The Echoing Grove (32 page)

Another volley of gunfire opened out beyond his cut-off voice: this time more distant, less dangerous, more ominous.

‘But now you’ve gone?’

Faint, dizzy, downward, she shot his endless arc with him; yet stayed rooted at the point of his departure, seeing him wheel and vanish.

‘I didn’t
go.
I mean, there wasn’t a moment of going but it seemed to happen.’ He paused, corrected the statement, as if intent on accuracy. ‘It seems
to have happened.
If that makes sense. I suppose not.’ The snort he gave, part helpless, part self-mocking, brought him once more just within her orbit. ‘Can you imagine it at all?’

‘Of course I can.’

He said rather crossly: ‘Where am I then?’

‘Inside yourself.’

‘Oh, am I?’ He considered. ‘Well, I never! … It seems to me more like—I don’t know … Being in space. Too much of it.’

‘It’s that too. Don’t worry. It’s real.’

‘How do you mean, real? You could call madness real. But I don’t
feel
mad. Madmen never do, do they?’

‘You’re not mad.’

‘How do you know?’ he said defiantly. ‘I was mad once—or on the verge of it. I got back by the skin of my teeth.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oddly enough, that night when we first met.’

She nodded; and he said sharply: ‘Why do you nod? I suppose it’s no surprise to you—you’re such a clever girl. Or was it fairly obvious?’

‘No. But I couldn’t help—recognizing you, the moment I met you. I fell in love with you, if you prefer that term.’

He pulled one arm from beneath her shoulder, crossed it with the other behind his head and lay silent, looking backwards into what, as she lay beside him, was only communicated darkness.

But he was seeing clearly: himself and party—late party, the latest place, place of lugubrious eroticism, sexily spot-lit, shaded, choking with fatigue and expensively procured hangovers and cigarette stubs, with vacuous puppets shuffling to the compulsive whipped-up rhythms of impotence. Suddenly in the thick of all these ambiguities,
graffiti,
innuendoes, he saw Sex; and he was terrified, though he concealed it. But She recognized him; and picking him out from the whole gaping roomful made him sing Sex with her in the old cavern of her mouth. Everybody sniggered. So after that there was nothing for it but to flog himself round and around the dance floor. He was half shouldering, half dragging a lead sarcophagus: he was inside, crammed in, preserving himself. No collision could jar his shrinking flesh through that dull thickness; no filthy sight, sound, stench offend him through so much opacity and weight. All the same he gasped, he ached, he burst with groans. He must set it down, must be set down; he must be disconnected. He became disconnected. He was now an automaton, a man-machine, enabled to record but not to correlate, let alone feel, a variety of sensory impressions. For instance, two curiosities: Madeleine stretched a peahen neck and pecked at his dry heart. The wrenched-off head of Dinah swirled away, a
papier
m
âché
mask washed down by never-to-be-wept torrential tears. Avoiding trapdoors, trick mirrors, dummies—particularly a jigging Negro drummer with a conniving leer—pretty obscene that one, even for a show like this—he stalked out into the crooked streets all shadowing his shadow, or running ahead of it to lose it.

‘No,’ he said loudly in Georgie’s ear, ‘that couldn’t have gone on. I’d have had to end it. It was touch and go.’

‘What did you do?’

He laughed to himself. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed when I left the party …’

‘I did notice.’

‘I went to look for someone.’

‘Dinah.’

‘Yes, Dinah.’ He dropped the name out simply, in absent-minded corroboration. ‘But I didn’t find her. I mean she wasn’t where I—I’d got it into my head she still might be.’

She said after a pause: ‘Well, that makes one appreciable difference.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t find her that time. You did find
me,
this time.’

‘Oh, I see … Oh, but the whole thing was different. That was all a nightmare. I was only tracking down the cause, the core of it because I bloody well had to: that’s what you do in a nightmare. In fact I was relieved in a way when I found she’d gone. The sheer emptiness gave me something to hold on to. I mean I saw everything was so to speak in order, just as I’d thought when I left her earlier the same evening—until this explosion, brainstorm, started up.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘Oh, then …’ He sighed rather helplessly, like a questioned child. ‘I went home and apologized to my wife for behaving like a cad. She was very nice about it—extraordinarily nice. I got into bed with her in the end. The result of
that
was Clarissa.’

‘You must have been tickled to death.’

‘We were rather. Though a thought disconcerted.’

He sounded sardonically amused. She scrutinized the picture so trustingly presented: confession, reconciliation, gratification in its somehow comic outcome: a
ruefully intimate, caught-out, philoprogenitive couple. Later perhaps, when the two-way time traffic in possessiveness had begun, it might be that such satiric outlines would grow human, all too human, such innocence be called in question. Better to find out now what she had often asked herself.

‘Do you still go to bed together?’

‘Oh no, never. In fact,’ he added with detachment, ‘after that occasion by tacit consent we turned it in. It was never a star turn
—
my fault, I expect. We were too young when we married. Poor Madeleine.’

‘Has she had lovers?’

‘One—I think only one. She’s had one for—oh, some years. At least, I believe it still goes on. She never mentioned it to you?’

‘She did tell me someone had been a support—no names—that time I went down after Anthony was killed. I didn’t ask questions. She’s kind of reserved by nature, isn’t she? Or else she has never trusted me. That was the time she asked me to see you as often as I could.’

‘Did she indeed?’ He raised his eyebrows, mildly surprised.

‘She was worried about you being lonely.’

He remained silent; and presently she said:

‘You don’t mind about this lover?’

‘No. I’m glad she’s got someone to keep her cheerful.
I
can’t do anything.’ He sounded rather fretful. ‘I don’t know the chap—it’s a different world—he might not be quite my cup of tea. Not that that is essential in one’s wife’s lover. The accent, I gather, is on culture
—
lots of slim vols in the house now; and classical gramophone records. Very nice, of course, no harm in it at all. Clarissa thoroughly approves: it seems it was due to his coaching that she was top last term in Musical Appreciation. So she told me. She flourishes his name about with almost tedious lack of inhibition: I dare say that’s normal. Colin used to mention him a good deal too—he doesn’t any more. That’s normal too, I dare say. He was Colin’s contribution in the first place, you see—he was keen on Bach fugues, like Colin. Poor boy.’ Still the note of irritation predominated. ‘Oh, I don’t want to poke my nose in—let alone inspect the chap personally. I only hope he won’t let her down, that’s all. Don’t know why he should …’ He jerked his hands apart from beneath his head and started picking at paint blisters on the wall beside him. ‘I feel it’s none of my business,’ he finally declared, ‘and yet I feel responsible. You may think it a conventional point of view, but I’d feel happier if he seemed to want to marry her … if they’d
sounded
me, at least, about a divorce. Of course they may have excellent reasons for not doing so. Principles. I doubt it somehow.’

‘You mean you would like to have the chance of obliging her to kick him out?’

‘Well … yes … or of …’ He uttered a faint snort of laughter. ‘Or of letting her go to him. Yes, I suppose so. One or the other. My guess is, he’s a chap on the make. Quite a lot younger; humble background, scholarships all along. No harm in that. And bags of charm. But these ruthless, sharp-witted orphan types—do you know what I mean?—have you come across them? … Orphan is the word, they’re a damned sight too frequent nowadays, forgive the pun. They’re a flourishing cross-section of the community, and they’re on the up and up—there’ll be a lot more presently. I doubt if my objections are altogether snobbish, though no doubt you’ll say so. It’s not that they behave any worse than our sort—my sort—on the whole: it’s just that they don’t behave at all. Behaviour has ceased to be a concept. I’ve got a hunch they simply don’t know what it feels like to feel
disgraced—
personal, moral, disgrace—dishonour if you like. You could say it was innocence, lack of humbug—end of the code of the Decent Fellow and high time too. Seems to
me
more like something left out, subtracted … like a dimension missing almost … She wouldn’t know what to look out for, Madeleine wouldn’t. She had an old-fashioned bringing-up and she’s still awfully like a girl. She wouldn’t know what to expect.’

‘You mean she’s so
na
ïve?
She wouldn’t expect to be walked out on?’

‘Well … does any woman?’

‘I always would.’ Her voice was firm and loud.

He was silent, then said curtly:

‘Oh, I dare say they have rows.’

‘I don’t mean,’ she hastily corrected herself, ‘that I’d spend my time courting nemesis. But I never have expected permanence: maybe it’s a question of conditioning in childhood. I never had what you and Madeleine had. It makes it all the harder to learn how to drop your past without getting poorer and thinner with every breakaway you choose—or have—to make. Perhaps I never have learnt. Perhaps that’s why I love you. I think you would never get a withered heart. And I guess anybody who lived with you would be helped not to shrivel up.’ Above her head, unseen but felt by her, his mouth became contemptuous. ‘And whether Madeleine knows it or not, she
does
know it. She would never leave you.’

He turned his head as if listening more intently.

‘And apart,’ she continued, ‘from that basic fact my guess would be that it may have crossed her mind there’s no for ever and ever with this guy. Which, without being over-cynical, would be an added reason for preferring to have her cake and eat it. I guess she kind of hopes that one day she’ll stop being crazy about him and sweep him painlessly off her doorstep.’

‘Oh, she’d never sack him,’ he said decisively. ‘She’s very faithful. Very loyal. Anything she undertook she’d stick to.’

This statement too she scrutinized: important item in the collection.

‘I don’t quite know how to put it,’ he went on. ‘She’s really awfully nice. Very just and—well, wholesome. Generous. Anyway she couldn’t be ungenerous to someone who trusted her: not in the last ditch she couldn’t. I’ve reason to know that. She’s a disciplined character—they all are, that family. Her mother’s a wonderful woman. Her father was incredibly nice too. She’s done well by the children: I didn’t make it too easy for her at one time; and what with that and the war … What I’m trying to say is, she’s not got much self-confidence, but she has got values. She won’t expect to be let down
in the way she will be.
’
Then as if to retract from his own dogmatism he added a vague: ‘Though she’s fairly realistic …’

‘Is he neurotic?’ asked
Georgie
after a pause.

‘Oh, Christ, I expect so. I dare say it’s a word he makes good use of.’

‘I wasn’t using it loosely.’

‘How then? What does it mean?’

‘Not a term of excuse, or of approbation. Something quite specific. Never mind. Say what
you
mean by “let down in the way she will be”.’

‘I mean,’ he said, his voice loud again, ‘it will be: “Yes, I did love you yesterday, I don’t today.” Or more likely: “Yes, I did want to go to bed with you two nights ago, that’s why I did. Last night I wanted to go to bed with someone else, so I did. What’s the objection?” First she’ll think he must have been tight. She knows about drink, that’s part of what she can accept. He got roaring tight, as chaps do, and played the fool, it was quite excusable because of course he’s sorry. But he’ll tell her he wasn’t tight at all—at least no more than usual. He had a very enjoyable time, so why should he be sorry? … She won’t understand
that
.
She’ll go crashing on, trying to make sense of it, building up a pattern for him, pushing motives and codes into him, when there simply are none, none at all. It was so, it isn’t so. It isn’t so, it was so. What is equals what was equals nought.’

The spate of his words abruptly ceased, and she lay listening to his breathing. Presently she said:

‘Is this a simple case of prophecy?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He stretched himself, to lie afterwards not so much quiet as inert, and with a suggestion of stiffness, like a body pinned down, resisting pressure. ‘I don’t know why I’m saying any of the things I’ve said to-night; or why they seem like the truth.’

The lips of dying men …
The words flashed out of hiding. Oh, after a long detour he was coming again towards her with something hidden in his hand.
‘Guess what I’ve got for you!’
This time he was going to present it to her, she would have to take it because it was his gift to her, the offering of a lifetime. Almost under her breath she spoke his name.

‘Must it be called prophetic?’ She discerned in his rather tentative tone a wish or an attempt to reassure them both. ‘Oh, can’t you see I’m talking really about myself? It’s something I understand. I’ve got it in me—this something, which is nothing, in the centre. You don’t understand do you?—you’re a woman. So much the better for you. I’m simply telling you for the tenth time I’m no good to you. Sometimes I think a new thing is happening: men aren’t any good to women any more. But why can’t you stop it happening? Sh!’ He shook her sharply. ‘All right, laugh.’

‘I wasn’t laughing.’

‘Well, don’t cry then. Are you crying?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘There’s nothing new in what you’re saying. It’s only too familiar.
Get thee to a nunnery …
That’s all you’re saying.’