And Madeleine didn’t fancy living there, quite understandably. However, spilt milk and all that …’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I’ll show you some pictures of it.’ He made as if to pull his wallet out again; then withdrew his hand and replaced it over hers. ‘Not now. Some other time … No, I was only thinking how extraordinarily lucky I was. Since the war particularly, the whole thing has often come back to me—come over me so strong and sharp it’s quite uncanny. Not as a craving exactly … more as if it was in me, as if I was still there … Perhaps one never does leave really … I can really smell the smell of the woods in winter, where I used to spend blissful days alone with Marshall, our angelic keeper. And the smells: Frost. Ferns and brambles—all those heavenly smells. And the smell of fishing—and of lake water. I used to go fishing with Charlie; he was the chauffeur’s youngest, a year or two older than me—my father’s godson. I used to have high tea afterwards with his mum and dad. I always wished I didn’t have to go home: cottages were cosier and I preferred Charlie’s mum to mine as a mother-figure, and the taste of Mazawattee tea to ours. Charlie made up for not having a brother; I always deplored my status of only son. I adored him—I think he liked me too. Once when we were sitting on the bank of the lake he suddenly put his arm round my shoulders. My heart beat like a sledgehammer, I can’t vouch for his. Anyway there we sat, quite dumb. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hand. For some reason I was thinking about it just now … It must have been about November. Clear green sky, beginning to get dark. Presently we heard a sound above us, coming out of the east … oh, if you’ve ever heard it!—but it’s indescribable. Rushing, creaking, unearthly … Geese flying over. It was the first time I’d ever heard it. We counted them. Charlie said: “Greylag”. He knew a lot about birds, far more than me. Can you imagine what it was like?—waiting, bursting with expectation—then that sound? It was the Annunciation. I mean that’s how it took me. Charlie had simply had the luck to see the geese, I should imagine, and in my company, which made it even more jollier. That’s all that happened. We started to walk home—five miles to go, and I began to feel horrible—horribly low. He whistled and I bit his head off. I could hardly wait to get away from him—be alone—be sick—be nothing. I don’t know if he noticed. But he wouldn’t have held it against me: he wasn’t one to crawl away bleeding if a chum told him to shut his beastly row. He was a nice chap, awfully good-looking too. Talking about poor Edwards made me think of him—I don’t know why, they weren’t a bit alike … except that Edwards had the same kind of hands—broad, rough, open-air hands, blunt fingers. I noticed them that night, and they reminded me … Not that
he
put his arm round my shoulders. In the end we were both nodding in our chairs. In fact he was snoring heavily. Yes, it was a rum start, that evening.’