The Echoing Grove (2 page)

Glancing at her, Madeleine thought with extreme surprise: ‘We are both widows.’

They went out, down the garden path. From its eight square windows the house watched them go; saw one of them—Dinah—stop at the wrought-iron gate in the low brick wall and look back hard at it. Her wide-open opaque dark eyes examined its compact brick face, the half-random, half-formal lay-out of the garden: herbaceous border on the left, lawn in the middle, on the right the apple orchard separated from the garden proper by an inconclusive hedge of yew in need of clipping. Her eyes had the look of eyes accustomed to observing things in themselves with close attention. She said something to her companion, who turned from a vague survey of the landscape and looked too: she was admiring the semicircular bow window that made such a pleasing feature between the four pairs of windows.

‘Who lived here before you?’ she asked.

Madeleine was not sure. She believed a retired naval officer and his maiden sister had inhabited it; but it had been empty for months when they bought it. She thought it had had a number of owners; luckily the building itself had never been touched; but everybody had done something to the garden and made a mess of it. Faintly she frowned, contemplating the area of her labours, seeing what should have been, what could be done. Her eye was for the land, for the last flowers in the border, the frost-blackened dahlias that must be lifted, the rose bed that must be pruned, the apple leaves drifted on the lawn. The other stared at the windows, thinking they looked uncommunicative. Upon what terms, she wondered, did they and Madeleine agree to contain, to release their mutual and separate lives, their ghosts and substances? It was a house for a quiet couple, or for someone in retreat. Could Madeleine really have retired in her prime, become a country woman on her own, her days plotted by the seasons, evenings alone with books and wireless, or writing letters to her children; a friend occasionally for week-ends perhaps? Strange, it was she, Dinah, who had dreamed always of living in the country, of running a small farm. Madeleine had been the Londoner, in the swim, never unaccompanied, never without new clothes, shored up with layer after layer of prosperous social life. Now though still expensively dressed and carefully made up she was no longer
soign
ée.
Her hair was going grey, her face had hollowed underneath the cheekbones, the tremendous vitality of her youth had faded out … no, rather sunk down in her. In her youth it had spilled out all over the place, brilliant but not warm, and rather avid, even when playing with her babies. Now she had a glow from within, like an autumn rose. Yet the years just behind her had dealt her cruel blows: her firstborn, Anthony, killed; then Rickie’s death. If she had been, as she must have been, adrift in wilderness, she had planted herself again in something … more likely, someone? Yes, more likely than the soil or the community or intellectual interests or God.

They went out of the gate and took the elm-bordered
lane
that ran down past cottages, past the Dutch barns, past the church towards the river. The early November day was windless, blooming with a muffled lustre; weak sun drew out of the damp ground a haze within whose grained iridescence shapes and colours combined to create a visionary landscape, consuming its heart of honey colour, lavender,
rose,
dark amber, russet, jade and violet. From the polls of the stripped willows sprang sheaves of tapering copper wands, each one luminous from groove to tip. The river lay in its crescent loop entirely without movement, an artifice of green-black liquescent marble, inlaid between the banks’ curved and scalloped edges; solider far than the dematerializing forms of earth around, above it. Flat fields unearthly green, dotted with grazing cattle, stretched into the distance on the side they walked on; the other side was broken, hillocky, and patched with unkempt plantations of smouldering beech and hazel. With intermittent yelps of hysteria, Dinah’s dog tore along full pelt, plunging into the pitted banks, blowing rough snorts down holes and cavities, launching himself madly into treacherous rushbeds.

‘What do you do with him in London?’ asked Madeleine, watching a startled moor-hen skitter out across the river.

‘Take him to work with me,’ said Dinah. ‘I insinuated him gradually and now he’s more or less in control. There’s quite a lot of competition to exercise him in the lunch hour. One girl brings him her meat ration. Another’s mum queues Thursdays for offal for him. Everything is gratefully accepted. His food is rather a problem. He looks fit though, doesn’t he?’ She stopped to gaze with indulgent pride at his tranced and quivering stern now sticking up out of a tangle of alder roots beneath them; adding: ‘I’m looking after him for someone. His master had to give up his job and go and live in the country—he got ill. He was given this puppy by a farmer in the Welsh hills. But now he’s too ill—he’s in a sanatorium. He asked me if I could look after him till he came out, so I went down last Spring and collected him. But I don’t think he will ever come out … He’s worse. So there we are.’

‘You’ll have to keep the dog?’

‘Of course. I should miss him dreadfully anyway. He’s very intelligent and affectionate. Very pleasant company.’

Suddenly she called to him in a sharp tone: ‘Gwilym! Come out of it, there’s nothing there. Come out, you ass!’ At once, all simple optimism and goodwill, the dog emerged and bounded off in another direction. She followed his course with a dreamy look, remarking that he was very obedient.

‘How long have you been living where you are now?’ asked Madeleine. The address was in the Holborn district; it sounded shabby, dismal.

‘Oh … years,’ said Dinah lightly. ‘It’s a big room and fairly cheap. Only one bathroom in the building but the other tenants refrain from baths till Saturdays, so it’s not too bad. Still, the stairs are endless and there’s not a square inch of garden to let him out in.
I
might move now.’

By the terms of their mother’s will, apart from particular legacies to her two sons—prospering one in Canada, one in South Africa—the jewellery and furniture had been divided between her daughters; her own capital—her handsome annuity ceasing on her death—she had left to Dinah. The income to be expected, from safe investments, was about two hundred and fifty pounds a year. It was to this that Dinah referred by implication.

‘You live alone?’ said Madeleine, rather awkwardly.

‘I live alone.’

‘And your job?’

‘What about my job?’

‘Well … what is it exactly?’

‘Oh, I see. I work in a bookshop.’

‘Do you really? Just selling books?’

‘Selling them and wrapping them up and making out the bills for them.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’

‘Very much.’

Turning over in her mind rumours that had reached her through the years of Dinah’s advanced political views, Madeleine paused before asking in a delicate way:

‘Is it that place that got started in the thirties—I used to see it—called The Socialist Bookshop or something like that?’

‘No. It’s called Bryce and Perkins.’ Dinah looked amused. ‘It’s simply a jolly good bookshop. Not a big one.’

‘Highbrow?’

‘Middle to high. It does cater for what’s called the cultivated reading public—and for specialists.’

‘Specialists in what?’

‘Oh, various branches of literature. Art historians. Foreign research students. It’s got quite a flourishing foreign section even now; and a second-hand one. Mr Bryce deals with the bibliophiles—he’s one himself. He’s an authority on early printing and types and title pages. I find all that a bore: I don’t have anything to do with it of course. He’s nice; a hard taskmaster but I like that. He won’t employ anybody who trips up on his standards—of culture, I mean, and education. Every employee is made to take authority in some department. It’s assumed you have an area of special knowledge.’

Her voice awoke in Madeleine echoes of a series of ancient exasperations: Dinah authoritative about something or other always—the drama it might be, the dance, psychiatry, wine, Negro sculpture, dirt-track racing, Egyptology, Buddhism, jazz composition, boxing … Dinah airing her latest piece of serious research … Not that she showed off exactly: she was always unaggressive, courteous in argument, not exactly dogmatic, never smug. That made it worse. She had simply made up her mind from the beginning.

‘What is your area?’ asked Madeleine.

‘Oh, political history, economics—Marxist chiefly.’

‘I see.’ They stopped and looked out across the river at one fisherman anchored midstream in a stumpy green punt: motionless abstraction, double image, half air-borne, half reversed in water, pinpointed through the lens of a coloured dream. Watching him, Madeleine continued in a vague and level manner: ‘I didn’t realize that would be your area. It absolutely isn’t mine. But then I haven’t got any area …’

‘Well, you’ve never wanted one, have you?’ said Dinah as if passing judgement, not unsympathetically, on a self-evident case of human nature.

‘How do you know?’ Her voice sharpened.

‘Your brain is as good an instrument as mine. Better, probably.’

‘You mean, I haven’t used it.’

‘I didn’t say so,’ said Dinah, mild. They turned and walked on slowly. ‘No … I mean it’s just another way of life. For one thing, you haven’t been obliged to earn your living …’

‘God knows what I’d have done if I had,’ burst out Madeleine, the prey of violent and obscure emotions: suspicion, indignation—a complex wish to lay the blame on someone and at the same time defy the critics of unearned income as a way of life. ‘The ridiculous education I was given.’

‘Mine was the same,’ said Dinah, inexorably mild.

‘I could have got a job in the war. I was offered a decent one, in the B.B.C.—translating French—Rickie wouldn’t let me. He said I must stay with the children.’

‘He was perfectly right.’

‘God knows I worked as hard as any working-class housewife.’ She flushed darkly, to her forehead. ‘I
slaved
.’

‘I bet.’ Dinah was sympathetic.

‘What did you do?’

‘Oh … various things. Nothing spectacular. Worked in rest centres mostly. Taught some children drawing for a bit; some of the evacuated ones who came back. I had a huge class in the end—in a cellar in Stepney. I enjoyed that. They were brilliant, some of them.’

Suppressing another burst of querulous resistance to the idea of this huge drawing class, Madeleine merely said:

‘You were in London all the time?’

‘Yes, right slap through.’

‘I suppose you were called up.’

‘Would have been.’ Dinah stopped and lit a cigarette. She smokes, thought Madeleine, like a chimney. ‘Being a widow with no home ties. Actually, I volunteered.’

There was a silence; then the other said nicely:

‘You must tell me where your bookshop is. I’d like to come in, next time I’m in London.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Dinah, cordial. ‘You look so stunning, you’d raise my prestige.’

‘It doesn’t sound—from what you said—as if it needed raising.’

‘Then I must have given you a false impression.’ She stopped again on a small bridge with white wood railings to watch a pair of swans glide from the main stream into a meandering reedy willow-bordered backwater. ‘My capacity is a very humble one. I’ve no particular qualifications, worse luck. What I do know I’ve taught myself. At least, Jo started my education …’ The swans slid out of sight, making for some known evening haunt in the creek’s upper reaches. ‘If only,’ she said with sudden eagerness, ‘I could be a whole-time student for a year or two! Go to Oxford or Cambridge. Get a degree. How I’d work! How I’d love it! … I
might,
you know, now. I might be able to afford it.’ Her lifted profile, regular, delicate, looked rapt.

They strolled on again.

‘What do they pay you in this job?’ said Madeleine.

‘Five pounds a week.’

‘That’s not all you—what you’ve been living on?’

‘No. It comes to a bit more than that. I get a small bonus at Christmas—and a guinea or so for an occasional article here and there. And then of course I’ve still got that hundred a year—at least it’s less now but it does make all the difference: what we both had from Papa when we were twenty-one.’

Doing sums in her head, Madeleine thought ruefully of the hundred a year. She had forgotten all about it, was uncertain whether it still came in, whether Rickie had long ago reinvested it, or long ago helped her to spend the capital it represented. He had had a regardless way with money in the first years: a lordly way, a generous way, as Dinah might remember … Hush, stop, for shame, she told herself. Here was the truth: Dinah a frugal wage-earner, managing on a few hundreds: she herself comfortably provided for. She had feared a possible clause in Rickie’s will: something left away from his family, for Dinah, something to mark his sense … to say sorry, to say remember, to say
love. But
no: absolutely nothing.

The dog bounded back with a stick, and Dinah took it from his jaws and threw it for him, far, like a boy, from the shoulder. She said:

‘Seeing that Jo was killed in the Spanish Civil War and not the Second World War, I don’t, of course, get a pension.’

She seemed to throw the words after the stick, letting them go with simplicity and ease.

‘I suppose not,’ murmured Madeleine, thinking this was not the time … All she knew was that in the end Dinah had married a man, a Jew, called Hermann, killed fighting in the International Brigade. ‘My sister, Mrs Jo Hermann.’ Strange.

Observing what they took to be a bull in the next field, they turned for home. Talking of relatives—kept up with by Madeleine, by Dinah lost sight of—they recrossed the old toll bridge with its rosy picture postcard cottage and garden brightly patched with the last Michaelmas daisies, the first chrysanthemums; and walked up a slope towards the rambling village. On their right lay the rectory, a glum neo-Gothic building girt with laurel, ilex and other dark nondeciduous shrubbery. Beyond it the church raised a fine untouched fifteenth-century tower above the remainder of its injudiciously remodelled structure. A group of poplars, still topped with lemon-coloured turbans, stood beside the gate: and crammed with nettles, long grass and lurching headstones, the neglected graveyard ran down in rough terraces almost to the river’s bank.