The Echoing Grove (14 page)

‘I don’t know that I did change towards her,’ he said rather querulously, biting his thumb—another trick of his. He saw her slow rare unbecoming flush and felt that he had touched yet another new low. ‘I suppose I did. Of course I did,’ he added lamely; then with a change of voice: ‘But I’m a bloody good liar, you know. And a bloody good actor. And she’s singularly unsuspicious … Sorry! Old-fashioned way of putting things. I mean, she’s an escapist, of course … And I’m on the schizophrenic side. That looks after everything, I think—except you, my love. Elaine M. Corrigan we’ve dealt with, haven’t we? She’s a psychopath, with paranoiac delusions based on guilt …’ Slowly Dinah raised her drooping head and slowly let it fall back against the back of her little chair. He watched this movement closely, with detachment and curiosity. Her face at this new angle had a look of pathos and stricken dignity, and he noted that the colour had drained out of it: also that under her lowered lids she was looking into space. He said conversationally: ‘Go on about your time in France.’

She waited a moment or two, then went on, her voice at first almost inaudible, then gradually assuming a more normal resonance. Last week, she said, a scene to end all scenes had brewed up in the small hours. Corrigan had rushed drunk, hysterical, to the station and entrained for England, leaving most of her clothes and a stack of canvases behind and snatching a wad of notes from Dinah’s handbag. Dinah had enjoyed a few quiet days in the hotel, bathing, walking, reading; then at the appointed time—yesterday—returned. Late last night she found the note in the letter-box:

One day you will forgive me for what I have done: realize that I was the best friend you ever had or ever will have: and now as always am acting in your true interests.
Nothing explicitly set down. ‘But I guessed, of course, what she’d been up to.’ She had been telephoning at intervals all day. Each time, hearing her voice, Dinah had simply replaced the receiver.

Her story finished, she glanced across at him. He was still nibbling the skin round his thumb nail and he seemed to her to have shrunk in weight and height; also there was something darting, flickering about his eyes, like an animal at bay … a predatory, hunted animal. He said in a tone of reflection:

‘It’s all extraordinarily squalid. Gutter press tit-bit. I suppose it always was.’

At Oxford he had had an intense if short-lived relationship with a gifted undergraduate who read modern poetry aloud to him in a punt on the Cherwell. A fragment he could not place had been recurring to him for the last hour or so:
For so the game is ended That should not have begun
…
Apt but not helpful. How many, many traitors, tricked at last, must have reached the same conclusion! Stockbrokers, politicians, priests, gangsters, poets, lovers, murderers … Taking a rapid mental survey, he could not, offhand, think of a single chap of his acquaintance who had not behaved badly to some woman or other; or to some other chap on account of a woman. ‘His best friend’s wife’—a banal phrase, joke almost. He’d heard of a chap who’d gone off with his own daughter-in-law; of a woman who lived contentedly in sin with her husband’s father. Then there was incest, very natural in a way—as Byron had discovered—and not by a long chalk only Byron … He tried to think if he’d ever come across anybody known to have resisted a really strong temptation. Such people must obviously exist, but he couldn’t call any to mind: wouldn’t care for them anyway, wouldn’t feel easy
…
If a friend came to him and confessed to having fallen in love with his sister-in-law he’d think it not monstrous but the most natural thing in the world. As indeed it was … On the other hand he would certainly recommend flight. ‘Chuck it,’ he’d say, ‘before it’s too late. It isn’t worth it.’

Dinah had risen and disappeared into the kitchen. When she came back carrying a dish of curry—his favourite supper—he watched her set it down and then, catching her eye, smiled. Poor girl. The pathos of going through all the customary domestic routine … They ate in silence, sitting side by side as usual; as usual he praised and thanked her. He took her hand, which was cold and limp.

‘Say something,’ she said faintly.

‘What can I say?’ His reply rang a jarring bell in him.

‘You’re not thinking about me at all.’

He answered coldly: ‘I’m trying to think about everybody.’

After a long pause she said: ‘Yes, Rickie, I know—I know you are.’ Her voice was gentle, pitying; the first kind words he’d heard that day. They melted his frozen heart. He put his head down on her shoulder and whispered:

‘I do love you. You know I do.’

‘And I love you.’

They got up and drifted to the sofa and sank down on it with their arms tight round one another.

‘Forgive me,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to forgive you,’ she said in the deep voice he loved; not her everyday voice, but the one he listened for, that was for him alone—he was sure of it—that seemed when it returned—how rarely lately!—to transport them to another, a visionary world, bare of superfluities, purged of calculations and confusions. ‘Or if so, I must say it equally: forgive me. But we knew—we decided all this at the very beginning. Don’t you remember? We said we forgave one another everything beforehand. And that there would never be anything to forgive.’

‘Could you still say so?’ he murmured. ‘No, you couldn’t.’

‘Of course, I can, of course. Can you?’

‘Need you ask? But I feel so poor,’ he said, feeling it no longer. ‘So useless to you.’ He sat up and mopped his eyes.

‘Useless to me?’ Her large eyes opened and dilated as if in ecstatic surprise. ‘Why, love, you gave me back my life, To do anything—everything with. I never forget it for a single instant, I never shall. Snow. Blood. I was dying. Remember.’ He remembered these essentials. He took her in his arms again. ‘You saved me. You do know that, don’t you?’ He sighed. If she said so, then it was so. ‘We knew then that we knew something very few people in the world have even an inkling of. We can’t unlearn that, can we?—whatever happens to us.’

‘People do sometimes forget what they’ve learnt.’ He pressed her to him, to show that this was said in confident disbelief, almost
pour
rire.

‘We’re not people. And if I ever could come to feel I
had
got anything to forgive you …’

‘Yes?’

She said with a pale smile: ‘It would be your saying it was all extraordinarily squalid.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It might well be but it isn’t. And it won’t be. Nobody outside has the right to judge us. We’re responsible to one another, aren’t we?’

‘I hope so,’ he said soberly. He had been accusing himself all day of criminal irresponsibility.

‘This is the test of us.’ She sounded elated. ‘Of her too,’ she added. ‘Madeleine.’

‘I can’t see that she comes into this except as the—victim of it. She wasn’t responsible.’

‘Oh, Rickie, “victim”—“fault”! I never did believe in victims, unless they choose the
r
ôle.
’
With what cold certainty she burned; with what contempt for weakness. ‘She told you, didn’t she, she’d known it all along? Why didn’t she face it?’

‘Perhaps that was her way of facing it.’

She drew a little away from him, as if total communication had been partly severed; but after a pause, said in the same quiet confident tone: ‘No. That
is
one way. It would have been Mother’s, for instance’—she faintly smiled—‘she’s clear, she’s real in her own peculiar way, she takes up a stand. But not Madeleine. She’s not real, not about you or the children or anything—never has been. She plays everybody up, she gets by. Don’t think I’m censorious. She doesn’t mean to. In some ways she’s so wonderful; it’s right to love her—when I say right I mean—inevitable. She’ll always be loved, I know I won’t be. In fact I shall always love her, she’ll always hate me. She hated me when you and she were engaged; after you were married, when she was always asking me to stay, she hated me even more.’

‘No. More likely feared you,’ he interposed.

‘Hate—fear, they’re the same. She knew I knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Oh, I’ve told you all this before. That she was running away—cheating. That she didn’t love you.’

‘Oh, I think she did,’ he protested mildly. ‘We were very much in love, weren’t we? In a beglamoured bemused sort of youthful way?’

‘She shouldn’t have married you,’ said Dinah with finality. ‘And she knew it. And she always wanted me to prove to her that she shouldn’t have—or should have. Well, I did. I hope she won’t cheat her way out of this now.’

‘Ah well,’ he said, getting up and stretching. ‘It hardly becomes me, I feel, to tell her I’m offering her the chance of her finest hour.’

She got up too and stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded, her eyes fixed, ruminating. Finally she said:

‘Shall I go and see her? Shall I come with you now?’

‘No!’ he said quickly, in horror. ‘At least—no. I don’t think it would be at all a good idea.’

‘I think I should. However, if you feel so strongly … Do you think she’ll see Corrigan?’

‘No,’ he said, again in horror. ‘She wouldn’t dream of it, I’m sure.’ He added grimly: ‘I’ll see there’s no question
of that,
anyway.’

‘I agree with you, she wouldn’t want to.’ She took a breath and said, her voice shaken for the first time: ‘There’s one thing I would hate her to know about. Last February. The baby.’

‘Never,’ he said passionately. ‘Never, never. I promise.’

She turned slowly on her heel and stared out of the window saying as if to herself: ‘Or has she really known it all the time?’

‘I must go,’ he said. He came and took her in his arms.

‘Yes, I suppose you must.’ She sighed. ‘I hope all will be well.’

‘I hope so.’

‘When will you come back?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t tell.’

‘Will you telephone?’

‘Yes, I’ll telephone.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. Some time tomorrow. I can’t say when. It depends.’

They looked into each other’s eyes; but what, if anything, they saw they could-not read. They managed to smile at one another.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘You’re terrible. I love you. Whatever happens, you’ll always be the only person I could ever tell the truth with.’

He kissed her with all of the truth, whatever truth was, upon his lips. He was gone.

She looked at the clock and saw that it was only ten o’clock. Hours and hours of night to be got through. She watched herself take off the telephone receiver, undress, get into bed, reach for a book, open it, light a cigarette, start composedly to read. After a time she put the book down and heard herself say clearly: ‘This is the end.’ Make it so, once and for all. Pull up the anchor, set forth once more, transparent yet solid, to the ocean. It was best so. Put away those wretched years: nothing but wear and tear, concealment, lies, suspicion; only half a person. Now I can be true only to myself again. Leave them to clean up the mess—or not: I wash my hands of it.

She felt calm. ‘Calm as the blessed saints above,’ she said aloud: a nursery phrase, one of old Nannie’s, incorporated long ago among the family tags.

Where was he now? What was now being unfolded, brought to light, only a mile or so out of earshot? What betrayals was he preparing?—sanctioning? When would he telephone? Would he?

The usual clocks struck the night hours. One after another the hours stalked by.

He stood in front of his house and scanned the windows. No light on the ground floor, but a glow in her bedroom curtains. He went in, went up, opened her door. She was lying in bed, flushed, haggard, and when she saw him she held out her arms, saying brokenly:

‘I thought you might never come back.’

Murmuring: ‘I had to come,’ he went and flung himself down on his knees by her side. Nothing could have touched him more than such a greeting. In a moment he was all at sea again; the raft—not his construction—he had got his balance on as he came from the other one crumbled beneath, around him in jagged spars and broken ropes. He was all at sea but he was flung a lifeline. He held it, let it go in revolt and in despair when she sobbed for her outraged heart and flayed him for his crimes and Dinah’s; clutched it again, somehow, in despair, when she forgave him, asked forgiveness, appealed in the name of home and children, for help in a fresh start. It did not draw him in: it held him floating, swinging, helpless; it held him—saved? or done for?

In the end, completely exhausted, they agreed that they must try and get some sleep. He dropped a kiss on her hand and went away to his dressing-room; she turned over on her pillows and sank into unconsciousness. Undressing, he told himself dimly that this generosity she’d shown, this humility … as impossible to counterfeit as to reject. He was not a stick or a stone. It was
real,
whatever Dinah … He was grateful, touched; grateful—oh God!—to both of them, but just at this moment touched, heartwrung, by one alone. The other was strong, clear, stoical, disinterested, an alarming elevating influence; this one petty, proud, yielding, generous, sensible, silly, open, dishonest, kindly, cruel … everything. Shamelessly human, natural. Yes, she was pretty awful taking it by and large, but somehow it seemed more
natural.
‘
I’
m bloody awful,’ he muttered, drunk with fatigue. It struck him that they had not mentioned the word love. Was that natural? Yes, it was. Not a word to use … ‘in such rumbustical circumstances,’ he said, half aloud again, falling into bed. His senses, numbed, released him till on the very edge of sleep one sound returned to pierce him for a moment: a telephone bell shrilling, shrilling in the room he’d fled from. That had been Madeleine terrified, she told him, imploring him to come at once. The sound sank with him, deeper than his consciousness: symbol of defeat, capitulation; of a man in flight, of a man caught.

Next day, feeling wretched, he took a holiday from the office and motored with Madeleine into the country. They took the children too, and a picnic lunch, hired a punt at Cookham and spent a peaceful afternoon on the river, under Clivedon woods. It was—how long?—years since they had gone out all together as a family unit, for a treat, a Happy Day. He was a jolly paterfamilias, teaching Anthony to wield a paddle, lifting Colin on his shoulder in the lock to watch the keeper close the sluice gates. He and their mother rested in a place they had almost ignored for ages, or forgotten about—the place where they could exchange looks, winks, smiles parental, co-operative, above the children’s heads. The little fellows had never seemed to him more attractive; pathetic too, so innocent and vulnerable. He could be proud, and he was, of their sturdy, handsome looks. He was charmed, too, by Madeleine’s youthful yet maternal bearing. What a girl she was still! He was conscious again today of the primitive thing in her which had moved him the first time he ever saw her: the something wild, threatened, at once warm and cold, laughter-loving, melancholy, helpless and protective; not a mysterious nature exactly, but one for ever disturbed, in flux. Past, present and future were all poignant to him as he watched her lying in the bottom of the punt with her eyes closed and a smile playing on her tired but peaceful face, patiently answering the children and letting them clamber over her. All this was what had been so long, so blindly, wantonly jeopardized … Was still in jeopardy? … No doubt.