The Echoing Grove (7 page)

‘Where did you lunch?’

‘Oh, a dive in the City. The usual one.’

‘With anybody?’

‘No one in particular. I saw one or two familiar figures along the bar.’

Something had happened, she was certain of it. He was lying or prevaricating.
Her
touch was on him once again. He’d had a letter? Seen her? … Don’t question, don’t examine. Behave as if it was only what, after all, it might be: a passing mood of depression, a breath coming up again out of the buried day, as it was bound to still from time to time. These things took time; and less than a year had passed. Poor Rickie. Must be kind, patient, wifely. Most unfortunate, infuriating, that it should happen tonight, when things had gone so smoothly now for weeks and weeks. Clara would spot trouble in a trice. Why could men never put a good face on? If they were tired they yawned in your face, if they were depressed they glowered: women were expected to lump it.

It was a party of eight: besides their host and hostess and themselves there were the Wainwrights—three couples paired off in matrimony at about the same time, still living in wedlock, their offspring roughly parallel in age and number. The fourth pair, Jack Worthington and one Mrs Enthoven, were both recently divorced and about to marry one another. Jack and Rickie, each in his different way, wore the insignia of adulterous romance; in the case of Rickie a highly extravagant embarrassing affair, not easy to swallow or explain away. But it was over, all hushed up. Madeleine seemed to have played her cards with dignity and skill—one had to hand it to her. As for old Jack, his marriage had come unstuck by unspectacular orthodox degrees, to nobody’s surprise or great distress. The point of interest was that he had picked on an outsider, an unknown quantity, for his second venture. This divorced woman was American. He had met her, fallen head over heels in love, in New York last year. She was a quietly dressed brown-haired woman in the middle thirties, with a subdued voice that now and then seemed to curl round and echo in her throat, with eyes and jaw both slightly protuberant: large wide-set brilliantly grey eyes, lips full and just not closing over strong regular teeth. She drank one cocktail and no more, sat trimly in her place listening with unaffected interest and composure while, amiably neglecting her, the stranger, in the English way, the rest of them gossiped together and exchanged the customary group badinage. When she did interpose remarks they were formal and courteous, also trenchant; they and her rare questions seemed to have a faint twist to them, as if with a little spur—or a little curb—she might go further, verbally, than social basic. All this the English wives were to tell each other afterwards; agreeing also that at first they had thought her plain and a bore, but they weren’t so sure after all, there was something about her—personality … or sex appeal perhaps? Clara said Tim had not thought her plain; neither, said Mary Wainwright, had Sandy: not that he ever noticed people much. Had Rickie given an opinion? Well, Rickie hadn’t altogether taken to her, but he’d agreed with Madeleine that she had
something.

It struck Madeleine almost at once what it was that this woman had: while eating salmon
mousse
to be exact, and looking across the table at Rickie and Mrs Enthoven sitting side by side. It struck her that the quiet creature was looking steadily at him with luminous myopic orbs and parted lips; and that she was formidable; and that Rickie was half turned in his chair towards her, with that look … abstracted and yet concentrated, drowning a blind stare in hers. Here it was again, the same thing over again: this one could do what the other one did, had done under one’s eyes in other rooms, at other dinner tables; shamelessly, unexceptionably; drawing a charmed circle round one other and herself, pulling in whomsoever she chose to pick on—beside her or across the table or across the room—by the force of the current she switched on and caused to flow between them, while she searched, probed, provoked him with her curiosity … with an idea, always a cold idea, a subject—politics, books, art, sex, religion, science, business, law, psychology: whatever she had to find out, whatever would engross him while she calculated and drove the hot naked under-cover bargain.

Rickie’s face was stripped and at the same time utterly obscured. He was lost once more in a face,
the
face, searching this one’s image for another,
the
other,
the mysterious one.
They were saying it, the essential nameless thing, exchanging recognition, slipping the password. If one were to say casually to him later: ‘You seemed to be having an absorbing conversation at dinner with Jack’s girl friend. What was it about?’ he would say: ‘Absorbing? Was it? I can’t remember—you know I never can. It can’t have been anything in particular.’

‘What have you lost?’ The low voice of this Mrs Enthoven penetrated his ear with such curious force that it seemed to start a reverberation in his head. He continued to stare at her, struck dumb. Then he said:

‘Nothing in particular.’ And after a moment: ‘Why did you say that?’

She replied without hesitation: ‘You’ve got a kind of a look on your face as if you were wondering where you could possibly have left something or other. Where was it you last had it?’

‘Oh … Like a dog with a buried bone, you mean. I know exactly.’ He uttered a laugh. ‘What a perspicacious woman you are. There may be something about me that forcefully suggests a canine simile. It’s happened before.’

‘It was your simile, not mine. Myself I wouldn’t have selected it.’

Again he searched her face: composed, not looking amused. He said rather aggressively:

‘Don’t you ever laugh? I know someone else who doesn’t laugh—at least, not at my jokes, not latterly. This person
makes
jokes though, very witty ones, at other people’s expense sometimes—not always. Do you? I suspect you do. Though over here we tend to think Americans a bit solemn, much as we love them. On the serious side. What would you say to that?—as a generalization …’

Turning to Jack Worthington on her right, Madeleine broke into effusive chatter. Revelling in his new and now drink-heightened happiness, he answered rather absent-mindedly, with bantering affection, while his eye wandered across the table, approving with a fatuous beam the spectacle of his love and his best friend getting on so famously together. For he’s a jolly good fellow and she’s a jolly good fellow, God bless us one and all … It would be shocking indeed, thought Madeleine, when it began to occur to him … when his genial coarse-veined face would stiffen, his eyes go thick.

‘But
don’t
you remember?’ she persisted.

‘Mm?’ He looked at her, indulgent.

‘That time at Oxford, when you and Rickie fought?’

‘
Fought?
Me and Rickie? My dear girl, you dreamt it. Or you’re pulling my leg—eh?’

‘No, no. I don’t know
why
you fought and Rickie swears he can’t remember, but it’s true and we’ve often laughed about it. Why, it was one of your landlady’s classic sagas. She told it to me. Rickie took me to Oxford when we were engaged and we went to call on her and she came out with the whole thing.’

‘Good lord! It does ring a bell. Good lord, yes! We were as tight as ticks …’

‘And she came in with a tray of crocks and found you locked in a wrestling bout without so much as a stitch of underwear between you. And it gave her such a turn her inside started to work like ginger beer, not that she hadn’t seen plenty of young fellows up to their larks and it would take more than seeing them at it in the birthday suits to upset her at her time of life, but you were so deathly quiet the both of you and heaving to and fro like a blessed football scrum and never so much as noticed the door open, it didn’t seem natural; and she was just a-wondering what to do for the best when she heard Mr Masters mutter:
“I’ll
get you this time, Worthington, if I have to swing for it.”
So she says to herself: “Then it’s murder, is it?” and she lets out a screech to wake the dead and bless her if you didn’t drop your hands off one another like as if it was the Sunday joint you’d been caught stealing, and so she says: “Oh Mr Worthington, Mr Masters, sirs! Think of your dear mothers! Turn the other cheek! Let bygones be bygones be your motter! Don’t let the sun go down on it, I beg.” And Mr Masters he says: “Oh, Mrs Upex,” he says, as cool as a cucumber, “is that you? I never heard you. I do sincerely trust,” he says, “you’ll accept our humble apologies and overlook the shock to your feelings.” Oh, you were a precious pair of rascals the both of you, but mind you, always the perfect gentlemen …’

‘I guess I was impertinent,’ said Mrs Enthoven from the middle of her throat, fixing Rickie with a steady gaze.

‘Dearest Mrs
Discoboles!’
He waved a hand across her eyes. ‘Relax, relax! It is I who should feel remorse. Truth to tell, this pain makes me feel a trifle snappish.’

‘What kind of a pain?’

‘A pain I have sometimes. We all have one sometimes, somewhere, don’t we? Where do you get yours?’

‘I guess you shouldn’t be here.’

‘Not here? But I must be here. This is a big evening, all sorts of celebrations. Hymen in the ascendant. We’re gathered together here to drink to you and Jack. A blood-curdling rumour reached me I was to be the hero. False, thank God! Sh! Forget I mentioned it. Jack’s my best friend. He’s an extraordinarily nice chap. Nobody knows how nice, except you and me, it’s not on the outside, bless his heart. I hope you’re going to be very happy.’ He smiled, an extremely winning smile.

‘Thanks, Rickie. I hope you are too,’ said Mrs Enthoven, not smiling.

‘Ah, you’ve been tipped the wink.’ Brusquely he turned a shoulder on her.

Driving on through Jack’s hilarious explosions, observing the moment when Rickie turned suddenly, with a sharp jerk of his head, away from his unsmiling neighbour, Madeleine wound up:

‘Kind Mrs Upex, I think she wanted to warn me, as one woman to another, that I was taking on a dangerous character.’

‘A dangerous—old Rickie …’ Jack mopped his eyes. ‘Ah well, perhaps she was right. Perhaps he is.’ Hey, mind your step, he told himself—thin ice. ‘Ah well! Boys will be boys, you know,’ he added feebly, hastily. ‘Not that I wouldn’t take my dying oath old Rickie and I never fell out for a single moment from the day we met.’

‘You can both swear on your grandmothers’ graves, I’ll never believe you’ve forgotten the incident. It was terribly disgraceful, wasn’t it?
—
and you’re too ashamed to tell me.’

‘Rickie!’ called Jack across the table; and immediately Rickie leaned forward with an expression of intense willingness to join in the fun. ‘Help here! Your wife—I’ve done my best, but women, you know
—
tenacious animals. We’re ruined. It’s out at last.’

‘It is, is it?’ His grin stretched wary, false, too broad.

‘There, you see!’ cried Madeleine. ‘He does know. He doesn’t even ask
what’s
out at last.’

‘Matter of principle,’ countered Rickie. ‘Always plead guilty. Th’ charge is immaterial. Takes th’ wind out o’ their sails.’ He was rather drunk. Dilated, his eyes thrust at Madeleine, then from face to face, then back at her. He looked—not a tenacious animal but a tricky, nimble-witted one; and caged up; and dangerous perhaps. ‘United we fall, Jack,’ he said; then turning to Mrs Enthoven, added politely: ‘Old English custom.’

‘Stout fellow! Right, Madeleine, you’ve asked for it! What was it now? Remind me. What were my exact incriminating words?’

In a hush of suspended laughter everybody turned waiting upon Madeleine to elucidate the joke. She paused, sank her voice theatrically, put the words across in all their ludicrous ferocity:
‘I’ll
get you this time, Worthington, if I have to swing for it.’

How they laughed, what a sparking and crackle developed across that dinner table on that evening—Rickie the generator, the centripetal force. After his death, separated as they all were then by time and war, and too much preoccupied to miss and mourn him as long, as deeply as they would have wished, they did, each one of them, recall his mood that evening: never more lively and preposterous, just like his old self at school, at Oxford, or in his days of a young bachelor about town. Come to think of it, none of them could remember ever seeing him like that again. As the years passed he had seemed to draw more and more into his shell, to lose his gaiety and resilience. He must have taken a bad knock, worse than he ever let on to anybody, over that rotten business. As Tim said to another chap, walking from the House of Commons across the park towards their club one raid-free evening, when it came to women old Rickie, bless his heart, had always lacked any instinct of self-preservation. The other chap remarked that Tim surprised him. To a mere acquaintance like himself, a charmer such as Rickie had appeared eminently fitted, in the matter of women, to get away with anything. He could think of three women, straight off, who’d been in love with him, or said so. Yes, agreed Tim, they said so freely: he was that sort of chap—the sort women didn’t mind people knowing they’d adored. Had a lot of loves? Tim supposed not, on the whole. He was kindness itself; he had a conscience; in spite of … And then … Tim fell silent, pondering; could not and did not want to express what else he had in mind. For instance, that evening … only the pitch and tempo, rapid, pulsating, stuck in his memory; together with the feeling beyond all qualification or rational analysis that then and always Rickie had been—how to put it?—not exactly reckless but—but any moment about to do himself no good; clearly though indefinably less able than most chaps to—to take calculations and precautions, less concerned than most to provide adequate safeguards against pain to himself. Women would love him for that, but on the other hand …

And roughly at the same moment, in a Tuscan hill town, it came over Jack grieving for his oldest and best-loved, his irreplaceable friend, how it had struck him that evening that the dear old fellow was sailing a bit near the wind; that it didn’t seem altogether up his street to indulge in such uproarious fooling: almost defiant once or twice, almost—if not quite unkind—antagonistic. Then suddenly, to his surprise, with a gush of nostalgic tenderness Jack remembered the thrilling peace and joy that had invaded him when, in the midst of it all,
Georgie
had met his eye and offered him a smile, such a smile, the one he’d waited for, he knew then, all his life; sealing an absolutely secure forever understanding and devotion. Also it came sharply back to him that later, after they got home,
Georgie
had remarked to him: ‘That man is a tragic figure—or pretty nearly.’ ‘Rickie tragic? What rubbish, silly girl.’ But she was always one to get her teeth into a notion and hang on. She had persisted in her cross-questioning and analysis, listening with extreme attention to his rather lame account of Rickie’s recent troubles. He could see her now, lying on the sofa, drinking iced water, himself holding and stroking her small feet in his lap. He could hear her slow voice say: ‘Well, I guess you’re wrong. It’s not all over. I’d say there was considerable trouble going on in the Masters’ home right now.’ Nonsense again: Rickie had told him months ago that it was finished; and that from Rickie meant it
was
finished. This girl now, she said, this sister-in-law, was she truly that much of a bitch? Absolutely: one of those real deep ones, out to play a lone game and play the innocent and stop at nothing. Hard as nails. He could see
Georgie
considering this judgement carefully. Did he think, she’d asked suddenly, Rickie might end up an alcoholic? No, he did
not.
Because, she went on unruffled, if he were one of her own countrymen that would with all due modesty be her prognosis; but it was on the cards that she did not yet grasp the psychology of Englishmen. She’d heard tell that over here some of these immature romantics rode it out. At that he shook her and kissed her and told her to stop being a little Yankee smart-puss. There was quite a lot about Englishmen she hadn’t grasped yet, and she’d talked quite enough for one night.