The Echoing Grove (24 page)

She tried; but all the same the ambushed image sprang.

Anthony suddenly appeared fondling the hand of Dinah, crying with ardent love: ‘Your cherry hand!’ He was three years old.

‘Nose, cherry
nose
,’
corrected Rickie, smiling, while Dinah leaning towards the little boy said in soft mockery: ‘Cowslip cheeks.’

At this he had looked first gratified, then perplexed, touching his nose and cheek and then the hand he held in both his own, saying finally, with loss of assurance:

‘
Not
nose. And not those red kind of cherries. That other sort—what’s in the dining-room.’

He watched their faces anxiously, awaiting revelation. Then:

‘Ah,
white
hearts,’ said Rickie, lounging on the arm of Dinah’s chair, also leaning forward, his shoulder pressing hers, to tweak his son’s ear. Then as if on an idle impulse he picked up that hand of Dinah’s, polished, waxy, edged with a half-transparent coral flush, turned it over, examined the pronounced, delicate structure of its bones and joints, said low:

‘Cherry. Yes,
I
see. Clever little boy.’ Then holding out the hand to him, in a provocative whisper: ‘
Bite!’

Anthony’s eyes opened in wild surmise; Dinah with uncharacteristic brusqueness pulled her hand away. All over. Innocent pretty fooling, meet for children’s hour. Rickie’s glance slid towards me, he came over to the sofa and stroked my forehead. I was convalescent from the birth of Colin—sharper-eyed perhaps than usual. I saw Rickie turn Dinah’s hand towards me to show me what lay coiled inside its palm … but I told myself nonsense, neurotic fancy.

All over, all painless now; images, words without power or colour, their meaning within meaning long ago exhausted … No, not
all,
not over, never to be over. She turned on her side, awaiting what was now ineluctable: apparition of the child, bursting again without warning through yet one more crack in time, focused dead centre against toneless shadows, blazing with inextinguishable terror; pity; searing a shaft down into limitless naught; infinitely removed yet always near, clear and exact—Anthony in the very flesh and hair, the clothes, the mood and gestures of whatever hour he arbitrarily selected to present himself. The voice called pipingly: ‘Your cherry hand!’ Or wailed: ‘I dreamed you lost me’; or asked: ‘Could anybody’s heart break if they weren’t careful?’ Or: ‘Flowers can have a sick smell,’ it said in a knowing way; or in a way of anguish: ‘Must we be dead?’—such things as children say. The voice piped its own dirge, the words wove a little shroud of pathos to contain them, dwindled and crouched down harmless. The words stirred, bred, the shroud convulsed grew great, it groaned with swelling symbols, with proliferating echoes, the voice burst through and split the world.

She waited for this to happen; but this time she was spared. He vanished quietly in his white blouse and buttoned-on pants and scarlet slippers; leaving behind him his customary offering—a taste of poison, the old one with the new fashionable name.
Angst;
more popularly known as guilt.

Quite a common thing; as common, so one heard, to humanity as having a father and a mother. One day, perhaps, she would give up and go to an analyst to discover who it was who played this claustrophobic game with her—Grandmother’s Steps or Looking Back; or the game of the Stalker Stalked. Creep up, creep up, one step and then another; pause; risk a little run; pause, big step forward; TOUCHED! She crept, she was crept up on; she stiffly ran and stopped; she heard through her crawling spine that wing-beat sound, pounced on it just in time or rather just too late; in time, too late was pounced upon … But who was the other player? Who called:
‘Back to the beginning!’
—
or faceless fled away back beyond recall? What panic echoing what desire could possibly engage with her in such equivocal sport?

Death wish. Birth trauma. Narcissism, sadism, masochism: the terms of reference were all available. The games ceased, or went underground, after the young man, the young lover, Jocelyn, came forward to embrace her; returned with excruciating variations after the young man, the young son lost his life … Oh but there were no words for the cat and mouse game that went on then. But whoever appeared and vanished in her nights, it was never Rickie. He seemed to have retired for ever from the scene, leaving no travesties of himself as legacy, no reminders behind the keyholes, in the cellars. Why should he spare her? Why should Anthony, her best-beloved, hunt her so ruthlessly? She was not guilty towards him—had never destroyed his confidence or let him down; except perhaps twice, but in such minor ways … Once at the swimming baths when she had publicly rejected him because among other people’s fearless children he was the only one to be a coward, a humiliating child; once—rather worse
—
when he had come upon her weeping in her bedroom and asked her why, and she had answered because Daddy had been unkind to her. Bad that, of course—a classical example. On both occasions he had received the shock in the same way: a look of chill exhaustion, a lid half-lowered, veiling an eye gone dead … as if he had been given a hypodermic shot. She had been scared, telling herself that this, already, was his method, the way he dealt with suffering imposed upon him. Out of this, murmured a voice in her, would come the means and method, one day, of imposing it. Could anybody’s heart break if they weren’t careful? Yes, Anthony was going to be careful, unless one was careful, never to let his own heart break.

But who could define heart?—how was it to be measured, where did it reside? Cold poets who fed on hearts—the true, the false—and spat out the remains, they celebrated it. Practitioners in psychology had other terms for it, Jocelyn, with his turn for paradox, insisted that heart was never a commodity exchanged in that least disinterested of all human phenomena, the passionate idyll.
‘
What do you mean, Jocelyn, by a passionate idyll?’
‘
You should know.’
Radiantly he smiled. Pinning down heart, qualifying, separating kindness, disallowing generosity, he concluded at last that it could best be defined by considering its opposite, the void: it was the reverse of the void in the being’s centre; nothing to do with a code of morality, by no means always recognizable in good conduct. It was a residue, an essence … something more like grace. Not unselfishness, but the capacity for freedom from self—the void-containing self. He more than suspected himself of lacking heart.
‘But why?’
Because he was capable only of passion; only of self-torture, not of suffering; only of intensity of soul, not of expansion. If she did not believe it now, she would discover it one day: a treat in store for her.

‘And what about me, Jocelyn, my heart?’ ‘Ah, you! …’
Radiantly he smiled. People with hearts could die of them, he said; they could not petrify or shrivel. Age was the final testing time, the time of resurrection—or of none. Lying in his arms she entered a dark maze where, lightly, he and Rickie set to partners, each holding her by a hand.

‘Strong passions from a child but not much heart.’
Whose well-known voice of summing-up resounding in her ears? Her mother’s. Pronouncing verdict on her eldest child. But when pronounced? Never in my hearing, thought Madeleine; certainly never repeated to me. What then? Mere morbid self-accusation, self-begotten … Yet it went on sounding, with an authentic note, as if it were the record of an ultimate judgement never delivered, locked up, so the judge had fancied, to die with her; yet in her last unconsciousness she had exhaled it; and I, thought Madeleine, received it … but never heard it until now? When I sat with Dinah by her bed in the nursing home a month ago, when I saw Dinah face to face at last, when we knew she would not rally: then was the moment when from her fading mind she yielded it up and I received it. When all was over I broke down and said: ‘I wish she’d known we were here together. Do you think she might have known? Surely she must have.’ Dinah, also in tears, doubtless thinking me hysterical and childish, went on holding my hand but did not answer. We were reconciled.

But it should have been brought about on the living side of their mother’s lifetime, and it had not been.
Why not? Why not?
At last she had tracked it down—the cry torn out of the pit of her with her waking. It was her fault, her failure of heart and no one else’s.

A matter chiefly of procrastination; a matter not sufficiently important to warrant the effort, the emotional disturbance bound to be involved. Time enough, time enough to see which way the cat jumped. She had been rescued from despair, snatched from the core of the furnace; she was reprieved, she was safe at last, but still so vulnerable that she must be given time to relax, to consolidate herself; she must be allowed to care only for one person, the one to whom she owed her life given back to her, who needed her at last as much as she needed him. Anybody likely to interfere, to ask questions, to give an opinion on the relationship must be set at a certain distance for fear of some contagion. Anybody who might with one finger touch her security and set it rocking; might smile, secretive, with a stretch of the nostrils, a twisted eyebrow; might come again to the door, a waif,
mysterious,
in straits, on the prowl, on the make, but seeming to be the one with no demands to make because she had taken steps to corner all the answers … Or, worst of all, if one came again to
her
door, palms icily sweating, lungs paralyzed from terror, determined as before to swallow pride and be less pardoner than suppliant, bent on offering terms of surrender so rare, so honourable that they would, they must be freely accepted and adhered to; only to find, as before, so grotesque a discrepancy between one’s preconception of the drama to be unfolded and what had actually been played out; to be caught out in fact once again by the unforeseeable, seen … seen this time by Dinah, as Dinah had once been seen by Madeleine:
double-faced.

The door had opened to admit her; she had walked straight upstairs, intent on saving Rickie, walked straight into treachery. Found two, not one, awaiting her.
Rickie betrayed.

That was how she would be seen by Dinah if she came holding out the olive branch; came unaccompanied yet with someone doubtless visible to Dinah behind her shoulder, turning her face and Dinah’s towards the ambush where once more Rickie would be hidden and Rickie would be betrayed.

The taxi deposited her and drove off; she cast a tense and furtive glance upwards over the high dingy peeling
façade
of the building that on one floor or another concealed the actual form of Dinah; and mounted the steps towards the front door. A dog in the basement set up a shrill yapping. On her right a row of starveling privet bushes flanked a segment of wall truncated, crookedly slanting, seemingly sinister, like a portion of a surrealist film set. A stunted tabby cat without a tail shot out of the area, leaped the railings and vanished along the narrow pathway between this wall and the side of the building. An unfamiliar square, a drab secretive part of London. Curious to think of Rickie approaching it so many many times, hurrying up these steps, closing this dark door after him in lively anticipation—freeman of a second area of domesticity, more private, more tempting than the one on the other side of the park, where also he was expected, to which sooner or later he would return, wrapped in the cloak of a double life—rank cloak, invisible. She bent to examine the four bell buttons each with a card above it on the left of the door, then straightened up again, opened her handbag and rapidly surveyed herself in the square of mirror, taking courage from the flawless mask that gleamed back at her from behind a finely-spotted black veil. Very becoming, these veils; a disguise she had come to rely on for self-confidence. For a second she wondered whether this growing dislike, mounting to phobia almost, of exposure to full daylight, could be connected with the psychology of rejection; whether if she had a lover …

She started to ascend, her tread echoing round the steep well of the uncarpeted stone staircase, her imagination stiffly apprehending fragments of Dinah’s actual, unsubjectivized identity. She was going to confront the person who was at home here; she was going to break in on this person’s independent social life: an orderly life, not the life of an adulterous dipsomaniacal waif awaiting rescue willy nilly by the sister she had wronged.

On the second floor landing, her breath caught in her throat, her pulses hammering, she stopped dead, relinquishing a project that now seemed to her insane. A door, above her opened, closed again, someone came winding with a measured tread down the last short wooden flight, emerged before her: elderly stoutish man, dark, sallow, foreign-looking, dressed with a certain dandified distinction—grey suit, silk shirt, lavender bow tie; something about him—his eyes?—not ordinary or reassuring. His face, an engrossed one, closed as it took the shock of this unbargained-for encounter; the sunken eyes searched hers, were quickly lowered. With a murmured ‘Good evening. Excuse me,’ he passed her deferentially and continued his descent.
Who?
Who possibly? Doctor? Professor in exile? Representing what further portion of the now terrifying identity silent, hidden just above her head?
Murderer?
Dinah strangled on the bed or with her throat cut … Dinah having a few friends in for a drink … Anything was possible, all possibilities equally appalling. But now there was no turning back. She went on, found herself before a door painted canary yellow, touched a bell.

Almost at once the door was flung open. A young man in grey flannels and black polo-necked sweater stood staring at her, a smile that seemed at first both welcoming and teasing fading sharply as he took her in. Behind him, out of sight, a voice, Dinah’s, called out in a tone—familiar, lightly mocking—to match his smile: ‘Come in, come in. What have you forgotten
this
time?’

Still blocking the entrance, the young man said quickly: ‘It’s not him.’ Dinah was well guarded. Next moment, while Madeleine with a sense of final loss of bearings began to stammer: ‘I came—I wondered if …’ Dinah appeared behind his shoulder.