The Echoing Grove (17 page)

On his return, Madeleine greeted him with the news that they were moving into her old country home near Reading for the summer. Her father had been ordered a long sea voyage to ward off a threatened physical breakdown, and, with her mother, had embarked for South Africa. He was sorry about his father-in-law, of whom he was fond, and whose reminiscences, as a retired K.C. and excellent
raconteur,
he enjoyed; but he quite saw what made a temporary move from London so opportune; and he accepted her dispositions in a spirit of passivity tinged with glum relief.

That summer was a fine one and he quite relished motoring out of town each evening, bringing a friend or two at week-ends, sitting and strolling late in the warm shrubby thrush-chiming garden. He felt it incumbent on him to resume what he understood to be known as a full married life with Madeleine, and they made panicky approaches to one another; but it was a failure. The twitch in his leg was as troublesome as ever, and he retreated with feelings of thankfulness and embarrassment to his dressing-room, out of range of the tears which Madeleine attempted both to bring to his notice and to conceal from him. This frightful awkwardness which had started really after the birth of Anthony seemed past mending. Humiliating for her, equally so for him. Bad for their nerves. Perhaps in time it would come right … unless he were to become completely impotent. His thoughts travelled to Dinah, and two or three times she was his partner in erotic dreams.

This state of affairs continued for several weeks during which there was no letter from Dinah, no word of her on anybody’s lips, no telephone call, no dreaded hoped-for shock of meeting her round any corner. Then came help from the hills, the invisible hills towards which his prisoned gaze had long been strained. A cable to Madeleine from South Africa:
Father dangerously ill.
She cabled back to say she would start at once by air. Within forty-eight hours she was on her way.

The evening before her departure she remarked: ‘I was told to inform everybody. I haven’t informed everybody.’

He inquired nervously if she wished him to attend to this, and she replied that she didn’t give a damn one way or the other. ‘I expect,’ she added, ‘she’ll be turning up anyway, the moment my back is turned.’

‘No,’ he said quickly, vehemently.

She went on to say that this summer had been a complete and hideous fiasco, that he could not have shown more plainly his boredom and distaste for her, that all her efforts—her patience, her cheerful front, her willingness to forgive—had gone for nothing. Then she checked herself and declared that by this time Papa was probably lying dead and here she was worrying about their squalid personal lives instead of thinking about Papa. Here goes again, he told himself, observing the tears course down her cheeks; and offering a shoulder, did his best to comfort her.

All solicitude and practical attentions, he drove her to the airport. On the way she asked him to get out of London as early as possible each evening, so that the children should see him before bedtime. He promised. She smiled, pathetic, wan, and said:

‘I don’t ask you for any other promises.’

‘You don’t need to,’ he replied in all sincerity.

‘And by the way I rang up Aunt Lilian, of course, the day the cable came, and asked her to pass on the news to Dinah.’

‘Oh, you did.’

‘Well, naturally. After all, it’s Papa—I’m not the only daughter. I asked her to help by taking on the job of telling all the relations. Of course she was delighted.’

‘Of course.’

‘I said I’d cable to her as well as to you, and she’d better go on keeping
everybody
posted.’

‘I see. Then I’ll leave it all to her.’

‘By now, if Papa’s alive, he’ll know I’m coming. I wonder if it could possibly make just that particle of difference—as they say it does in books …’

‘Easily darling, it might. It’ll help him hold on. You know how he adores you.’

‘Yes. I’m his spoilt favourite child … Whom would you want to send for if you were dying?’

‘Sh!’ He took his hand off the driving wheel, caught hers and gripped it hard, in tender repudiation and reproach.

This time it was he who stood at the barrier watching her walk away from him towards the giant blunt-snouted bull with wings. When she turned back finally to wave and smile at him he felt extremely moved; and when her first cable came saying
Arrived safely Papa definitely better,
his relief was enormous. Her airmail letter gave him details. Now that anxiety was over, she was thoroughly enjoying herself, staying on her brother’s farm, riding, and doing tremendous motor expeditions. She expected to sail for home with her parents in three weeks’ time: this meant that late September would see her home.

Late August, the dog days, the fag end of the stale season, brought him the next help. The door to a sealed room, long airless, rank with the sour undissipated odours of fumigation—that door cracked, shook, swung ajar. He advanced, reluctant, unresisting; transparent, clotted.

It was Corrigan again, Corrigan (Elaine) to the rescue. When he got the appalling letter he told himself beware!—it was only another trap. He discerned, without words for what was evident, the pyramiding guilt, the false atonement; he saw the track, serpentining back again to him, by which the tricky jungle runner, ignored by Madeleine, had run again with hot confidential news.

She dared no longer keep him uninformed, announced that thick backward-leaning script; no doubt he thought of her harshly, cursed her in his heart perhaps: this was her cross and she must bear it. She had done all for the best, as she saw it, without thought of self, and would continue so to do. Three weeks ago Dinah had turned up at her door dead drunk. She had taken her in, nursed her, kept her from the bottle and her drinking companions. (A memory rigidly suppressed now stabbed him sharply: Madeleine, that evening before she left, hysteria climbing in her: ‘As for—if you think—if you only …’ then with a gasp stopping, biting on a finger as if to bite back … well, he’d guessed what: almost, the curtain had been stripped back; the Scene with Two Fingers, never to be revealed, revealed.) She had seemed better, the letter went on to say; but suddenly, a few nights ago, a terrible thing had happened: Dinah had discovered where she, Corrigan, hid the tablets some doctor—a personal friend, it seemed—had prescribed her for insomnia, taken them secretly from the drawer and swallowed the whole bottleful. She had been rushed in the nick of time to hospital … she would spare him a medical account. With the utmost difficulty, the authorities had been dissuaded from informing her next-of-kin: she, Corrigan, had invented a plausible story and managed to put it across. Yesterday Dinah was discharged, was now in her house, in bed, had given her solemn promise; but had lost, her friend felt, the will to live; had said quietly this morning that if only she could see Rickie her mind would be at rest. Therefore, would he in his goodness come as soon as possible?

So he rang up Corrigan and told her, briefly, that he would be along that evening. He came along, and she opened the door to him; he saw again without one glance at her the overpowering bosom, the buttocks in dirty slacks, the caramel eyes rapacious, cringing on him, waiting to
reassume
control of his emotions. He heard her give one of her great windy sighs and felt her about to lay a strong comradely hand upon his shoulder. He said, looking over her head:

‘How is she?’ and was conscious of her pause for readjustment before she answered with imitative curtness:

‘Expecting you. Be careful, won’t you? She’s still sedated—mildly of course.’

‘On whose instructions?’

‘The doctor’s,’ she said, haughtily; adding: ‘I haven’t left her day or night.’

‘Well, leave us now,’ he said.

She stumped ahead of him, opened a door at the end of the passage, said softly, brightly: ‘Dearie, here’s your visitor,’ and carefully shutting the door, withdrew.

He did not know what he had most feared to be confronted with: white waif, prostrate, in effigy, after the style of the death mask of the drowned girl of the Seine which a man he’d known at Oxford had had laid out on a black velvet catafalque on top of his bookcase; or worse, a piece of rubbish thrown away, unrecognizable, abject. He did not expect what in fact he saw: a dear little soul with freshly combed hair sitting up in bed in a striped silk
pyjama
jacket, listening to a dance band on a portable wireless. This she switched off, then held out loving arms, smiling in joyful welcome. He went and gathered her to him, lost in another surge of tenderness, remorse and gratitude. He kissed her cheeks and lips, and begged her not to cry, and drew up a chair and wiped his own wet eyes. She said:

‘I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve missed you horribly.’

‘Don’t you suppose I’ve missed
you
?’

‘Don’t let’s talk about what’s happened.’

‘No,
no
.’

‘I was crazy. You needn’t be afraid—I’ll never do it again.’ Comically grimacing, pointing towards the door, she said in a stage whisper: ‘Might she be listening?’

They waited, ears pricked. He shook his head, murmuring grimly:

‘I think I settled her hash.’

‘Were you distant?’

‘Very.’

In a moment they heard the front door bang, and she leaned back, and said: ‘She’s gone out—she promised she would. You’ll stop, won’t you, till she comes back? I’m all right, but when I think I’m alone in the house I get claustrophobia.’

She held out a hand and he folded it in both of his, telling himself that it would be unwise in the extreme to say that he had promised to take Anthony fishing before supper.

‘The poor old cow,’ she remarked with a sigh. ‘I’ve given her a pasting. She’s been incredible—marvellous to me. I’m grateful. It’s hell having to be grateful to someone you loathe.’

He said shuddering: ‘I can’t bring myself to look at her.’

‘I know. Poor Rickie, poor darling. All my fault.’

‘Nothing has been your fault,’ he said for the hundredth time.

‘God knows,’ she said very much in her old clipped pseudo-magisterial manner, ‘I’ve read enough about the behaviour patterns of
psychotics:
I ought to have applied it. If you choose to embark on a relationship with a psychotic, you must expect what’s coming to you. I got it.’

It flashed across his mind that, whatever Corrigan had expected, Corrigan had got something too. Aloud he said ruefully: ‘She’s a psychotic, is she? Is that the same as psychopathic?’

She let this pass. Presently her face lit up. She said with sparkling eyes: ‘And what do you think? She’s through with painting, she’s taken to lit.
She’s writing a play
.’

‘What about?’ he exclaimed in simple horror. ‘Us? I bet it’s about us.’

‘God knows. I should think it’s more than likely.’ She beamed with malice and amusement, indifferent to this unnerving aspect of Corrigan’s activities. ‘She taps away on her typewriter into the small hours. I can hear her. I’m not to read it till it’s finished. Don’t you
see
how it all fits in? She
would.
Bet you she’ll deliver the goods too—she’s no fool. Oh, I see it all! “At last a play that looks contemporary problems squarely in the face, burking no issue, pulling no punches, but informed withal with infinite wisdom and compassion” … Oh, and bits of poetry and philosophy thrown in, and some Freud as well. And the cleverness of her! Shall I tell you what will happen? She’ll make a bee-line for
les
Boys, the Big Boys—and Bob’s your uncle! You’ll see: they’ll dine her and wine her and dress her up to kill and take her down to their cottages for cosy week-ends. They’ll give madly funny imitations of her behind her back, but never mind, they’ll dote on her. What’s more, with that deadly instinct of theirs, they’ll know what they’ve hooked and they’ll respect it: the real rare Box-Office-busting matriarch, the real McCoy! She’ll go galumphing straight to her apotheosis on the first night, she’ll make such a packet! I do hope so.’

Was she perhaps a little overwrought, he wondered, a little wild and over-voluble? He took a look at her, this week-old suicide, his victim, Corrigan’s, and saw her in a glow, twinkling, never in better spirits. There was no end, none, to his bewilderment about women. He would have liked to enter into the fun, but he could not help a feeling of discomfiture, due possibly to his surroundings: this cramped bedroom with its aggressive walls painted in panels and strips of brilliant colour—turquoise, acid yellow, magenta—and further covered with largish specimens of Corrigan’s abstract period; its small window, its general appearance of having been tacked up roughly in cheap material over a framework of scrap iron and packing cases. This bed she lay in, under a Paisley rug … clean, of course, but so poor, so narrow … He wiped his forehead.

Presently her contented expression faded, and she asked abruptly, in an agitated voice, what news there was from her mother. He reassured her, and she said, taking several big breaths:

‘Thank God. I haven’t written once, I couldn’t, what will they think of me? I did send a cable … It was the last straw, being punished like that by—both of you …’

‘Punished?’

‘Yes, locked in the schoolroom with Aunt Lilian pushing my bread and water in and croaking at me through the keyhole.
Aunt Lilian!
She was so delighted to tell me you and Madeleine had charged her to keep me taped. I couldn’t be trusted, of course, to come in on decent terms at the death of my own father, I must be shown where I belonged …’

‘Oh, darling, don’t! It wasn’t like that, not meant to be …’

‘No. But if you’ll forgive my saying so, what a show-up. I’ll never forgive her … So she flew out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Coming back when?’

He told her, and she relapsed into silence, holding his hand tight. Then she said: ‘Look here, Rickie, I’ve never asked you for help, not really, have I? I’ve never asked anyone for help—my damned pride, but it’s broken. I do need a bit of help now.’

He stared at her pretty hand that he adored, bent down and put a kiss on it. Help. Help. In a moment it would be too late, it was too late already, to take counsel with that truly sensible man he so often felt to be his second self, or his only temporarily absent twin.