The Comforters

‘I was resting. I’m so tired running backwards and forwards to the country,’ she told Ernest when he was shown up by that nice little man.

For the first few days after the accident, till Caroline was out of her long bruised sleep, Helena had stayed intermittently at a local hotel and at Ladylees with her mother. She had been watchful, had said nothing to upset the old lady. Once in the night she had turned it over in her mind to have it out with Louisa — Mother, I’m driven mad with anxiety over this accident, I can’t be doing with worry on your account as well. Laurence told me … his idea … your gang … diamonds in the bread … tell me, is it true or not? What’s your game … what’s your source of income …?

But supposing there was nothing in it. Seventy-eight, the old woman. Helena considered and considered between her sleeps. Suppose she has a stroke! She had refrained often from speaking her mind to Louisa in case she caused the old lady a stroke, it was an old fear of Helena’s.

So she said nothing to upset her, had been more than ever alert when, on returning to the cottage one evening after her hospital visiting, Louisa told her, ‘Your Mrs Hogg has been here.’

Then Helena could not conceal her anxiety.

‘But I sent her away,’ said Louisa, ‘and I don’t think I shall see her again.’

‘Oh, Mother, what did she want?’

‘To be my companion, dear. I am able to get about very nicely.’

‘Nothing worrying you, Mother? Oh, I wish you would let us help you!’

‘My!’ said Louisa. ‘I vow, you are all a great comfort to me, and once the children are recovered we shall all be straight with the world.’

‘Well,’ said Helena, ‘I brought you a present from Hayward’s Heath, I was so happy to see Laurence looking better.’

It was a tin-opening gadget. The old woman got out the tomato basket in which she kept a few handy tools. Helena held the machine against the scullery door while her mother screwed it in place, the old fingers manipulating the screwdriver but without a tremor.

‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ Louisa remarked as she twisted the screws in their places.

‘That will be handy for you,’ said Helena, ‘won’t it?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ Louisa said. ‘Let’s try it now.’ They opened a tin of gooseberries. ‘It was just what I wanted to open my cans,’ said Louisa. ‘You must have guessed. You have a touch of our gipsy insight in you, dear. The only thing, you don’t cultivate it.’

‘Now that’s an exaggeration, really, Mother. Buying you a can-opener doesn’t prove anything specially psychic, now does it?’

‘Not when you put it that way,’ said Louisa.

Helena had already taken advantage of one of her mother’s outings to search the bread bin. There were no diamonds anywhere evident, neither in the bread nor in the rice and sugar tins, nor nestling among the tea nor anywhere on the shelves of the little pantry. There Louisa also kept the sealed bottles and cans of food, neatly labelled, which she canned and bottled herself from season to season.

‘Georgina wasn’t horrid to you, or anything?’ This was Helena’s last try.

‘She is not a pleasant woman by nature. I can’t think why you ever took up with her. I would never have had her in my house.’

‘She’s had a hard life. We felt sorry for her. I don’t think she can do any harm. At least … well, I think not, do you?’

‘Everyone can do harm, and do whether they mean it or not. But Mrs Hogg is not a decent woman.

Everything stood so quiet, Helena wondered if perhaps Laurence had been mistaken, his foolish letter useless in Mrs Hogg’s hands.

And that was what she told Ernest when he was shown up to Caroline’s flat. She had allowed this hope to grow on her during the weeks following the accident when, sometimes alone, sometimes with her husband, she had motored back and forth between London and the country hospital. Laurence was a case of broken ribs, he could be moved home very soon. Caroline had come round, her head still bandaged, her leg now caged in its plaster and slung up on its scaffold. She had started to make a fuss about the pain, which was a good sign. Everything could have been worse.

‘I doubt very much that there was anything in that suspicion of Laurence’s. It caused me a lot of worry and the accident on top of it. Everything could have been worse but I’m worn out.’

‘Do you know,’ said Ernest, ‘my dear, so am I.’

Those revelatory tones and gestures! — she watched Ernest as he picked up Caroline’s blue brocade dressing-gown with the intention of folding it, helping Helena to pack, but there — before he knew what he was doing he had posed himself before the long mirror, draping the blue stuff over one hip. ‘Sumptuous material!’

Helena surprised herself by the mildness of her distaste.

‘The room is full of Caroline,’ she remarked. ‘I feel that I am seeing things through Caroline’s eyes, d’you know?’

‘So do I,’ said he, ‘now you come to mention it.’

Helena knelt by the large suitcase she had brought. Her fair skin was drawn under its frail make-up.

‘We could make a pot of tea, Ernest. The meter may need a shilling.’

He put on the kettle while she considered his predicament in life. Caroline had always been able to accept his category. It was easier, Helena thought, to accept his effeminacy now that he had given up his vice and had returned to the Church, but even before that Caroline had declared, on one occasion of discussing Ernest, ‘I should think God would say, “Don’t dare despise My beloved freak, My homosexual.”‘

Helena had replied, ‘Of course. But if it goes against one’s very breathing to respect the man —? Oh, love is very difficult.’

‘I have my own prejudices,’ Caroline had said, ‘so I understand yours. Ernest doesn’t happen to be one of mine, that’s all.’

Helena, adrift in these recollections, caught herself staring at Ernest. She lifted the phone, spoke in reply to the housekeeper’s ‘Yes, what number?’ — ‘May we have a little milk, please? We’ve just made some tea and we have no milk.’

Whatever he said caused Helena to exclaim when she had put down the receiver.

‘Rather beastly abrupt that man! I thought him so nice before.’

She apologized for the trouble when the man brought the milk, to which he made no reply at all.

‘The man’s a brute, Ernest,’ she said. ‘He knows the sad circumstances of our being here.’

But she settled down with Ernest now, observing the peculiar turn of his wrist — he showed a lot of wrist — as he poured out their tea. Caroline with her sense of mythology would see in him a beautiful hermaphrodite, she thought, and came near to realizing this vision of Ernest herself.

‘I managed to see Laurence yesterday,’ Ernest said, ‘remarkably well, isn’t he, considering?’

‘Thank God,’ Helena said.

‘He gave me this’ — a red pocket notebook — ‘and told me what he knew about your mother’s friends.’

‘D’you know, Ernest, I don’t think there’s anything to fear. I kept my eyes open those few days I spent at the cottage, but I noticed nothing suspicious. Laurence must have been mistaken, I can’t help thinking. And apparently Mrs Hogg has come to the same conclusion; she actually descended on my mother while I was out. Mother was very calm about it — simply sent her away. I’ve no doubt — though Mother didn’t say so — that Mrs Hogg came about Laurence’s letter.’

‘That’s exactly what I should have thought. Exactly that.’ Ernest was now folding Caroline’s blue dressing-gown, very meticulously. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I happen to know vaguely one of the men in Mrs Jepp’s gang.

‘Oh, who’s that?’

‘Mervyn Hogarth. Eleanor used to be married to him. Now, he’s most odd. Laurence thinks Mrs Hogg may be related to him.’

Helena said it was unlikely. ‘I’ve never heard her mention the name Hogarth.’ She took the notebook from him and turned its pages. The meagre dossier Laurence had prepared had a merciless look of reality. It revived Helena’s fears. She was happiest when life could be reduced to metaphor, but life on its lofty literal peaks oppressed her. She peered at the stringent notes in Laurence’s hand.

‘What do you think of this, Ernest? Is my mother involved or not?’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

‘Oh, she would never say.

Ernest said, ‘Laurence thinks we should investigate. I promised him we would, in fact.’

Helena read aloud one of the unbearable pages of the notebook:

‘Mervyn Hogarth: The Green House, Ladle Sands. Lives with crippled son (see Andrew Hogarth). No servants. Ex-library workshop. Bench tools. Mending (?) broken plaster statuettes. St Anthony. S. Francis. Immac. Concept. — others unrecognizable. No record in S.H. Ex Eleanor.’

‘I can’t make this out,’ she said, ‘broken plaster and the saints — are they Catholics, the Hogarths?’

‘I think not,’ Ernest said.

‘What does “S.H.” stand for?’

‘Somerset House. There’s apparently no record of them there. They may have been born abroad. I shall ask Eleanor, she’ll know.’

‘Laurence has explained all these notes to you?’

‘More or less. Please don’t upset yourself, Helena.’

‘Oh, I did hope there was nothing more to be feared. Explain all this to me, please.’

She kept turning the pages, hoping for some small absurdity to prove the whole notion absurd that her aged mother should be involved in organized crime. She had a strong impulse to tear up the book.

‘There wasn’t time to go through the whole of it with Laurence. He wants me to go and stay nearby for a couple of weeks, so that I can investigate under his supervision and consult him on my daily visits.’

‘No,’ Helena said, ‘that won’t do. We can’t weary Laurence in his state. I want him moved to London at the first opportunity.’

Ernest agreed. ‘It would be very inconvenient for me to leave London at this time of the year. But Laurence was keen. Perhaps there’s some other way —’

Helena looked at Ernest reclining now on Caroline’s divan in such a hollowed-out sort of way. Shifting sand, we must not build our houses on it. But Helena was not sure whether he didn’t possess some stable qualities in spite of the way the family regarded him. She realized her inexperience of Ernest: Caroline had a more lucid idea of him.

‘Of course,’ Helena said, ‘it would cheer Laurence up tremendously, someone visiting him every day. Now that they’re out of danger I can only manage twice a week. Caroline too, you would visit Caroline too?’

‘I’m not sure that I can get away.

‘Ernest, I will pay your expenses of course.’ She was almost glad of his resistance, it proved him to be ever so slightly substantial.

‘If you would,’ he said, ‘it would be a help. But I shall have to talk to Eleanor. This time of year is difficult, and we aren’t doing so well just now.’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t confide in Eleanor.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t mention any family business.’

They talked back and forth until it became needful to Helena that Ernest should go to reside at Hayward’s Heath for two weeks.

‘We must get to the bottom of this intrigue without upsetting my mother,’ she declared. ‘Laurence understands that perfectly. I’m sure his recovery depends on our doing something active. We must be doing. I know you are discreet, Ernest. I don’t want Mother to have a stroke, Ernest. And we must pray.

‘I’ll try to see Hogarth,’ he promised. ‘Maybe I can get him to meet me in London.’

He was pouring out their second cups, with that wrist, of which there was a lot showing, poised in a woman’s fashion which nibbled at Helena’s trust in him.

‘I have no misgivings,’ she declared, ‘I have implicit trust in you, Ernest.’

‘Dear me,’ said Ernest. She thought how Caroline with her aptitude for ‘placing’ people in their correct historical setting had once placed Ernest in the French Court of the seventeenth century. ‘He’s born out of his time,’ Caroline had explained, ‘that’s part of his value in the present age.’ Laurence had said placidly, and not long ago, ‘Ernest never buys a tie, he has them made. Five-eighths of an inch wider than anyone else’s.’

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life. It is possible for parents to be corrupted or improved by their children. Through Laurence, and also of later years through Caroline, Helena’s mental organization had been recast. She was, at least, prepared for the idea that Ernest was not only to be tolerated in a spirit of what she understood as Christian charity, but valued for himself, his differences from the normal. Helena actually admired him a little for what she called his reform. But when he gave up his relations with men she had half expected an external change in Ernest; was disappointed and puzzled that his appearance and attitudes remained so infrangibly effeminate, and she understood that these mannerisms were not offensive to people like Laurence and Caroline. Helena possessed some French china, figurines of the seventeenth century which she valued, but the cherishing of Ernest while he was in her presence came hard enough to present her with an instinctive antagonism; something to overcome.

Ernest had folded while she packed nearly everything. What couldn’t be packed was ready to be carried to the car. ‘Let’s have a cigarette, we’ve worked hard.’

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that machine belongs to Caroline. We had better have the man up to make sure we haven’t left anything of ours, or taken away what’s theirs.’

Ernest, curling himself on a low footstool, lifted the cover off the machine. ‘It’s a tape-recorder. Caroline probably used it for her work.’

‘I have implicit trust in you, Ernest. I’ve come to you before anyone. I don’t want to inconvenience you of course, and if it’s a question of expense —’

‘Thank you, Helena. But I can’t promise — I’ll try of course — this time of year we have our bookings, our classes. Maybe Hogarth will agree to come to London.’

‘I’m so grateful to you, Ernest.’

He fiddled with the tape machine, pressed the lever. It gave a faint whirr and the voice came with an exaggerated soppy yak: ‘Caroline, darling… .

Within a few seconds Helena had recognized Laurence’s voice; a slight pause and it was followed by Caroline’s. The first speech was shocking and the second was nonsense.

Ernest said, ‘Hee, silly little dears.’

Helena lifted her coat, let Ernest help her on with it.

‘Will you send for the man, Ernest? Give him a pound and ask if everything’s all right. I’ll take some of the loose things down to the car. No, ten shillings will do.’

She felt almost alone in the world, wearily unfit for the task of understanding Laurence and Caroline. These new shocks and new insights, this perpetual obligation on her part to accept what it went against her to accept… . She wanted a warm soft bath in her own home; she was tired and worried and she didn’t know what.

Just as she was leaving, Ernest phoning for the housekeeper said, ‘Look, there’s something. A notebook, that’s Caroline’s I’m sure.’

A red pocket notebook was lying on the lower ledge of the telephone table. He picked it up and handed it to Helena.

‘What a good thing you saw it. I’d quite forgotten. Caroline was asking specially for this. A notebook with shorthand notes, she asked for it.’ Helena flicked it open to make sure. Most of it was in shorthand, but on one of the pages was a list in longhand. She caught the words: ‘Possible identity.’

‘This must be connected with Laurence’s investigations,’ Helena said.

She turned again to that page while she sat in the car waiting for Ernest with the bags, but she could make nothing of it. Under ‘Possible identity’ were listed:

Satan

a woman

hermaphrodite

a Holy Soul in Purgatory

‘I don’t know what,’ said Helena, as she put it away carefully among Caroline’s things. ‘I really don’t know what.’

SEVEN

Just after two in the mild bluish afternoon a tall straight old man entered the bookshop. He found Baron Stock alone and waiting for him.

‘Ah, Mr Webster, how punctual you are, how very good of you to make the journey. Come right through to the inside, come to the inside.’

Baron Stock’s large personal acquaintance — though he had few intimate friends — when they dropped in on the Baron in his Charing Cross Road bookshop were invariably greeted with this request, ‘Come to the inside.’ Customers, travellers and the trade were not allowed further than the large front show-place; the Baron was highly cagey about ‘the inside’, those shabby, comfortable, and quite harmless back premises where books and files piled and tumbled over everything except the three old armchairs and the square of worn red carpet, in the centre of which stood a foreign-looking and noisy paraffin stove. Those admitted to the inside, before they sat down and if they knew the Baron’s habits, would wait while he placed a sheet of newspaper on the seat of each chair. ‘It is exceedingly dusty, my dears, I never permit the cleaners to touch the inside.’ When the afternoons began to draw in, the Baron would light a paraffin lamp on his desk: the electricity had long since failed here in these back premises, ‘and really,’ said the Baron, ‘I can’t have electricians coming through to the inside with their mess.’ Occasionally one of his friends would say, ‘It looks a simple job, I think I could fix your lights, Willi.’ ‘How very obliging of you.’ ‘Not at all, I’ll do it next week.’ But no one ever came next week to connect up the electricity.

‘And how,’ said the Baron when he had settled Mr Webster on a fresh piece of newspaper, ‘is Mrs Jepp?’

Mr Webster sat erect and stiff, turning his body from the waist to answer the Baron.

‘She is well I am pleased to say, but worried about her grandson I am sorry to say.

‘Yes, a nasty accident. I’ve known Laurence for years of course. A bad driver. But he’s coming home next week, I hear.’

‘Yes, he had a handsome escape. The poor young lady’s leg is fractured, but she too might be worse, they tell us.’

‘Poor Caroline, I’ve known her for years. Her forehead was cut quite open, I hear.’

‘Slight abrasions, I understand, nothing serious.’

‘Such a relief. I hear everything in this shop but my informants always exaggerate. They are poets on the whole or professional liars of some sort, and so one has to make allowances. I’m glad to know that Caroline’s head has no permanent cavity. I’ve known her for years. I am going to visit her next week.’

‘If you will pardon my mentioning, Baron, if you intend to be in our part of the country, I think at the moment you should not make occasion to call on Mrs Jepp. The Hogarths have had to cancel their trip to the Continent and they frequently call at the cottage.’

‘What was the trouble? Why didn’t they go?’

‘Mrs Jepp had the feeling that the Manders were about to investigate her concerns. She thinks there should be no further trips till the spring. The Hogarths were ready to leave, but she stopped them at the last minute. She is not at all worried.’

‘It sounds fairly worrying to me. The Hogarths do not suspect that I am involved in your arrangements?’

‘I don’t think you need fear that. Mrs Jepp and I are very careful about mentioning names. You are simply Mrs Jepp’s “London connexion”. They have never shown further curiosity.’

‘And the Manders? I suppose Laurence has put them up to something, he is so observant, it’s terrifying. I am never happy when he goes to that cottage.’

‘Mrs Jepp is very fond of him.’

‘Why, of course. I am very fond of Laurence, I’ve known the Manders for years. But Laurence is most inquisitive. Do you think the Manders are likely to suspect my part in the affair?’

‘If anything, their interest would reside in myself and the Hogarths. I do not think you need worry, Baron.’

‘I will tell you why I’m anxious. There is no risk of exposure either from the Hogarths or from the Manders. In the one case they themselves are involved. In the other case the old lady is involved and the Manders would of course wish to hush up anything they found out. But it happens that I am interested in Mervyn Hogarth in another connexion. I have arranged to be introduced to him, and I do not wish to confuse the two concerns.

Mr Webster thought, Ah, to do with the woman, Hogarth’s former wife, but he was wrong.

‘Hogarth is up in London today,’ he informed the Baron, ‘I saw him on the train, but I thought best to remain unseen.

‘Sure he didn’t see you? No chance of his having followed you here out of curiosity?’

‘No, in fact I kept him in sight until he disappeared into a club in Piccadilly. Ho, ho, Baron.’

He handed the Baron a small neat package. ‘I had better not forget to give you this,’ he said, still chuckling in an old man’s way.

The Baron opened it carefully, taking out a tin marked in Louisa Jepp’s clear hand, ‘Soft herring roes.’

‘Mrs Jepp was particularly anxious that you should eat the actual herring roes,’ Mr Webster said. ‘She bade me say that they are very nourishing and no contamination can possibly arise from the other contents of the tin.’

‘I shall,’ said the Baron, ‘I shall.’

He slid the tin into his brief case, then opening a double-locked drawer took out a bundle of white notes. These he counted. He took another bunch and did likewise, then a third; from a fourth lot he extracted a number of notes which he added to the three bundles. He replaced the remainder of the notes in his drawer and relocked it before handing the bundles to Mr Webster. Then he wrote three cheques and handed them over.

‘They are dated at three-weekly intervals. Please check the amount,’ he said, ‘and then I will give you this good strong envelope to put them in.’

‘Much the safest way,’ said Mr Webster as he always did, referring, not to the envelope but to the method of payment. ‘Much the safest in case of inquiries,’ he added as always.

When this business was done, and the notes packed into their envelope and locked away in Mr Webster’s bag, the Baron said, ‘Now, a cigar, Mr Webster, and a sip of Curaçao.’

‘Very well, thank you. But I mustn’t delay long because of the time of year.’

The shop door tinkled. ‘Tinkle,’ said the Baron, and rising, he peered through a chink in the partition that separated the grey-carpeted front shop from the warm and shabby inside. ‘A barbarian wanting a book,’ the Baron remarked as he went forth to serve his customer.

Returning within a few seconds, he said, ‘Do you know anything of diabolism?’

‘I’ve seen witchcraft practised, many times in the olden days; that was before your time, Baron; mostly in South American ports.’

‘You are a sail-or,’ said the Baron. ‘I have always thought you were a sail-or.’

‘I was a merchant seaman. I have seen witchcraft, Baron. In those countries it can be fearful, I can tell you.’

‘I am interested in diabolism. In a detached way, I assure you.’

‘Ho, I am sure, Baron. It isn’t a thing for a temperate climate.’

‘That is why,’ said the Baron, ‘I am interested in Mervyn Hogarth. You would call him a mild and temperate man?’

‘Well, Baron, he doesn’t say much though he talks a lot. Myself I don’t care for him. But Mrs Jepp tolerates, she tolerates. She is thinking perhaps of the poor son. This trading of ours, it gives him something in life. Poor lad, poor lad.’

‘Would it surprise you, Mr Webster, to know that Mervyn Hogarth is the foremost diabolist in these islands?’

‘I should never have thought of the man as being foremost in anything.’

‘How does he strike you, tell me?’

‘Between ourselves, Baron, he strikes me, between ourselves, as a cynic, as they say, and a misanthropist. A tedious fellow.’

‘Devoted to his son, though?’

‘I don’t know, I do not. He behaves well to the lad. Mrs Jepp believes, and this is between ourselves, Baron, that he only sticks to the boy in order to spite his former wife. At least that was her impression when she first met them.’

‘This diamond trading was Mrs Jepp’s idea, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh yes. Oh, and she enjoys it, Mrs Jepp would be the last to deny it.’

‘They don’t need money, the Hogarths?’

‘No. Hogarth himself is comfortable. The unfortunate young man does so enjoy evading the customs, Baron.’

The Baron put a finger to his lips with a smile. Mr Webster lowered his voice as he thanked his host for the replenishment of his glass.

‘Evading the customs has made a great difference to young Andrew Hogarth. It has given him confidence,’ Mr Webster said in low tones.

‘When Mrs Jepp first suggested this arrangement to me — for it was she, you know, who approached me with the scheme, she came straight in to the shop here a few days after I had met her with Laurence and stated her proposition most admirably; I could see her quality. Well, when she put it to me she added that if I should agree to come in with her, I must undertake not to inquire into the methods used by the more active agents. When I had thought over her suggestion and had satisfied myself that the plan was genuinely and well conceived — allowing for the usual risk which I do not find unpleasurable — I agreed exactly to Mrs Jepp’s terms. I mention this, because frankly I would not be within my rights if I asked you by what means the Hogarths convey their valuables. Up to the past few months I have not been greatly interested in that side of the transactions, but now I am greatly interested because of my interest in the actions of Mervyn Hogarth.’

‘I do not know their method,’ said Mr Webster, and the Baron could not tell if he were speaking the truth or not, so unaltered were his sharp blue eyes.

‘Hogarth is a diabolist. I am intensely interested in Hogarth for the reason that I am interested in the psychology of diabolism. You do not know the madness of scholarly curiosity, Mr Webster. To be interested and at the same time disinterested. …

‘I can well understand it, Baron. But I should not have thought the elder Mr Hogarth indulged in any exotic practices. He seems to me a disillusioned man, far from an enthusiast.’

‘That is the interesting factor,’ said the Baron excitedly. ‘From all I have discovered of the man’s personality, he is drenched in disillusionment, an intelligent man, a bored man; an unsuccessful man with women, indifferent to friendships. Yet, he is a fanatical diabolist. You will keep my confidence, Mr Webster.’

‘Baron, of course. And now I must be going.’

‘A fanatic,’ said the Baron as he escorted Mr Webster from the inside to the outside. ‘A pity the Hogarths did not go abroad. I would have called on Mrs Jepp. She may have been persuaded to tell me more of Mervyn Hogarth. However, I shall be meeting him myself very soon, I believe.’

‘Good day to you, Baron.’

‘My regards to Mrs Jepp.’ And he added, ‘Be assured, Mr Webster, the risk is neglig-ible.’

‘Oh, Hogarth is not dangerous.’

‘I do not mean Hogarth. I mean our happy trade. We are amateurs. There is a specially protective providence for amateurs. How easily the powerful and organized professionals come to grief! They fall like Lucifer—’

‘Quite so, Baron.’

‘But we innocents are difficult to trip up.

‘I shouldn’t call us innocents. Ho!’ said Mr Webster stepping forth. ‘That’s the point… .’ But by this time the old man had gone out of hearing.

‘I don’t pretend to understand women,’ Mervyn Hogarth stated over the brandy. He looked at his host as if he were not sure he had said the right thing, for there was a touch of the woman, a musing effect in the baby-faced, white-haired man.

‘The lamb was not right or else the sauce, I fear,’ Ernest Manders mused. After all, he had not gone to Sussex. He had contrived a better plan.

‘I take it you are speaking in good faith?’ Mervyn Hogarth was saying.

‘The lamb —?’

‘No, no, the subject we were discussing, I take it —’

‘Do let’s take it that way, Mr Hogarth.’

‘Manders, I meant no offence. I wanted to make my mind clear —only that. It seems to me a definitely odd suggestion to come from Eleanor, she knows my position, definitely.’

‘It was only, you see, that we’re temporarily in a tight place. Baron Stock has withdrawn his support. Naturally Eleanor thought of you. It was a kind of compliment.’

‘Oh, definitely.’

‘And if you can’t, you can’t, that is quite understood,’ said Ernest.

‘Have you approached your brother?’

‘Yes. My brother Edwin is a mystic. He is not interested in dancing and will only invest in that which interests him. But he gave us fifty pounds. Eleanor bought a dress.’

‘I can imagine Eleanor would.’

‘I am myself very detached from money,’ Ernest remarked, ‘that is why I need so much of it. One simply doesn’t notice the stuff; it slithers away.

He sat back in his chair as if he had the whole afternoon. His guest had discovered that the business proposition for which he had been summoned was an unprofitable one.

‘A quarter to three,’ said Mervyn Hogarth. ‘My word, the time does fly. I have one or two things to do this afternoon. People to see. Bore.’

‘There was something else,’ Ernest said, ‘but if you’re rushed, perhaps another time.’

‘Perhaps another time’ — but Mervyn Hogarth did a little exercise in his head which took no time at all, but which, had it been laboured out, would have gone like this:

Fares 13s. but had to come to London anyway; dreariness of food but it was free; disappointment at subject of discussion (Ernest had invited him to discuss ‘matters of interest to you’) but satisfaction about Eleanor’s break with Stock and consequent money difficulties; annoyance at being touched for money but satisfaction in refusing; waste of time but now Manders wants to say something further, which might possibly redeem the meeting or on the other hand confirm it as a dead loss.

The process passed through his mind like a snap of the fingers and so, when Ernest said, ‘There was something else, but if you’re rushed —’

‘Something else?’ Hogarth replied.

‘Perhaps another time,’ Ernest said.

‘Oh, I’m not rushed for the next half-hour. Do carry on.

‘Well,’ said Ernest, ‘it may interest you or it may not. I feel, you know, I’ve brought you up to London on a disappointing inducement — I did think honestly it would please you to be substantially connected with the dancing school — and Eleanor was sure you would — I hope you don’t feel it impertinent on our part.’

‘He is like a woman,’ Mervyn thought. ‘It’s just like lunching with a woman.’ And he assured Ernest that he hadn’t minded a bit: ‘only too sorry I can’t spare a penny. What was the other question you wanted to mention?’

‘Yes, well, that may be of interest and it may not. It’s just as you feel. The lamb was most peculiar, I must apologize. It’s the worst club lunch I do ever remember. I would send a complaint, only I did fire watching with the chef, who is most really nice and almost never has an off day like this.’

‘A very good lunch,’ said Mervyn sadly.

‘Sweet of you to say so,’ said Ernest.

‘This further question —?’

‘Truly you’ve time? I should so like to say a few words, something which you might be interested in. You know my brother Edwin?’

‘I haven’t met Sir Edwin Manders.’

‘He is very rich. You know Helena?’

‘His wife, that is? I know of her.’

‘She’s rather sweet. You’ve met her mother?’

‘As a matter of fact I do know Mrs Jepp. ‘‘Mrs Jepp,’ said Ernest.

‘Fine old lady. Lives quite near my place,’ said Mervyn.

‘Yes, I know that,’ said Ernest. ‘You visit regularly, I hear. ‘‘I hear,’ said Mervyn, ‘that her grandson had an accident.’

‘Only a broken rib. He’s recovering rapidly.’

‘Ah, these young people. I met the grandson.’

‘I know,’ said Ernest.

It was creeping on three o’clock and their glasses had been twice filled. Ernest thought he was doing rather well. Mervyn was hoping against time, but really there was no excuse for prolonging the afternoon. Ernest had made it clear, in the soft mannerly style of pertinacity, that the Manders family had started to smell out the affairs of Louisa Jepp. Mervyn would have liked to hit Ernest for his womanly ways, and he said, ‘I must say, Manders, I can’t reveal any of Mrs Jepp’s confidences.’

‘Certainly not. Are you going abroad soon?’

‘I take it this farce of asking me to lunch in order to ask me for a loan was really intended to create an opportunity to ask —’

‘Oh dear, I can’t possibly,’ said Ernest, ‘cope. I am so — am so sorry about the lunch. “Farce” is the word exactly. I do wish I had made you take duck. Most distressing, I did so think you’d be interested in Eleanor’s academy, it is top-ranking absolutely if she only had the capital. How dire for you, how frightful my dear man, for me.

‘Your questions about Mrs Jepp, I can’t possibly answer them, ‘said Mervyn, looking at his watch but unpurposed, settling into his chair, so that Ernest in his heart shook hands with himself: ‘He is waiting for more questions, more clues towards how much I’m in the know.’ He said to his guest, ‘I mustn’t keep you, then. It’s been charming.’

Mervyn rose. He said, ‘Look here,’ and stopped.

‘Yes?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’ But as he stood on the top doorstep taking his leave from Ernest he said, ‘Tell Eleanor I shall think over her proposition. Perhaps after all I shall think it over and scrape up a little to help her out. But it’s very grim these days, you realize, and I have my poor boy. He’s a heavy expense.

‘Don’t think of it,’ said Ernest. ‘Please don’t dream.’

‘Tell Eleanor I shall do what I can.’

For about four minutes after his guest’s departure Ernest was truly puzzled by these last-minute remarks. Then he sat back in a cushiony chocolate-coloured chair and smiled all over his youthful face, which made his forehead rise in lines right up to his very white hair.

He was in Kensington within half an hour, and at the studio. He saw Eleanor in one of the dressing cubicles off the large upper dancing floor, and pirouetted beautifully to attract her attention.

She sleeked her velvet jeans over her hips, pulled the belt tight as she did always when she wanted to pull her brains together.

‘How did you get on? Anything doing?’

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘He’ll put up the money?’

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘Ernest, what charm you must have with men. I would have sworn you wouldn’t get an old bit of macaroni out of Mervyn, especially seeing I’m to benefit by it. He’s so mean as a rule. What did he say? How did you do it?’

‘Blackmail,’ Ernest said.

‘How did you do it, dear?’

‘I told you. It isn’t certain yet, of course. And yet — I’m pretty sure you’ll get the money, my dear.’

‘How did you manage it?’

‘Blackmail by mistake.’

‘What can you mean? Tell me all.’

‘I gave him lunch. I explained your difficulties. Asked for a loan. He said no. Then I asked him some other questions about something else, which he took to be a form of blackmail. Then, as he was leaving, he succumbed.’

‘What questions — the ones he thought were a blackmailing effort? —What were they?’

‘Sorry, can’t say, my dear. Something rather private.’

‘Concerning me?’ said Eleanor.

‘No, nothing at all to do with you, honestly.’

‘Nothing honestly to do with me?’

‘Honestly.’

Then she was satisfied. Ernest left her intent on her calculations, anticipating the subsidy from Mervyn Hogarth. She sat cross-legged on a curly white rug with pen and paper, adding and multiplying, as if the worries of the past had never been, as if not even yesterday had been a day of talking and thinking about bankruptcy. Before he left she said to Ernest, ‘Don’t forget to draw on expenses for the lunch.’

‘Helena?’

‘Hold the line a minute.’

‘Helena?’

‘Who’s that? Oh, it’s you, Ernest.’

‘I saw Hogarth.’

‘Already? Where?’

‘At my club. For lunch. Frightful serious little man with a Harris-tweed jacket.’

‘Ernest, you are a marvel. You will let me pay for it of course.

‘I thought you might like to know how things went. Such a glum little fellow.’

‘Tell me all. I’m on edge to know.’

‘Laurence is right. There is certainly something going on between your mother and Hogarth.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘He wouldn’t say, of course. But it’s something important enough to make him most unhappy, most eager to appease us. A bleak little bodikin actually. We had such unfortunate food, lamb like tree-bark, no exaggeration. He thinks we know more than we do. That’s one up for us, I feel.’

‘Certainly it is. Can you come right over, Ernest? You could take a taxi.

‘It would cost ten bob.’

‘Where are you speaking from?’

‘South Kensington underground.’

‘Oh well, come by tube if you like. But take a taxi if you like.’

‘I’ll be with you presently.’

While Ernest was telephoning to Helena that afternoon Mervyn Hogarth climbed the steps of a drab neglected house at Chiswick. He pressed the bell. He could hear no sound, so pressed again, keeping his finger on it for a long time. Presumably out of order. Just as he was peering through the letter-box to see if anything was doing inside, the door opened so that Mervyn nearly stumbled over the threshold into the body of the blue-suited shady-looking man with no collar, who opened it.

‘Is Mrs Hogg living here at present?’ Mervyn said.

He was acquainted with the place, Georgina’s habitual residence when in London. He had been to the place before and he did not like it.

On that day Caroline Rose in hospital heard the click of a typewriter, she heard those voices,

He was acquainted with the place, Georgina’s habitual residence when in London. He had been to the place before and he did not like it.

It is not easy to dispense with Caroline Rose. At this point in the tale she is confined in a hospital bed, and no experience of hers ought to be allowed to intrude. Unfortunately she slept restlessly. She never did sleep well. And during the hours of night, rather than ring for the nurse and a sedative, she preferred to savour her private wakefulness, a luxury heightened by the profound sleeping of seven other women in the public ward. When her leg was not too distracting, Caroline among the sleepers turned her mind to the art of the novel, wondering and cogitating, those long hours, and exerting an undue, unreckoned, influence on the narrative from which she is supposed to be absent for a time.

Tap-tick-click. Caroline among the sleepers turned her mind to the art of the novel, wondering and cogitating, those long hours, and exerting an undue, unreckoned, influence on the narrative from which she is supposed to be absent for a time.

Mrs Hogg’s tremendous bosom was a great embarrassment to her —not so much in the way of vanity, now that she was getting on in life —but in the circumstance that she didn’t know what to do with it.

When, at the age of thirty-five she had gone to nursery-govern the Manders’ boys, Edwin Manders remarked to his wife, ‘Don’t you think, rather buxom to have about the house?’

‘Don’t be disagreeable, please, Edwin. She has a fine character.’

Laurence and Giles (the elder son, killed in the war) were overjoyed at Georgina’s abounding bosom. Giles was the one who produced the more poetic figures to describe it; he declared that under her blouse she kept pairs of vegetable marrows, of infant whales, St Paul’s Cathedrals, goldfish bowls. Laurence’s interest in Georgina’s bulging frontage was more documentary. He acquired knowledge of her large stock of bust-bodices, long widths of bright pink or yellow-white materials, some hard as canvas, some more yielding in texture, from some of which dangled loops of criss-cross straps, some with eyelets for intricate tight-lacing, some with much-tried hooks and eyes. He knew exactly which one of these garments Georgina was wearing at any given time; one of them gave her four breasts, another gave her the life-jacket look which Laurence had seen in his dangerous sea-faring picture books. He knew the day when she wore her made-to-measure brassiere provided at a costly expense by his mother. That was about the time Georgina was leaving to get married. The new garment was a disappointment to the children, they felt it made her look normal, only, of course, far more so. And they knew their mother was uneasy about these new shapely protrusions which did so seem to proceed heraldically far in advance of Georgina herself; the old bust-bodices were ungainly, but was this new contraption decent?

‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills,’ little Giles chanted for the entertainment of the lower domestics.

The boys did not share their mother’s view of Georgina’s character. They were delighted when she was to leave to marry her cousin.

‘What’s wrong with her cousin, then?’

‘Be quiet, Laurence, Miss Hogg will hear you.

They had found her to be a sneak, a subtle tyrant. Prep school, next year, was wonderfully straightforward in comparison.

Her pale red-gold hair, round pale-blue eyes, her piglet ‘flesh-coloured’ face: Georgina Hogg had certain attractions at the time of her marriage. Throughout the ‘tragic’ years which followed (for when misfortune occurs to slightly absurd or mean-minded people it is indeed tragic for them — it falls with a thud which they don’t expect, it does not excite the pity and fear of the onlooker, it excites revulsion more likely; so that the piece of bad luck which happened to Georgina Hogg was not truly tragic, only pathetic) — throughout those years since her marriage, Mrs Hogg had sought in vain for an effectual garment to harness her tremendous and increasing bosom. She spent more money than she could afford in the effort — it was like damming up the sea. By that time of her life when she met Caroline Rose at St Philumena’s she had taken to wearing nothing regardless beneath her billowing blouses. ‘As God made me,’ she may have thought in justification, and in her newfound release.

… ‘As God made me,’ she may have thought in justification, and in her newfound release.

‘Bad taste,’ Caroline commented. ‘Revolting taste.’ She had, in fact, ‘picked up’ a good deal of the preceding passage, all about Mrs Hogg and the breasts.

‘Bad taste’ — typical comment of Caroline Rose. Wasn’t it she in the first place who had noticed with revulsion the transparent blouse of Mrs Hogg, that time at St Philumena’s? It was Caroline herself who introduced into the story the question of Mrs Hogg’s bosom.

Tap-tap. It was Caroline herself who introduced into the story the question of Mrs Hogg’s bosom.

Caroline Rose sighed as she lay in hospital contemplating her memory of Mrs Hogg. ‘Not a real-life character,’ she commented at last, ‘only a gargoyle.’

Mervyn Hogarth, when he was admitted to Georgina’s lodgings by the lazy dog-racing son of her landlady, was directed to Georgina’s room. As he mounted the stairs towards it, he heard the swift scamper of mice, as if that part of the house was uninhabited. He knocked and jerked open the door. He saw her presently, her unfortunate smile, her colossal bust arranged more peculiarly than he had ever seen it before — and he had seen it in many extraordinary shapes — all lopsided, one side heaving up and the other one rolling down, for, possibly in the flurry of confronting him, the right shoulder strap of her bodice had snapped.

He took in her appearance without being fully aware of it, so anxious was he to speak his mind, give her warning, and be at peace.

Mrs Hogg said, collecting herself though lopsided, ‘You’re late, Mervyn.’

He sidled into an easy chair while she made to light the gas-ring under the kettle.

‘No tea for me,’ he said. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why you have started interfering. You’ve been to see Mrs Jepp. What’s your game?’

‘I know what yours is,’ she said. ‘Smuggling.’ She sat down in her chair by the window so that the side where her bust-bodice had burst was concealed from him.

‘Mrs Jepp ‘told you that.’

‘Yes, and it’s true. She can afford to be truthful.’

‘Andrew is involved,’ he said.

‘Ah yes, it’s all in keeping, you have ruined Andrew already. It’s only to be expected that you’re making a criminal of him.’

‘Why exactly did you go to Mrs Jepp?’

‘I know I can do her some good if I have the chance. She’s a wicked old woman. But I didn’t know she had got thick with you and Andrew. When she told me “Mervyn and Andrew Hogarth” I was stabbed, stabbed to the heart.’ And taking her handkerchief she stabbed each eye.

Mervyn Hogarth, looking at her, thought, I never pity myself. A weaker mind would be shattered by the perversity of my life. There would be plenty to pity if I were a man who indulged in self-pity.

Georgina was speaking. ‘Bigamy and now diamond smuggling. Diamond smuggling’ — she repeated this crowning iniquity with dramatic contempt, upturning her profile. She looked very like Mervyn in profile.

He determined to frighten her, though he had intended only to warn.

Georgina Hogg had no need to worry about her odd appearance that afternoon, for Mervyn, though he looked straight at her, could not see her accurately. She had stirred in him, as she always did, a brew of old troubles, until he could not see Georgina for her turbulent mythical dimensions, she being the consummation of a lifetime’s error, she in whom he could drown and drown if he did not frighten her.

There was no need for him to fear that the woman profiled in the window would ever denounce him openly for his bigamous marriage with Eleanor.

In their childhood he had watched his cousin Georgina’s way with the other cousins — Georgina at ten, arriving at the farm for the summer holidays with her bloodless face, reddish hair, lashless eyes, her greediness, would tell the cousins, ‘I can know the thoughts in your head.’

‘You don’t know what I’m thinking just now, Georgina.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘What then?’

‘I shan’t say. But I know because I go to school at a convent.’

There was always something in her mouth: grass — she would eat grass if there was nothing else to eat.

‘Georgina, greedy guts.’

‘Why did you swing the cat by its tail, poor creature, then?’

She discovered and exploited their transgressions, never told on them. She ruined their games.

‘I’m to be queen of the Turks.’

‘Ya Georgina lump of a girl, queen of the fairies!’

Even Mervyn, though a silent child, would mimic, ‘I’m to be queen of the turkeys!’

‘You stole two pennies,’ and in making this retort Georgina looked as pleased as if she were eating a thick sandwich. Mervyn, the accused, was overpowered by the words, he thought perhaps they were true and eventually, as the day wore on, believed them.

He had married her in his thirty-second year instead of carving her image in stone. It was not his first mistake and her presence, half-turned to the window, dabbing each eye with her furious handkerchief, stabbed him with an unwanted knowledge of himself.

‘I have it in me to be a sculptor if I find the right medium … the right environment … the right climate … terrific vision of the female form if I could find the right model … the right influences’, and by the time he was forty it became, ‘I had it in me … if only I had found the right teachers.’

By that time he had married Georgina instead of hacking out her image in stone. A mistake. She turned out not at all his style, her morals were as flat-chested as her form was sensuous; she conversed in acid drops while her breasts swelled with her pregnancy. He left her at the end of four months. Georgina refused to divorce him: that was the mistake of marrying a Catholic. Wouldn’t let him see the son; a mistake to marry a first cousin, the child was crippled from birth, and Georgina moved him from hospitals to convents, wherever her various jobs took her. In her few letters to Mervyn, she leered at him out of her martyrdom. He sent her money, but never a message in reply.

At intervals throughout the next twenty years Georgina would put in appearances at the Manders’ house in Hampstead, there to chew over her troubles. Helena hardly ever refused to see her, although she could hardly abide Georgina’s presence. As the years passed, Helena would endure these sessions with her distasteful former servant, she would express banal sympathies, press small gifts into Georgina’s hand and, when the woman had gone, ‘offer up’ the dreary interview for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Sometimes Helena would find her a job, recommending her to individuals and institutes with an indiscriminate but desperate sense of guilt.

‘I am sure you are better off without Mr Hogg,’ Helena would say often when Georgina bemoaned her husband’s desertion.

‘It is God’s will, Georgina,’ Helena would say when Georgina lamented her son’s deformity.

Georgina would reply, ‘Yes, and better he should be a cripple than a heathen like Master Laurence.

That was the sort of thing Helena put up with, partly out of weakness and partly strength.

One day after a long absence Georgina had arrived as of old with her rampant wounded rectitude. On this occasion she kicked the Manders’ cat just as Helena entered the room. Helena pretended not to notice but sat down as usual to hear her story.

‘Lady Manders,’ said Georgina, dabbing her eyes, ‘my son has gone.

Helena thought at first he must be dead.

‘Gone?’ she said.

‘Gone to live with his father,’ Mrs Hogg said. ‘Imagine the deception. That vile man has been seeing my boy in the hostel, behind my back. It’s been going on for months, a great evil, Lady Manders. The father has money you know, and my poor boy, a good Catholic—’

‘The father has taken him away?’

‘Yes. Andrew has gone to live with him.’

‘But surely Mr Hogg has no right. You can demand him back. What were the authorities thinking of? I shall look into this, Georgina.’

‘Andrew is of age. He went of his own free will. I wrote to him, begged him to explain or to see me. He won’t, he just won’t.’

‘Were you not informed by the authorities before Andrew was removed?’ Helena asked.

‘No. It was very sudden. All in an afternoon. They say they had no power to prevent it, and I was in Bristol at the time in that temporary post. It’s a shocking thing, a tragedy.’

Later Helena said to her husband, ‘Poor Mrs Hogg. She had reason to be distressed about it. I wish I could like the woman, but there’s something so unwholesome about her.’

‘Isn’t there!’ he said. ‘The children never cared for her, remember.’

‘I wonder if her son disliked her.’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Perhaps he’s better off with Mr Hogg.’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’

There was only one disastrous event which Georgina Hogg omitted to tell the Manders. That was the affair of Mervyn’s bigamous marriage under the assumed name ‘Hogarth’.

Mrs Hogg shifted from the window to turn up the gas fire. She said to Mervyn, ‘Making a criminal out of Andrew.’ ‘He likes the game.’

‘Bigamy,’ she said, ‘and now smuggling. You may get a surprise one day. I’m not going to sit by and watch you ruining Andrew.’

But he knew, she would never dissipate, in open scandal, the precious secret she held against him. He counted always and accurately on the moral blackmailer in Georgina, he had known in his childhood her predatory habits with other people’s seamy secrets. Most of all she cherished those offences which were punishable by law, and for this reason she would jealously keep her prey from the attention of the law. Knowledge of a crime was safe with her, it was the criminal himself she was after, his peace of mind if she could get it. And so Mervyn had exploited her nature without fear of her disclosing to anyone his bigamy (another ‘mistake’ of his), far less his smuggling activities. It was now three years since Mrs Hogg had made her prize discovery of the bigamy. She had simply received an anonymous letter. It informed her that her husband, under the name of Hogarth, had undergone a form of marriage in a register office with the woman who had since shared his home. Georgina thought this very probable — too probable for her even to confide in Helena who might have made investigations, caused a public fuss.

Instead, Georgina made her own investigations. The letter, to start with: on close examination, obviously written by Andrew. She rejoiced at this token of disloyalty as much as the contents agitated her with a form of triumph.

They were true. Georgina turned up at Ladle Sands, Sussex, where the couple were established, and made a scene with Eleanor.

‘You have been living with my husband for some years.’

‘Quite right,’ said Andrew who was present.

‘I must ask you to leave,’ Eleanor had kept repeating, very uncertain of her ground.

It was as banal as that.

Eleanor left Mervyn Hogg, now Hogarth, shortly after this revelation of his duplicity. She re-enacted the incident many times to the Baron. She made the most of it but her acting ability was inferior to her power of dramatic invention; what Eleanor added to the scene merely detracted from the sharp unambiguous quality of the original which lingered now only in the memories of Andrew and Georgina, exultant both, distinct though their satisfactions, and separated though they were. All the same, the Baron was impressed by Eleanor’s repeated assertion, ‘Mrs Hogg is a witch!’

Georgina wielded the bigamy in terrified triumph. Her terror lest Eleanor should take public action against the bigamist was partly mitigated by the fact that Eleanor had a reputation to keep free of scandal.

‘But my name would suffer more than hers. I’ve always been respectable whereas she’s a dancer,’ Georgina declared on one of her unwelcome visits to Ladle Sands. On the strength of the bigamy she had made free of Mervyn’s house.

‘Moreover,’ she declared, ‘the affair must be kept quiet for Andrew’s sake.’

‘I’m not fussy,’ Andrew said.

‘Imagine if my friends the Manders got to hear,’ Georgina said as she propped a post-card picture of the Little Flower on the mantelpiece.

For a year she made these visits frequently, until at length Mervyn threatened to give himself up to the police. ‘Six to twelve months in jail would be worth it for a little peace,’ he declared.

‘Good idea,’ said Andrew.

‘You are possessed by the Devil,’ his mother told him as she departed for the last time with a contemptuous glance at some broken plaster statuettes lying on a table. ‘Mervyn has taken up modelling, no doubt!’

Mervyn continued to tell himself, as he sat in that room in Chiswick late in the afternoon, that if he were a man given to indulge in self-pity he would have plenty of scope. It was one mistake after another. It came to mind that on one occasion, during his matrimonial years with Eleanor, he had slipped while crossing her very polished dancing floor. Polished floors were a mistake, he had broken an eye-tooth, and in consequence, so he maintained, he had lost his sense of smell. Other calamities, other mistakes came flooding back.

It was not any disclosure of his crimes that he feared from Georgina, he was frightened of the damage she could do to body and soul by her fanatical moral intrusiveness, so near to an utterly primitive mania.

Georgina was speaking. ‘Repent and be converted, Mervyn.’

He shuddered, all hunched in the chair as he was, penetrated by the chill of danger. Georgina’s lust for converts to the Faith was terrifying, for by the Faith she meant herself. He felt himself shrink to a sizable item of prey, hovering on the shores of her monstrous mouth to be masticated to a pulp and to slither unrecognizably down that abominable gully, that throat he could almost see as she smiled her smile of all-forgetting. ‘Repent, Mervyn. Be converted.’ And in case he should be converted perhaps chemically into an intimate cell of her great nothingness he stood up quickly and shed a snigger.

‘Change your evil life,’ said she. ‘Get out of the clutches of Mrs Jepp.’

‘You don’t know what evil is,’ he said defensively, ‘nor the difference between right and wrong … confuse God with the Inland Revenue and God knows what.’ And he recalled at that moment several instances of Georgina’s muddled morals, and he thought again of his mistakes in life, his lost art and skill, his marriages, the slippery day when he broke the eye-tooth and another occasion not long ago when he had missed his travellers’ cheques after spending half an hour in Boulogne with an acquaintance of his youth whom he had happened to meet. Added to this, he had a stomach ulcer, due to all these mistakes. He thought of Ernest Manders, the hush money. He sat down again and set about to defy Georgina.

‘I’ll tell you what has happened thanks to your interference in my affairs. The Manders are on our trail.’

‘The Manders? They dare not act. When I saw Lady Manders about my suspicions she was very very frightened about her mother.’

‘You told Lady Manders? You’ve been busy. No wonder the affair is almost common property.’

‘She was more frightened than grieved, I’m sorry to say,’ Georgina said. ‘She dare not act because of the mother being involved.’

‘The old woman takes a very minor part in our scheme. Do you suppose we put ourselves in the hands of that senile hag?’

‘She isn’t senile, that one.

‘Mrs Jepp has very little to do with us. Almost nothing. The Manders are after us; they intend to make a big fuss. You see their line? — Preying on a defenceless old lady. That was the line Ernest Manders took when I met him today.’

‘Ernest Manders,’ Georgina said, ‘you’ve been seeing that pervert.’

‘Yes, he’s blackmailing us. Thanks to your interference. But I won’t be intimidated. A few years in prison wouldn’t worry me after all I’ve been through. Andrew will get off, I daresay, on account of his condition. A special probationary home for him, I reckon. He wouldn’t care a damn. Our real name would come out of course and you would be called as witness. Andrew doesn’t care. Only the other day he said, “I don’t care a damn”.’

‘You’ve ruined Andrew,’ she declared, as she always did.

He replied: ‘I was just about to take Andrew on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Einsiedeln, but we’ve had to cancel it thanks to your interference.’

‘You go on a pilgrimage!’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you would go on a holy pilgrimage, I don’t believe that.’

Sir Edwin Manders had been in retreat for two weeks.

‘Edwin has been in retreat for two weeks,’ said Helena.

Ernest, dining with her, noticed that she had said this three times since his arrival, speaking almost to herself. ‘I suppose,’ he thought, ‘she must love him,’ and he was struck by the strangeness of this love, whatever its nature might be; not that his brother was unlovable in the great magnanimous sense, but it was difficult to imagine wifely affection stretching out towards Edwin of these late years, for he had grown remote to the world though always amiable, always amiable, with a uniform amiability.

For himself, trying to approach his brother was an unendurable embarrassment. Ernest had decided that his last attempt was to remain the last.

‘A temporary difficulty, Edwin. We had expensive alterations carried out at the studio. Unfortunately Eleanor has no head for business. She was under the impression that Baron Stock’s financial interests in the school were secure from any personal — I mean to say any personal — you see, whereas in fact the Baron’s commitments were quite limited, a mere form of patronage. Do you think yourself it would be a worth-while venture, for yourself, to satisfy your desire to promote what Eleanor and I are trying to do?’ and so on.

Edwin had said, all amiable, ‘To be honest now, Ernest, I have no real attraction to investing in dancing schools. But look, I’ll write you a cheque. You are not to think of repayment. I am sure that is the best way to solve your problem.’

He handed Ernest the slip he had signed and folded neatly and properly. He was obviously at ease in his gesture; nothing in the transaction to cause reasonable resentment but Ernest was in horrible discomfort, he was unnerved, no one could know why.

Ernest began to effuse. ‘I can’t begin to thank you, Edwin, I can’t say how pleased Eleanor …’ What he had meant to say was: ‘We don’t want a gift — this is a business proposition’, but the very sight of his smiling brother blotted out the words.

‘Why, don’t think of it,’ — Edwin looked surprised, as if he had written the cheque a long-forgotten twenty years ago.

Ernest fumbled the gift into his pocket and in his nervousness exaggerated his effeminate movements. Blandly the brother spoke of the ballet, of the famous dancers he had seen; this for goodwill; Ernest knew that his brother had withdrawn for many years since into a life of interior philosophy, as one might say. The arts had ceased to nourish Edwin. It was sweet of him to talk of ballet, but it put Ernest out dreadfully, and altogether he had to go home to bed. Next day he remembered the cheque, looked at it, took it to Eleanor.

‘Fifty pounds! How mean! Your brother is rich enough to invest!’ Ernest was vexed at her tone.

‘Do modify your exclamation marks,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t want to invest in the school, don’t you see? He tried so hard to be nice. Fifty pounds is a generous gift.’

Eleanor bought a dress, black grosgrain with a charming backward swish which so suited her lubricious poise that Ernest felt better. With the money left over from the dress Eleanor paid down a deposit for an amber bracelet.

‘Wouldn’t your brother be dismayed if he knew how his sacred money was being spent?’

‘No, he would not be angry at all,’ Ernest said, ‘not even surprised.’

For the fourth time Helena murmured, ‘Edwin has been in retreat for two weeks.’

‘When he returns,’ Ernest said, ‘you must tell him the whole story, much the best way.

‘First we shall settle the business. I never tell Edwin my troubles until they are over.

‘I feel there is nothing more to worry about. Hogarth was really scared, poor bilious little bloke he was. I pulled a gorgeous bluff.’

‘If he was scared there must be something in our suspicions. Laurence was right.’

‘Does it matter if we never know exactly what your mother’s been doing, so long as we put an effective stop to it?’

‘I should like to know a little more,’ said Helena. ‘But Mother is very deep, Ernest. So deep, and yet in her way so innocent. I must say. I feel it a shortcoming on my part that I can’t accept her innocence without wondering how it works. I mean, those diamonds in the bread, and where she gets her income from. It’s a great defect in me, Ernest, but I’m bound to wonder, it’s natural.—’

‘Perfectly natural, dear,’ said Ernest, ‘and I shouldn’t reproach myself.’

‘Oh you have nothing to reproach yourself about, Ernest dear.’

Ernest had meant to imply, ‘I shouldn’t reproach myself if I were you’, but he did not correct her impression. A light rain had started to pat the windows.

‘Let’s employ a firm of private detectives and be done with it,’ he suggested.

‘Oh no, they might find out something,’ she said quite seriously.

Ernest, who hated getting wet, departed soon after dinner in case the shower should turn into a steady drencher.

He had been gone nearly half an hour and it was nine-thirty, Helena thinking of saying her rosary, and of bed with a hot-water bottle since it was chilly, when the doorbell rang. Presently the middle-aged housekeeper put her head round the drawing-room door.

‘Who is it, Eileen?’

‘Mrs Hogg. I’ve sat her in the hall. She wants to see you. She said she saw the drawing-room light.’ This Eileen knew Mrs Hogg; she was the one whose marriage was long ago precipitated by Laurence, his reading of her love letters. Though she had only recently returned to the Manders’ service after much lively knocking about the world, she retained sufficient memory of her kitchen-girl days and especially of Mrs Hogg to resent that woman’s appearances at the house, her drawing-room conferences with Lady Manders.

‘I was just going to bed, Eileen. I thought an early night —’

‘I’ll tell her,’ said Eileen, disappearing.

‘No, send her up,’ Helena called out.

Eileen put her head round the door again with the expression of one who demands a final clear decision.

‘Send her up,’ Helena said, ‘but tell her I was just going to bed.’ An absurd idea came into Helena’s mind while she heard the tread of footsteps ascending the stairs. She thought, ‘How exhilarating it is to be myself’, and the whole advantage of her personality flashed into her thoughts as if they were someone else’s — her good manners and property, her good health, her niceness and her modest sense and charity; and she felt an excitement to encounter Mrs Hogg. She felt her strength; a fine disregard, freedom to take sides with her mother absolutely if necessary.

It was hardly necessary. Mrs Hogg was docile. She began by apologizing for her previous visit about Laurence’s letter. ‘My nerves were upset. I’d been overdoing things at St Philumena’s. Some days as many as a hundred and thirty pilgrims —’Of course, Georgina,’ Helena said.

Georgina went on to explain that she’d been thinking things over. Clearly, she had misread that letter from Master Laurence. It was all a joke, she could see that now.

‘You never should have read it in the first place. It wasn’t addressed to you.

‘I did it for the best,’ said Mrs Hogg dabbing her eyes.’ And she handed the letter to Helena.

‘What’s this?’ Helena said.

‘Laurence’s letter. You can see for yourself how I was misled.’

Helena tore it in two and tossed it on the fire.

‘I hope you will do nothing more about it,’ Georgina said.

‘About what? The letter is burned. What more should I do about it? —’

‘I mean, about your mother. Poor old lady, I’m sure she’s a holy soul,’ Georgina said, adding, as she watched Helena’s face, ‘at heart.’

The interview continued for half an hour before Helena realized how desperately anxious the woman was to put a stop to all investigations. It was barely a month since Mrs Hogg had descended upon her mother at the cottage. Helena was puzzled by this change of attitude and yet her suspicions were allayed by the sight of Mrs Hogg dabbing her tearful eyes.

‘I’m glad you have come to your senses, Georgina.’

‘I meant everything for the best, Lady Manders.’

‘I understand you called to see my mother. Why was that?’

Georgina was startled. Helena was made aware of one of her suspicions being confirmed: something more than she knew had passed between her mother and Mrs Hogg.

‘I thought she might want a companion,’ Mrs Hogg said feebly. ‘You yourself suggested it not long ago.

Helena felt her courage surge up. ‘You mean to say that you offered your services to Mrs Jepp at a time when you believed her to be a criminal?’

‘A Catholic can do a lot of good amongst wicked people.’

‘My mother is not a wicked person, Georgina.

‘Yes, I quite see that.—’

A knock at the door, and ‘Your bottle is in your bed, Lady Manders. —’

‘Thank you, Eileen.’

Mrs Hogg rose. She said, ‘I can take it, then, that the matter is closed.’

‘What on earth are you worrying about? Of course there is no more to be done,’ said Helena.

‘Thank God! Now I shall feel easy in my mind.’

‘Where are you placed now? Have you got a job?’ Helena said as if by habit.

‘No, Lady Manders. ‘‘Have you anything in mind?’ ‘No. It’s a worry.

‘Come and see me tomorrow at five.’ Before she went to bed Helena rang Ernest. ‘Are you up, Ernest?’

‘No, in bed.’

‘Oh, I’ve woken you up, I’m sorry. ‘No, I was awake.’

‘Just to say, Ernest, that Mrs Hogg came here after you left. For some reason she’s highly anxious to stop all inquiries. She apologized for her suspicions.’

‘Well, that’s all to the good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, I know. But don’t you see this sudden change is rather odd, just at this time?’

‘Are you sure she has nothing to do with Hogarth?’ Ernest said in a more wakeful voice.

‘Well, I’ve never heard her mention the name. Is he a Catholic?’

‘Shouldn’t think so.

‘Then definitely she wouldn’t be friendly with the man in any way. She’s got a religious kink.’

‘You don’t think she means to attempt blackmail? These blackmailers beetle round in a curious way, you know.’

‘No. She actually brought me Laurence’s letter. I burned it in front of her. I carried the thing off well, Ernest.’

‘Of course. Well, we ye no thing more to worry about from Mrs Hogg’s direction.’

She was grateful for that ‘we’. ‘Perhaps we haven’t. I told her to come and see me tomorrow about a job . I want to keep my eye on her.’

‘Good idea.’

‘But personally,’ said Helena, ‘I am beginning to think that Georgina is not all there.’

At that hour Mr Webster lay in his bed above the bakery turning over in his mind the satisfaction of the day. In spite of his tiredness on his return from London he had gone straight to Mrs Jepp, had repeated with meticulous fidelity his conversation with the Baron, and together they had reckoned up the payment and their profits as they always did.

‘I am glad I sent herring roes,’ Louisa said. ‘I nearly sent fruit but the herring roes will be a change for Baron Stock. Herrings make brains.’

‘What a day it’s been!’ said Mr Webster, smiling round at the walls before he took his leave.

For Baron Stock it had also been ‘a day’. He hated the business of money-making, but one had to do it. The bookshop, if it had not been a luxurious adjunct to his personality, would have been a liability.

After sweet old Webster had gone the Baron closed his bookshop for the day and, taking with him Louisa Jepp’s tin of herring roes, went home. There he opened the can, and tipping the contents into a dish, surveyed the moist pale layers of embryo fish. He took a knife and lifting them one by one he daintily withdrew from between each layer a small screw of white wax paper; and when he had extracted all of these he placed the paper pellets on a saucer. These he opened when he was seated comfortably before his fire. The diamonds were enchanting, they winked their ice-hard dynamics at him as he moved over to the window to see them better.

‘Blue as blue,’ he said, an hour later when he sat in the back premises of a high room in Hatton Garden.

The jeweller said nothing in reply. He had one eye screwed up and the other peering through his glass at the gems, each little beauty in turn. The Baron thought afterwards, as he always did, ‘I must make a new contract. This man swindles me.’ But then he remembered how terse and unexcitable the jeweller was, so different from those gem-dealers who, meeting with each other on the pavements at Hatton Garden, could not contain for two seconds their business verve, nor refrain from displaying there and then their tiny precious wares, produced out of waistcoat pockets and wrapped in tissue paper. It was inconceivable that the Baron’s silent dealer should ever be seen on the street; possibly he never went home, possibly had no home, but sat in vigilance and fasting from dawn to dawn, making laconic bargains with such people who arrived to sell diamonds.

Later that evening the Baron sipped Curaçao in his flat and decided that doing business was exhausting. Once every three months, this trip to Hatton Garden and the half-hearted haggle with the jeweller exhausted him. He reclined as in a hammock of his thoughts, shifting gently back and forth over the past day, and before he went to bed he began to write a letter to Louisa.

‘The herring roes, my dear Mrs Jepp, have provided the most exquisite light supper for me after a most exhausting (but satisfying) day. I put them on toast under the grill — delicious! I admire your preservative process. The contents of your tin were more delicate than oysters, rarer than …’ But his mind drifted to other delicacies, mysterious Mervyn Hogarth, the inter-esting black arts.

What a day it had been, also, for Mervyn Hogarth, who had returned to Ladle Sands to find Andrew in one of his ugly moods. When he was in such moods Andrew would literally spit on everyone. Andrew had been left in charge of a village woman whom he had spat at so much she had gone home long before the arranged time, leaving the young cripple alone as darkness fell. When Mervyn at last got to bed he tried to read himself to sleep, but the ‘mistakes—’ of the day started tingling; he lay in darkness fretting about the cunning of Ernest Manders, the tasteless lunch, the blackmail; and he murmured piteously to himself ‘What a day, what a day’, far past midnight.

And what a day for Mrs Hogg, that gargoyle, climbing to her mousy room at Chiswick where, as she opened the door, two mice scuttled one after the other swiftly down their hole beside the gas meter.

However, as soon as Mrs Hogg stepped into her room she disappeared, she simply disappeared. She had no private life whatsoever. God knows where she went in her privacy.

EIGHT

It is very much to be doubted if Mervyn Hogarth had ever in his life given more than a passing thought to any black art or occult science. Certainly he was innocent of prolonged interest in, let alone any practice of, diabolism, witchcraft, demonism, or such cult. Nevertheless Baron Stock believed otherwise.

It was not till the New Year that the Baron was able to assemble his evidence. He confided often in Caroline, for since her return to London they met as frequently, almost, as in earlier days. She lived now in a flat in Hampstead, quite near the Baron, with only a slight twinge in her leg before rainy weather to remind her of the fracture, and in reminding her, to bring the surprise of having had a serious accident.

‘It is strange,’ said the Baron, ‘how Eleanor left me, her reasons. Did you ever hear?’

Caroline said, ‘I know she had suspicions of your participating in Black Masses and what not.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ the Baron said. ‘A woman of Eleanor’s limited intellig-ence is incapable of distinguishing between interest in an activity and participation in it. I am interested, for instance, in religion, poetr-ay, psycholog-ay, theosoph-ay, the occult, and of course demonolog-ay and diabolism, but I participate in none of them, practise none.

‘And your chief interest is diabolism,’ Caroline observed.

‘Oh yes, utterly my chief. As I tried to explain to Eleanor at the time, I regard these studies of mine as an adult pursuit; but to actually take part in the absurd rituals would be childish.’

‘Quite,’ said Caroline.

‘I have, of course, attended a few Black Masses and the ceremonies of other cults, but purely as an observer.’

Caroline said, ‘Um.’

It was a gusty day, and from the windows of Caroline’s top-floor flat, only the sky was visible with its little hurrying clouds. It was a day when being indoors was meaningful, wasting an afternoon in superior confidences with a friend before the two-barred electric heater.

‘Eleanor would not be reasoned with,’ the Baron went on. ‘And for some reason the idea of living with a man whose spare-time occupation was black magic appalled her. Now the curious thing is, I’ve since discovered that her former husband Mervyn Hogarth is a raging diabolist, my dear Caroline. That is obviously why she deserted him.’

‘Never mind, Willi. You’re as well apart from Eleanor, and she from you.—’

‘I’ve got over it. And you,’ he said, ‘are as well without Laurence.’

‘Our case is different,’ she said snappily. ‘There’s love saved up between Laurence and me, but no love lost between you and Eleanor.’

‘No love lost,’ he said, ‘but still it hurts when I think of her.’

‘Of course,’ she said nicely.

‘But not enough, my Caroline,’ said he, ‘to induce me to give up these investigations. People are unaccountable. One finds barbarity and superstition amongst the most unlikely. The subject, the people, excite me in-tensely. At present my attention is almost entirely on this Mervyn Hogarth. He is, I assure you, Caroline, the foremost diabolist in the kingdom. I go so far as to employ agents. I have him watched.’

‘Oh, come!’ Caroline said.

‘Truly,’ said the Baron. ‘I have him watched. I get reports. I have compiled a dossier. I spend a fortune. The psychology of this man is my main occupation.’

‘Dear me. You must miss Eleanor more than I thought.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Obviously your obsession with Eleanor’s former lover is a kind of obsession with Eleanor. You are looking in him for something concealed in her, don’t you see! Obviously you are following the man because you can’t follow Eleanor, she has eluded you, don’t you see?

Obviously —’Physician, heal thyself,’ said the Baron with what he thought was aptness.

‘Oh, I may be wrong,’ said Caroline mildly. The indoor afternoon idea went limp and she was reminded of her imprudence when, in hospital, she had begun to confide her state of mind to the Baron on the occasion of his visits. She knew he would not keep her confidences any more than she his.

But unable to leave well alone she said, ‘Why really does it trouble you even if Hogarth is a diabolist? I could understand your fanaticism if you had any religion to defend. Perhaps unawares you are very religious.

‘I have no religion,’ he said. ‘And I don’t disapprove of diabolism. For my part, it is not a moral interest; simply an intellectual passion.’

She teased him, but did not watch her words. ‘You remind me of an African witch-doctor on the trail of a witch. Perhaps you picked up the spirit of the thing in the Congo — weren’t you born there?’ Then she saw her mistake, and the strange tinge in the whites of his eyes that had made her wonder at times if the Baron had native blood. He was extremely irritated by her remark.

‘At least,’ articulated he, ‘I pursue an intelligible objective. Diabolism exists; the fact can be proved by the card index of any comprehensive library. Diabolism is practised: I can prove it to you if you care to accompany me to Notting Hill Gate on certain nights — unless, of course, you are too bound by the superstitious rules of your Church. Mervyn Hogarth exists. He practises diabolism; that fact is available to anyone who cares to instigate private inquiries into his conduct. You on the other hand,’ he said, ‘assert a number of unascertainable facts. That chorus of voices,’ he said, ‘who but yourself has heard them? Your theories — your speculations about the source of the noises? I think, Caroline my dear, that you yourself are more like a witch-doctor than I am.’

This upset Caroline, whereupon she busied herself with tea-cups, quick movements, tiny clatters of spoons and saucers. As she did this she protested nebulously.

‘The evidence will be in the book itself.’

Now Caroline, one day when the Baron had visited her in hospital, had told him, ‘Those voices, Willi — since I’ve been in hospital I have heard them. But one thing I’m convinced of’ — and she indicated her leg which had swollen slightly within the plaster case so that it hurt quite a lot — ‘this physical pain convinces me that I’m not wholly a fictional character. I have independent life.’

‘Dear me,’ said the Baron, ‘were you ever in doubt of it?’

So she told him, confidentially, of her theory. He was intrigued. She warmed to the sense of conspiracy induced by the soft tones of their conversation, for it was an eight-bed ward.

‘Am I also a charact-er in this mysterious book, Caroline?’ he asked.

‘Yes you are, Willi.’

‘Is everyone a character? — Those people for instance?’ He indicated the seven other beds with their occupants and visiting relatives and fuss.

‘I don’t know,’ Caroline said. ‘I only know what the voices have hinted, small crazy fragments of a novel. There may be characters I’m unaware of.’

The Baron came to see her every week-end. On each occasion they discussed Caroline’s theory. And although, profoundly, she knew he was not to be trusted with a confidence, she would tell herself as he arrived and after he had gone, ‘After all, he is an old friend.’

One day she informed him, ‘The Typing Ghost has not recorded any lively details about this hospital ward. The reason is that the author doesn’t know how to describe a hospital ward. This interlude in my life is not part of the book in consequence. It was by making exasperating remarks like this that Caroline Rose continued to interfere with the book.

The other patients bored and irritated her. She longed to be able to suffer her physical discomforts in peace. When she experienced pain, what made it intolerable was the abrasive presence of the seven other women in the beds, their chatter and complaints, and the crowing and clucking of the administering nurses.

‘The irritant that comes between us and our suffering is the hardest thing of all to suffer. If only we could have our sufferings clean,’ Caroline said to the Baron.

A visiting priest on one occasion advised her to ‘offer up’ her sufferings for the relief of some holy soul in Purgatory.

‘I do so,’ Caroline declared, ‘with the result that my pain is intensified, not at all alleviated. However, I continue to do so.’

‘Come, come,’ said the priest, youthful, blue-eyed behind his glasses, fresh from his seminary.

‘That is a fact, as far as my experience goes,’ said Caroline.

He looked a trifle scared, and never stopped for long at Caroline’s bedside after that.

On those Saturday afternoons the Baron had seemed to bring to Caroline her more proper environment, and for the six weeks of her confinement in the country hospital she insulated herself by the phrase ‘he is an old friend’ against the certainty that the Baron would, without the slightest sense of betrayal, repeat and embellish her sayings and speculations for the benefit of his Charing Cross Road acquaintance. Much was the psycho-analysing of Caroline that went on in those weeks at the back of the Baron’s bookshop, while she lay criticizing the book in the eight-bed ward. Which was an orthopaedic ward, rather untidy as hospital wards go, owing to the plaster casts which were lying here and there, the cages humping over the beds and the trolley at the window end on which was kept the plaster-of-Paris equipment, also a huge pair of plaster-cutting scissors like gardening shears, all of which were covered lumpily with a white sheet; and into which ward there came, at certain times, physiotherapists to exercise, exhort, and manipulate their patients.

The Baron, it is true, while he discussed ‘the book’ with her, had no thought for the Monday next when he should say to this one and that, ‘Caroline is embroiled in a psychic allegory which she is trying to piece together while she lies with her leg in that dreary, dreary ward. I told you of her experience with the voices and the typewriter. Now she has developed the idea that these voices represent the thoughts of a disembodied novelist, if you follow, who is writing a book on his typewrite-r. Caroline is apparently a character in this book and so, my dears, am I.—’

‘Charming notion. She doesn’t believe it literally though?’

‘Quite literally. In all other respects her reason is unimpaired.’

‘Caroline, of all people!’

‘Oh it’s absol-utely the sort of thing that happens to the logical mind. I am so fond of Caroline. I think it all very harmless. At first I thought she was on the verge of a serious disorder. But since the accident she has settled down with the fantasy, and I see no reason why she shouldn’t cultivate it if it makes her happy. We are all a little mad in one or other particular. ‘‘Aren’t we just, Willi!’

Laurence was out of hospital some weeks before Caroline.

‘I can’t think what possesses you,’ he said, when at last he was able to see her, ‘to confide in the Baron. You asked me to keep your wild ideas a secret and naturally I’ve been denying all the rumours. It’s embarrassing for me.’

‘What rumours?’

‘They vary. Roughly, it goes that you’ve dropped Catholicism and taken up a new religion.’

‘What new religion?’

‘Science Fiction.’

She laughed then winced, for the least tremble hurt her leg.

‘Sorry,’ said Laurence who had promised not to make her laugh.

‘I never expected the Baron to keep his peace on any subject,’ she said. ‘I rather like talking to him, it amuses me. I’ve been lonely here, sick as well.’

She could see that Laurence was more niggled by the Baron’s attentiveness than by her actual conversations with him.

To return to that afternoon in the New Year when Caroline unwittingly hurt the Baron by comparing him to an African witch-doctor.

After tea, which she made in two pots: green for the Baron and plain Ceylon for herself, the Baron attempted to compensate for his anger. He told her a story in strictest confidence which, however, she repeated to Laurence before the day was out.

‘Once, on Eleanor’s behalf — shortly after her divorce from her daemonical Hogarth, and in connexion with a financial settlement, I went to call on him at his house in Ladle Sands. I had not informed him previously of my intention to call, believing that if I did so he would refuse to see me. I hoped to catch him by chance — Many were such services, I assure you, Caroline, that I performed for Eleanor. Well, I called at the house. It is fairly large with some elegance of frontage, Queen Anne; set well back from the road and concealed by a semi-circle of plane trees within a high hedge that had not been trimmed for months. The garden was greatly neglected. The house was empty. Peering through the letter-box I could see a number of circular letters lying on the hall table. From this I assumed that the Hogarths had been absent for some weeks, having arranged for their personal letters to be forwarded. I went round to the back of the house. I was curious. At that time, you must understand, I was greatly in love with Eleanor, and the house where she had lived with Hogarth inter-ested me in the sense that it gave me a physical contact with a period of Eleanor’s past which I knew only from what she had chosen to tell me.

‘The back premises were even more untidy than the front. The kitchen garden gone to seed and stalk, and an important thing that I am going to tell you is this. At the door of an outhouse lay a pile of junk. Empty boxes, rusty broken gardening tools, old shoes. And amongst these a large number of broken plaster statuettes — religious objects of the more common kind that are sold by the thousand in the repositories attached to the Christian shrines. These were hacked about in a curious way. The heads were severed from many of them, and in some cases the whole statue had been reduced to fragments. There were far too many of these plaster pieces to be accounted for by accidental breakage. Even at that time — I knew nothing of Hogarth’s occult activities then — I assumed that there had been a wholesale orgy of deliberate iconoclasm. In cases where the body was intact, only the head or limbs being severed, I noticed how cleanly the cleavage occurred, as if cut by an instrument, certainly not smashed by a fall, not that.

‘Then I must tell you, Caroline, what happened while I was engaged in examining these extraordinary bits of clay. The back premises were skirted by a strip of woodland. This was about thirty yards from the outhouse where I was standing. The sound of a dog growling caused me to turn and observe this direction, and soon I saw the dog emerge from the wood towards me. It was a black spaniel, very well cared for. I picked up a stick in case it should attack me. It approached with its horrid growling. However, it did not make straight for me. As soon as it got within five yards it started to walk round me in a circle. It encircled me three times, Caroline. Then it bounded towards the heap of broken statues and sat, simply sat, in front of the heap as though defying me to touch them.

‘Of course I went away, walking casually in case the dog should leap. But what I am trying to tell you, Caroline, is that the black dog was Mervyn Hogarth.’

‘What did you say?’ said Caroline.

‘I did not realize at the time,’ said the Baron, stirring his green tea, ‘I merely thought it an uncommonly behaved dog. Of course I am speaking to you confidentially, it is not the sort of thing one can tell one’s acquaintances, however intimate. But I feel you have an understanding of such things, especially as you yourself are supernormal, clairaudient and —’

‘What was that you said,’ Caroline said, ‘just now, about the dog?’

‘The dog was Mervyn Hogarth. Magically transformed, of course. It is not unknown —’

‘You’re mad, Willi,’ said Caroline amiably.

‘Indeed,’ said the Baron, ‘I am not.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean mad, you know,’ Caroline said. ‘Just a little crazy, just a little crazy. I think of course it’s a lovely tale, it has the makings of a shaggy dog.’

‘I wouldn’t have expected you to be incredu-lous of all people.’

‘Well, Willi, I ask you!—’

He was serious. What,’ he said, ‘do you make of the broken saints?’

‘Maybe they had a house-full and then got fed up with them and chucked them out. Maybe they break up the statues for pleasure. After all, most of those plaster saints are atrocious artistically, one can well understand the urge.

‘For pleasure,’ the Baron repeated. ‘And how do you account for the dog?’

‘Dogs are. One doesn’t have to account for dogs. It must have been the Hogarths’ dog —’

‘It wasn’t the Hogarths’ dog. I inquired. They possess no dog.’

‘It must have been a neighbour’s dog. Or a stray, looking for something to eat.’

‘What do you say to its having encircled me three times?’

‘My dear Willi, I’m speechless.’

‘True,—’ said the Baron, ‘you have no answer to that. Not that I have formed my opinion that Hogarth is a black magician solely from the experience which I have just described to you. I haven’t told you yet about the carrier-pigeons, and many subsequent phenomena. Are you free to dine with me tonight? If you are I can tell you the whole story, and then, my Caroline, you will no longer say Willi’s mad.’

‘We’re all a little mad, Willi. That’s what makes us so nice, dear. No, I’m not free tonight, I’m sorry to say. It would have been pleasant really. …

He planted a friendly kiss on her cheek when he said good-bye. As soon as Caroline heard him descending in the shaky lift she went into her bathroom and taking out a bottle of Dettol poured rather a lot into a beaker of warm water. She saturated a piece of cotton wool with this strong solution; she dabbed that area on her face where the Baron had deposited his kiss.

‘The Baron is crackers.’

It gave Laurence pleasure to hear Caroline say these words, for he had been lately put out by the renewed friendship between Caroline and the Baron.

‘The Baron,’ she declared, ‘is clean gone. He came to tea this afternoon. He related the most bats tale I’ve ever heard.’

So she told Laurence the Baron’s story. At first it amused him. Then suddenly his mild mirth changed to a real delight. ‘Good for the Baron!’ he said. ‘He’s actually stumbled on a clue, a very important one, I feel.’

‘Clue to what?’ she said.

‘My grandmother.’

‘What has the black dog to do with your grandmother?’

‘The clue is in the broken statues. Why didn’t I think of it before?’

‘Your grandmother wouldn’t break anything whatsoever. What’s the matter with you, dear man?’

‘No, but Hogarth would.’

‘You’re as bad as the Baron,—’ she said, ‘with your obsession about Hogarth.’

Since their motor accident Laurence had been reticent with Caroline. She saw that, because he was partly afraid, he could not keep away from her, but it was not at all to her taste to nourish the new kind of power by which she attracted him. Laurence’s fear depressed her. For that reason she stopped altogether discussing with him the private mystique of her life. Only when she was taken off-guard in conversation did she reveal her mind to Laurence, as when he innocently inquired, ‘How is your book going?’ meaning her work on the structure of the modern novel.

‘I think it is nearing the end,’ she answered.

He was surprised, for only a few days since she had announced that the work was slow in progress.

Another thing had surprised him.

They had planned a holiday together abroad, to take place in the last two weeks in March.

At first Caroline had objected that this was too early in the year. Laurence, however, was fixed on this date, he had already applied for leave before consulting Caroline. She thought it rather high behaviour, too, when he announced that they would go to Lausanne.

‘Lausanne in March! No fear.’

‘Do trust me,’ he said. ‘Have I been your good friend?’

‘Yes, yes, but Lausanne in March.’

‘Then believe that I have my reasons. Do, please.’

She suspected that his choice of time and place was connected with his intense curiosity about his grandmother’s doings. Ernest and Helena had come to believe that the danger was over. Any illicit enterprise the old woman had been engaged in was squashed by Ernest’s interference and bluff. They hardly cared to think there had been any cause for anxiety. But Laurence, who had made several week-end trips to the cottage during the past winter, seemed convinced that his grandmother’s adventures were still in hearty progress. Arriving unexpectedly one recent week-day evening Laurence had found her little ‘gang’ assembled as before, the cards in play as before, Louisa unconcerned as always. From her own lips he learned that the Hogarths had twice been abroad since January.

For his failure to pull off a dramatic swift solution of his grandmother’s mystery Laurence blamed the car accident. He bitterly blamed the accident. At the same time he felt stimulated by his discovery that Ernest and Helena had between them succeeded only in putting the gang on its guard. It still remained for him to search out the old woman’s craftiness. That was what he mostly desired, and not content merely to put an end to her activities, Laurence wanted to know them.

Throughout the winter his brief trips to the cottage tantalized him. He snooped round Ladylees and Ladle Sands with blank results; he had a mounting certainty that the gang was lying low. Ernest had bungled the quest. Most of all Laurence felt up against his grandmother’s frankness. She was never secretive in her talk or manner, but decidedly she refrained from disclosing her secret. All he had gained was the information that the Hogarths planned a trip to Lausanne in the last two weeks of March.

‘The Hogarths go abroad a great deal, Grandmother.’

‘They do like travelling, my, don’t they!’

He got no more out of Louisa. He applied for a fortnight’s leave to start on 15 March.

Helena had been so far emancipated by her son that she saw nothing offensive in suggesting to him, ‘Why not take Caroline with you? She needs a holiday and, poor girl, she can’t afford one. I’ll pay her expenses.’

It was then Laurence was faced with Caroline’s objection, ‘Lausanne in March! Why Lausanne? It will be so bleak.’

But when he said, ‘Haven’t I been your good friend? Do please agree with me this once,’ she agreed.

That was in the middle of February. Two weeks later she disagreed.

‘I’ve been to the Priory to see Father Jerome,’ she began.

‘Jolly good!’ said Laurence. She had observed lately with some amusement that Laurence displayed himself keen to promote all her contacts with religion, the more as he himself continued to profess his merry scepticism. One recent Sunday when she had decided to miss church because of a sore throat, he had shown much concern, in the suggestion of a warm scarf, the providing of a gargle, and transport to and from the church in his new car, to see that she did not evade the obligation. ‘Jolly good!’ said Laurence, when he heard that she had visited the old monk whom he had known since his boyhood.

‘He says,’ Caroline announced, ‘that I ought not to go to Lausanne with you.’

‘But he knows me! Surely he knows we can be trusted together, that it’s simply a companionable holiday. My goodness, it’s done continually by the deadliest proper couples. My goodness, I always thought he was a reasonable broad-minded priest.’

‘He said that in view of our past relationship, we ought not to appear in circumstances which might give rise to scandal.’

‘But there’s no question of sin. Even I know that. I was indoctrinated in the Catholic racket, don’t forget.’

‘No question of sin, but he said it would disedify,’ Caroline said.

‘We needn’t tell anyone we’re going together. And we’re hardly likely to be seen by anyone at all in Lausanne in March.’

‘A furtive trip would be worse than an open one. More disedifying still. I can’t go. Awfully sorry.’

Her withdrawal upset Laurence more than she expected. He had not told her that, as she had guessed, his determination to visit Lausanne in March was in some way connected with his passion to play the sleuth on his grandmother. She had not reckoned with his need for her participation, and the more he argued with her the more she conceived herself well out of the affair. It reminded her too much of the pattern of events preceding the car-smash.

Laurence did not press her very far. He accepted her decision with that strange fear he now had of approaching close enough to Caroline to precipitate a row. It was on this occasion that, suppressing his disappointedness, he asked her amicably, ‘How is your book going?’ and she, her mind brooding elsewhere, answered, ‘I think it is nearing the end.’

‘Really? You were saying only the other day that you still had a lot to write.’

Swiftly she realized her mistake, and so did Laurence. He looked rather helpless, as if enmeshed. She hated to think of herself as a spiritual tyrant, she longed to free him from those complex familiars of her thoughts which were to him so foreign.

‘Naturally, I look forward to the end of the book,’ she said, ‘in a manner of speaking to get some peace.’

‘I meant,’ said Laurence with a burst of irritation, ‘of course, the book that you are writing, not the “book” in which you think you are participating.’

‘I know,’ she said meekly, ‘that is what you meant.’ And to lift the heavy feeling between them she gave him her pretty, civilized smile and said, ‘Do you remember that passage in Proust where he discusses the ambiguous use of the word “book”, and he says —?’

‘To hell with Proust,’ said Laurence.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t inquire into your fantastic affairs. Leave mine alone. And look,’ she said, ‘we have nothing to say to each other this evening. I’m going home. I’ll walk.’

They were dining in a small restaurant only a few minutes’ walk from Caroline’s flat, and so her ‘I’ll walk’, falling short of its intended direness, tickled Laurence.

‘I find it difficult to keep up with you these days.’ And to pacify her he added, ‘Why do you say that the “book” is nearing the end?’

She was reluctant to answer, but his manner obliged her.

‘Because of incidents which have been happening within our orbit of consciousness, and their sequence. Especially this news about your grandmother’s friend.’

‘Which friend?’ said Laurence.

‘Haven—’t you heard about it? Helena rang me this morning, very excited, and from what I can gather it’s most remarkable —’

‘Which friend?’

‘One of those concerning whom you entertain your daft suspicions. Andrew Hogarth. Apparently he was paralysed, and his father took him off to some little shrine of Our Lady in the French Alps. Well, he was brought back yesterday and he’s actually started to move his paralysed limb. Helena says it’s a miracle. I don’t know about that but it seems the sort of incident which winds up a plot and brings a book to a close. I shan’t be sorry.’

‘But they haven’t been abroad since January. They hadn’t planned to leave until the middle of March, at least so I understood. I have reason to believe the Hogarths are diamond smugglers, don’t you understand?’

‘Ask your mother,’ Caroline said. ‘She knows all about it. She’s brimming full of it.’

‘I don’t see,—’ said Laurence, ‘much point, now, in going to Lausanne in March.’

‘Absolutely perfect … A pass back there — a foul tackle and the whistle … the sun has come out, everything looks absolutely perfect with the red coats of the band … that feeling of— of tenseness … and now again for the second half … the first dramatic … absolutely perfect … it’s a corner, a goal to Manchester City … a beautiful, absolutely …

Louisa Jepp sat beside the wireless cuddled in the entranced caress of Laurence’s voice.

Much later in the day, after he had braked up loudly outside the cottage in his new car, and had settled into a chair by the stove with a newly opened bottle of beer, he said, ‘Is it true about young Hogarth?’

‘He is receiving physiotherapeutic treatment,’ she said, with correctness, for she used and pronounced her words, however unlikely, accurately, or not at all.

‘And he has actually started to use his legs?’

‘Yes. He totters a little. It’s too soon to say “he walks”.’

‘He was absolutely paralysed before.’

‘My, yes. The trips abroad did him good. I always knew they would.’

‘I suppose,’ said Laurence, ‘that the Hogarths have cancelled their holiday in Lausanne?’

‘Oh yes. There’s no need for them to go wandering in March. It’s very chilly. Much better at home. Andrew is getting his treatment.’

‘I suppose,’ said Laurence, ‘they will be off again in the early summer?’

‘Not abroad,’ said the old lady. ‘Somerset or Cornwall I should say, if the boy’s fit enough.’

‘I suppose that means,’ said Laurence, ‘that your game is up, Grandmother?’

‘Why, dear,’ she said, ‘I was thinking, as I listened to you on the wireless today, how much I wished for your sake, dear, that you could have caught us red-handed. It must be a disappointment, love. But never mind, we all have our frustrations and you were lovely on the wireless, you were absolutely perfect.’

‘I had every clue, Grandmother. I only needed the time. If I hadn’t had the smash I’d have got you last autumn, Grandmother.’

‘There, never mind.’

‘But you’re in danger. An acquaintance of ours is on your trail. I heard by chance through Caroline. His name’s Willi Stock, a phoney Baron —’

‘No, he is quite authentic a Baron.’

‘You know Baron Stock, then?’

‘I have met the Baron,’ she said.

‘Well, do you know,’ he said, ‘Caroline told me last November, just before the smash, that the Baron had been seeing you last year. He described a hat you wore. Caroline recognized it, and inferred —’

‘That was very stupid of the Baron, but typical, though he is nice —’

‘But I didn’t,’ said Laurence, ‘place much faith in what Caroline said. I thought she was sort of dreaming.’

‘Why, you can’t be clever at everything.’

‘It was a good clue,’ said Laurence. ‘I ought to have followed it up. I might have got you right away. Have you any fears of the Baron? —Because if so —’

‘No, no. He’s my London party. Or was.’

‘The Baron has been in with you! I thought there were only the four of you.’

‘There are only four of us. Baron Stock was only our London agent.’

‘You’ve packed up the game, then?’

‘Now, which game?’ she said, puckering a smile as if to encourage him to recite a lesson.

‘Smuggling diamonds through the customs,’ he said, ‘concealed in plaster figures.’

‘And rosary beads at times,’ said Louisa. Her whole body seemed to perk with delight, and to further signify her sense of occasion she passed Laurence a glass and a bottle of stout to open for her. She watched him pour the brown liquid and she watched the high self-controlled froth as one who watches a scene to be preserved in memory.

‘You took a risk, Grandmother.’

‘There was very small risk,’ she said. ‘What there was, the Hogarths took, as I see it.’

She drew up to the stove and sipped warmly.

‘I had many a smile,’ she said, ‘considering how they came through with the merchandise.’

‘Several times a year,’ said Laurence, ‘at a guess.’

‘It has varied,’ she said, ‘over four years and eight months. Some trips were better than others. It depended so much on our continental parties. It was difficult for that end to get the right moulds for the statues. The beads were easier. But Andrew preferred the statues.’

‘I should have thought the customs would have got suspicious with all that coming and going. Very risky,’ Laurence said.

‘Everything’s risky,’ she said. ‘Many a laugh I had to myself when Mervyn told me about the customs men passing remarks. Mervyn didn’t laugh, he didn’t like that part of it. You see they went as pilgrims looking for a cure, Andrew in his invalid chair, you can picture him, hugging his statues with a long churchy face. So as to deceive the customs, don’t you see. Each time they went to some shrine of the Virgin Mary and our contact would meet them in the town, who was a gentlemanly party I believe. But I made Mervyn and Andrew visit the shrines properly, in case they were watched. You can’t be too careful with the continental police, they are very deceitful and low.’

‘Are the Hogarths Catholics?’

‘Oh, no. Not religious at all. That was the pose, you see. Many an entertainment I had, love.’

‘Mother has heard about Andrew Hogarth’s recovery,—’ Laurence said.

‘Yes, I wrote and told her. I thought it would be of interest to her that the young man, being a neighbour of mine, had got a cure at a Roman Catholic shrine. She likes those stories.’

‘Do you think it was a miracle, then?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I do believe in lucky places if your luck is in. Indeed Andrew was unlucky before. He got a cold in the bladder at Lourdes two years back, but Myans has brought him luck, where there’s a black Madonna, I believe. And indeed I once knew a gentleman very up in history and fond of the olden days who had a stammer which he lost in the Tower of London.’

‘That sounds psychological,’ said Laurence.

‘Oh, it’s all what I call luck,’ Louisa said.

‘You don’t think Andrew’s case is clearly a miracle, then?’

‘Oh, quite clear a miracle, as I see him now. He can move his legs from the knees, sitting in his chair. He couldn’t do that before.’

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘They say he has to have physiotherapy. He’s improving already.’

‘How do they explain it?’

‘They say it’s a marvel but they don—’t make mention of miracles. They brought a great crowd of students to look at Andrew up at the hospital. Andrew put an end to it, though, by swearing and spitting. He has such a temper. —’

‘Good for him!’ Laurence said. ‘I suppose he’s thrilled to be able to move his legs?—’

‘I think so. But he has a temper,’ she said, and passing a box of cigarettes, ‘Have a Bulgarian. —’

Laurence smiled, comparing this account of Andrew with the picture in his mother’s imagination of the young man miraculously cured. In Helena’s eyes, the event entirely justified the Hogarths’ shady activities. It justified her mother. She was content to remain vague about Louisa’s late intrigues, and convinced that Ernest, through his strong hand with Mervyn Hogarth last year in the course of a luncheon, had been successful in ending the troubles, whatever they were.

When she told Laurence of Andrew’s cure at the Alpine shrine, he remarked, ‘They’re still at the game, then.’

‘Nonsense,—’ Helena replied. ‘At the very worst, the Hogarths might have been winding up their business, whatever it was. I expect they will both become Catholics. The young man will, surely.’

‘Helena wants to make a Church thing of it,’ Louisa told Laurence. ‘But she won’t be able to. I’m sorry for her sake, but the Hogarths aren’t interested at all in churches.—’

‘Like me,’ said Laurence.

‘No, not at all. They aren’t interested in quite a different way from you.’

The old woman had sipped from her glass only at long intervals. Even so, Laurence was fascinated to notice how little she had drunk, while giving the companionable appearance of keeping pace with him.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you made a packet between you.

‘Yes. I meant to retire this year in any case.

Helena had developed a firm new theory about her mother’s motives. ‘I am sure she involved herself in all that unpleasantness, whatever it was, simply to help the young man. My mother is extremely secretive. She is quite capable of planning to send him to the holy shrines, using the financial reward as a bribery.’

Laurence reported this to his grandmother. She wrinkled her nose and sipped from her glass. ‘Of course I knew the trips would be good for Andrew. Psychologically. It gave him a job to do and a change now and then. The business side was good for me too. Psychologically. I shall miss it, dear, it was sport. Helena is sentimental, my!’

‘What was Mr Webster’s role, Grandmother?’

‘Oh, the good fellow baked the bread, and he sometimes went to London for me.’

‘Now tell me where the bread comes in,’ said Laurence.

‘You found diamonds in the bread, and you wrote to tell Caroline of it. That caused a lot of trouble.’ — Laurence, feeling sleepy from his day’s work, the warmth and the beer, was not quite sure whether he heard or imagined these words.

‘What did you say, Grandmother?’

The glass was at her lips. ‘Nothing, dear,’ she said when she had sipped.

‘Tell me about the bread. Who transferred the diamonds to the bread? You know I saw them once.

‘Mr Webster,’ she said. ‘Because I desired to have my merchandise quickly, as soon as the Hogarths brought it in. For the sake of the London end. Sometimes, at first, there was a little delay owing to Andrew being poorly after the journey and leading Mervyn a dance. So we arranged that Mervyn should break up his saints and rosaries and extract the stones as soon as he returned from the trips, which was always in the morning. Mervyn would telephone Mr Webster, because they use telephones, I stick to my pigeons. And then Mr Webster called at the Hogarths to deliver the bread.’

‘Ostensibly,’ said Laurence.

Louisa closed her eyes. ‘He called to deliver the bread as it might seem. You can’t be too careful. And he took the money for it.’

‘Along with the diamonds.’

‘Yes, you are clever, dear. Mr Webster has been invaluable. He would bring the merchandise to me on the following morning in my bread. I didn’t think it would be nice to let him slip the little goods into my hand as if there were some mystery or anything shady going on.’

‘Wonderfully ingenious—” Laurence said.

‘It was sport,—’ said Louisa.

‘But totally unnecessary, the bread part of it,’ Laurence said.

‘No, that was necessary. I never liked to have the diamonds carried loose.’

‘I can guess why,’ Laurence put in suddenly. ‘The police.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust the police. Our local constable is a nice fellow, but the police all stick together if it comes to the bit, the world over.’

Laurence laughed. Louisa’s dislike of the police was a family joke. ‘It’s the gipsy in her,’ Helena would explain.

‘I should have thought,’ Laurence said, ‘that if you got the goods safely into the country, there would be no need for elaborate precautions.’

‘You never can tell. It was sport,’ Louisa said.

After a while Laurence said, ‘I believe Mrs Hogg gave you some trouble.’

‘None at all,’ she said, ‘nor will she.’

‘You think she’s likely to turn up again? Has she any evidence against you, Grandmother?’

‘I don’t know about that. But she won’t trouble me, that I know. She might try, but I shan’t be troubled.’ She added, ‘There are things about Mrs Hogg which you don’t know.’

At a later time when Laurence learned of the relationship between Mrs Hogg and the Hogarths, he recalled this remark of his grandmother’s, and thought that was what she must have meant.

‘And at a side altar, I do assure you, Caroline,’ said the Baron, ‘robed in full liturgical vestments, was Mervyn Hogg alias Hogarth serving cocktails.’ Thus he ended his description of the Black Mass he had recently attended at Notting Hill Gate.

‘It sounds puerile,’ Caroline said, lapsing unawares into that Catholic habit of belittling what was secretly feared.

‘You as a Catholic,’ he said, ‘must think it evil. I myself do not judge good and evil. I judge by interesting or otherwise.’

‘It sounds otherwise to me,’ said Caroline.

‘In fact you are right. This was a poor effort from the sinister point of view. For a really effective Black Mass you need a renegade priest.

They are rare in these days, when the Faith is so thin. But Hogg is the one who interests me. He assumes the name of Hogg on the dark side of his life and Hogarth by daylight so to speak. I am preparing a monograph on the psychology of diabolism and black magic.

‘And my informants tell me that Hogarth has recently un-bewitched his son, a man in his early twenties who since infancy has suffered from paralysis in the lower part of his body due to a spell. This proves that Hogarth’s magical powers are not exclusively bent towards evil, it proves —’Tell me,’ said Caroline, ‘have you ever spoken to Mervyn Hogarth?’

‘Not in his natural flesh. But I shall shortly. A private meeting is to be arranged. Unofficially, I believe, he has been into the bookshop, transformed into a woman.

‘I’m sure, Willi,’ said Caroline, ‘that you are suffering from the emotional effects of Eleanor’s leaving you. I am sure, Willi, that you should see a psychiatrist.’

‘If what you say were true,’ he said, ‘it would be horribly tactless of you to say it. As it is I make allowances for your own disorder.’

‘Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else’s derangement?’

‘Largely,’ said the Baron.

‘I resist the proposition,’ Caroline said.

‘That is an intolerant attitude.’

‘It’s the only alternative to demonstrating the proposition,’ Caroline said.

‘I don’t know,’ said the Baron,’ really why I continue to open my mind to you.’

At various times the Baron had described to Caroline the stages by which he had reached the conclusion that Mervyn Hogarth was a diabolist and magician. The first hint had come to him from Eleanor. ‘She told me he had previously been through a form of marriage with a witch. Eleanor had seen the witch, a repulsive woman. In fact, it was when she began to frequent the house in Ladle Sands that Eleanor left Hogarth.’

‘I shouldn’t take much account of what Eleanor says. She dramatizes a lot,’ said Caroline, and barely refrained from adding the information that Eleanor, in her college days, had been wont to send love-letters to herself. Caroline only refrained because she was not too sure if this were true.

‘My subsequent experience has borne out her allegations. My subsequent investigations have proved that Hogarth is the foremost diabolist in the kingdom. One must speak as one experiences and as one finds. You, Caroline, are no exception. Your peculiar experiences are less explicable than mine: I have the evidence. The broken plaster images: a well-known diabolic practice: the black dog. If you would only entertain the subject a little more you would see that I am right.’

So he attempted to extort sympathy from Caroline. He appeared to her more and more in the nature of a demanding creditor. ‘The result,’ she told herself, ‘of going to him with my troubles last autumn. He acted the old friend and now he wants me to do the same, which is impossible.—’

And she told him, ‘You are asking me to entertain impossible beliefs: what you claim may be true or not; I have doubts, I can’t give assent to them. For my own experiences, however, I don’t demand anyone’s belief. You may call them delusions for all I care. I have merely registered my findings.’

Caroline had been reflecting recently on the case of Laurence and his fantastic belief that his grandmother had for years been the leader of a gang of diamond-smugglers. She had considered, also, the case of the Baron and his fantastic belief in the magical powers of Mervyn Hogarth. The Baron was beginning to show a sickly resemblance to Eleanor. She thought of Eleanor with her habit of giving spontaneous utterance to stray and irresponsible accusations. Caroline found the true facts everywhere beclouded. She was aware that the book in which she was involved was still in progress. Now, when she speculated on the story, she did so privately, noting the facts as they accumulated. By now, she possessed a large number of notes, transcribed from the voices, and these she studied carefully. Her sense of being written into the novel was painful. Of her constant influence on its course she remained unaware and now she was impatient for the story to come to an end, knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it.

Eventually she told the Baron that she simply wasn’t interested in black magic. She forbade the subject.

‘It gets on my nerves, Willi. I have no sympathy with your occult interests. Talk about something else in future.’

‘You are lost,’ he said sadly, ‘to the world of ideas. You had the makings of an inter-esting mind, I do assure you, Caroline. Ah, well!’

One morning Caroline had an unexpected caller. She had opened the door of her flat unguardedly, expecting the parcel post. For a second Caroline got the impression that nobody was there, but then immediately she saw the woman standing heavily in the doorway and recognized the indecent smile of Mrs Hogg just as she had last seen it at St Philumena’ s.

‘May I have a word with you, Miss Rose?’ Already the woman was in the small square hall, taking up most of it.

‘I’m busy,’ Caroline said. ‘I work in the mornings. Is it anything urgent?’

Mrs Hogg glared with her little eyes. ‘It’s important,’ she said.

‘Will you come inside, then?’

She seated herself in Caroline’s own chair and cast her eyes on the notebook in which Caroline had been writing. It was lying on a side table. Caroline leant forward and snapped the book shut.

‘There is a Baron Stock,’ said Mrs Hogg. ‘He was in your flat till after one o’clock this morning. He was in your flat till after two on Wednesday morning. You were in his flat till after midnight twice the week before last. If you think you are going to catch Laurence Manders with this carry-on —’

‘You are insolent,’ Caroline said. ‘You’ll have to leave.’

‘Till after two on Wednesday morning. Baron Stock is more attractive than Laurence Manders, I don’t doubt, but I think it low behaviour and so would everyone —’

‘Take yourself off,’ said Caroline.

She left, pathetic and lumpy as a public response. Caroline seized the phone angrily and rang Helena.

‘Would you mind calling off your Mrs Hogg. She’s just been round here making wild insinuations about my private life, citing Willi Stock. She must have been watching my flat for weeks. Haven’t you any control over the woman? I do think, Helena, you are far too soft with that woman. She’s a beast. If there’s any more trouble I shall simply call the police, tell her that.’

‘Dear me. I haven’t seen Mrs Hogg for months. I am sorry, Caroline. Won’t you come round to lunch? I recommended Mrs Hogg for a job in a place at Streatham last autumn. I haven’t heard from her since. We’ve got a new sort of risotto, quite simple, and heaps to spare. Edwin won’t be in to lunch. Have you seen Laurence lately?’

‘You ought not to recommend Mrs Hogg for jobs. She’s quite vile.’

‘Oh, one tries to be charitable. I shall speak severely. Did she upset you seriously, Caroline?’

‘No, she did not. I mean, she did, yes. But it’s not what she says, it’s what she is.’

‘She’s not all there,’ said Helena.

Presently, Caroline sprayed the room with a preparation for eliminating germs and insects.

NINE

‘Wonderful to have a whole day unplanned,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s like a blank sheet of paper to be filled in according to inspiration.’

It was summer, on a day which Laurence described as absolutely perfect for a riverside picnic. They chose their spot and got the luncheon boxes out of the car. It was Laurence’s day off. Helena too had decided to have a day off.

‘I’ve been working so hard on the committees, and Edwin is in retreat — I should love a day in the country,’ she admitted when Laurence invited her to join them. ‘But I hate intruding. You and Caroline enjoy yourselves together, do.’

But she yielded easily when Caroline too insisted on her coming.

‘All right. But you two go ahead. I’ll join you before lunch, if you tell me where to find you.

They described the area where they intended to park on the banks of the Medway where it borders Kent and Sussex.

There they were at midday sunning themselves lusciously and keeping an intermittent look-out for Helena’s car.

She arrived at half past twelve, and they could see as she bumped down the track towards them that she had brought two people with her, a man beside her in the front and a woman with a black hat at the back.

The couple turned out to be the Baron and Mrs Hogg.

Helena, uncertain of her welcome, and unusually nervous, began immediately, ‘Such fun. Willi phoned me just after you’d left and d’you know what, he’s been meaning to come down here the first opportunity. He wants to look at an Abbey in these parts, don’t you, Willi? So I made him come. And I’ve brought poor Mrs Hogg, I made her come. It was a lovely ride, wasn’t it? Poor Georgina’s had neuralgia. She called round to the house by chance just after you’d left, so I made her come.

A day in the country will do you a world of good, Georgina. We shan’t interfere with your plans, Laurence. We’ve brought extra lunch and you can go off by yourselves if you like while we sit in the sun.’

Helena looked a trifle shaky. While they prepared lunch she made the opportunity of a private word with Caroline, ‘I hope you don’t mind dreadfully, dear, about my bringing Georgina. She turned up so desolate, and there was I so obviously preparing the picnic basket. I asked her on impulse and of course she jumped to it — I was rather sorry afterwards, remembering how much you dislike her. Do try to ignore her and if she says anything funny to you just shake her off. I know how you feel about Georgina for I can’t bear the sight of her at times, but one tries to be charitable.—’

‘Don’t you think,’ Caroline said, ‘that you misconstrue charity?—’

‘Well, charity,’ said Helena, ‘begins at home. And Georgina has been part of our household.’

‘Mrs Hogg is not home,’ Caroline said.

‘Oh dear, I wish I hadn’t asked her to come. It was foolish of me, I’ve spoiled your day.’

‘The day isn’t over yet,’ said Caroline cordially, for the weather was glorious really.

‘But still I wish I hadn’t brought her, for another reason. Something happened on the way here, Caroline. It was disturbing.’ Caroline saw she was distressed.

‘Come over here and help me to take out the bottles,—’ Caroline said, ‘and tell me what happened.’

‘I gave Georgina a tablet for her neuralgia before we set off,’ Helena said, ‘and sat her comfortably at the back of the car. Before we were out of London I said over my shoulder, “Are you all right, Georgina?” She replied that she was feeling sleepy. I went on chatting to Willi and thought no more of Georgina at the back. I assumed she had fallen asleep for I could hear her breathing heavily.’

‘She snores,’ Caroline said. ‘I remember at St Philumena’s I could hear her snoring six doors away.

‘Well, yes, she was snoring,’ Helena said. ‘And I thought the sleep would do her good. After a while she stopped snoring. I said to Willi, “She’s dead asleep.” Then Willi’s cigarette lighter gave out and he asked for some matches. I thought there were some at the back of the car, but I didn’t want to wake Georgina. So I pulled up. And when I turned to reach for the matches, I couldn’t see Georgina.’

‘Why, what had happened?’

‘She simply wasn’t there,’ Helena declared. ‘I said to Willi, “Heavens, where’s Georgina?” and Willi said, “My God! she’s gone!” Well, just as he said this, we saw Georgina again. She suddenly appeared before our eyes at the back of the car, sitting in the same position and blinking, as if she’d just then woken up. It was as if there’d been a black-out at the films. I would have thought I’d been dreaming the incident, but Willi apparently had the same experience. He said, “Where have you been, Mrs Hogg? You vanished, didn’t you?” She looked really surprised, she said, “I’ve been asleep, sir.”‘

‘It may have been some telepathic illusion shared by you and Willi,’ Caroline said. ‘I shouldn’t worry.

‘Maybe it was. I haven’t had an opportunity to discuss this privately with Willi. It was a most strange affair; truly I wish I hadn’t brought Georgina. Sometimes I feel I can handle her, but at other times she seems to get the better of me.’

‘Maybe when she goes to sleep she disappears as a matter of course,—’ Caroline said with a dry laugh so that Helena would not take her too seriously.

‘What a gruesome idea. Well, I swear that she did apparently vanish. All I saw when I first looked round was the empty seat.’

‘Maybe she has no private life whatsoever,’ Caroline said, and she giggled to take the grim edge off her words.

‘Oh, she has no private life, poor soul,’ Helena agreed, meaning that the woman had no friends.

Mrs Hogg ate heartily at lunch. Caroline sat as far away from her as possible to avoid the sight of her large mouth chewing, and the memory of that sight, when at St Philumena’s, she had first observed Mrs Hogg sitting opposite to her at the refectory table, chew — pause —chew — pause. Mrs Hogg spoke little, but she was very much present.

After lunch, Caroline was stacking an empty food box in the boot of Helena’s car some distance from the rest of the party, when the Baron approached her.

‘Summer suits you, my Caroline,’ he said. ‘Your sun dress is charming. Green suits you, and you are plumper. I thought you a delightful picture at lunch, so secluded within your proud personality as you always seem to be and with such a watchful air.

Caroline appreciated flattery, the more so when it was plainly excessive and well laid on, for then she felt that the flatterer had really taken pains to please. So she smiled languidly and waited for the rest, not at all surprised that these remarks were a prelude to one of those ‘confidences’ which the Baron so greatly longed to make. For, since she had forbidden the subject of black magic, the Baron had been manifestly unhappy. She realized that he had chosen her as a repository for his secret enthusiasm because of that very edginess and snap with which she responded. If like his other friends, she could have been merely sociable about his esoteric interests, making a gay palaver of them — ‘Do describe the formula, Willi, for changing oneself into a fly. One could watch all one’s friends… . Suppose one got stuck in a pot of jam’ — if only she could have played buoyant and easy with the Baron, he never would have plagued her with his ‘confidences’.

Having lubricated the way with his opening speech he proceeded instantly, ‘I must tell you, Caroline, such a strange thing happened in the car as we came down. This woman, Mrs Hogg —’

Caroline tried to be pleasant ‘Helena has already told me of the incident. Obviously, Willi, you’ve been infecting Helena with your fancies. Obviously —’

‘I do assure you, Caroline, I have never discussed any occult subject with Helena. I am very careful in whom I confide these matters. There is no other way of accounting for the strange phenomenon in the car but to accept the fact that this woman Hogg is a witch.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Caroline said, ‘even if she did disappear. I think she’s too ignorant to be a witch.’ And she added, ‘Not that I believe in witches particularly.’

‘And I have made a curious discovery,’ the Baron continued relentlessly. ‘Don’t you see — this woman Hogg is, I am certain, the witch to whom Mervyn Hogarth was married. The facts meet together — he has been known to use the name Hogg, as I told you. My informants say he always used it in his younger days. This Georgina Hogg is his witch-wife.’

‘Nonsense. She’s an old servant of the Manders. I believe she married a cousin. She has a crippled son somewhere.’

‘Has she? — Then it is certain she is the one, the witch, the wife! It is her son who was cured a few months ago by Hogarth’s magic. It must be the same young man!’

‘Awfully far-fetched,’ Caroline said. ‘And, Willi, all this bores me. In fact it agitated her, as he could see. ‘That Hogarth crest,’ she was thinking, ‘on Eleanor’s cigarette case. Laurence identified it, the same as Mrs Hogg’s… .’ She decided to speak of this to Laurence later on.

Just then Helena shouted, ‘Caroline, will you fetch my book — I threw it in at the back of the boot with my little head cushion. Will you fetch that too?’

‘Hell!’ Caroline breathed.

It meant unloading the entire contents of the boot. The Baron helped Caroline to ease them out of the tiny space, while he talked as fast as he could, as if to get in as much as possible of his precious confidences in the next few moments.

‘It is the same young man,’ he said, ‘and you will see that I am right.’

‘You must be wrong,’ said Caroline, out of breath with the effort of shifting the boxes, old petrol cans, and other clutter. She was reminding herself that only the other day Helena had said, ‘Fancy, I told Mrs Hogg about that wonderful miracle that happened to the Hogarth boy. I thought it might give her some hope for her own son who’s a cripple. But do you know, she wouldn’t believe it was a miracle — she said if it had been a real miracle the young man would have become a Catholic. Unfortunately this Hogarth boy has gone off with some woman — a rich Theosophist, I understand. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told Georgina that bit.’

‘You must be wrong,—’ Caroline told the Baron. ‘Helena knows Georgina Hogg’s affairs. Ask Helena, she’ll confirm that Mrs Hogg has nothing to do with Hogarth.’ Again, she wondered about that crest.

‘Helena does not know,’ said the Baron. ‘And another thing, Caroline. So exciting, Caroline. I am going to see Mervyn Hogarth this afternoon. I have been informed that he is staying at an Abbey a few miles from this spot. Now why should he be staying at a religious house? He must be posing as a Catholic retreatant. I daresay that these are the means he uses for stealing the consecrated elements for use in the Black Mass. After all, he must get them from somewhere —’

Caroline caught his sleeve and nodded towards the hedgerow a few yards from where the car was parked. He looked in that direction. The black hat had just bobbed out of sight.

‘Mrs Hogg has been listening,’ Caroline said in a loud voice.

‘Did you call me, Miss Rose?’

Mrs Hogg came out of hiding as if she had never been in it. ‘Lovely round here,’ she said with her smile. ‘Did you call? I thought you called “Mrs Hogg”.’

Caroline walked away quickly, followed by the Baron, while Mrs Hogg made off along the towpath.

Caroline handed Helena the book. ‘It had slipped down at the very back,’ she said, ‘I had to move everything. I feel as exhausted as if I’d done a hard day’s work.’

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have — I thought Willi was doing all the heaving. Willi, why didn’t you do all the heaving?’

‘I did so, my Helena,’ said the Baron.

‘Mrs Hogg was bent behind the hedge listening to our conversation,’ Caroline said.

‘I take an oriental view of manual labour myself,’ said Laurence. He was stretched in the dappling shade of a tree.

‘She has nothing in her life,’ Helena said, ‘that’s her trouble. She always has been a nosey type. Simply because she hasn’t any life of her own. I’m sorry I brought her. I dread taking her back.’

Laurence gurgled. ‘I think that’s sweet.’ Helena had not told him of their creepy experience with Georgina that morning.

‘I’ve sent her off for a walk,—’ said Helena, looking round. ‘I wonder if she’ll be all right.’ Georgina was nowhere in sight.

‘Georgina is nowhere in sight,’ she said anxiously.

‘You’ve sent her off; well, she’s gone off,’ Laurence said. ‘Stop jittering. Relax. Read your book. There’s too much talking.’

‘Which way did she go?’ Helena said.

‘Downstream, by the towpath,’ said Caroline.

‘Silence,’ said Laurence. ‘Let nothing disturb thee,’ he chanted, ‘nothing affright thee, all things are passing… .

‘God never changeth,’ Helena continued, surprised that he had remembered the words.

The Baron was examining a map. ‘I should be back just after four,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Laurence. ‘Kindly depart.’

‘The Abbey is on the other side of the river,—’ said the Baron, ‘but there’s a bridge two miles down. I shall be back just after four.’

He set off with his jacket trailing over his arm. Lazily, they watched him until he was out of sight round a bend.

‘I wonder why he wants to see the Abbey,’ said Helena, ‘it isn’t an exceptional place, nothing architecturally speaking.’

‘He’s looking for a man he believes is staying at the Abbey. A man called Mervyn Hogarth,’ Caroline said deliberately.

Helena looked startled. ‘Mervyn Hogarth! Does Willi know him then?’

‘By hearsay,’ Caroline said.

‘That’s the father of the young man who was cured,—’ Helena said. ‘Has Mr Hogarth become a Catholic, I wonder?’

‘The Baron thinks,’ Caroline said, ‘that he is a magician. ‘The Baron believes that Mervyn Hogarth is the leader of a Black Mass circle and that he’s staying at the Abbey under the guise of a retreatant, but really on purpose to steal the consecrated Host.’

‘Oh how frightful, oh how frightful!—’

‘The Baron has a kink,’ Laurence put in.

‘Exactly,’ said Caroline.

‘It does sound a far-fetched story,’ Helena said. ‘There’s nothing in it, you think?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Caroline said. ‘I should be surprised if he found Mervyn Hogarth at the Abbey. And more surprised if his suspicions were true.’

‘It would be dreadful if they were true,’ Helena said. ‘But why should Willi Stock be troubled if they were; does he intend to expose the man?’

‘No, he intends to write a monograph.’

Caroline put the palms of her hands out to the sun to get them browned.

‘He thinks he is aloof from the subject of black magic, merely interested. Whereas he is passionately attracted to it. “My nature,”‘ she quoted, ‘“is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. Pity me then… .”‘

‘Willi always has been eccentric,’ Helena remarked.

‘Part of his cultivated Englishness,’ said Laurence.

‘It will be interesting,’ Helena said, ‘to hear what he says when he comes back.’

‘Don’t mention what I’ve told you,’ Caroline said, ‘he’s touchy, poor Willi.’

She felt a sweet pleasure in her words, ‘Poor Willi!’ They soothed her resentment of the Baron’s ‘Poor Caroline!’ with which he must have ended many an afternoon’s session at Charing Cross Road. Especially with Helena was she pleased to discredit the Baron. Sometimes Helena would inquire gently of Caroline if she was quite happy — nothing worrying her? From which Caroline was sensitive to assume that the Baron had been talking. In fact, Helena had discouraged the Baron’s gossip. One day in the early spring he had asked her plainly, ‘Is it all off between Laurence and Caroline?’

‘No, I don’t think so. They are waiting.—’

‘For what? My dear, they are not chicks,’ said the Baron.

‘I suppose Caroline wants to get her book off her hands. But I don’t know their business at all really. I wish they would do something definite, but there it is.’

‘Caroline’s “book”,—’ he said; ‘do you mean the book she is writing or the one in which she lives?’

‘Now, Willi! Caroline is not a silly girl. She did have a little upset and imagined things, I know. And then there was the accident. But since that time she’s recovered wonderfully.’

‘My dear Helena, I do assure you that Caroline has been receiving communications from her Typing Spooks continuously since that time.’

‘Nonsense. Caroline is perfectly sane. What’s going to win the Lincoln, do you think, Willi?—’

And so, occasionally, when Helena asked Caroline, ‘Quite happy now, dear?’ or ‘Nothing worrying you?’ Caroline would be unhappy and worrying about these inquiries.

So, on the day of the picnic she was especially happy to discuss the Baron’s latest fantasy with Helena.

‘He must have built up a theory,’ said Helena, ‘on rumours and suspicions. I hate,’ she said with unusual force, ‘doubt and suspicion.’

Caroline thought, ‘She is worried about Mrs Hogg. The affair in the car is pressing on her mind. Poor Helena! Perhaps she would not at all like to know things clearly.’

Laurence lay listening to their voices, contentedly oblivious of what they said. He was too somnolent in the warmth of the sun to take part in the conversation and too enchanted by his sense of the summer day to waste it in sleep. He watched the movements of a young fat woman on a houseboat moored nearby. Every now and then she would disappear into the cabin to fetch something. First a bright scarf to protect her head from the sun. Then a cushion. Next she went below for so long a time, as it seemed to Laurence, that he thought she was never coming back. But she did emerge again, with a cup of tea. She drank it propped tubbily on the tiny bridge of the boat. Laurence spent his pleasurable idleness of long meaningless moments in following every sip. He wished the houseboat were his. He wondered where the man of the house could be, for he was sure there must be a man, referred to by Tubby as ‘my friend’. Laurence wished it were possible for him to go on lying drowsily by the river and at the same time to poke about in the cabin of the boat, to pry into the cooking arrangements, the bunks, the engine. A little rowing boat which lay alongside caught Laurence’s fancy.

It came home to him that Caroline was saying, ‘I’ll start the kettle for tea.’

She had lit the spirit stove when Helena said, ‘Thunder.’

‘No,’ said Laurence. ‘Couldn’t be. I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘we might be able to borrow that little boat and row over to the other side. —’

‘I thought I heard a rumble,’ Caroline said.

‘No.’

‘It’s quarter past four,’ Helena said. ‘I wonder where Georgina has got to?’

‘Spirited away,’ said Laurence remarkably.

Helena roused him to scout round for Georgina.

‘I’m sure it’s going to rain,’ she said.

The sky had clouded, and in spite of Laurence’s protests the barking of distant thunder was undeniable.

‘The thunder’s miles away over the downs,’ Laurence said, ‘it will miss the valley.’ Nevertheless, he went off in search of Mrs Hogg, pausing on the way to look more closely at the houseboat. The plump girl had gone inside.

Caroline and Helena started to move their rugs and tea-cups into the cars.

‘Even if we miss the storm,’ Helena said, ‘it will certainly set in to rain within the next ten minutes.—’

Suddenly they caught sight of the Baron on the opposite bank. He shouted something, but he was too far from them to be heard. With his hands describing a circuit he conveyed that he was coming back by the bridge.

‘He’ll get soaked,’ Caroline said. ‘Poor Willi!’ But before he set off again she waved him to stop.

‘I’ll ask for the boat,’ she said, ‘and row him over.’

‘That would be nice,’ Helena said. ‘Sure you can manage it?’

But Caroline, with Laurence’s raincoat over her shoulders, was away to the houseboat. The Baron stood perplexed for a moment. He saw Caroline bend down and knock at the little window. He understood the plan, then, and waited. In a few minutes Caroline signed to him that she had the owner’s permission to use the boat.

The rain had started, but it was light and the river calm. Caroline reached him within a few moments. He climbed into the boat and took the oars from her.

‘I got a sight of Hogarth,’ he said immediately, ‘alias Hogg, but he was in disguise. Quite a different appearance from the man I saw conducting the Black Mass. In the circumstances I did not address him, it was too frightening.—’

‘How did you know it was Mervyn Hogarth, then?’

‘I asked one of the lay-brothers. He confirmed that Mervyn Hogarth was staying there, and pointed him out. They believe he is come to the Abbey for the fishing.’

‘What fishing?’

‘Apparently the Abbey rents out a strip of fishing ground. They put up the anglers in the Abbey,’ said the Baron. ‘Little do they know whom they are harbouring. Hogarth alias Hogg,’ he said.

‘I think you are mixed up, Willi.’ Caroline pulled the raincoat over her head and patted her hair beneath it. ‘The man at the Black Mass must have been a different Hogarth.’

‘Oh no, he was named Hogg. Hogarth is the daytime name. I know for a fact that Mervyn Hogarth was born Mervyn Hogg.’

‘The man at the Black Mass must have been a different Hogg.’

‘I have the whole picture, which you have not,’ the Baron said. ‘This afternoon, as I was leaving the Abbey grounds I saw the witch, Mrs Hogg, entering them. I turned back and followed her. I saw —actually saw, Caroline — Mrs Hogg approaching Hogarth. He was doing something to a fishing rod at the time. He recognized her of course. He looked very miserable. They exchanged a few words. Soon, he walked away and left her. The couple are clearly known to each other.—’

They had landed. Caroline thanked the woman while the Baron tied up the boat.

‘There’s no sign of Georgina,’ Helena said as they reached her car. ‘Laurence has been back and he’s gone off again to search for her. What a nuisance.

‘She was over at the Abbey,’ said the Baron. ‘I left her there half an hour ago.’

‘How vexing. Well, we shall have to wait. Let’s try and continue some tea in the back of the car.’

The thunder was still distant. The storm that was raging some miles away seemed unlikely to reach them, but now the rain was heavy.

‘Which way did Laurence go?’ the Baron said.

‘Towards the bridge.’

‘I’ll take his car and meet him. I daresay I shall pick up Mrs Hogg on her way back. She must be at the bridge by now.’

He drove off. Every few minutes Helena poked her head out of the back window of her car. ‘I hope they don’t miss each other,’ she said, ‘Laurence only has his jacket. Oh, there’s Georgina!’

Mrs Hogg was coming down to the riverside by a track through the trees on the opposite bank. She saw Helena and raised her hand in recognition.

Helena made a frantic dumb-show at her. Mrs Hogg stood waiting and stupid-looking.

‘Caroline,’ said Helena, ‘be an angel.’

‘You want me to fetch her in the boat,’ Caroline stated.

‘Put the mac over your head, do.’ Helena was nervy. ‘We shall be kept waiting here for ages if she has to plod round by the bridge. It’s two miles each way. I’m dying to get home.’

When Caroline did not reply, Helena seemed aware of having asked more than an ordinary favour.

‘I’ll go, dear,’ said Helena at once. ‘Give me the mac. I’m sure I can manage the boat.’

Caroline was sure she couldn’t. She jumped out of the car and was off like someone taking a plunge against nature.

In spite of the rain, with only a cardigan over her summer dress, Helena followed. She caught up Caroline at the houseboat, and added her gracious thanks to the owner. As Caroline unmoored she said, ‘This really is charitable, Caroline. Poor Georgina would be drenched if she had to walk round to cross the bridge.’

Caroline gave her an amiable smile, for she was too proud to reveal her neurotic dread. Her dread was on account of a very small thing. She knew she would have to give Mrs Hogg a hand into the boat. The anticipation of this physical contact, her hand in Mrs Hogg’s only for a moment, horrified Caroline. It was a very small thing, but it was what she constitutionally dreaded.

‘Step down here, Mrs Hogg. On to that stone. Give me your hand. Take care, the river’s deep here.’

The bank had grown muddy but there were several firm footholds. Caroline, standing astride in the boat, reached out and grasped Mrs Hogg’s hand firmly. Step there, now there. ‘I’m doing fine,’ Caroline thought, gripping the woman’s hand tightly in her own. She was filled with the consciousness of hand.

Mrs Hogg had rubber-soled shoes which had picked up a good deal of mud. In spite of all her care she slipped on her heels, she tottered backwards with her hand still gripped in Caroline’s so that the boat rocked wildly. In an instant she was loudly in the water and Caroline, still grasping the hand by the first compulsive need to overcome her horror of it, went with her. Mrs Hogg lashed about her in a screaming panic. Caroline freed herself and gripped the side of the boat. But she was wrenched away, the woman’s hands were on her neck — ‘I can’t swim!’

Caroline struck her in the face. ‘Hold on to my shoulders,’ she shouted. ‘I can swim.’ But the woman in her extremity was intent on Caroline’s throat. Caroline saw the little boat bobbing away downstream. Then her sight became blocked by one of Mrs Hogg’s great hands clawing across her eyes, the other hand tightening on her throat. Mrs Hogg’s body, and even legs, encompassed Caroline so that her arms were restricted. She knew then that if she could not free herself from Mrs Hogg they would both go under.

They were under water and out of sight for a while. Helena said later that it was only a matter of seconds before Caroline’s head emerged. But in that space of time it was a long breath-holding contest between them. Caroline had practised underwater swimming. Not so, Mrs Hogg. The woman clung to Caroline’s throat until the last. It was not until Mrs Hogg opened her mouth finally to the inrush of water that her grip slackened and Caroline was free, her lungs aching for the breath of life. Mrs Hogg subsided away from her. God knows where she went.

Caroline had the sense of being hauled along a bumpy surface, of being landed with a thud like a gasping fish, ‘before she passed out.

‘Jolly good luck I had my friend here. I can’t swim myself.’

Caroline lay in the bunk of the houseboat, without a sense or even a care of where she was. She recognized Helena, then the plump woman of the houseboat and a strange man who was taking off all his dripping wet clothes. Caroline had a sense of childhood, and she closed her eyes.

‘There was no sign of the other,’ the man was saying. ‘She’s had it. Any relation?’

‘No,’ said Helena’s voice.

‘She gave this one a rough time,’ said the man. ‘Just look at her face. I’ll bet she’s been trained to hold her breath under water. If she hadn’t, she—’d have had it too, this one.

The woman of the houseboat helped Caroline to sip from a warm beaker.

‘Have you anything to put on the scratches?’ That was Helena.

Presently Caroline felt something soft being smoothed over her face and throat. Her neck was hurting. And again she was sipping something warm and sweet, her shoulders supported by Helena.

The man said, ‘I had a look for the other, best I could. It’s deep in that spot. I daresay we’ll get the body. There was a tragedy five summers back and we got the body two days after.’

Helena murmured, ‘You’ve been marvellous.’

Before she went off to sleep, Caroline heard Laurence’s voice from somewhere outside, then the Baron’s, then Helena again, ‘Here they are with the doctor.’

Sir Edwin Manders was making his autumn retreat. October 24th, the Feast of St Raphael the Archangel; he had arrived at the monastery during the afternoon in time for Benediction.

The window of his room looked down on a green courtyard over which the leaves were scattering. Fixing his eye on this sunlit square of leaves and grass, he gave himself to think about his surprising family affairs.

Usually when he was in retreat this man would give his time, under a spiritual director, to regarding the state of his soul. In the past few months he had been given cause to wonder if he did not make his retreats too frequently. Amazing things occurred at home; extraordinary events which he never heard of till later.

‘Why didn’t you inform me at the time, Helena?’

‘You were in retreat, Edwin.’

He had misgivings then, about his retreats. He told his spiritual director. ‘I might have done better to spend the time at home. My family have had to cope with difficulties … my son … my brother … my mother-in-law … one of our old servants … I might have done better had I not made so many retreats.’

‘You might have done worse,’ said the shrewd old priest, and sounded as if he meant it. It was a humiliating thought, which in turn was good for the soul.

‘They manage admirably without me,’ Edwin Manders admitted. And so he was in retreat again. Really on this occasion he had not wanted to come. But Helena insisted. Ernest even, in his shy way, had said, ‘Someone has got to pray for us, Edwin.’ Laurence had said, ‘Cancel your autumn retreat? Oh you can’t do that,’ without giving any reasons. Caroline Rose had driven him to the station.

For years he had felt drawn to the contemplative life. To partake more fully of it he had retired, all but nominally, from Manders’ Figs. Helena took pride in his frequent recourse to monasteries. In fact he was embarrassed at this moment to realize how effectively she had fostered the legend of his ‘certain sanctity’. More and more he had felt attracted by the ascetic formalities. Only this autumn, in his hesitation before leaving home, did he feel he was being pushed into it.

He had no more qualms after his arrival at the monastery. The charm began to work on him. His austere cell was like a drug. The rise and fall of plain-song from the Chapel invited him into its abiding pure world. The noiseless, timeless lay-brothers moved amenably about their business, causing Edwin Manders to feel pleasurably humble in the presence of this profound elect. The fact that there was a big upset going on in the monastic quarters of the buildings due to half the bedrooms being flooded by a burst pipe, that one of the lay-brothers was sick to death of his life, that the Abbot was worried about an overdraft, was mercifully concealed from Edwin at that moment. And so he was sufficiently unhampered by material distractions to see his spiritual temptation plain, which being so, he found it after all resistible, that luxurious nostalgia, that opium daze of devotion, for he knew, more or less, that he never would have made a religious. He gave his mind to reviewing his family affairs.

There were two items in the embarrassing category, for both had reached the newspapers. He was in doubt which was the more distressing, Louisa Jepp’s case or Georgina Hogg’s. He decided, on the whole, Georgina’s. And for a good half-hour he concentrated on Georgina, now lodged, it was believed, in the mud of the Medway, for her body was never recovered. There was a piece in the London evening papers, mentioning by name Helena, Laurence, Caroline, Baron Stock, and the couple on the houseboat. There was an inquest. Poor Helena. In former days, he recalled, their name for Georgina in the household was Manders’ Mortification.

As he heard afterwards, for he was in retreat at the time, Helena got Laurence to make inquiries for poor Mrs Hogg’s son. He turned out to be an unfortunate person. The father a bigamist. Helena dropped her inquiries as soon as she learned that Eleanor Hogarth was involved in the bigamy; innocently no doubt, but she was in partnership with his brother Ernest, another embarrassment… Helena hushed it up. Helena was marvellous.

‘We had a sort of forewarning of Mrs Hogg’s death. Willi Stock and I were on our way to the picnic, with Georgina at the back. …

Women were rather fanciful, of course. Edwin often wondered if there was any truth in the story that Mrs Hogg’s son was miraculously cured. Helena was convinced of it. There had been nothing official on the subject. The man in question had been taken under the wing of a wealthy woman, a Theist or Theosophist, something like that. Anyway, the later news was that he had left that woman’s house and departed for Canada to lecture there about his cure.

‘In spite of which,’ Edwin thought, ‘young Hogarth may be a worthier man than me.

Likewise, when he turned to Baron Stock, he murmured, ‘Miserere mei, Deus.’ The Baron, probably a better man than himself, was having treatment in a private mental home and, according to accounts, loving it. He thought of his brother Ernest, so worldly and yet so short of money and not perhaps really keen on that dancing girl. He forced himself to consider Eleanor… . ‘All these people have suffered while I have fattened on fasting.’ He meant what he said, and so truly he was not as limited as he seemed.

And to think of his mother-in-law! He reflected, now, unflinchingly on the question of Louisa Jepp. There again he could not quite grasp … smuggling diamonds, a gang, it sounded like an adventure story. Then there was Louisa’s real folly and it was quite embarrassing. Heroically he forced his mind to that moment in September when, at breakfast, Helena limply passed him a letter. The letter was from Louisa. With it was a press cutting from a local paper. The press cutting was headed ‘Sunset Wedding’. It was a long piece. It began ‘In the sunset of their lives two of the old folks of Ladylees have come together in Holy Matrimony. At All Saints’ on Saturday last, Mrs Louisa Jepp, 78, of Smugglers’ Retreat, Ladylees, gave her hand in marriage to Mr J. G. L. Webster, 77, of the Old Mill, Ladylees… . The bride promised to “obey”… .’ This was followed by a substantial account of Webster and his career in the Merchant Navy, and the column ended, ‘Mrs Jepp (now Webster) has one daughter, Lady Manders, wife of Sir Edwin Manders, head of the famous firm Manders’ Figs in Syrup. The Rev. R. Socket who conducted the ceremony stated, “This is a very happy and unique occasion. Though not a regular churchgoer, Mrs Jepp is a figure much loved and respected in the district.”‘

The accompanying letter was brief. In it Louisa remarked, ‘It is not strictly accurate to say that I am not a regular churchgoer as I go to church regularly on Remembrance Day.—’

‘It isn’t for us to judge her wisdom,’ Helena said glumly.

Edwin stared out at the green quadrangle, the blown leaves. Miserere nobis. . . . Have mercy.

Laurence and Caroline had been high-spirited about Louisa’s marriage. That was to be expected of Laurence. He had always adored his grandmother; and indeed she was charming, indeed.

Edwin wondered if Caroline herself was really interested in marriage.

‘She’s waiting for Laurence to return to the Church,’ Helena said. He wondered. Caroline was an odd sort of Catholic, very little heart for it, all mind.

‘That dreadful experience with poor Georgina in the river hasn’t had any harmful effects on Caroline,’ Helena said. ‘She must have a strong constitution. In fact, since then she’s been much more light-hearted. She seems to be amused by something, I don’t know what.’

Caroline had finished her book about novels. Now she announced she was going away on a long holiday. She was going to write a novel.

‘I don’t call that a holiday,’ said Helena, ‘not if you mean to spend it writing a novel.’

‘This is a holiday of obligation,’ Caroline replied.

‘What is the novel to be about?—’

Caroline answered, ‘Characters in a novel.’

Edwin himself had said, ‘Make it a straight old-fashioned story, no modern mystifications. End with the death of the villain and the marriage of the heroine.’

Caroline laughed and said, ‘Yes, it would end that way.

A few weeks later the character called Laurence Manders was snooping around in Caroline Rose’s flat. She was away in Worcestershire writing her novel, and he had gone to the flat to collect some books which she had asked to be sent to her.

He took his time. In fact, the books were the last things he looked for.

He thought, What am I looking for? and flicked the dresses in her wardrobe.

He found the books that Caroline wanted, but before he left he sat down at Caroline’s desk and wrote her a letter.

I have spent 2 hours 28 mins. in your flat [he wrote] . I have found those books for you, and had a look round. Why did you lock the right-hand drawer in the wall cupboard? I had difficulty in getting it open, and then the hair curlers in one box and the scarves in another, and the white gloves were all I found. I can’t lock it again. I have just found myself wondering what I was looking for.

I found an enormous sheaf of your notes for your novel in the cupboard in that carton marked Keep in a Cool Place. Why did you leave them behind? What’s the point of making notes if you don’t use them while you are writing the book?

Do you want me to send the notes to you?

I wonder if you left them on purpose, so that I should read them?

But I remember your once saying you always made a lot of notes for a book, then never referred to them. I feel very niggled.

I will tell you what I think of your notes:

(1) You misrepresent all of us.

(2) Obviously you are the martyr-figure. ‘Martyrdom by misunderstanding.’ But actually you yourself understand nobody, for instance the Baron, my father, myself, we are martyred by your misunderstanding.

(3) I love you. I think you are hopelessly selfish.

(4) I dislike being a character in your novel. How is it all going to end?

Laurence wrote a long letter, re-read it, then folded and sealed it. He put it in his pocket, stacked away Caroline’s notes in their place in the carton in the cupboard.

The autumn afternoon was darkening as he turned into Hampstead Heath. Religion had so changed Caroline. At one time he had thought it would make life easier for her, and indirectly for himself. ‘You have to be involved personally,’ Caroline had said on one occasion, infuriating him by the know-all assumption of the words. At least, he thought, I am honest; I misunderstand Caroline. His letter had failed to express his objections. He took it out of his pocket and tore it up into small pieces, scattering them over the Heath where the wind bore them away. He saw the bits of paper come to rest, some on the scrubby ground, some among the deep marsh weeds, and one piece on a thorn-bush; and he did not then foresee his later wonder, with a curious rejoicing, how the letter had got into the book.

Table of Contents

Start