The Echoing Grove Read Online Free

‘The ridiculous education I was given.’
    ‘Mine was the same,’ said Dinah, inexorably mild.
    ‘I could have got a job in the war. I was offered a decent one, in the B.B.C.—translating French—Rickie wouldn’t let me. He said I must stay with the children.’
    ‘He was perfectly right.’
    ‘God knows I worked as hard as any working-class housewife.’ She flushed darkly, to her forehead. ‘I slaved .’
    ‘I bet.’ Dinah was sympathetic.
    ‘What did you do?’
    ‘Oh … various things. Nothing spectacular. Worked in rest centres mostly. Taught some children drawing for a bit; some of the evacuated ones who came back. I had a huge class in the end—in a cellar in Stepney. I enjoyed that. They were brilliant, some of them.’
    Suppressing another burst of querulous resistance to the idea of this huge drawing class, Madeleine merely said:
    ‘You were in London all the time?’
    ‘Yes, right slap through.’
    ‘I suppose you were called up.’
    ‘Would have been.’ Dinah stopped and lit a cigarette. She smokes, thought Madeleine, like a chimney. ‘Being a widow with no home ties. Actually, I volunteered.’
    There was a silence; then the other said nicely:
    ‘You must tell me where your bookshop is. I’d like to come in, next time I’m in London.’
    ‘Yes, do,’ said Dinah, cordial. ‘You look so stunning, you’d raise my prestige.’
    ‘It doesn’t sound—from what you said—as if it needed raising.’
    ‘Then I must have given you a false impression.’ She stopped again on a small bridge with white wood railings to watch a pair of swans glide from the main stream into a meandering reedy willow-bordered backwater. ‘My capacity is a very humble one. I’ve no particular qualifications, worse luck. What I do know I’ve taught myself. At least, Jo started my education …’ The swans slid out of sight, making for some known evening haunt in the creek’s upper reaches. ‘If only,’ she said with sudden eagerness, ‘I could be a whole-time student for a year or two! Go to Oxford or Cambridge. Get a degree. How I’d work! How I’d love it! … I might, you know, now. I might be able to afford it.’ Her lifted profile, regular, delicate, looked rapt.
    They strolled on again.
    ‘What do they pay you in this job?’ said Madeleine.
    ‘Five pounds a week.’
    ‘That’s not all you—what you’ve been living on?’
    ‘No. It comes to a bit more than that. I get a small bonus at Christmas—and a guinea or so for an occasional article here and there. And then of course I’ve still got that hundred a year—at least it’s less now but it does make all the difference: what we both had from Papa when we were twenty-one.’
    Doing sums in her head, Madeleine thought ruefully of the hundred a year. She had forgotten all about it, was uncertain whether it still came in, whether Rickie had long ago reinvested it, or long ago helped her to spend the capital it represented. He had had a regardless way with money in the first years: a lordly way, a generous way, as Dinah might remember … Hush, stop, for shame, she told herself. Here was the truth: Dinah a frugal wage-earner, managing on a few hundreds: she herself comfortably provided for. She had feared a possible clause in Rickie’s will: something left away from his family, for Dinah, something to mark his sense … to say sorry, to say remember, to say love. But no: absolutely nothing.
    The dog bounded back with a stick, and Dinah took it from his jaws and threw it for him, far, like a boy, from the shoulder. She said:
    ‘Seeing that Jo was killed in the Spanish Civil War and not the Second World War, I don’t, of course, get a pension.’
    She seemed to throw the words after the stick, letting them go with simplicity and ease.
    ‘I suppose not,’ murmured Madeleine, thinking this was not the time … All she knew was that in the end Dinah had married a man, a Jew, called Hermann, killed fighting in the International Brigade. ‘My