The Echoing Grove (10 page)

‘What’s the big worry, my sweet?’ He gave her another hug.

‘I
am
worried. Oh, Tim, it’s Rickie. What am I to do?’

He looked blank, bending his ear down towards her lips. ‘Couldn’t catch.’

‘You’re too tall. You never do hear what I say.’

‘I always hear what you say. But the band makes such an infernal row. Try again.’

‘I said I was wondering what to do.’

‘What to do about what, my love?’

‘Wondering where he is. Rickie.’

‘Wondering where he is?’ He looked at her in simple astonishment. ‘Why, just about tucked up in bed by now, I should hope.’

‘Do you think so? I don’t. I can’t somehow picture it. But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps that’s where he is—tucked up and sleeping peacefully.’

But no, it was implausible. Something cataclysmic had occurred, too terrible to explain. Before her eyes he had performed an act of total rejection, stepped over the dance floor into limbo. She had no bearings now.

‘Even supposing he walked home,’ said Tim, ‘it couldn’t have taken him more than fifteen minutes. But he’d take a cab surely if he was feeling a bit queasy?’

‘I don’t know what he did.’ Direction, goal, motive all equally unpredictable. And after all she could not tell Tim anything. She had cried out to him: ‘I don’t know what to do’—a cry from the heart, and he had not even heard her. A grotesque flop—ironic. ‘But sweetie,’ she went on, ‘I think I’ll disappear. You do understand, don’t you? I know it’s fussy but I’ve slightly lost my nerve since he had that haemorrhage. I’m glad we had this’—she lightly caressed his shoulder—‘but now I’d like to go. Explain to Clara. I’ll give her a ring in the morning.’

This sort of appeal, to his sentimental protectiveness, was what he most enjoyed. Deprecating her wifely anxiety yet responsive to it, he escorted her out with his arm through hers, summoned her taxi and, as she leaned out from it for one more grateful farewell, dipped his sleek head in and kissed her cheek.

‘You’re a ravishing woman,’ he said. ‘Always were and always will be. God bless.’

‘Good night, dear Tim. Don’t forget me.’

Silly thing to say. He wouldn’t question it; one more sweet titillating nothing, appropriate to the silly time and place.

Not a valediction.

He had not come back. Hall, study, dining-room, drawing-room: she opened doors and saw
the
face of each in turn, sunk in lugubrious hostility, emanating greyness and decay, like animals behind bars, or manic-depressives in a private bin. Already midsummer dawn fainted pre-natally in the high uncurtained windows. He was upstairs … But already she knew along the vibrations of her nerves that there was nobody on the next floor. The house of a widow. Above the married floor, the floor of the children sunk in the routine of normal nursery sleep seemed cut off as if by a zone of concrete.

She climbed slowly to her bedroom; and it was not till she had rapidly undressed and washed that she looked almost perfunctorily into his dressing-room and saw his empty bed, pyjamas laid out upon it, sheet turned down. She shut the door, drew the blue silk curtains close, got into her big bed and switched the lamp off.

He was everywhere outside in the whole of London, he was nowhere. Gone to his club. Walking the streets. Gone to a hotel. Picked up a tart and gone home with her. Gone—but it wasn’t possible?—to Dinah. Yes, it was possible. Certain in fact. She’d known it all the evening. Almost at once she fell into bemused half-consciousness, then slept a whirling sleep for half an hour, started broad awake again, the inside of her head stretched dry and taut, and ringing like a shaken tambourine. Someone was moving in the house. Above, in the night nursery? No. Below her, far down, and not a noise at all, but ponderable silence, as if someone heavy with intention were standing still: as a burglar might stand, or a murderer. She lay in a super-sensory trance, conjuring footsteps, breathing, creaking, a hand brushing her forehead, from invaded space. He was in the house. He was weight, silence. He was still no one, nothing.

The door of his dressing-room flew open soundlessly. He turned from the wash-basin and saw her standing in the doorway in her nightdress, her hair rumpled, her eyes like hot coals boring into him. He finished drinking a tumblerful of water in long gulps without a break.

‘Thirsty,’ he said. He put down the glass and mopped his forehead with a towel. ‘Whew! Ain’t it stuffy? The air’s like a damp dishcloth in this house.’

His voice was level, matter-of-fact: he might just have come in from the office on an ordinary day. He twisted himself to examine his dinner jacket: one sleeve and shoulder were streaked with whitish dust. He picked up a clothes brush and started removing this in a collected way. His face in the half light looked perfectly calm, unnaturally pale.

She vanished, closing the door noiselessly.

He took off his clothes and lay down on the bed naked, his feet crossed, his hands behind his head—a reflective pose. After a while he swung himself into a sitting position on the bed’s edge, propped his elbows on his knees, sank his forehead in his hands and remained thus, absent-mindedly running his fingers through his hair till it stood on end, and groaning once or twice vaguely under his breath like a person disturbed in sleep. Presently he got up, opened the door into her bedroom, stood a moment considering the dark blot of her head against heaped pillows, the mound of her body curled sideways under the blanket, then stalked across the room and sat down on the bed, near the foot of it.

After a few minutes she turned on her back and scrutinized him under lowered eyelids. What an extraordinary sight—planted there in an attitude that seemed one of contemplation, without a stitch on, his hands clasped loose between his thighs, his powerful shoulders easy. A long time since she had seen him stripped. A fine specimen, with muscle and youthful spareness still intact. What happens next?

‘What time is it?’ she said at last in an exhausted voice.

‘I don’t know,’ was his amiable reply. ‘Between four and five, I should think.’ He yawned. ‘Sorry if I woke you up.’

‘You didn’t wake me up. I haven’t been asleep.’ Disregarding the bitter meaning in this statement, he said with a sort of sprightliness: ‘I’m jolly hungry.’

She stretched an arm out to the painted biscuit box on the table beside her, handed it to him.

‘Ah, thank you,’ he said, opening it. ‘Digestive. Excellent. Have one?’

‘No, thank you.’

Offering her the biscuit tin, his mouth full, his hair standing up in a mad crest, he looked, in his nudity, extremely comic. She wanted to laugh, and turned her head away upon the pillow. This was not the scene, not any sort of scene that could have been imagined. He was in a very queer frame of mind: not guilty or repentant or aggressive or on the defensive. Simply null and void, as if he had been washed up somewhere by a broken dam—stranded irrevocably in the flood’s wake and resting now in a state of harmless emotional regression; as indifferent to the moral challenge, or to the rudiments of etiquette, as a babe new-born. Above all, out of reach—stubbornly so: as if his will had operated a deliberate assumption of irresponsibility; an absolutely ruthless withdrawal into self-preservation. There he sat naked, munching biscuits, yawning, complaining of thirst, of the weather …

‘No pyjamas?’

He cocked a
distrait
eye at his abdomen and said as if mildly surprised:

‘No. More comfortable without—cooler. Do you object?’

‘Not in the least. I merely thought perhaps they hadn’t been laid out and you didn’t know where to look.’

‘I’m quite capable of finding my own pyjamas.’

‘Well …’ Her tone was lightly sceptical, exposing the whole area of his acknowledged incompetence: ransacking of shirts known to be at the laundry, failure to recognize anything in the airing cupboard for what it was, mislaying of studs, loss of cuff links …

‘By the way, did you find those links?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll have a hunt tomorrow.’

‘You won’t find them.’

‘You know I always find things.’

‘I assure you you won’t.’

He leaned forward, shifted a book on the bed table, tilted it to read the title, let it drop again. His eyes travelled vacantly here and there in the twilit room, resting on objects, never once on her. Every reduced remark and gesture seemed intended to convey: ‘See, if you care to, how bare I am. Scooped out to the marrow. Helpless.’

‘Where on earth have you been?’ A heavy sigh from him incensed her and she added: ‘Your abrupt departure took a little explaining away, to say the least of it.’

‘I suppose it did.’

‘I don’t enjoy being humiliated.’

‘Who does?’

‘It would never occur to you, of course, to apologize.’

‘I don’t object at all to apologizing. Who expects me to? Everybody?’

She was silent; and after a moment he said with faint curiosity:

‘Was there a public scandal?’

After a pause she muttered: ‘No.’

‘Did you say no?’—again with curiosity. She remained silent, bursting with indignation, and he added in a detached way: ‘You’re good at that sort of thing. Face saving. Women usually are. I should have been stumped.’

‘You might at least apologize to me. Never never never in all my …’ she choked.

‘I do apologize. It was disgustingly bad manners. I’m sorry.’

‘I suppose you thought you were paying me out.’

He brooded; then said: ‘I see it must have seemed so. Perhaps that was it—I don’t know. I was surprised myself afterwards. At the time I just wanted to get away.’

It was like listening to a child’s self-analysis: like Anthony at three years old, reproved for howling without warning at the Infants’ dancing class, reflecting, then replying in a reasonable way: ‘Well you see, I didn’t know which I was—a tiny baby or a big boy.’ Watching the mindless preoccupations of his shifting hands and eyes, she felt apologies, indignation and the rest of it irrelevant. The fact was, they were plunged in the thick of an experience without precedent in all their years of marriage. A strange man was sitting naked on her bed: situation fraught with alarming fascination.

‘What did you do?’ she said with interest.

‘Walked about. I must have covered miles.’

‘How did your clothes get in such a mess? Your coat looked as if you’d squeezed through a trap-door in a loft.’

‘Not exactly.’ He looked amused. ‘I suppose it’ll clean off … No; that was from insinuating my person through an extremely narrow and filthy window.’

‘Where? Here? Hadn’t you got a latch key?’

‘No, not here.’ He fetched a sigh or yawn from the pit of his stomach. ‘I went back to look for my cuff links.’

An explosion rocked her whole nervous system. Pushing herself down in the bed, she stretched her legs straight out, pressed them together.

‘Where?’

‘In Dinah’s flat. I must have left them there months ago. I’d no idea. I hadn’t missed them. It was a queer coincidence, wasn’t it, you should mention them this evening?’

‘I don’t quite follow.’

‘Well, I’m telling you. They were in her flat.’

‘So you said.’

‘They
were
…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps that woman’s pinched them. Well, that’s that.’

‘What woman?’

‘Caretaker woman—in the basement—where I got in.’

She fancied that he was smiling to himself. Hearing her heart beat in loud rapid thumps through her thin voice, she said: ‘I didn’t realize you were still seeing Dinah. As a matter of fact, I thought she’d gone abroad—for a long time. Not that I’d know her movements. Perhaps she didn’t go abroad. Or if she did, I presume she’s back. Safe and sound and everything as usual, I suppose. Since when, if it isn’t too personal a question?’

He looked puzzled; then, with an effort, patient.

‘I’ve no idea since when. I haven’t been seeing her. At least, not till today. I did see her today—or rather yesterday, I suppose.’

‘I knew it! I knew the moment you came in. All your lies—why bother? I shall always know. Oh well … What are your plans now?’

He frowned, a frown of faintly irritated query.

‘I haven’t any plans. None in particular. How do you mean?’

‘
Her
plans, I should have said. Her plans for you. Your joint scheme for the future. That’s what I mean. I’m sorry to seem nagging, but I’d rather know.’

He hunched himself, as if her voice grated intolerably on his ears, and remained silent. So she went on:

‘The moment she’s back she rings you up. The moment she rings you up you gallop round for a glorious reunion. So overwhelmingly glorious that you can’t be civil to your old friends for one evening—let alone to me—you can’t wait to see her again. You pick a quarrel with me to give you an excuse to gallop off again and visit her in the small hours. She’s waiting—oh yes!—you’d told her you’d get to her by hook or by crook. Pretending I’ve insulted you—you told her
—
oh, how indignant she’d be!—and comfort you …’ Her arms flung over her face, she thrashed about. ‘Utter humiliation—utter—utter
—
utter …’ she went on gasping through paroxysms of dry sobs.

The room she had seen once only, suppressed for ever, glared at her again in all its details: deep settee, brown with lemon-coloured cushions, brilliant red curtains, Khelim rugs, a dresser covered with painted bowls, plates, jugs—foreign-looking, cheap but attractive, one huge round glass lamp on a low table strewn with portfolios, art books, magazines: material, doubtless, for intimate cultural evenings, Dinah teaching him all about Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Greek and Persian art, before they went to bed. Place of treachery and passion, broken in upon, exposed, sealed up, vacated … Reassembled again; Dinah sitting there once more with a closed smile of mockery and triumph, knowing that she would never open her door again to admit Madeleine to see—what once she had shown her.

Not a word came out of Rickie, till finally he said in the tone of one upon whom a great light dawns:

‘Oh, that’s what you think—I see. Do be quiet, Madeleine. You’ve got it all wrong, I promise you. Stop.’ He put his hands on the mound her knees made and shook it, repeating peremptorily: ‘Stop!’ At once she did stop; a stiff hysterical silence followed. He did not remove his hand; and presently began to pat her knee—the first personal gesture he had made. Uncovering her face, she saw that he was looking at her. For the first time. Something about him suggested an increase of animation, if not of sensibility; as if her outburst had penetrated to some nerve centre in him and administered shock treatment.