The Echoing Grove (25 page)

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Cold nasal languid voice after a moment’s pause. ‘What a surprise.’ She put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and added: ‘Come in.’ She elbowed him gently aside, turned her back, and Madeleine followed her into a low rectangular room decorated, it seemed to her stupefied sense of vision, with an effect of brilliant splashes of colour against darkness; a full room, a lived-in, book-strewn yet not untidy room, original and charming.

‘Sit down,’ said Dinah, giving a small armchair a perfunctory push. Madeleine sat down. Everything that was happening was mechanical. Dinah stood looking down at her, her hands in the pockets of a black overall tied tightly round her fragile waist, her hair falling thick, lopsided over one eye and loose on her shoulders, her face a spectral mask. And what can mine be? thought Madeleine, trembling.

‘Well, what’s happened?’ said Dinah in the same voice.

In dumb query Madeleine looked up. ‘Accident?’ drawled the voice. ‘Illness? Or what?’ Then suddenly, metallic, strident: ‘I
said, what’s happened
?’

‘Nothing’s happened.’

‘Oh. I thought perhaps you were a widow. With the
chic
veil. Do push it up or something. I feel at a disadvantage.’ She laughed, a brief impertinent sound; then as Madeleine with one scornful gesture removed hat, veil and all, turned brusquely away, walked to the mantelpiece, took a cigarette from a packet and lit it with deliberation. ‘We thought,’ she continued, keeping her head averted, ‘it was Selby back for something he’d left, didn’t we, Rob?’

‘That’s right,’ agreed the young man who had remained standing by the door, his blank eyes fixed on space.

‘Selby’s a very absent-minded man. Did you pass him on the stairs? You must have.’

‘I did pass somebody.’

‘How funny! He’s a friend of ours, of Rob’s at least—Selbig his name is really,
Dr
Ernst Selbig. Oh, my manners! I haven’t introduced you. This is Rob Edwards. Rob, this is my sister, Mrs Masters.’

The young man now advanced to wring Madeleine’s hand, saying: ‘Pleased to meet you’ in a stylized way. His grip drove the rings into her flesh, she was unable not to wince from pain. It seemed less a clasp of greeting than a violent muscular spasm. His appearance was extremely striking: pale yellow hair, a shock of it, straight, silky, a long face of curiously perfect cut and finish, and biscuit-coloured, as if carried out in thick glazed china, with prominent cheek-bones and sculpturally modelled lips; the eyes put in last—yellow-green glass, transparent.

‘Should I fix a drink?’ he inquired of Dinah in a transatlantic accent of the bonhomous-host type, strangely at odds with given circumstances and with some other half-throttled more natural mode of speech.

‘Not for me,’ Madeleine said hastily. ‘I can’t stay long. I …’ She added: ‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, come on, we shan’t poison you,’ said Dinah briskly. ‘You’re not on the wagon, are you? If you’re considering me or Rob it’s quite all right. We
were
both on a bend up till recently and we
did
have to lay off, didn’t we, Rob?’

‘That’s right.’ A faint transparent smile crossed his expressionless face.

‘But now we just drink in a mild domestic way and take turns winding up the gramophone. I
cannot
think why you’ve come, but I suppose you’ll tell me in your own good time.’

Waiting till the youth had withdrawn, she hoped with tactful timing, through the door towards the kitchen, Madeleine burst out in angry wounded protest:

‘I haven’t had much chance yet, have I? This isn’t any easier or pleasanter for me than it is for you. I realize it’s a shock for you, my coming, but at least give me credit … I don’t propose to bounce you into seeing me. If you refuse to talk, just say so and I’ll go. But stop slicking it up into cheap melodrama. I haven’t come for hush-money. And I’m not from the Rescue and Preventive.’ She was conscious of the dark flush rising to scorch and settle in her cheeks.

Raising her eyebrows and assuming the expression of one who remarks: ‘The little spitfire!’ Dinah emitted a long pseudo-appreciative whistle. The door to the kitchen opened and the youth came in with his light tread, stopped in the middle of the room and stood like a peaceable animal at home with but indifferent to man.

‘None left?’ inquired Dinah. Leaning against the mantelpiece she smiled at him.

He shook his head. She lifted the cover of a small white and gold porcelain bowl beside her, took a pound note from it and held it out to him.

‘There you are,’ she said in an oddly formal yet encouraging voice. ‘Be back soon if you can, and fix us a drink.’

‘O.K.,’ he said, without expression, pocketing the note; then to Madeleine, amiably: ‘So long’; and was noiselessly gone.

‘How long will he be?’ asked Madeleine nervously, glancing at her wrist-watch.

Dinah appeared to ignore the question. Her stance suggested both abstraction and intentness, as if her ears were following some other, remoter, auditory line. The front door was faintly, clearly heard to bang. She came slowly then and took a chair facing Madeleine—a low Victorian nursing chair upholstered in a rich bright tapestry of wool and beads against whose high scalloped back her presence seemed designed, disposed, with deliberate economy and grace, as if she had become a portrait of herself. Then, while Madeleine cast about through a wave of physical nausea, through the drum-taps of the silence, for the true start with the right words, she remarked as if to herself:

‘He won’t come back.’

‘You mean—not till I’ve gone? I thought …’ She stopped. It seemed unsuitable to suggest that she was expecting the refreshment so recently offered.

‘He won’t come back at all. That’s what I mean.’

‘Why not?’ Alarm gripped her; she glanced at Dinah thinking that perhaps Rickie had been right: Dinah was far gone indeed. But though once more ignoring a straight question, Dinah said presently, in a normal manner:

‘What did you make of him?’

‘He’s frightfully good-looking,’ said Madeleine with caution. ‘Who is he?’

‘Incredible looks, aren’t they? I’ve never seen their equal.’ She sounded pleased; meditated; then continued with a characteristic sniff: ‘It’s a handicap he won’t surmount—everybody will see to that. He’s a working-class character, one of the ones Bruce
Corder
picked up and did no good to. You may remember Bruce: he took to cocaine and killed himself a year or two ago. I’d lost sight of Rob. Bruce used to bring him to parties, and I never remember an evening it didn’t end in tears—oh, the hell of a shindy, boo-hooing and bashing and smashing.’ Her reminiscent smile broadened; all of a sudden she burst out laughing as if at some irresistibly comic memory; then her face set again, rejecting its moment of relaxation. ‘I thought it was a shame. Rob was all right—not awfully bright but lovable. We always got on. His jokes amused me … He’s from Nottingham …’ Her eyes clouded, her jaw dropped slightly; she let her head fall back lifelessly against the chair. ‘I don’t know why I … This doesn’t interest you,’ she muttered.

‘It does,’ said Madeleine timidly. ‘Truly it does. Very much.’

But nothing in the image of utter fatigue and melancholy confronting her responded. After some moments, however, the lips opened to say:

‘Why have you come?’

‘I’m not absolutely certain—now—yet …’ Madeleine could not suppress a quavering laugh. ‘I’m sorry. I do know really, I’m not trying to … But I can’t start till it starts coming in the right way. If you don’t mind my staying a bit longer …’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. Now you’re here.’

Her tone seemed unequivocal, indifferent. She sat forward and lit a cigarette and while she did so Madeleine ventured a chary inspection of the room—books, ornaments, rugs, curtains, pictures. Pinned on one wall among miscellaneous paintings in oil and gouache which bore every mark of being the work of Dinah’s friends, was a profile sketch of a man’s head, life size, executed in red chalk. Rickie. A living line, distinctly a good likeness. She averted her eyes. Yet, she felt suddenly, it would have been an easy matter to comment critically: ‘That’s good of Rickie.’ One turn one click and all could have been re-established, it seemed to her, on the old footing; only irrelevancies dividing them from the old schoolroom, from hours that seemed beyond time and change secure, discussing their future fates or the behaviour of their callow suitors. She waited in silence, too confused to adopt a course in any one direction; or else the initiative, she told herself, had passed to Dinah.

‘He hadn’t a chance,’ said Dinah presently. She rose sharply to her feet and started to walk up and down, her head thrust forward, her hands pushed into the pockets of her overall. With every swerve in her pacing towards, away from Madeleine, her face seemed ground to a more harsh, a finer edge; and the broken sentences she laboured to bring forth fell heavily from her mouth like lumps of stone spat out. ‘They got their rotten rotting teeth in him.
They’ve
got the belts and ties and rings and bracelet watches. And all the words.
Avant
garde
passwords. And the freedom of the hunting grounds. All the happy hunting grounds mapped out, combed over. Barracks, pubs, ports, tube stations, public lavatories. How could he possibly be missed! The classiest piece of goods on the market. Bought and paid for. A
whizzing
beauty! Really but really a knock-out. And really but really amoral and uncorrupted and out of the bottom drawer! A natural gangster, a natural innocent. A natural. An enemy of society.
Done time!—
actually done time—for housebreaking!
Actually actively
anti-bourgeois. A real moronic proletarian high-brow. And a judge of character—well, that’s true. He’s been brought up to know his onions, he looks romantic, but he isn’t—not he! Would you believe it?—he’s not interested in personal relationships! But his manners are very good, you saw that for yourself. He was prepared to do right by Bruce according to his standards, but poor old Bruce, he didn’t measure up. Rob thinks he made a monkey of him, parading him around one day and whisking him into purdah the next and sobbing and creating and turning sarcastic. It gave Rob the fair sick. Rob’s got his pride. Poor Bruce, he had none. To the end he believed in salvation. It was a clash really of two—irreconcilable—standards of unscrupulousness. Rob doesn’t know words like that. He just thinks we’re all shockers, bastards, bitches. He disapproves of our messy mushy sex lives and our filthy language. What does he like? He likes going to the pictures, and betting on the dogs, and all-in wrestling, and going dancing, and being taken for rides in supercharged open sports cars. And drinks he likes, and money: he likes to be given lots of both. And me he likes. And Selby … I can’t say
I
do. And he’s very fond of children; and he’s partial to a day at Brighton—and I meant to take him. We shan’t go now.’ She dropped into her chair, as if suddenly dead beat. Her lids sank. She said again: ‘He won’t come back’; then added listlessly: ‘You ought to be more careful.’

‘
I
ought …
?
You mean it’s
my
fault he’s not coming back? Why? I don’t know what you mean. I don’t understand. It all sounds mad. I …’

Flushing darkly, Madeleine jumped up, seizing her handbag and dropping her gloves. Shocked pride, indignation contended in her with a painful sense of rejection, of mortification that seemed allied to guilt. Her enterprise, so arduous, resolved upon with such selfless intent of generosity, had foundered. She was a bungler, a humiliated figure; once again proved unacceptable by Dinah’s standards, summed up, contemptuously walked out on by one of this crew, her Betters. And suddenly as she stood pulling on her gloves, she had an explosion of memory; that hated, hating voice rasped in her ears again. ‘You’re a great big gorgeous girl, you Madeleine, aren’t you?—and of course I want to go to bed with you, damn you, but you’re not a patch on little sister, are you? Are you now? Look at her! Look at that modelling. Plain one of the family, I take it?
Aha! Ha! Ha!
My God, if I could get that head on canvas …’ and so on and so forth. What gross, red-kerchiefed, corduroyed, unshaven drunk of a so-called artist, utter stranger; what outrageous, beer-and-sex-stained party years ago? Dinah’s studio period, after she’d broken off her engagement and gone to live seedily on her own among raffish intellectuals; and after lying low for months started to invite us, just for the hell of it, to meet her interesting set; and Rickie became the rage and paid for all their drinks and bought at Dinah’s prompting their ghastly daubs … Amusing that Dinah should have classy relations with money, amusing to make suckers of them … Going up to Rickie at that party, wishing to say: ‘Look after me, take me away’; but able only brightly to suggest the lateness of the hour, a headache; and someone screeched: ‘Oh, my
dear
!
What
can
you be getting up to? You naughty double-faced disloyal thing you—making off with Rickie. Honestly, come come now, is it cricket? He’s just your dish, we all know, but we
must
learn not to be a greedy girl, now mustn’t we?’ And Rickie with sheepish endearments, his eyes sliding, let me go away alone. We only had one latchkey. ‘My dears, stop fussing. Darling Madeleine, cross my heart, I’ll buckle him into his chastity belt and tuck him up
myself,
if it’s romps in the dorm you’re worrying about. Now
don’t
be governessy, there’s a good girl, I’ll brush him down, the madcap, and get him along to you fresh as a rose for breakfast.’ Thus we avoided the stigma of being the kind of stuffy bourgeois couple who left a party together. Thus amid the plaudits of the conspirators Rickie compassed his objective: swirled out, bemused, in the amorous maze, turning, turning, turning, embraced with the Belle of the Ball … The truth was under my nose like a thing under a stone. I didn’t lift the stone. It was forced up at last by what was breeding under it: the Thing, worm-generating, bedded in blood, roots, clay.

‘I must apologize,’ said Madeleine, ‘for not being more careful. What you wish me to feel is that my tactlessness has been inexcusable. I just hoped—expected—to find you alone. I’m sure I don’t know why. And I see that my turning up like this without warning must seem to you simply one more typical example of my utter insensitiveness and bad taste. I won’t attempt to justify it. I’ll go now.’