The Echoing Grove (29 page)

He rubbed his eyes, yawned slightly, sending her a cramped apologetic smile. ‘But that’s a big subject,’ she added, still in the same clarified, edgy voice. ‘I wouldn’t worry about her too much. I guess she has all the company she wants. When I last saw her she certainly gave me that impression. Completely engrossed. But that’s some time ago now. Things may have changed.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

He looked about him, as if vainly searching for escape. The room they sat in, in stiff armchairs, was a double drawing-room, extending the whole width of the house with a window at either end; all faded chintz, brocade, fringed velvet; and thick with maiden aunts’ water-colours framed in guilt, and with miniatures, photographs and samplers, with glass-fronted cabinets containing a job lot of Dresden figurines and Oriental plates, bowls, teacups; with spindle-legged small tables displaying, also under glass, a miscellany of trinkets, silver snuffboxes, objects in ivory, amber, mother of pearl and other forms of semi-demi-precious curio. He got up and started to prowl up and down, idly absorbed, it seemed, in a meticulous examination of the walls and shelves.

‘Doesn’t it get you down,’ he said presently, ‘living with all this junk?’

‘Dusting it gets me down. Jack’s aunt’s sole condition was that I should attend personally to the dust. I can’t be said to live with it. I guess I’m too tired in the evenings to think of the room as anything but functional—four walls for privacy.’

‘You’re tired now?’ he said in a voice of concern. ‘Was it monstrous of me to drop in like this without warning? You ought to have told me to go away.’

‘That would have been kind of infantile,’ she said in a pleasant voice, ‘considering what long hours I’ve spent hoping you would come. No, I’m not tired. You go on looking around.’

He glanced at her with a curious, attentive expression, as if hooded in surmise; as if he had received some expected alert or confirmatory message which, even as he took it in, he lacked the equipment to acknowledge. She said still pleasantly:

‘But why do you act always as if nothing people say—have said—to one another needed to be remembered? Need have any meaning, continuity?’

‘Do I? I didn’t know I did.’

‘If you don’t know it, that’s the worst of all.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Well, if I do,’ he said, not pleasantly, ‘it must be because that’s the way I feel about the things people say to one another. They’re not meant to be remembered—or else not fit to be. Or it’s best, you know, to start off again as if they were forgotten.’

‘Is that a warning? Or just a cynical speech?’

‘I hadn’t thought of giving it a label. It seems like the truth, but perhaps it isn’t. You would know.’ He looked over her head, pushing out his lower lip, ironic, hostile.

‘Well, not polite, let’s say.’

‘I’m sorry, Georgie. My faculties are dreadfully blunted.’

‘It is I who should apologize. Blurting out lopsided reminders.’

With an urgent but almost imperceptible shake of the head, he turned and walked off a few paces, came to a halt and with his back to her presently remarked:

‘It’s not even functional. It’s parasitic. A whole life history, but it all seems dead. Like a shed cocoon.’ He turned round and looked at her, saying with a stiff smile: ‘You look so incongruous in it.’

‘Exiles look out of place wherever they are.’

Surprised by the words, he brought his eyes to focus on her, and saw suddenly as if he had touched, separated, and held it up before him, a core of isolation in her, a shape coldly illumined, contained, defined, like a dark crystal with a grain of incandescence in its heart. Whatever it was—moment of intuition, recognition, unconscious
interpenetration,
it left him at once shaken and mysteriously eased; as if a clue still held—a long overlaid or forgotten clue. Let it go, he told himself. Let it bury itself again. Once or twice as a child, he had seen into people in this way; not since.

‘But I never had a background,’ she said, as if picking up his train of thought. ‘Maybe that’s why physical surroundings don’t make much impression on me—or me on them. I guess I’m underdeveloped visually—maybe humanly. If all you’ve done in youth is to check out from countless apartments and hotels you don’t get much training in aesthetics. You had a different start. I imagine you integrated into your background like a figure in a conversation piece.’

‘Do you indeed? It’s an interesting theory,’ he said, coming to sit down again, ‘like all your theories, darling. It’s not for me to question it, but that word integrated …’ He shook his head. ‘No … Have you read
Alice—
Lewis Carroll? That’s more how it was. My so-called background seemed to me an extremely dubious affair: I never could get to grips with it. If I began to appear, as you might say, it disappeared; and vice versa. Nothing was ever
all
there. Don’t ask me why. My Mamma frequently told me no woman had ever gone through what she went through in giving birth to me—perhaps that accounts for it. Now shall I tell you my first memory?—then you tell me yours. It was snooping around the attics at home, looking into the maids’ rooms. Our old cook’s. The sewing-maid’s. Everything struck me profoundly,—it was so sacred and mysterious, and so vulnerable. With such a stuffy, personal smell; so—uninherited and without taste, and so crammed with mementoes. So—
organic.
I used to creep from one room to another and stare and sniff and touch the ornaments and the photographs. I can’t describe the churned-up feeling … rooms like that belonged to
safe
people, people without misgivings. I always had misgivings. Particularly in the drawing-room with my Mamma, and in her lovely, pale, shining bedroom.’

She uncrossed her knees, put her feet up on a tiny tapestry-covered fender stool, tilted her head back slowly. The thick creamy plastically modelled lids sank down. Her head, compact, almost austere, had the same trick, he thought, as Dinah’s of turning itself into the Portrait of a Woman: an uncontemporary head, with those full-globed eyes, rounded full neck, high breasts, small sloping rounded shoulders. Nobody had ever called her beautiful. Why then did he want to go on looking at her for ever?

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Now I see it, at last, from the beginning. I’ve tried so often. I only saw external things, the same as Jack had: ponies, guns, fishing rods, cricket bats … And a kind of a retinue to give you individual attention from birth. I never saw
you watching them.
Now you have given me some images for it. Before, I could never visualize the start of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘Oh … you separating yourself and …’ She added: ‘Well, the thing we mentioned earlier: wondering where you were.’

‘Oh, that.’ He sounded bored, or else impatient. ‘Oh, I see,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘you think I’m still in the attic! What a preposterous idea. But you may be right … I must say, the connexion never struck me, but it’s odd, since the war I do find myself remembering these trifles, from infinite ages back; though in fact, this particular gem had altogether escaped me till I came to mention it. I suppose that’s highly significant, you’d say.
Don’t
pin me down to it, I beg. It makes me seem such a clown, and I should be sorry for myself. I’m always so sorry for clowns.’

‘I’m not sorry for you. It would mean I saw you at a disadvantage in comparison with myself. And that would be ridiculous.’ She paused. ‘Compassion is a large word, but that more expresses it. I do feel compassion for that little boy. Some of the things you tell me seem so—uncorrupted. Like poetry in a way. Maybe you should have been a poet.’

‘Rubbish,’ he said harshly. ‘Poets write poetry.’ He got to his feet, stretching himself with an unconvincing air of langour. ‘Oh, it was all right later,’ he went on vaguely, the look of faint irony or self-contempt reappearing on his lips. ‘I had a wonderful time—at least, after I got into my teens. No complaints. Friends, fun … I was thoroughly spoilt. My father being killed affected everything of course. It was utter disaster for my mother—for me too, I suppose. But I don’t remember missing him.’

He wandered away again towards the farther window and stood looking out.

‘What do you do in an air raid?’ he asked presently.

‘I remain in my bed. There is a sort of basement, full of trunks and crates and things in newspaper and camphor, and iron bedsteads. I did try going down at the beginning of those fire-raids, but I didn’t care for it. Rickie, is it true there is something distinctly unpleasant on the way?’

‘Might well be. I wouldn’t actually know.’

‘Jack’s aunt is superstitious about her ornaments. She said she had the feeling this room must be left just as if the war was not. Otherwise it would attract the bombs.’

‘You’d be a fool,’ he said, returning to stand over her on the hearthrug, ‘to stay among all this glass and china nonsense if anything heavy started dropping. I sincerely hope you won’t.’

‘Then I won’t.’ Seeing him glance at his wrist-watch, she added quickly: ‘I’ll go and fix some supper for us. You will stay, won’t you?’

‘Georgie, I can’t to-night. I wish I could.’

After a pause she said: ‘Well, that’s too bad. This has been a short visit.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve got a tiresome appointment.’

‘Can’t you cut it?’

‘I wish I could.’ He added with reluctance: ‘It’s a doctor, actually.’

‘Are you sick?’ Her eyes searched his face in their myopic way, at once remote and intense.

‘No. At least I don’t expect to be told so. Though sometimes I wonder a bit …’

‘What, Rickie?’

‘Oh, nothing much. Whether that accounts for me, I meant. Whether I’m reduced to—a sort of wheel turning, automatically. Till it stops turning. I don’t want to be taken unawares. Or perhaps I do.’ He flushed, looking suddenly ten years younger; enabling her to discern by contrast his former greyish pallor. ‘No, it’s just that I have to be a thought prudent about my damned boring guts. I nearly died of them once—that was before your time. I’m supposed to go and be overhauled every few months or so and I’ve kept postponing it. He’s fitting me in after hours as a special favour. Nice chap—very busy man—can’t very well skip it.’

‘No,’ she said heavily. ‘I suppose you can’t. And judging by the way you look you shouldn’t.’

‘Don’t tell me I look fragile. I assure you I go on as well as most—better than some. My poor dear boss has had a breakdown, that’s why I’ve been so loaded. But my stamina is exceptional.’

She got up, saying with a hard-wrung smile: ‘Well, try to come back before next Spring.’

Their last meeting had been in May the year before. Walking in Kensington Gardens one Saturday at lunch time, she had run into him. They had gone down to Kew on top of a bus.

Without looking at her he picked her hand up, dropped it.

‘I remember all about that day. Don’t think I don’t.’ He hung his head.

By one of those azalea bushes, its every fabulously laden branch in shimmering soft explosion of carved and honey-breathing coral, he had pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Going back to London in the evening, alone on the upper deck, they had sat hand in hand, laughing at everything they said, saw, heard.

‘It was the happiest day I’ve had since the war,’ he said. ‘Since—oh, God knows how long!’

‘You wanted it left like that?’

He looked at her dubiously, nervous. She said:

‘Without a sequel.’

He said in the tone of one attempting a scrupulous self-examination: ‘I suppose I did.’ He opened his mouth as if about to explain himself; but no words came.

‘Is that how you feel about happy days? That they are—well, sufficient in themselves?—should not be followed up? Or need not be?’

‘I suppose I do.’ He glanced at her again, the bright, measuring glance of the antagonist.

‘Not even out of a sense of obligation to the one with whom the happiness was made and shared?’

‘I don’t think in terms of obligation about the people—the very few people—whose company I enjoy.’ He spoke quickly, with more assurance, as if she had given him the opportunity to score a point.

‘Oh, ordinary social obligations, no. I guess the word is gratitude. The thing that gives affection continuity—or makes you want to try for it, anyway … want to try to carry on its promises.’

‘I was grateful,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t think we talk the same language.’

‘We did once. That day we did.’

‘Yes. At least I thought so.’

‘We don’t any more?’

He remained silent. Hands thrust in the pockets of her slacks, heels braced in the shaggy wool hearthrug, she tipped slowly back until her shoulders touched the mantelshelf; and in this position said with harsh flippancy:

‘Ah well, it’s just one of those things—one of those differences that always trip one up. Now I come to think it over, that is the way of course that a man feels about a casual date … Girls have more personal curiosity, so generally speaking they are more interested in the follow-up. Also, more likely to be suckers.’

Unable as she was to look at him, she felt that something unexpected had taken place: a change of temperature, a softening warmth. When finally she glanced up it was to see him watching her with a grin—tenderly mischievous, genuinely amused. He said:

‘You are a silly girl. I knew another absurd girl once who liked to generalize, particularly about men and women: differences between relationship of, physical, emotional, intellectual—every imaginable heading, sub-heading, etcetera etcetera. I was fascinated.’

‘I wasn’t trying to fascinate you.’

‘Ah, fascination is a peculiar thing. It’s not always what the books tell you to look out for that gets under your skin.’

She turned round, propping her elbows between a pair of Dresden shepherdesses in daintily provocative, toe-pointing postures.

‘Well,’ she said, her voice sinking to a strained, almost guttural note, ‘if that one went out of your life, maybe it was because she got—because one gets—to the end, in the end, with a person who cannot be prevented, in the end, from preferring the beautiful memories.’

‘Oh, you think that was the reason?’

His face underwent a sudden violent contraction; then as suddenly relaxed. As if relinquishing once and for all the effort to maintain the artificial dam in him, for the first time he looked openly at her, surrendering an area to be explored. She thought: ‘At last’; and penetrating this conviction, felt the time lag in him, his demand upon her to wait, wait, in case he should yet choose to require her to let him remain in his stopped earth.