The Echoing Grove (21 page)

In the silence Dinah’s nerve-ends crept, contracted, listening for the guns, the sirens. Absurd: this was the heart of Berkshire; outside this pleasant cottage which Madeleine and Rickie had found for her mother when war broke out, was a cherry orchard, beehives, nightingales in the thicket just beyond; farther, a village pub, a store, church, vicarage, manor, farm; still farther, torrents of aromatic foam of wild parsley in the banks; and all around, the architectural masses and perspectives of the Downs, sheep-cropped, thymy, spattered with juniper bushes, cut with immemorial chalk tracks. In widening rings she placed the night-folded features of the landscape. She began to hear a steady giant pulse. The old woman from the village who obliged for Mrs Burkett had told her earlier that when Victory Day came the beacons would be lit from ridge to ridge as they had been for the Armada and for Bonaparte. Yes, she had called him Bony.

Her mother took up her knitting again and critically examined it. It was an ambitious work—an entire frock for Clarissa, whose measurements and other physical characteristics her grandmother now discussed; with comparisons leading on to recollections of her own childhood and of her children’s childhood.

‘I suppose,’ mused Dinah, ‘if ever a generation knew its own strength it was yours: or rather
didn’t
know it, as the saying goes, meaning it’s so tremendous it hasn’t got to be consciously considered, for good or ill. We inherited your Juggernaut momentum; but of course not your sphere of operations.’

‘Indeed!’

‘That started to be blocked. And we seized up. Rickie must have known it in his bones long before we did. We weren’t conditioned like him, not deeply, by ruling class mentality. You needn’t get on your snobby-horse’—for her mother had snorted—‘I couldn’t be more thankful for the good sound upper-middle stock I come of. It’s meant a sort of solid ground floor of family security and class confidence that’s been a great stand-by. But Rickie hadn’t got it. He was a romantic orphan boy, irrevocably out of the top drawer. He was never at home in his situation, was he?—I mean the contemporary one, the crack-up—not just the general human situation of wondering why you’re born.’

There was no answer. Mrs Burkett polished her spectacles.

‘Coming down in the world must cause as many strains and stresses as going up in it,’ continued Dinah, inhaling and blowing out trails of smoke. ‘I’ve sometimes thought, if Jo had lived and we’d had children, they might have felt it.’

‘Ah, you compare the alliances,’ said Mrs Burkett on a formidably unprejudiced and deferring note. ‘Poor Colin and Clarissa, dear me! To think they do not appear to recognize what they might well feel.’

‘I merely meant that Madeleine and I both married out of our walk in life,’ said Dinah in a voice which sounded to her mother intolerably patient, condescending. ‘Only a degree or so in her case—drastically in mine. I know you’ll resent my saying it, but Rickie and Jo did have something in common: a sort of frailty, as if they had no compost round their roots … Jo would have got bedded down, if he’d lived; but Rickie … You see, Jo had the advantage of a trained political mind. He knew where we were, in history. He taught me to see ourselves historically.’

‘Ah, in that case,’ said Mrs Burkett pleasantly, after a pause for counting stitches, ‘you are certainly more advantageously placed than most of us. What can one hope to do without training? Only one’s duty according to one’s
very
narrow lights.’

Suiting action to words she briskly rose, drew the black-out curtains across the window, switched on two darkly shaded lamps and returned to her chair.

‘I don’t mean to give the impression,’ said Dinah, ‘that Jo looked on our marriage as a social experiment.’

‘I should hope
not
,’
snapped Mrs Burkett. She pressed her lips together, then added: ‘As you know I only met him once. He appeared to me to behave like any nice young man in love—the usual excess of humility, the usual over-estimation. I didn’t see him in terms of the potting shed, I must admit: but then I never noticed Rickie’s difficulties in the matter of manure. I simply felt he—Jo—was genuine. I liked him very much.’

Her thoughts travelled back to the day when he had turned up without warning in a battered two-seater, and announced his intention of marrying her younger daughter. Spring
1936
it must have been? A dark plump glowing little man with intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a bright pink shirt, a loud check jacket and easy manners. Excellent teeth. Face expressive, mouth a shade too mobile. Hands cared for, sensitive. Warmth in his voice to compensate for the Jewish-Cockney twang. His father was dead. He and his mother ran a big bakery in East London, he spoke of her with endearing pride. An affectionate boy, a good son, a taking little man. Interested in literature, in education: these they had discussed, not politics. What she remembered best were his shouts of laughter once she had got over the initial shock and put him at his ease. A laughing little man. ‘Aren’t you a duchess, though!’ he said. His eyes teased, admired, delighted in her. ‘I don’t mind telling you I wasn’t looking forward to this interview—though I’d made a vow I’d go through with it on my loney-own. I thought you’d be sure to come it over me, in spite of Diney saying no, not on the whole you wouldn’t, not if I played my cards right.’ A shout of laughter. ‘But aren’t you lovely? Diney did say you were a classic but I got the picture wrong: I took it from those old-style musical comedy favourites—you know those picture-postcard photos, Edwardian Beauties, the ample type as you might say, all bust and fuzzy fringe and a face like a love-sick spaniel mooning at you.’ Another shout of laughter. ‘I’ll tell Diney she’s not a patch on you for looks. Not that she isn’t what I call perfect in her own way. It’s a funny thing, she doesn’t take after you but I’d know you were related: your skeletons ’ud be the dead spit of one another.’ How tender and serious when he talked of Dinah, what admiration, also what shrewd perception; also what pity, what humour. ‘God bless you,’ he said at parting, wringing her hand till her fingers ached.

‘What an act you put on for me, didn’t you? Gorgeous. I’m common—that’s why I appreciate it.’ Another shout. ‘I wish you could meet my mother and her you—you’d hit it off. I’ll bet you’ve never bounced anybody in your life and nor has she. And wouldn’t she revel in a place like this!—she loves nice things. Her and Dinah get on a treat.’ His last words sober: ‘I get your point of view, don’t think I don’t. It’s a facer for you, in a way. But there’s one thing Diney needs as things have turned out for her—two things rather: one’s to stay where she is because she believes in what she’s doing: the other is someone to look after her, someone that wants to, mind you, because he believes in her and she helps him to believe in himself. I’m the guy that wants to, and what’s more I’m going to.’

She had told him that she too believed in him. She had never seen him again. A week or so later they were married at a Registry Office in London: by friendly consent it was not made a family affair. Jo’s mother and his aunts and uncles still practised the Jewish faith; and what with this, and her own Anglicanism—still potent in her though not formally professed except at Christmas and at Easter—and the aura of dogmatic atheism or of dialectical materialism (whatever that might be) around the bridal couple, there seemed no common meeting ground for the ceremony of marriage. They were married, they were happy in two rooms in Stepney. Dinah went on with her job—clerical work it appeared to be in some local clothing factory—and wrote that they would love to come and stay for a few days in September when they had their fortnight’s holiday. Presently she wrote to say that she had left the clothing factory to take on an organizing job for the Spanish Republican cause: unpaid, it meant real poverty, but that was nothing. And they did not come in September. By then Jo was in Spain with the International Brigade. He did not come back, he did not look after Dinah. Waste, tragic folly, criminal waste and folly.

‘What I meant was,’ said Dinah with the harping persistence of one who has felt a dig, ‘it must have been more of a wrench for Rickie than we realized, selling up his estates and going into business. He’d been brought up to be landed gentry like his fathers. It was a whole way of life gone—not just his own personal one: all his racial memories, you might call them. He couldn’t have helped feeling he was letting down a lot of people—tenants and retainers—shrinking his responsibilities. One shouldn’t underestimate that sort of dislocation.’

‘So you have remarked before,’ said Mrs Burkett, thinking: what a prig she is becoming, a pedantic spinster, nothing but views, no man would stand for it—no proper man. ‘Since I am not equipped for these discussions, let us stick to the particulars, let us stick to simple economic facts.’

‘Yes?’ said Dinah in a tone of mannerly encouragement.

‘Rickie, I take it,’ began Mrs Burkett rapidly, ‘inherited a certain property and like most of what you term the landed gentry—indeed so do I but without feeling called upon like you to impose a particular inflection upon my vocal chords—found himself crippled by taxation, whether justly or unjustly is a matter of opinion though I am sometimes tempted to consider it more a matter of
taste—
and being a young man of foresight, intelligence and initiative, and luckily empowered to break the entail, he came to a sensible decision.’ She paused for respiration, and disregarding the
‘whew!’
that Dinah uttered on a long whistling note, drove on: ‘And above all wishing to marry young, for love, not money …’

‘Ah, we were forgetting that … He could have bettered himself, couldn’t he, by a more—advantageous match.’

‘Do you suggest,’ said Mrs Burkett after a pregnant pause, ‘that cynicism was even
possible
to Rickie?’ A violence in which some threat, some accusation of betrayal thrashed like a half-glimpsed subterranean monster began to swell in her. She kept her eyes fixed on her knitting needles, thinking: ‘For two pins I would get up and beat to a jelly my own flesh and blood.’ And as if the suppressed image had been formulated she heard Dinah murmur in a thin exhausted voice:

‘No. He was on the side of the betrayed more than the betrayers … It’s still in the Henry James
genre
though, if one could follow out the threads.’

Re-orientated by the further check of this apparently gratuitous irrelevance Mrs Burkett was able to continue:

‘Be that as it may, he came to your father for advice, on his engagement. How old would he have been? Twenty-three? Not more.’ She heaved a heavy sigh. ‘You would not remember that.’

‘Of course I remember their engagement. I wasn’t in the nursery, or mad.’

‘The practical aspect, I mean, you would not have realized. He wanted to fall in with Madeleine’s preference for London life … And then money, as I said … In fact he was looking for an opening in business. Through your uncles, your father was able to procure him the very thing. He had great faith in Rickie’s judgement and common sense. So had your uncles. In the end.’

Silence fell. Presently Dinah said in a drowsy voice:

‘I remember Rickie telling me once about his twenty-first birthday party. The celebrations.’

‘Ah, no doubt there would have been,’ agreed Mrs Burkett, with enthusiasm, taken off her guard. ‘Madeleine went down to Norfolk for that party, I think? I rather fancy it was then that they first got to know one another. Or would that have been some other house party?’

‘That I couldn’t say. He didn’t mention that aspect. But if so,’ said Dinah, yawning, ‘it was a closer shave for Madeleine than she realized. Touch and go, if he was to be credited. I know we’re not worldly, but he
was
a catch, wasn’t he? Not the catch of the season of course, but by no means to be sneezed at.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Mrs Burkett sharply.

‘About that coming-of-age party. He told me such a curious thing, I’ve never forgotten it.’

‘And what may that have been?’

‘Well, only that in the middle of it he had a sudden—crisis, explosion, brainstorm. When all the speech-making and health-drinking and fireworks display was over and everyone had retired to sleep it off, he suddenly had an awful come-over. And he got up in the dead of night and crept downstairs and got his gun and loaded it …’

‘Hmm, yes, what nonsense. No doubt,’ cut in Mrs Burkett, knitting in rapid jerks, ‘he had taken a great deal too much to drink.’

‘That’s what he thought must have accounted for it—the sudden attack of depression. He was convinced he wanted to blow his brains out.’

‘Young people get these turns,’ said Mrs Burkett after a second’s silence. ‘Particularly young men. It is mostly moodiness and playacting.’

‘That’s what he finally concluded—at the time—it must be. Anyway, after sitting in the gun-room for about twenty minutes working out the most elaborate sort of cat’s cradle of string from his big toe to the trigger, he undid the whole thing and went back to bed.’

Brusquely Mrs Burkett glanced towards the window, then apparently detecting a chink between the curtains, got up and hurried towards it. Standing there twitching at the black-out material, she said with her back turned:

‘Perhaps you would prefer not to discuss Rickie any more. I think I would prefer it.’

Dinah stirred on the sofa: her look of amusement faded; her hands clenched, relaxed.

‘Just as you choose.’

‘How is it, I wonder, that you have never learnt humility.’

It was less a query than a statement, made in the resolutely uncomplaining tone of one taking up a cross, one more, unmerited.

‘If you don’t mind,’ said Dinah, ‘we won’t go into that.’ Pause. ‘If you think what you seem to think, you’re wrong—and stupid too. I haven’t forgotten Rickie. Or what we did to him.’

Returning at a brisk blind march, Mrs Burkett stooped to grasp the poker, pushed it between the logs, tossed them noisily, muttered: ‘Damp wood again,’ seized Dinah’s ash-tray, shook out its contents with evident disgust, then said:

‘Speak for yourself.’ Planted stiff upon the hearthrug, she fought audibly for control of breath.
‘
I
did what lay in my power to prevent a terrible tragedy.’