Read Online The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann - Free Book Online Page B

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