The Echoing Grove (5 page)

And then we foundered—on elementary facts. For her it was the crack-up. Poor wretched old Corrigan who from the highest motives blew the gaff on the delinquents … What of it now? I never saw her again, I heard of her death by chance. Some pair of queens or other took her to Mexico and she died there, years ago.

It was a time that couldn’t be sustained. Time of enormities. Madeleine’s still got it under her skin. She’s partly stuck in it still, and thinks I am, or should be: Why, says her bright stare, should she—not I—feel guilt for crimes not hers but mine?

All of a piece without,

Thy chase had a beast in view,

Thy wars brought nothing about,

Thy lovers were all untrue …

A long time ago now that burden had faded out of earshot. Once my head was a gong, beaten on day and night: all of a piece thy chase, all of a piece thy wars, thy lovers untrue, in view, untrue, gone away, gone away … Day in day out the stamping bold refrain; then intermittent, bursting out and fading; bad days, the beast at bay; bad nights, beast running in the jungle; then slowly, by dint of unremitting labour, with sweat, blood, tears—months, years of them?—I passed out of this circle; I gave birth to myself and entered into life. My head was purged, my hearing was absolved; my eyesight … If I looked backwards, I saw only one of those old dim scenic paintings, featuring histrionic crag and precipice, leopard-concealing forest, storm clouds, zigzag lightning, distant prospect of lit water; and in the foreground a few figures, important in relation to the whole conception yet unemergent, kept in their proper place; dark, or transparent almost; standing or sitting for ever in repose.

But before I was made free of such a landscape, before I could arrest the flux, compose it, I had had, of course, to die. Not one
coup
de gr
âce,
but three; and all in the same day: remarkable.
One:
Rickie;
two,
Rob;
three,
the third one, the last, the finisher … But that enormity was still unperpetrated the last time I saw Rickie.

That time when I summoned him, the very last time, I still had it in my mind to … What did I have in mind? … to place myself under his protection. My brother-in-law: what more suitable? If when I telephoned he refused to see me, I told myself I intended to go straight to my sister Madeleine: an unequivocal appeal this time. ‘Look, for God’s sake,’ I would have said, ‘surely you know I’m honest? Surely my having kept my distance, silence, all these months—when after all one
could
say I had rights, seeing that Rickie had chosen to leave you and come to me, seeing that I did, so to speak, deliberately relinquish him and hand him back—surely that earns me the benefit of the doubt? Listen,’ I would have said, ‘I’m in trouble, I’m not up to anything; I’m frightened. I’m in the hands of crooks, thieves, perverts,
murderers.
I’ve been living in dreadful lodgings,’ I’d have said, ‘in Stepney. A working-class boy that I befriended—he spun me a hard-luck story … He’s taken all my money, and my valuable cigarette case (yes, Rickie’s present, but so long ago, it’s of no consequence)—and vanished. Question is, what am I to do? I can’t inform my landlord because he’s a German Jewish refugee … because he thinks better of me than to think I’d mind … because he’s not my landlord but Nemesis overtaking me … because he said all along that Rob was a stillborn soul and must be left in peace, not tampered with; and I did tamper, break in on what had to be everlasting twilight … because in the crackpot Scheme of Things he is constructing, in which each individual soul is a world or an atom to be split—thereby releasing limitless potentialities of spiritual energy, thereby progressively creating God or the Myth or the spiritual universe—factors of moral and material order such as H.M. Police Force are false, unreal … I’m telling you these facts,’ I’d have said, ‘because they’ll help you to realize what I’m up against; how badly I need authoritative protection. Some male person of importance, such as Rickie, must return with me to Stepney, stand guard while I collect my property—what’s left of it, repel intruders with the threat of Law, pay from his well-stuffed wallet what is owing, drive me away in his expensive car.’

This speech was not made. I betrayed no one. I got Rickie at the office, curtly made my request. Shocked pause; appointment curtly granted. I had five shillings left, I went to the Grand Central Hotel, St
Paneras,
and had a bath; with my last shilling saw a News Reel, watching the programme round and round; at five went along to the flat, let myself in with the keys, hoping but failing to pass unnoticed by Mrs Lilley in the basement. She nosed me out, she came up carrying her mongrel bitch in her arms to give it a bit of a change. We discussed its heart attacks. I made loud bright chat with many a Cockney quip and crack thrown in. I’d been abroad, I said; was off to the country now for an indefinite stay. Come to clear up, clear out, the lease being up. Mr Masters (yes thank you quite himself again) would be along later to settle any bill outstanding and make arrangements for the furniture. When the van came would she be a duck and keep an eye on the stuff that was going into store? To keep her sweet I made her a present of my crocks and saucepans, which with marked nonchalance she accepted—thinking me barmy or else there would turn out to be a catch in it. She was sorry to see me go: she’d miss me, so would Spot: I was quite a favourite with Spot—eh, Spotty, love? Her eyes, with snakes’ tongues darting out of them, appraised me. Well she knew that my status had declined; that I was no longer wealthy gentleman-friend’s young lady-friend, walking illicitly, securely, demurely, on the sunny side of the street. A thrill for her; but all the same …

She hung about, seeming to feel uncertain; presently remarked she must be popping down, her old man would start creating. In one of his wicked old moods he was, the sinner. What with the grumbling all day and the lifting all night, she sometimes felt she’d as lief be in her grave. Still he was grateful in his way. ‘You pore old cow,’ he’d come out with only yesterday. Ah well, one blessing, not having the use of his legs he’d never play her no more tricks: she’d got him now, where she could lay her hand on him and serve him right. He’d been a devil in his day. But there, it was a woman’s lot: give ’em the best years of our lives, the more fools us. What good, she said finally, did fretting ever do? Any girl that got herself deceived should ought to say good riddance. Plenty more fish where that one got hisself hooked, the joker … Ah well, she wished me luck. She lifted Spot, held Spot stomach upwards, manipulating one nerveless paw in my direction.
‘Bye bye Auntie, all the best,’
squawked a ventriloquist’s dummy’s voice.

I went on packing, turning out, filling the waste-paper baskets. Punctually at 6.15 Rickie arrived. I said hullo and got straight down to business. He was co-operative. Telephone? Gas? Electricity?—all paid up. Just one account from the wine merchant. ‘Give it to me,’ he commanded, stretching out his hand, pocketing it without a glance.

Last the keys. ‘Ah yes.’ He would look in tomorrow at the estate agent’s, give formal notice, hand them in. Nothing simpler. ‘Anything more?’ … I didn’t, I said, want any of the furniture, only my own pictures, and a few French pottery jugs and plates I’d bought myself. ‘Just as you please, of course. It’s yours to keep or dispose of.’ ‘I don’t want to sell it, simply be rid of it.’ In that case he would, of course, arrange to have it removed and stored; or put in a sale. ‘It isn’t much anyway.’ ‘No, not much.’ He glanced round at it. He had a patient expression; business adviser at the end of a tiring day, prepared to listen and advise but wishing to be gone. ‘Oh, and your links,’ I said. ‘I found them in that drawer when I was turning out.’ He took them from me, jingled them in his palm, closed his hand on them; then slowly his hand fell open. When presently he moved it to smooth, in an automatic way, his hair, I saw the cuff-links lying on the arm of our big chair. I watched all this; I saw when he shut his eyes. Had seen him do this a dozen, dozen times by the family hearth—never before with me. Had decided to my own satisfaction what it meant, in psychological terms; not tension, not active boredom—simply negativity. I’d often wondered how it struck her, if at all.

‘Tired?’ I said at last. He opened his eyes and sent a rapid blinking smile in my direction, a sort of grimace, apologetic, and said yes, no not really, he’d had rather a long day of it and then this damned pain, indigestion or whatever, had started up again. Since my telephone call, I thought, perhaps. He ought, he said, to be getting along now, he was preposterously late already: one of his words, preposterous. I noticed he was a bad colour, and drawn round the mouth. I saw how he might look in middle age. Heaving himself out of his chair, he walked to the window, stood there looking down into the street. How heavy his broad shoulders … I sat on, and, from where he’d let them fall, the links stared glazed, thick, like eyes dropped out from broken dolls’ heads. Already they looked incriminating—clues dropped, forgotten, in the room that saw the murder, objects the sleuth picks up, examines, pondering in his hand their weight of evidence. On an impulse I leaned forward, snatched them up, stuffed them in my pocket. He turned slowly from the window and looked round the room, laying a look of lead on every object. I knew that look—it meant he had resigned. It was a look I’d seen very recently on another man’s face, in another room. The only difference was that Rob had laid it on
me—
marking me UNTOUCHABLE; Rickie laid it on every cherished property of the small space we had enclosed for our domestic love.
Home no more home to me
… But he, of course, he was not homeless; he was expected back. I wasn’t. Not anywhere. Whichever way I turned, my possessions were a few fag ends of human occupation: one or two suitcases, some hairpins in a drawer, a pound of tea, an empty milk bottle. Such things can spell despair, deadliest of the seven deadly sins. I kept telling myself this was after all what I had come for, after all: the final pay-off, the practical one that always has to be gone through when there has been a death. That’s how I’d put it to him on the telephone, to persuade him after all these months of silence it was safe to meet me. But I knew I’d doubled back in panic terror to pick up, if I could, an old familiar trail. And didn’t he know it too? I did not find out.

Once, on one of the former occasions when we had made an end, saying good-bye he said: ‘I give you my life. If ever you need it, come and take it.’ Wild words, meaningless, I told him; but I kept them locked in me, and after all the time had come to remind him, to bring him to the proof. But I didn’t remind him. He was totally beyond my range at last: my body and mind, all known, loved once and offered back to him, anachronistic weapons. ‘Rickie, help me …’ He knew I was saying that and he wouldn’t hear. The coward … But even from the last ditch, from my contempt for him, he cut me off. He was a coward, but not a coward then. His shut eyes seemed to hold authority. He had decided to resign without consulting me,
he was not ashamed of it.
He stopped me dead in my tracks.

Did he? Did he? Was it something deliberate—a choice a person capable of love might make? A person of integrity, one become wholly responsible, within his limits, in the realm of moral action? A person who had begun to face, before I had truly begun to in spite of all my fine words and gestures, the lifelong consequences of a choice that, once made, is made to be adhered to with no soft option, not even a dying grace-note to echo on in the ensuing void? Or was it merely that he had become indifferent?

No, not indifferent I know, because—I know. To resign, to be indifferent, are not synonymous. On the other hand, not to resign, to remain predatory, are also not synonymous … And why accord such honour or what is, after all, a self-defensive impoverishment of self? I hadn’t resigned, that’s all; obviously not, because I felt, suddenly, an escape of pure pity for his shoulders, for his stance by the window, for his looking so dully down, then all around the vacancy: look, stance of the disinherited. So I knew I was connected still; a
posthumous nerve,
but irreducible, intact survival. So then I was able to say: ‘It’s all right, Rickie.’ I think that’s what I said; meaning … oh, many things. He let his eyes come to rest on me at last; they didn’t brighten, but he smiled faintly. Eyes of that blue are the most vulnerable: in anger, pain, grief, sickness, the pigment drains away. His had become wall eyes … not quite that … transparent. A ghost gaze rested on me. So then we left the room. He went ahead of me. He had a way of running downstairs that always gave me pleasure because it made me see him as a schoolboy, practising to bring it to a fine art: an unbroken skidding run from top to bottom of the staircase, back straight, knees and ankles loose. He had charming hangovers of this sort from boyhood: accomplishments, tricks he had never quite put away. It’s an upper-class thing: ways they invented in youth of playing with their ease of mind and body, decorating bored leisure with a flourish. He did it now, and it struck me with a pang that what I witnessed was a man dividing: a schoolboy giving me the slip went hurrying down ahead, improving his technique; abandoning upstairs a stock-still man with heavy shoulders. In the void of this split husk he left me cancelled … I wonder if he went on practising in Montagu Square … here in this house … at the Admiralty in
1944,
with death running downstairs after him, as Madeleine had described tonight. Picked up unconscious at the bottom, rushed to hospital, a burst duodenal ulcer, too late, a few hours later he was dead.

On the pavement we hesitated, pausing for a final check-up, making sure that nothing had been left undone. It was a tepid washed-out June evening, grey, steamy after a day of thunder showers; the air was penetrated with the smell of exhausted strawberries and pinks and stocks from a barrow on the corner. The person who strummed every evening upon a twanging piano in a house across the road was playing scales. A group of children burst out of the alley-way behind us, dragging an orange box screwed to a pair of rusty iron wheels. In it sat two tiny Negro children, twins, boy and girl, in magenta flannel jackets. Their faces, black, tender, designed in harmony with the skull’s perfect globe, had an extraordinary abstract dignity. They tore past us brushing our legs, on up the street. Behind the opaque glass windows of the pub on the opposite corner shadows passed and re-passed. Everything looked expectant, supercharged, dramatic: opening shots in a French film, camera turning on doors, pavements, lamp-posts, street-vistas, housefronts, on selected figures; sound track picking up the thin invisible piano, the screech of a rusty wheel, shouts, motor horns and running footsteps, all intermittent between loaded silences, all to build up the atmosphere for what would happen. Anything might happen. Who would slouch shady from that narrow passage, on the heels of that penny-for-the-guy prelude, that flurry of infant mummers? Whom would the swing-swinging pub doors reveal at last, solid against the phantoms? When will they move, that pair of lovers? What are they muttering, their lips stiff, looking hard at each other, then away? She wears her hair shoulder-length, rolled under, she wears a mackintosh and carries a shabby suitcase: clearly she is the heroine. He has a virile sensuous distinction, a prosperous suit of clothes. Upper-class philanderer caught in a fatal net with waif? … Why does that taxi crawl along the street, slow down beside them? Watch now, the plot is about to thicken.