The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-05-28T21:19:27+00:00

Midnight

Emerging from Knightsbridge tube station and exploring in the direction of Harrods, Rickie hit finally upon the street he was almost sure that he was looking for: a brief by-street of miniature late-Georgian houses, half boarded up and shuttered, but still intact from end to end, and agreeable by reason of the compact small-scale yet generous simplicity of its perspective. A slightly soiled bedraggled free-and-easiness had come to overlay—it was Spring, 1944—what must have been a pre-war character of modest domestic elegance. Children were playing hopscotch in the middle of the road; one or two prams were parked upon the pavement; several raffish dogs converged with prurient competitiveness and studied méfiance upon a dustbin; two middle-aged housewives, their heads tied up in kerchiefs, called to one another across the street from upper windows; another, young, trim and pretty, leaned out as he passed to water some hyacinths in a window-box. Her pose, lyrical, devoted, offered to all and no one the charming smile she gave as he caught her eye; presenting him suddenly with an image of romantic decoration; with the forgotten taste of an unthreatened vernal intimacy.

For a moment, in a spirit of almost abstract contemplation, he saw himself anonymously, one of a young couple starting married life on a small income, in a delightful little house. No, he could not put actual names or shapes to the pair whom he envisaged. Without much curiosity he pondered, as he went slowly down examining front doors, whether it could be a symptom of premature senility, this daydreaming habit that was growing on him—if indeed it could be called daydreaming, this recurrent state of—what?—of sleep-walking, this phantom-like observation, fluid, undirected, without personal desire attached to it. Directly he knocked off work it was apt to happen: he became like one waiting in an ante-room, not with particular anticipation and not with apprehension: the state, more, of one to whom waiting has become a habit, a way of life disassociated from its original raison d’être; so that expectation of … whatever it was … summons to present his case, or to hear judgement passed on it, had in course of time evaporated, leaving him with a tenuous internal freedom … Not turning backwards to recapture his own past, but fading out at will, slipping his identity; intently, idly playing with all possibilities, selecting one substitute-identity, then another, to fill out—or scale down—or put a frame round the amorphous semi-transparent mass of low-powered energy that seemed himself. For instance, just now he had been a young man, not recognizably his youthful self, simply a youth in love going eagerly home in the evening to the loved one … as it might be Colin if he survived the war; as it might have been Anthony; or one of those scarcely known friends of his who had written letters of condolence; or any young sailor, solider, airman. Any piece of humanity could invade him like a cloud and like a cloud pass through and out of him.

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