The Echoing Grove (41 page)

‘Did he explain the situation?’ asked Dinah, after waiting for a moment.

‘Oh yes. He was quite collected. Said he’d intended to spend the afternoon writing me a letter. That’s one blessing—I shan’t have to open
that
and read it … Oh, it’s just as I—as we supposed. He’s found somebody else. It’s happened before, as I told you, several times: once I found out, once I suspected and he lied to me, once I never had an inkling—and he told me afterwards. But I stopped minding when he was unfaithful—at least minding
horribly;
perhaps partly because he never for a moment stopped wanting
me
;
partly because I thought in the end he might learn to be faithful—choose it, if I left him free. It seemed a sort of compulsive thing—having to make someone fall for him, or having to fall for someone, some ghastly girl who was after him. But only occasionally. And it never lasted any time. He was never serious about anybody else. He always said he knew he’d be bound to come back … However he says this time it’s different. He won’t come back.’ Pronouncing the words, she totally rejected them. It came to her again, not in a flash but in a kind of dark electric storm that stabbed her nerve ends, that he had telephoned, of course, to say it was all untrue, he must come back. This must be fought. She brought out breathlessly: ‘He said this time his feelings may well be permanent.’

‘What a pedantic boring thing to say.’

‘It’s the way he’s inclined to talk when he’s being cornered about his feelings. He puts on a clipped donnish sort of voice … Still,’ she said, stubbornly turning the screw, ‘he wasn’t like that today. He wasn’t superior or huffy or dramatic … or apologetic either. Just unapproachable.’ She shuddered. ‘He wanted to give me a friendly good-bye kiss but I couldn’t—I was afraid if I touched him I’d find he was made of concrete.’ A recollection struck her and she uttered the same weak laugh. ‘He kept on looking in the glass so I knew it was Jocelyn. It’s one of his habits. As if he was watching himself and wondering who he was.’

Dinah exclaimed abruptly: ‘Rob did
that.’
Adding, ‘Someone I used to know. Very disquieting habit.’

‘That young man—the one I met? Wasn’t his name Rob? That time I came to your flat …?’

‘Oh yes. Funny, I’d forgotten.’

‘I’ve never forgotten. I often used to wonder … what happened to him?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Dinah. She took the steaming kettle and filled first Madeleine’s hot-water bottle, then her own. ‘He joined the Navy—killed in the Battle of Narvik. I only heard afterwards, by chance.’

‘It’s funny you should say that about looking in the glass. Something about Jocelyn always reminded me of him—I can’t think why, they weren’t a bit alike. You may think it mad considering I only saw him once for a few minutes … but you talked about him afterwards …’

Dinah added briefly: ‘It might be there was a likeness.’ One eyebrow lifted. She screwed in the caps of the bottles and shook out a few spilt drops. ‘This girl—does he propose to marry her?’

‘He says so.’ Madeleine looked bewildered. ‘It’s crazy. He hardly knows her. He only met her a few weeks ago.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’

‘Only what he told me today. She works in some publisher’s office. She’s twenty-seven.’

‘What’s her name?’

Painfully she pronounced it. At once the obscure amorphous image advanced itself, became consolidated.

Dinah’s eyebrows shot up again. ‘How odd,’ she said in a casual voice. ‘I’ve met her.’

Another step—no, a leap forward, terrible, the spring in the dark in the jungle.

‘You
haven’t,
have you? How incredible.’
Don’t tell me, don’t describe.
‘What is she like?’

‘Oh, I scarcely know her. I came across her a few years ago. She came in on a campaign about some Spanish political prisoners I was helping to organize.’

‘I see. How very interesting. He told me she was—very serious, progressive … public-spirited.’

‘Oh well …’ She made an equivocal grimace. ‘Interested, certainly, in publicity. I can’t say she struck me as a girl to go to town on. I rather think I didn’t take to her.’ She frowned, as if aiming at disinterested accuracy. ‘Enthusiastic. Not amusing or amused. Enlightened more than intelligent … and making heavy weather of it. Ambitious—yes.
Frank
…
Steel-true wanton, I rather thought. Well-developed figure, trinkets, head scarves, cheek-bones, on the grubby side.
New Statesman
girl. Not
nasty
.’

‘She sounds
appalling
!’

‘N-no.’ Dinah shrugged. ‘Just not our sort.’

‘He told me she wanted so much to meet us …’

‘Ah, self-abnegation!—yes, that fits. She’d serve her Man. Total Acceptance—conflicts, impotence, neurotic drinking bouts—all the works.’ Her lip curled. She added bitterly: ‘Oh, she’s a piece of cake for a modern hero.’

‘Do you know what he said? He said he saw no reason why we shouldn’t go on seeing one another
—from time to time
.’

‘How very common.’ She advanced briskly, nursing her hot-water bottles, handed one to Madeleine. ‘What did you say to that?’

‘Nothing.’ She shook her head; went on feebly, shaking it; then said as if concluding: ‘Well, if that’s what he thinks, if that’s how they’ve fixed it between them, if that’s the sort of person he wants—prefers …’

But it would not do. She heard her own voice, female, vindictive, counterpointing the spinsterish asperity of Dinah’s, stridently vocalizing love’s degradation and betrayal. She said, despairing: ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t try. It doesn’t really help.’

‘But I must! How can I possibly get through it otherwise?’

Taking the almost untouched soup bowl from the table, Dinah poured its contents into a large enamel dish, blew on it, tasted its temperature with one finger and set it down before the dog.

Watching him drink it splashily, she said: ‘I only meant don’t try to analyse it now. It’s too soon. One can’t see the wood for the trees at first, and one goes stumbling about … Still, one has to do that, of course. Whatever I say now you’ll think I’m wrong. And I may be.’

‘He said he still loved me.’

‘I expect he means it.’

‘Then how can he …? We were so happy—not always, but most of the time, as he agrees. Do I understand
nothing
?
He says I don’t. Does it always wear out? Are men bound to get sick of making love to the same woman, even if it’s—if it seems to her—very successful? Is that all there is to it?’

Glancing at the childishly quivering face, Dinah said with pity and kindness:

‘It’s not all there is to it by any means; but it does seem almost insoluble. I can’t help thinking it’s particularly difficult to be a woman just at present. One feels so transitional and fluctuating … So I suppose do men. I believe we
are
all in flux—that the difference between our grandmothers and us is far deeper than we realize—much more fundamental than the obvious social economic one. Our so-called emancipation may be a symptom, not a cause. Sometimes I think it’s more than the development of a new attitude towards sex: that a new gender may be evolving—psychically new—a sort of hybrid. Or else it’s just beginning to be uncovered how much woman there is in man and vice versa.’ She pondered. ‘Perhaps when we understand more, unearth more of what goes on in the unconscious, we shall manage to behave better to one another. It’s ourselves we’re trying to destroy when we’re destructive: at least I think that explains the people who never can sustain a human relationship. It’s not good and evil struggling in them: it’s the suppressed unaccepted unacceptable man or woman in them they have to cast out … can’t come to terms with.’

‘Did that friend of yours, that psychologist, teach you that?’

‘That’s why when each time the destruction is accomplished, they seem to us so calm. It’s a kind of death.’

‘That doctor—he was one, wasn’t he?’ insisted Madeleine. ‘I remember him too, that day. I met him on the stairs.’

‘Oh yes, so you did,’ said Dinah vaguely.

‘I can’t remember his name. You talked about him afterwards—about his theories.’

‘Did I? … Oh, we used to have discussions. He didn’t
teach
me.’

‘I thought he looked as if he might be mad, a little. Do you still see him?’

‘No. He died years ago.’

‘Everybody’s dead or mad. Everybody’s going mad. Cracking up. Going out of control. Perhaps everybody
will
go mad and that’s how the world will end.’

Nursing their hot-water bottles, they stood facing one another across the kitchen table. The powerful lamp in the ceiling poured light down on to their hair, the pale, the dark brown, both sprinkled with grey but abundant, burnished, soft still; and on to their down-bent faces, both faintly lined and sunken, firm in bone structure; one tense with pain, the other with concentration.

‘Murder in the air,’ said Madeleine in a twanging thread of voice. ‘It did seem like that. It
was
like that—the aura of it, the smell … Such a calm face. Fixed. It may have been himself he was destroying, but it felt to me like me. Not that he was violent in any way—quite the contrary … He went out before me and left me there—he said she was expecting him. And before he went he looked at himself in the glass above the fireplace. Murderers are vain, aren’t they? Narcissistic. Have you ever come across one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rob?’

‘Rob did try to strangle me once.’

‘You mean really?—physically?’ Madeleine’s head lifted sharply; her eyes lost their film of beaten apathy.

‘Oh yes. Not in cold blood—or hot blood either. In his sleep. At least I think so—half asleep—I’ve never been quite sure.’ A smile, amused, sardonic, stretched her mouth. ‘I was asleep, anyway, having an appalling dream that I was bursting: and then I woke up to find his fingers were round my throat, I was having the breath choked out of me. What a grip!—he had very powerful hands. I remember thinking what a horrible corpse I was going to make—swollen, black in the face. I couldn’t even get a squawk out, but I struggled and clawed. And then just when I thought I was done for he suddenly pulled his hands off.’

She heard again the harsh gasp, felt the leap he made away from her side, out of the bed; watched him, by first dawn light, dress quickly, noiselessly, open the dressing-table drawer, find her notecase, take the whole wad of notes out and pocket them. He looked about him. He looked into the dressing-table mirror, smoothed his hair, pocketed the comb, picked up the watch. He looked at his hands. He went out of the room, not once looking at the bed.

‘Were you terrified?’

‘Not really. I think my main feeling was: “This is it.” I suppose I’d been expecting it … Oh, he wasn’t a real killer. Lots of respectable couples have these nerve storms, I’m sure.’ She returned to the sink and gave a smart turn to the handle of a dripping tap. ‘Some women do get drawn into the aura, though. They get to be murderees. You can smell it in them. I know what you mean. I was pretty rank myself once. There’s nothing like that about you, don’t worry. You’re as fresh as a field of clover. But you need to get some sleep.’ Summoning the somnolent Gwilym, now toasting his stomach before the stove, she went to the door and stood with her finger on the switch till Madeleine joined her. ‘I love your kitchen,’ she said, putting it in darkness. ‘I love all this house.’

Going ahead upstairs, she opened Madeleine’s bedroom door, ushering her within. The electric fire was on, the big bed turned down.

‘Shall I run you a bath?’ she said. ‘I had mine after tea.’

‘No. I’ll have one, but I’m not quite ready. I’m probably going to telephone. Thank you for everything. Good night. I’m glad you’re here.’

It was nearly an hour later when, reading in bed, her ears on the alert, Dinah saw her door open. Madeleine, in a blue dressing-gown tied with a rose-coloured sash, stood on the threshold.

‘Come in.’ Dinah sat up briskly. ‘Sit down.’ She moved her feet and Madeleine came to sit down on the end of the bed.

‘I thought I’d tell you,’ she said. ‘I’ve rung him up.’

‘Oh, you did. You got him?’

‘Yes. He was asleep but … It was all right, he was quite on the spot. Not drunk.’

‘It
was
him who telephoned?’

‘Yes, it was.
He
.’
A smile touched the corner of her lip.

‘Had he got anything special to say?’

‘He’d been worrying.’

‘Just as you thought.’

‘Yes. No, not really. Anxious about
me,
he said. Not quite so … Not what I said. Better, I suppose, in a way. And worse, I suppose. I mean, it
is
over.’ Her huge eyes, fixed on the wall, consumed her face. ‘But he wasn’t like stone any more. He was like himself. We were able to talk to one another.’ A long unconscious sigh lifted her breast. ‘He wanted to tell me that he’d been to see her and it’s all fixed up. They’re going to be married as soon as possible. He wanted to tell me that he would always love me. That I could be sure—whether it helped at all or whether it didn’t—that he was thinking about me all the time. It will
not
help, needless to say, it’ll be one of the tortures: it is already. I thought I’d just tell you now, then we needn’t mention it again.’

‘You’ll be glad he said it one day. Sooner than you think perhaps.’

‘That’s what he said. He knows too much, it’s awful. I do see it should be better to feel I never did him any harm.’

‘It will be better.’

‘You do see he isn’t worthless—infantile … Do you? Despising doesn’t help. I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Though it’s only a temporary relief. He thanked me for coming: he said it was the most wonderful of all the things I’d ever done him. He said he was very unhappy.’

‘I do hope so.’

‘But he thought he was going to be very happy.’

‘Well …’ said Dinah. Her voice was non-committal. After a pause she added: ‘I suppose he begged you to be happy too.’

‘Yes. I told him he always seemed to prefer me when I was unhappy.’ She laughed, a dry vestigial sound. ‘That’s true. He was perfect to me when Anthony was killed. And when Rickie …’ Her breath caught. ‘Deplorable, but true. He said he’d never been any use to me. I told him it was no good talking like that, he needn’t falsify … I shan’t. Though of course it would be agreeable to feel I was lucky to get rid of him. Lucky to lose my happiness!’ Her mouth quivered, pale, swollen, ugly without lipstick. ‘And how can he possibly be happy,’ she wailingly protested, ‘with this ghastly girl? Do you think he will be?’