The Echoing Grove (38 page)

She opened her eyes and sat up, then swung her legs down to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed to search under it for her bedroom slippers. Fallen beside one of them lay a piece of folded paper; the letter from Rob Edwards. Let drop absent-mindedly by Rickie? Forgotten about? … She screened it carefully with one bare foot; heard him remark, from a long way off, over his shoulder:

‘Be done with love, you mean.’ His voice was hard and flat.

‘Oh, that would be too sweeping: though I guess at the time she may have felt that that would be salvation. I just mean one kind of love: passion … Romantic love, perhaps. We do know, don’t we, that though she never came back, in the end she was all right—she made a happy marriage?’

Thrusting her foot beneath the bed, she touched the dropped paper with the tip of her big toe, pushed it a fraction further in. Then easing her heels into the crimson mules, she got up, crossed the room and went to stand on the threshold of the open door, taking breaths of fresh air into her lungs. After a moment he came and joined her. They stepped out and stood together in the narrow well of brick and stone, in the loaded silence of blacked-out London at four o’clock in the morning.

‘What are we waiting for?’ she murmured. ‘Something is going on.’ With her mind’s eye, she discerned his profile above her, lifted, sniffing the dark. ‘I wish the skies would fall. I wish we could see Christ’s blood stream in the firmament.’

He put his arm round her waist and held her close against him. She thought she heard him say faintly: ‘Hush!’

‘Wait for the All Clear,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t sounded, has it? Surely we can’t have been cut off even from that?’

‘Well, I don’t know what’s happening …’ She could feel him busy with matter-of-fact surmises, calculations.

‘What is it? Robots? Are you informed about the nature of the secret weapon? Are your lips sealed? Shall we be saved?’

‘Hush,’ he said again, gently patting her hip. ‘Don’t worry. I expect we shall soon know a lot more.’

‘Honestly, is it going to be a little more than we can bear?’

‘No, no, that’s one thing certain. Whatever it is, we shall get over it—find the answer to it, I mean. There may be a nasty patch before we do: it’s bound to take time. But nobody has any doubts. Do you honestly not see that?’

‘Yes. Yes, surely. It’s only the suspense. Not knowing precisely what to stiffen up our sinews for.’

‘We shall be told,’ he said, mild, reassuring. He lifted his head to scan the sky. ‘It almost looks as though …’

‘As though what?’

‘I was going to say, if anything has started, not much of it seems to be getting through. But I may be dead wrong.’

He reflected carefully on what, by pure chance, he had seen go over, extraordinarily low, at the exact moment when he had emerged into the area two, three, how many?—hours before. An aircraft with a tail of fire, like a streaking comet. An aircraft engine with a thrumming and buzzing note—a clockwork sound. He had been keeping half an ear strained ever since for its return, but he had not heard it again. He considered whether to mention it to
Georgie
now; decided not to. Time enough. If she had not said all those hours ago when he came back: ‘I thought you’d gone to Dinah’—fantastic nonsense!—he would have described it to her.

The thought of the work facing him in the Admiralty was beginning to weigh heavily on his mind: a particularly tough day ahead, and he was in no shape for it. He had begun some time ago to long to be back at his desk; had, regrettably, been unable to give his whole attention to the important subject they had been discussing. He must leave her now.

Contrite, he took her invisible face in his two hands, tilted it up to cover it with loving kisses.

‘I must go,’ he said, not liking the sound of the words as soon as they were uttered.

Something more was obviously expected—more adequate, more personal, more … What on earth? Quite beyond him. But he wished very much not to leave her with too disappointing an impression of him. He tried.

‘So you think that’s what happened. She went to Stepney to find Selbig … Oh well, he’s dead now. We shall never know.’ It sounded in rather poor taste, almost jaunty. He tried again. ‘Perhaps he had the answer. She was always after it: but I never knew what the question was, let alone the answer … Yes, she was all right in the end. She married this nice chap—from all accounts—in Stepney. Don’t know how that came about. Nor did Edwards, of course. She didn’t marry Selbig, did she? Whatever that proves … or doesn’t …’

He could only hope that the ground had now been more or less completely covered, because he couldn’t, really
could not
go on. There was nothing left in him except for this compulsion, so fatal, so familiar to say that he must go: nervous compulsion of the departing traveller wishing to show a creditable last-moment spirit, but already in transit, busy seeing himself out. His expectations, such as they were, lay all ahead of him: but here she stood, silently holding out to him the load (rather heavy for her, take it, hurry)—the question there was never time to answer.

‘It’s getting light,’ he said. ‘What time is it, I wonder? My watch stopped hours ago. Precious, go back to bed, and get some sleep. I can see your face, it’s a ghost. And oh, you’re shivering! What a selfish brute I am.’ He drew her to him, wrapped his arms round her and kissed her lips hard, long, once. ‘My darling, thank you for everything. I must go.’

‘I must see you to the top,’ she said, following him as he went up the steps. They stood on the pavement in the greying street where nothing stirred.

‘Thank heavens I can see you now,’ she said, able to smile. ‘This is my third resurrection.’ But he was inattentive. She could just discern him in silhouette looking up, down the street and at the sky.

‘Not a cat or a dog …’ she said. ‘Dogs will be in the shelter still, I guess. There are several regulars who bustle along the moment the Warning goes and don’t stick their noses out again till the All Clear. I wish there weren’t so many children in this street. But I suppose if anything is going to start they’ll be evacuated again.’

‘I hope to God they will. And double quick,’ he muttered. ‘I must say I wish you weren’t in London. If I were to telephone and suggest your leaving if you could, what would you say?’

‘I’d say I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. If I were to telephone and ask you to come back and see me soon, what would you say?’

‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said, in a hurry again. ‘I shall be absolutely up to my eyes for the next few days, but I promise I’ll telephone. I’ll come as soon as I can.’

The singing began in his ears. Giddy. A bit sick too. He must get going, start at once. He looked down at her and her face seemed to have gone far away, to be a paper mask. His lips opened to speak; but he was dumb; seeing hollow eye sockets, nostrils, mouth, stare back as she receded …

One more effort.

He waved his hand and turned away: a brusque farewell, an almost graceless self-dismissal; too pushed for time to smile; heading too urgently away to linger, even a second, for her answer. She would have blown him a kiss … Her hand dropped down. She watched his shadow-outline fade into the tenebrous nullity of the void street: listened to his footsteps. Slow. Curiously faint. Not the loud-ringing, driven-sounding stride she had heard approaching hours ago. He did not once look back; and she too withdrew, went below again, locking and bolting the door between herself and this continuation of suspended time.

She went at once to stoop, feel about under the bed and retrieve the evidence. Unfolding it, bringing it close to her short-sighted eyes, she saw less than a dozen lines of mauve pencilled script, blurred, cramped, ornate, impossible to decipher apart from the known signature: R. Edwards. On the other side something had been scribbled in ink. This also she scrutinized, seeing it to be a capital D and an address, in Rickie’s harum scarum scrawl. She hesitated. Her spectacles were upstairs in the bedroom. She tore the paper into minute pieces and threw them into the grate. The other piece of paper, the one upon which Rickie had, with less than customary illegibility, copied out a line of poetry, remained in the pocket of her dressing-gown. Later she transferred it to her notecase.

So that three days later when his life was spent, when after a long vigil Madeleine had seen the end, had had his personal effects silently, respectfully returned to her, and with Colin’s arm supporting her, left him alone, and dead, no clue remained. It was some time before she was able to summon enough courage to go through the papers in his wallet; but the only secrets brought to light were a ticket for shoe repairs, a roughly jotted list of investments and securities, some childhood snapshots of the boys—one including herself; a recent laughing one of Clarissa; two of his old home; also one he had never shown her of his mother as a pretty little girl with a fringe and a mane of fair hair, wearing a black yoked pinafore tied in at the waist and holding a kitten up to her cheek; also a letter: the good letter Jack Worthington had written after Anthony was killed.

Touchingly trivial odds and ends to leave behind. All above-board, simple and clear as his blue English eye. Yet she had watched a stranger die. Body and limbs inert, anonymous, concealed beyond recovery under the neatly tucked hospital sheet and blanket; wax face, discoloured with a two-days’ growth of beard; anybody’s dying face, relentlessly exposing its indifference. Only his hair, its shining brown just touched with grey, but thick still, youthfully energetic, made him seem Rickie asleep on his pillow. Some time in the small hours of the night, the nurse having taken his pulse and raised the lamp to took at him, murmured a change, she thought, she must fetch Sister … hurried out. Madeleine was left alone with him.

Last chance, last minute opportunity, chance of a life-time to resist … restore … Fight for him, fight … Call back. But stooping over him to speak his name, she found herself prevented. His lips and lids were a closed frontier, behind which he had been irrevocably taken over, claimed by eternities of change and dispossession. She dared not touch him. She raised herself to stand passively beside him, hearing swift feet advancing in the corridor. Then on an impulse of compunction—he must not think she feared him—she put her hand out and touched his unaltered hair.

His lids flew open. She looked into twin globes of crystal, shining without comment, without recognition; one moment lighting the finished portrait; then extinguished.

The Early Hours

Switching off the engine at the top of the lane—a long-established petrol-saving device—Madeleine let the car run down the slope towards her house, steering it to come to the expected standstill in the bay of grass beneath her garden wall, just under the shelter of the holly tree. She sat on a moment watching its moulded thicknesses, floodlit by her headlamps, spread like some glazed monumental Gothic canopy above her, darkly glittering, incised, fire-bead-encrusted. Then switched off, took the ignition key, got out, locked the doors. All the motions, all the precautions gone through just as usual.

She stood still in the vaporous mild moony dusk, hatless, hugging her fur coat to her stomach, forcing herself to breathe in and out … Thank God for the light behind the curtains in the lower windows, for the narrow comfort of being expected back. Dinah, instead of no one, waiting in the house: Dinah, of all people … Incredible. On the long drive from London, shivering, crawling through fog-patches, the thought of Dinah waiting had been the one point of rest. The urgent longing to reach this point ahead of her—she saw it featureless but precise, blocked in like a mark on a battle-map meaning Ambulance, First Aid behind the lines—had focused her shocked mind and body and pulled her, magnetized, back home again.

Unimaginable turn of the wheel; stranger-than-fiction fact. Yesterday, only yesterday, Dinah, that fifteen years banished phantom, had re-materialized; solid enough after one night of domicile to detect the sudden atmosphere of crisis, to say: ‘What’s wrong?’ to receive the answer: ‘Nothing,’ with an air of unperturbed acceptance of the necessary interval: before it came, the breaking-point, the painful confidence, accepted, discussed, deliberated on, judged finally in the style of the old schoolroom days, the salad days of suitors—pressed-flower, dropped-handkerchief, sealed-note, keepsake-and-token suitors: aerial, stinging, wild-fire, harmless swarm, transparent ephemeridae … Not these clay effigies, these stagnant eyes and hands, this congealed, oh, not even animal indifference …

Thus it had come about that morning after breakfast that Dinah from behind the Sunday papers had remarked, with no preliminaries:

‘Shall we take a turn or would you rather not?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t mind which.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘Fairly well only. Did you?’

‘Like a log … ditto Gwilym. Till you came in, in fact. Or did I come to a few moments before? I half thought I heard the telephone.’

‘You might have. I’d promised to ring up someone at nine o’clock and I couldn’t get on. It’s that half-witted girl at the Exchange, she drives me raving mad.
“The lines are all engaged: you’ll be rung later.”
’
Vicious adenoidal imitation. ‘When she feels disposed, in fact, that means.’

‘Maddening. Were you too late?’

‘No, but the line to London was so bad it was hopeless. I couldn’t … Nothing made sense. Was I talking incoherently?’

‘If you were, I didn’t hear you. I only heard the bell.’ Then presently, laying down the newspaper: ‘Would you like to talk, or don’t you want to?’

So with reluctance and relief the outline had been revealed, then sketchily filled in; and a couple of hours later, having agreed suspense intolerable, nothing to be lost, possibly much gained by immediate interview with Jocelyn, Madeleine had dressed for London, Dinah had brought the car round, checked the oil and water, slipped a brandy flask into the dashboard pocket, said: ‘You look a knock-out. Expect you when I see you. I’ll have something cooked. Good luck’; and stood to watch her start.

Keeping to the grass to make no noise, she reached her gate and opened it. Almost at once the dog started to bark; one pair of curtains parted, an outlined form appeared: Dinah, alerted by the iron gate’s creak and click.

I hope I don’t outlive her. What provision have I made against an empty house?
… Old age meant, among other things, fewer and fewer people coming to one’s door. One would end by being pleased to see the caller with the collecting box, the Whist Drive ticket seller; one would be wishing to detain the postman and the milkman for a chat.
What if no man, no real man, ever comes back into my house?
One should take more trouble to invest in women friends. Two or three pleasant neighbours yes, but occupied with families, chores, local interests, envisaged only as parents of young people in the holidays. No one to drop in for a good gossip on a lonely evening: I never wanted that enough to take trouble about it. Shyness?—self-sufficiency?—distaste for mental picture of Women without Men, cosily resigned, exchanging recipes, knitting patterns, confidences …? More and more rarely girl-friends of youth turned up to stay: Clara gone to live in Ireland, Sylvia become a drunk—boring, distressing; Georgie Worthington … As she went up the paved path and saw the front door open to reveal Dinah, stock still, in slacks and jersey, waiting on the threshold,
Georgie,
dead and so long out of mind, startled her with a stab of memory. Killed in the black-out one night—only a few months after Rickie’s death—not even in an air-raid: knocked down by a car of all futile ways of being a war casualty. And why walking over Putney Bridge alone at
2
a.m.? Nobody ever discovered … But she had always been odd, uncommunicative, catlike: for instance, that going all the way to Norfolk to see where Rickie was buried … that letter to Clarissa:

I want to tell you I saw your father quite a short while before he died. We talked for a long time not about the War but about really important things—people, human relationships, personal feelings, which he understood about better than most people. He was very happy himself, and he gave me an idea of what love and happiness should be: that made me happy. Since you were a big part of this idea he had …

That was how the letter began, or near enough—extraordinary letter, wonderful really; perhaps Clarissa’s greatest comfort; shown to me with tears, in struggling silence, locked up by itself in a mother-of-pearl box Rickie had once given her … I wanted to write to
Georgie
about it, thank her for the thought; but I never did, not wanting to seem intrusive, or suggest that I thought myself included in what was intended only for Clarissa … What had she gone on to say?—something about Rickie’s home, his childhood … the things he remembered … something about wild geese, about inheritances, losing and not losing them: Rickie had done that, she said. Then a quotation, a line of poetry:
‘Heart of this heartless world …’
That could be said, she wrote, of a few rare men and women: it was true of Rickie, Clarissa must remember that, it was the reason why he gave people this idea of love … (less true of others—experts, dealers, professionals, black marketeers, who also were able to give people ideas of love) … Georgie always made me feel inferior, same knack as Dinah of conveying there was something which I didn’t know or was unfit to hear … or was that just my guilt? Perhaps she was in love with Rickie: I sometimes wondered … But no, an ideal marriage, poor old Jack, completely broken, married however less than a year later, such a relief to all, very nice girl, father of twins already, fatuously proud …

She called ‘Hullo!’ and Dinah came slowly out a step or two to meet her. The dog sprang at her with rapture; then immediately sped in the direction of a clump of viburnum, emitting in his hurry an urgent, whirring and growling sound like a shaken rattle.

‘Hedgehog trouble,’ said Dinah. ‘I found him prodding it under that bush at tea-time. He thinks it’s still there but it isn’t. I put it in your shopping basket and carried it up to the edge of that near wood and decanted it. He’s had another spiffing day, but he’s hideously demoralized.’ With scarcely a pause she continued: ‘There was a call for you about a quarter of an hour ago. From London.’

Through the iris-coloured lucent gauze made by the fog-filtered, windless air and the three-quarter moon her face came swinging towards Madeleine like a balloon on a string. She said in a medium’s voice:

‘Oh, was there? Who was it?’

‘I don’t know but I think it was him—Jocelyn. He didn’t say, I didn’t ask him. I said I was expecting you but you weren’t back yet from London, should I give you any message.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said no thank you, no message, and rang off.’

‘You might have …’ She took a lunging step forward as if to push past Dinah into the house; then stopped. ‘Well, I suppose you couldn’t—you weren’t to know. What time is it? Does your watch say eleven? I’d better …’ In the act of taking another step, but this time slowly, almost languidly, she checked it. ‘No. There’s no hurry. I don’t know whether to—I’ll wait a bit, I must see. What do you make of it?’

‘Of what? His telephoning? I can’t make anything of it, can I, at the moment?’

‘I didn’t expect it, I must say.’

He had moved, he had been the one after all to take the first step through silence and separation. This proof that he felt
something
strongly enough to ring her up—the mere report of it enabled her to move and breathe again. Like one pinned down under beam in fallen house, suddenly released … Briefly, self-deprecatingly, she laughed. ‘It would seem on the face of it to show concern.’

‘On the face of it, yes,’ said Dinah unemphatically.

‘How did his voice sound?’

‘Well … I don’t know his voice. It’s got charm, hasn’t it? It doesn’t sound quite English for some reason.’

‘He can’t pronounce his r’s—he makes them French. Yes, that was Jocelyn all right.’

Yes, his voice had charm: would at once assume it to speak to an unknown woman at the other end of the line. She felt a spasm of sickness; then of shame at her schoolgirl questions.

Dinah strode away a few paces, grabbed Gwilym, snapped a lead to his collar and returned.

‘I’ve made some onion soup; and an omelette would be the work of a moment,’ she said.

‘Darling I couldn’t, thank you all the same. I don’t feel as if I could swallow. Perhaps the soup a little later. I adore it.’

‘It’s the real McCoy. I had a pudding-basinful with toast in it for supper.’

‘I hope you gave yourself a drink.’

‘You bet.’ Flanking the door, the Italian tubs exhaled an ashen gleam. Dinah sat down upon the edge of one; and at once, flexing his rear with military precision, Gwilym perched his hind quarters on the alert beside her. She observed him with attention, defining his pose and outline as heraldic; then turned her face up to the sky. ‘Unearthly,’ she murmured. ‘Is November often like this?’

‘Often. Though I’m always apt to forget it.’

‘I had quite forgotten. Isn’t this the month for shooting stars?’

A winter-flowering stellar essence misted earth, air and sky. The tilted moon rode tangled in a long angelic drift of blossoming unearthly cloud-dapple. A faint rhythmical noise, a kind of reedy croaking came from the region of the crown of the big chestnut tree beside the gate.

‘What can that be?’ said Dinah.

‘I’m not sure. It starts up every night. I think it must be young owls talking. Or snoring perhaps.’

Dinah laughed softly in her throat, a sound of satisfaction.

‘I saw the big one again, going over the river this afternoon. One way and another I’ve had a blissful day. I found a very classy paint-box in the attic, and a drawing block, and I did a sketch. Some time or other I want to have a bash at making a proper picture of it. Perhaps you’d let me come back some other week-end?’

‘Please. Promise to. Any time.’

‘Though I should make a ghastly mess in oils. There was a nice concert on the Third this evening—Fauré and Debussy. You must be tired. The water’s hot, I stoked the boiler. Do you want to go straight to bed?’

‘No,’ said Madeleine slowly, after some hesitation. She glanced through the door that stood ajar. On the drive down, everything that her walls enclosed had been exposed to her. Room after room and over and over again in two-faced images: one welcoming, familiar, to be hurried to for shelter, comfort; the other cynical, estranged, condemned, giving out a suspect breath. In every room some object contained some aspect of him, some jack-in-the-box about to spring. And now, since hearing of his telephone call, swaying as she was in the first pluck of some untested current, her dry craving to push forward, know the worst, had left her. To remain in suspension was enough; to rest a moment on this bare unencroaching verge, among these interlucent spaces, in this thin world of ghosts, outlines, abstract densities.

As if to image her mind’s nebulous collapse, the moon’s face blurred, webbed over by a drift of spreading vapour. Forms stood extinguished—non-created specimens in some grey pre-natal chamber of creation. The dog uttered an experimental bark.

‘Sh! Pipe down,’ said Dinah. ‘There’s nothing anywhere. Must write and tell Master about horrible heroic exploits.’

‘Here,’ said Madeleine, ‘wrap this round you.’ She threw the soft plaid rug she was carrying over Dinah’s shoulders, and then sat down on the rim of the other tub. ‘Is his master a great friend of yours?’

‘Yes, he is. He was Jo’s best friend, actually. They were together at Guadarrama when he was hit.’

Guadarrama. Spanish name, of course—but it evoked an echo. There was another … Guernica. Elegiac syllables; lament and outrage in the very sound of them … Apocalyptic brutal vision, on canvas, by Picasso: fury of teeth, horns, blood, steel, entrails, men and monsters; agony of women. Name meaning catastrophic moment in other people’s history, like Messina, or Pompeii … or Hiroshima.

The name is Tobruk for me: for Dinah Guadarrama.

‘Their section of the front was cut off,’ continued Dinah. ‘He carried Jo, somehow or other, all one night; eight miles, and Jo a deadweight—paralysed. His back was broken. It was a miracle they ever got back to the Battalion at all. But it was too late for Jo: for Danny too, I suppose. He never really recovered. He was sent home a few weeks after with a collapsed lung. I nursed him and he got much better. But this war finished him. He volunteered in the Fire Service and had a hellish time in the first East End blitzes; and he developed t.b. He can’t live more than two months now.’ She stood up, opened the rug, wrapped herself in it and sat down again, folded like a Red Indian in his blanket.