(1954) The Comforters

by Muriel Spark

  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 worthwhile 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 goodwil
l; 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.—’