(1954) The Comforters

by Muriel Spark

  ‘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 bac
k 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 o
f 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.