The Echoing Grove (4 page)

‘The great thing was to get it out of here. I couldn’t have done that. I admire you.’

‘The great thing was to kill it. I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’

We’re sorry. We did our best. Stopped it going on dying, shovelled it into limbo. There’s nothing more to be done, we’ll go away. Darkness, close up this fissure; dust under roots and stones, consume our virulent contagion; silence, annul a mortal consternation. We must all recover.

But still the stones seemed rocked, the unsterile mounds, reimpregnated, exhaled dust’s fever; a breath, impure, of earthbound anguish.

Morning

Sleepless in the small hours, Dinah switched on her lamp and looked through the pile of books upon the bedside table. A brand-new novel—Book Society Choice; an anthology of modern poetry; two thrillers; a recent collection of delicious Continental recipes; Keats’s Letters;
Green Mansions;
a worn copy of
The Phoenix and the Carpet
with her name, Dinah Dorothea Burkett, pencilled inside in her own sprawling nine-year-old hand; last, a small volume in a honeycombed Victorian binding, dark blue stamped with gold;
Tuppy the Donkey.
She opened this, and an aroma of sour paper and dead nurseries came out of it. She read on the title page: John Vandeleur Burkett, on his sixth birthday, from his affectionate Mother, May 14th
1878;
a time-browned script, swimming and delicate as a dragonfly. Somebody, years and years ago—John Vandeleur perhaps, her father—had crudely chalked in the illustrations. The ghost of a qualm twisted in her bowels—residue of some obscure long overlaid association with childish fear and sickness; some intimation of mortality breathed out from the engravings—boys with improbably celestial faces, sailor-hats haloing cherubic curls, short jackets and long trousers—old-fashioned boys at play, an old-fashioned donkey. Push them out of sight, bury them deep at the back of the shelf: they won’t come back alive, and Tuppy’s a nasty name to give a donkey.

Everything for the spare room had been remembered, just as in former days.
Cloisonn
é
jar filled with ginger biscuits, box filled with cigarettes, ash tray beside it. She took a biscuit and started to break and eat it with stealthy movements and glances towards the armchair where, upon an old rug of Madeleine’s, Gwilym lay curled. But even this, his favourite noise, the breaking of a biscuit, failed to penetrate his total anaesthesia. Tilting the lampshade, she craned forward to peer at him. Normal respiration, no sign of swelling in the lip: thank God, he seemed all right. Surely, she told herself, lying back on the pillows, I can begin to relax. Forget the omen. I can’t face anything more … Omens are nonsense anyway. If he’s O.K. tomorrow—and he will be—it will be a good omen. The rat will be gone for good to the bottom of the river, the swans will float together in light and peace. This enterprise we’re on, whatever it is, whoever accompanies us—myself, herself, Rickie, our parents—who besides?—or awaits us still unknown along the road—this enterprise will bring us somehow to an extension of freedom; not end, as it still seems it might (is she thinking like thoughts, is she asleep next door?) in a place of distorting mirrors and trap doors.

The room she lay in must have been Rickie’s dressing-room. She looked round it in a cautious way, but nothing made a leap out of neutrality: not the pastel portrait of him as a pretty child—fair waving hair, rose cheeks, periwinkle eyes, white blouse—above the fine mahogany chest of drawers; not the set of good sporting prints on the walls, nor the cream and green floral chintz curtains that Madeleine had drawn after tea, saying you remember these old spare room ones from home, Mother produced them about a year ago, she’d packed them away, the linings have had it, as you see, but still, these days … Frowning, dissatisfied, twitching the folds.

Madeleine’s household goods had always been expensive and well chosen, suggesting an advised taste, the aesthetic tact of the interior decorator, rather than any personal preference. These charming rooms, decorated out of what was suitable and small enough from Montagu Square (after Rickie’s death she’d sold so much, thought now she’d been a fool) revealed no alteration in her formulae. Only that long room in the attic, Clarissa’s room, struck with determination a note of discord. A junk shop, said Madeleine, looking round on what had been superimposed upon a basic conception of girlish simplicity, pink-painted. Did you ever see? … but she would have it so. Shelves crammed with animals in glass and china, with snapshots in composite frames—Nannie and former cooks and housemaids, girl friends, dogs, kittens, ponies; one table reserved for studio portraits: her father and her brothers all three in uniform; also her mother. The window seat carried her radio, her gramophone, two record cases, several albums, a pile of old sporting and country magazines, a pot of Stickphast and a pair of cutting-out scissors. ‘A year
at least
they’ve been there,’ said Madeleine. ‘I’m not to throw them away. She’ll deal with them
in her own good time—
I ask you! She’s making scrapbooks for Colin, so she says. Look at her desk …’ She flung open one drawer, then another; stuffed with old letters, theatre programmes, regimental badges, note-books, balls of knitting wool, old purses, broken wrist-watches. ‘Every letter she’s ever had. And things the boys had …’ She picked up an old diary, glanced inside it, put it down again, rummaged uncertainly, closed the drawer. ‘
Nothing
is to be touched, I’ve had to swear. It’s always the same answer—she’ll go through everything in her own good time. Where does she get this magpie streak from? Can she be maladjusted? … But Mother hoarded, didn’t she? She’s like Mother in some ways. The same obstinacy too …’

In one corner stood a cabinet containing Rickie’s boyhood collection of birds’ eggs; in another Anthony’s old fretsaw; behind it, propped against the wall, a pair of skis once his. Colin had made the rather good models of sailing ships on top of the bookcase. The library bore witness to a decade of voracious hugger-mugger reading, ranging from Shakespeare, the Bront
ë
s and Jane Austen, E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter, to madcap-of-the-school fiction and equestrian books, technical and romantic, by the dozen. On the wall hung a guitar adorned with many-coloured streamers; a straw boater bound with maroon gold-lettered ribbon and a wreath of faded pink roses: Rickie’s, a trophy from his Eton boating days; also a couple of Van Gogh colour prints and several unframed water-colours on rough paper, casually attached by insufficient drawing pins: her own work these. Yes, conceded Madeleine, she had talent; she seemed to be able to do everything rather well. They were bold, na
ï
ve, formal—scenes of drama and violence; a shipwreck, a resurrection of the dead from tombs in a moonlit cemetery, a street of houses on fire, ladders, black figures jumping, flinging up arms of lamentation, running through lurid flames.

Opening one of the albums, they found it to be Anthony’s, its stiff cardboard leaves pasted with athletic groups, the names printed neatly out below. Raking the lines of schoolboy puppets with folded arms and bare knees spread, they detected, without comment, the lost one’s face, bright, blank, pre-adolescent. Another, similar, album belonged to Colin’s past.

The person inhabiting this space reflected her own ego, fluid and tenacious, in all its dispositions; scaled down an immeasurable bereavement in this pious setting up of emblems: a fervent matter-of-fact heart had been at work here, intent on consolidating all its history; a girl who missed her father and her brothers. ‘Not a permanent inhabitant,’ Madeleine had said, describing with half-sympathetic irony the spiritual awakening which Clarissa was now undergoing as the result of recent
confirmation
at her school. On the one hand beckoned the dedicated life; on the other the life of selfish pleasure. But dedicated to what? Clarissa asked herself; impossible to discover; whereas pleasure presented no such problems: she wished to study tap-dancing, and to broaden the mind by riding alone through Europe on her pony. To make matters worse her two best friends had already discovered their vocations. ‘They all three deplore my lack of faith. Fidelia is sorry for me and writes me helpful letters.’ And turning to leave the room, Madeleine repeated: ‘No, I can’t tell myself I must make a home for her all that much longer …’ Yet this area staked out beneath the family roof seemed the almost clamorous assertion of an attached child. I was the same, thought Dinah, at her age; my room like hers, stuffed with nursery relics and the boys’ discarded things. Yet I knew I was half-packed already.

She saw Clarissa in the attic, a big fair-skinned Nordic type of a girl, brushing out a mane of hair with vigorous perfunctory strokes, looking not into the mirror but out of the window while she shook it back. The time is coming, she thought, when we shall meet. I can advise—no, make only the most cautious suggestions, to help her keep her relics and discard them. She might give me devotion—I the black sheep, unmentioned member of the family, natural object of romantic interest to the young. Presumably she knows of my existence. What can she have been told?—or what conjecture? … The situation is tricky, almost anything I say might cause her to admire me more than would be acceptable to Madeleine. The young take sides, she’d take mine, it couldn’t be prevented … In no time, we should be conspirators. Feeling her heart begin to thump, she lit a cigarette and lay back, drawing deep breaths, seeing again that photograph staring at her from Clarissa’s table: the face of a tired man, good-looking, his hair a little thin, grey round the temples; Clarissa’s father, sacred relic not to be breathed upon. It was only in corrupt literary fantasies, in the world of steel-true waifs and blade-straight wantons that daughters made pacts in their wise grave childish way with the Woman in Daddy’s Life.

Let it alone, it’s dead and everybody’s dead except Madeleine and myself. It’s a patch of scorched earth, black, scattered with incinerated bones. Whatever she’s digging for will not turn up: there’s nothing buried alive. What does she fear? … He fathered her breathing children in lawful wedlock; and in the lawless dark another: mine; spilt seed, self-disinherited prodigal; non-proven proof, stopped breath, rejecting our and the whole world’s complicity. What of it now?

‘Oh!
…
It’s not breathing.’
Puzzled, matter-of-fact. Not a tactful thing to remark in that tone of voice to a woman just through labour. Before that, with my eyes fast shut, I’d seen her, Corrigan, pick it up out of the tumbled bed. ‘It’s a boy.’ Just what I’d expected to have: three normal words. I felt my huge smile flood through me, burst out of my spent body like the huge irradiated backwash of the final wave of birth. A boy. Under my shut eyes I listened, peacefully waiting for what was only to be expected—the sound of newborn crying. I wasn’t worried by the silence: in all those hours I hadn’t had a moment’s fear; and, bound to me in our unreality, nor had she. I was travelling first class and taking her along for the privileged hell of it: wild country but
de
luxe
conditions. Poor old Corrigan, she’d never done anything in style, she thought we were initiating her. We bamboozled her. She was an old clown doing her damnedest, born to the game, condemned to it, assiduously tumbling in the ring; we were the glamorous
artistes
doing the new sensational trapeze act high up among the lights with a roll of drums. Breath-taking acts, drama and suspense. Danger? Not for such star performers.

Her movements creaked, breathed round me while a timeless age went by. ‘It’s dead I think.’ Flat statement. My lids lifted, she was holding him up, I saw his blood-stained human head. She’d cut the cord and tied it; she was clever with her hands. One couldn’t say she’d lost her head … It was just bad luck. Or it had gone on too long, we’d thrown our hands in without telling one another we knew the game was up. Thinking back afterwards, I realized there was a moment about half-way through when the intimation reached me that … something biding its time from the beginning had stepped from ambush and taken charge. The enterprise was moving to its predestined outcome. But one is never prepared for what one has prepared to bring about. Her bulky figure blocked the low-ceilinged room, solid between lamplight dying on the table and pewter snowlight through the pane. Dawn. Some time in the small hours the blizzard had drawn ahead of me and emptied itself out. There was a cry then, animal, and it was mine. It trailed its length out of the window and died in the nine-days-hanging shroud of the dead world.

Presently, as the morning whitened, the men from the farm began to clear the lane, digging us out for the third time in ten days, hailing our dumb door as they dug towards it. They were full of rum and very jolly. She ran down and called to them, I was beginning to die by then. Distinctly I heard her say: ‘I think she’s dying.’ That was the last thing I heard for a long time … All the wires were down, the milk van crawled five miles on chains to the doctor. What a freak of climate in Cornwall at the end of February: only once before in living memory, fifty-eight years ago. What a grotesque disaster, all of a piece with the rest.
All of a piece
to stay in an isolated cottage at the bottom of a Cornish lane in winter when you’re eight months pregnant. They told me later at the hospital that it was just one of those things, unaccountable, the heart fails suddenly in transit, nobody could have saved him; but I never have believed it. If I hadn’t fatuously lain there thinking myself triumphant and past effort, if I’d sat up and given her some simple sensible instructions …

No …

Next thing, I was being lifted into the ambulance. Seeing her face mottled, in pieces, I said aloud: ‘Your face is a smashed plate.’ I saw her hand a sort of parcel wrapped in white towelling to a public Statue of Justice in a dark blue veil who placed it somewhere, with tact, out of my sight. I said: ‘What a balls-up,’ but nobody answered, so I thought they were shocked at my language, I’d better keep quiet. I felt hot-water bottles being pushed in all round me, her icy fingers on my pulse as we set off. I thought I’d try a medical approach and said, with calm: ‘How can this haemorrhaging be dealt with?’—but there was still no answer, so perhaps I only thought I said it. Then I went on dying until I began to live again in a different place in the middle of the next night. ‘Your husband has come, dear …’ Kind voice, later less kind, suspicious. I opened my eyes and there was Rickie, who had driven for fifteen hours through thaw and snow to reach me when he got her telegram. What a blue blaze of love and grief his eyes poured over me to draw me back. What tenderness, what self-reproach and consolation … Which suffered most then, of the three of us? Not I, perhaps … I played the lead, and it was big stuff; supporting
r
ôles
are less rewarding. I was prostrate, absolved, pure tragic principle in the cathartic state. What they got stuck with was the guilt and conflict, clogging their vitals, not to be expelled. That’s what in other words she told me later; but again I was unprepared … While she raved and wrung her hands, while she accused and cursed me, I began to dream of shaking it all off, the love and the hate, the treachery and the fidelity, the humiliation and the reconciliation, the fear, the reassurance … the whole claustrophobic world of the emotions where truth and falsehood exchange their masks for ever and for ever. I began to conceive of loss as liberation. But only as a moment’s wild surmise, or a sudden failure of instinct in the chase. Meanwhile I heard her say she could find it in her to be sorry for Rickie, under my influence he had lost all sense of right or wrong; and sorry, damned sorry for Madeleine and she had to say so; far be it from her to judge or be censorious, but she simply had to. And revolted as I was by her dishonesty, I felt compunction; she’d gone the whole way to find that the taste of me was ashes. I’d fed her raffish power addiction, her snobbery, her temperament of a good sort cum
procureuse.
The responsibility was mine. I wasn’t in the category she’d so far catered for, poor devil: I hadn’t borrowed her money and drunk her gin and come to her for the abortionist’s address and relied on her to see me through the botched dark deed. I was bound for a private room in the District Hospital: when my time came I’d be safe there with my layette and wedding ring. It was just bad luck that my time was premature; he had less chance by far than the snowborn lambs all gathered in and tended. He was to have saved her: a cottage in the country, a love-child, not her own, to dedicate her life to. The best of her was her nurse-mother instinct, and she’d always wanted to adopt a child. We were to have committed ourselves, somehow, to the future—constructively, religiously you might say. No more anarchy and squalor.