Free The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann

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