The Echoing Grove (37 page)

‘Did he stay on?’

‘Yes, he stayed the night. I shoved him into my dressing-room and removed his shoes and stretched him on the bed. It’s where I sleep as a rule, but Madeleine being away I slipped into the nuptial couch. I looked in on him pretty early next morning with a cup of tea, but he’d flitted: he must have slipped off at crack of dawn—leaving no trace beyond some creases in the bedspread. Oh no, I’d forgotten …’ He gave a chuckle. ‘He did leave a trace. I never spotted it, but Madeleine did in no time.
Wrote
to me about it.’ Again he chuckled. ‘How could I be so careless, since when had I taken to smoking in bed? Well, I hadn’t; that’s never been one of my vices. It seems a burning cigarette had been placed on the rather good Regency pedestal beside my bed—ruined it. I had to take the rap—couldn’t give him away. So he managed to leave her a memento: jolly funny I think, don’t you? I saw why she had to get on to me without delay; some other poor innocent chap might have come to stay and got the blame. See?’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘She’d always have held it against him, I’m afraid. He’d have been upset to know he’d done himself no good with her that time either. Rough justice, isn’t it?—seeing he’d come to eradicate a former bad impression—social impression, quite trivial, still weighing on his conscience. Whereas any bad impression he might have left on Dinah …’ His smile fading, he shook his head. ‘But it’s not for me to judge him. It’s scarcely a parallel, but I also wronged one of those girls rather more than the other. At least, I think so.’ He sighed. ‘But I don’t exactly feel guilty about her … and I always do about my wife. Odd, isn’t it? There must be something guilt-erasing about Dinah. Edwards seemed to think so.’

‘I call that a pretty high compliment.’

‘So do I.
He
didn’t.’ He got up suddenly, and stood with his shoulders hunched. ‘Oh no, of all the shits! His conscience didn’t trouble him a jot: because it was all her fault, if you please, that it ended as it did.’

‘Oh, you did discover how it ended?’

‘Yes, I did.’ His shoulders went higher: he paced up and down in front of her, burst out impatiently, reluctantly: ‘It didn’t last long the second time—not much longer than the first, I gathered. He couldn’t stick it, he said; he wasn’t cut out for that sort of life. It was her idea, not his, this setting up in Stepney. All he meant was to breeze in on her in a friendly sort of way when he got back to London in the autumn: that was after his cruising holiday—if you remember, he’d walked out on her earlier in the summer—on her and Madeleine. He’d left some shirts in the flat, and he needed them, he said. She was ever so pleased to see him … Yes, I can imagine she would be—she always was: she never had any bones to pick, no matter what … She made herself such pleasant company it came over him again he wouldn’t mind having her—see what came of it this time. But bless me if she didn’t say no to that! Quite a change. Reason: she’d shut up her bedroom. A friend that had been staying there a few weeks back had been taken very queer there in the night one night, the ambulance had come for him …’ He paused to glance at
Georgie.
‘That would be you know who. I suppose he knew too: but he kept a poker face and so did I … Since when she hadn’t fancied that room to sleep in any more. She’d taken to dossing down on two chairs in the sitting-room, and he could see for himself there wasn’t room for two. Small low chairs she had with high sort of padded backs to them, hard—not his style (I remembered them too). He saw how she felt about that bedroom: he wouldn’t have fancied sleeping in it himself knowing an ambulance case had been there. Then it seems she got low in her spirits and told him to get out and leave her be: he’d never known her like that—quite sarcastic. But he hadn’t hardly got to the other end of the street when he heard steps coming after him in a hurry, and it was her. “I’m coming with you,” she said, just like that. You could have knocked him down. She seemed all worked up, like as if she’d seen a ghost. So he didn’t argue, he took her along back: not meaning for more than just the night. But he was stuck with her. Once she was there she wouldn’t budge: went up the other end once for a few clothes and came straight back. What’s more, after that she never stirred from his room except of an evening when she’d slip out sometimes to do a bit of shopping to cook him an evening meal—very tasty too, he’d give her that. He’d be out all day, of course, but when he came in of an evening there she’d be, sitting smoking cigarettes and listening to any old programme on the radio, and well, just taking big breaths as if she was short of air. Carrying on more like something moping in a gilded cage than a Christian. Though she’d always brighten up when they got talking—the evenings weren’t so bad: specially when his friend who owned the house—the doctor—dropped in late and got her to read aloud. Poetry mostly—bits of Shakespeare, Milton—his friend enjoyed it, and the fact was she did speak it nice. Then she and his friend would get talking, more after the philosophical style, or politics: they’d talk their heads off, he didn’t complain of that, but it couldn’t go on like it, could it? (I saw his point). Funny thing, in spite of her clinging on so, in another way she didn’t seem to take all that much notice of him; and whichever way you looked at it, it wasn’t like her. In the old days she was always after him to start leading what she called a constructive life—(can’t I hear her!)—even to getting a job somewhere in the country and setting up with him in a caravan she was going to buy, or some other such daft notion—but now she didn’t seem to trouble much what he did with himself. She’d stare through him with her great eyes like as if she was simple. Money was getting short too—not that he was having to keep her (no, you bet he wasn’t) but she’d always been the independent sort … That’s true enough. She’d never let me … except for the rent of the flat which I insisted … She had a bit from her father; and she did odd jobs of writing when I knew her—fashion notes or sketches or cooking hints or something, she never let on exactly what. But she had quite a flair as a journalist. She was the most frugal, saving, discreet little creature I ever knew. I suppose he took it for granted he only had to stretch his paw out … However, not my business … only when he mentioned money matters I felt upset. It was exactly what I’d suspected the last time I saw her …’

‘She told you she’d been borrowing?’

‘No, not that.’ He started pacing again, the glum look heavy on his face. ‘She wouldn’t let on. When I raised the subject she sort of set her lips and thanked me with great formality—said she was managing perfectly well. But Edwards told me she took to borrowing from Selbig. That was so incredibly unlike her—nothing could have brought it home to me more disagreeably that …’ He stopped.

‘She’d folded up?’

‘Mm. Given up hope. Demoralized. I felt quite sick.’

She rolled over on to her side and lay with one elbow propping her cheek, in a meditative attitude.

‘And in the end?’ she said.

‘Oh, in the end his nerves got bad. Somehow he didn’t fancy telling her to clear out, but she got him down so he started walking in his sleep—or talking, I forget which. They’d certainly left him with a sense of grievance, those broken nights of his. But the very end of it was he got browned off again. Cut the painter. Did a bunk. She’d bought it, hadn’t she? … Bought it, paid for it, wrapped it up and taken it home.’

‘Did he leave her there?’

‘He left her fast asleep. Very sensible I think, don’t you? She might have made a scene.’

‘Leaving her with
Dr
Selbig,’ she said reflectively.

‘Yes. He was there I suppose. History doesn’t relate.’ He sat down again listlessly, scratched his head. ‘As you know when he finally came back there was no room, no Dinah and no Selbig … The only thing that goes on bothering me is …’ He brooded.

‘Is what?’

‘Whether that might have been what she came to tell me, that last time. Whether it had already bust and she needed help and I—failed to make it possible for her to say so. She looked … I think there was something on her mind—more even than could be accounted for by the obvious awkwardness of the occasion. I left her in a taxi to be taken to wherever she told the driver. She wouldn’t tell
me
… merely said she was expected back, there was someone waiting for her.’

An infinite boredom seemed to be invading him.

‘Maybe there was,’ said
Georgie,
still propped on one elbow. ‘I should think probably.’

‘Ah well …’ He yawned. ‘It’s not a fruitful subject for conjecture. If she was in straits there was
Dr
Selbig, as you say. Perhaps he looked after her. I hope so.’

‘The missing link,’ said
Georgie.

He looked at her vaguely, puzzled; and she went on slowly: ‘The one person she could go to after you left her. No one you need be jealous of. I guess that wasn’t Mr Robert Edwards she had in mind.’

Not light, but a look of nullity, collapse, smoothed his face suddenly. He said without apparent curiosity: ‘Oh, I see.’

‘Don’t be mad at me,’ she pleaded.

‘She’s putting up another candidate,’ he remarked, ignoring her, addressing himself or no one. ‘Selbig the missing link, not Edwards … Well, she may be right. I hadn’t thought of it. Or had I? No. But she’s a clever girl … It wouldn’t be singular, would it, if such a clever girl was right?’

She lay down again flat on her back.

‘I haven’t been lying here,’ she said after a silence, ‘with my subtle smile, seeing it all quite clear from the beginning; casting my line and seeing you swallow the bait. It’s just that I’m … Oh, can’t you see? I have to feel the pull, I’m hooked as well as you. Tied up in all the lines. Oh, I pray I never meet her! I’d be too tempted to wind her in.’

His mouth opened; but as if something in her voice had suggested second thoughts, or an attempt at making contact, he said quite kindly: ‘There’d be no need.’

‘My needs are not yours, alas for me. Never mind all that.’

He hesitated, looking at her now.

‘You think she had this foreign chap in tow?’ His tone conveyed open-mindedness. ‘Got him up her sleeve perhaps, all the time?’

‘Perhaps. But you know what a stickler I am for my own hunches. Total sceptic about other people’s. Or maybe it can just be put down to wish-fulfilment. It would seem more on the side of life, if you understand—kind of counter-defeatest more … Well, let’s say more natural. Whether it turned out an asset or not I wouldn’t know, but I guess she had something more positive than Edwards in the bag when she went to Stepney.’

It was her turn to address herself to no one in particular. She put her arms behind her head and lay with her eyelids almost closed; as he had seen Dinah lie a hundred times.

‘I place myself in her shoes,’ she presently continued. ‘Re-united with you on that shore … situation fraught with happiness, intensest happiness … All the same, not a situation to give her total confidence. She was a girl in a precarious position. She had had it proved to her—not once but twice—that she was one of that class of girl that is rejectable: acceptable until getting on for zero hour, but then rejectable. She was to have it proved to her a third and a fourth time; but twice is enough to make any girl suspect she may have to scratch for good from the mixed doubles. Or put it another way … That going together to the seaside the way you did, that was not—life-like—was it?’

‘I suppose it was pretty crazy,’ he said, conceding the point dejectedly but fully. ‘Like everything we did. Considered as a piece of folly it was certainly a high spot.’

He stopped abruptly, startled by what had suddenly appeared to him: the figure of a girl in a bright blue cotton frock, bare-legged, honey-brown, streaming with wind and sunlight, turning to hold up a bunch of wild flowers: tiny split-second image seen through a stereoscopic lens. ‘Quite mad. Mad, bad … And considered as …’ But once again he stopped, hearing the words just uttered circling her vanished image as they left his lips.
Sad … mad … bad … sweet …
An entrail-piercing cry, like seagulls.

‘Yes, I know,’ said
Georgie,
putting her hands up and pressing her eyeballs hard with her finger-tips. ‘Like our Kew Gardens, if you will forgive the analogy. Not for human nature’s daily food. She knew it, you knew it, both of you: you were compelled to say so: though you would have preferred more delicacy. If you lost, you were still—not unacceptable, to someone, as a partner. But she had nothing, no one: not Edwards—he’s not in the match at all—or not playing on any court anywhere she knows of. He’d disappeared. Not Edwards: not her sister … If this girl is to survive,—and she will survive, she’s a determined girl, she hasn’t lost her passion for adventure—she must go on, further and further, to get—oh, anywhere near home again.’

‘You’re very cryptic,’ he said wearily. ‘I can’t say I follow.’

‘Well, let me see … In that conversation you spoke to me of having, that kind—deep questioning—men wish women would refrain from, you were admitting to one another, weren’t you, your secret knowledge that you—hadn’t reached, together, the—the point of no return? In case of need—and the need was a sad certainty—you would go out separately, by different emergency exits. You had yours in reserve. And she had hers. It’s only my hunch, as I told you, backed with a little circumstantial evidence, that Selbig was her point of no return. Something, someone, final to fall back on. Not a substitute lover. Maybe a kind of father figure? I’m only suggesting it. We realize that’s what he was to Edwards. Protector, admired comforter, one true friend. Maybe it’s purely subjective and irrelevant, but I keep on investing his personality with mystic symbols: The everlasting Arms, The Hound of Heaven … Waiting. Shadowing them—in and out of the picture, in and out of the room—Dinah as well as Edwards. If that makes him even more of a mystery, even more unreal than before as a person, it seems to
me
to make his
rôle—
this
rôle
I am assigning him—more possible, more plausible. The
one
person left for her to go to. His crazy set-up the place where one thing anyway was certain: she’d get off the merry-go-round for good.’