‘Very useful, your having been brought up a Catholic,’ said Caroline. ‘Converts can always rely on your kind for instruction in the non-essentials.’
Eventually, they had clear road. Caroline pulled their spare duffle from the back seat and arranged it over her head and shoulders, so that she was secluded inside this tent, concealed from Laurence; then he guessed she was trying to suppress her irritable mood. In fact, it was getting on her nerves more and more that the eyes of an onlooker were illicitly upon them. Her determination to behave naturally in face of that situation made her more self-conscious.
Laurence was thinking about his grandmother, and as he did so he speeded up.
Two days had passed since Mrs Hogg had paid her bleak visit to Helena. Strangely, when Caroline had heard of this, she had seemed incredulous: and now, when he reverted to the subject:
‘No. Helena must be mistaken. I can’t conceive Mrs Hogg as a blackmailer.’
‘But you’ve seen what she’s like.’
‘I don’t think that particular vice is quite in her line. Opening your letter — that I do visualize. I got the impression that she’s a type who acts instinctively: she’d do any evil under the guise of good. But she wouldn’t engage in deliberate malice. She’s too superstitious. In fact, Mrs Hogg is simply a Catholic atrocity, like the tin medals and bleeding hearts. I don’t see her as a cold-blooded blackmailer. Helena must have imagined those insinuated threats.’ And so Caroline rattled on, overtaken by an impulse to talk, to repeat and repeat any assertion as an alternative to absolute silence. For in such a silence Caroline kept her deepest madness, a fear void of evidence, a suspicion altogether to be distrusted. It stuck within her like something which would go neither up nor down, the shapeless notion that Mrs Hogg was somehow in league with her invisible persecutor. She would not speak of this nor give it verbal form in her mind.
Laurence could not see her face, it was behind the duffle coat. He felt exasperated by Caroline’s seeming to take Mrs Hogg’s part, if only that little bit.
‘We’ve known her for twenty-odd years. We know her better than you do, dear. She’s vicious.
She snapped back at him. And so, in his need for their relations to return to a nice normal, he said peaceably, ‘Yes, I suppose old Georgina means well. But she’s done a lot of harm one way and another, and this time she’s gone too far. We can’t have Grandmother tormented at her time of life, no matter what mischief the old lady’s up to. We can’t, can we?’ So Laurence tried to calm her testiness and engage her sympathy.
Caroline did soften down. But she surprised him when she declared vehemently, ‘I don’t know that Mrs Hogg wants to torment your grandmother. I don’t really think your grandmother is involved in any suspicious activity. I think you’re imagining it all, on the strength of a few odd coincidences.’
It was strange. Normally, Laurence’s concession, his ‘Yes, I suppose old Georgina means well’ should have evoked something quite agreeable from Caroline.
So he tried again. ‘There’s something else to be considered. That clue I got from Eleanor’s cigarette case. I’m sure the crest is the same as Georgina’s. There is some connexion between Georgina and this Hogarth couple, I’m convinced of it.’
She did not reply.
‘Strange, wasn’t it, my discerning that crest, quite by chance?’
‘By chance.’ Caroline repeated the words on a strained pitch.
‘I mean, said Laurence obligingly, but misunderstanding her, ‘that God led me to it, God bless him. Well, it’s a small world. We just bump into Eleanor and —’
‘Laurence,’ said Caroline, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be much help to you at Ladylees. I’ve had enough holiday- making. I’ll stay for a couple of days but I want to get back to London and do some work, actually. Sorry to change my mind but —’
‘Go to hell,’ Laurence said. ‘Kindly go to hell.’
After that they stopped at a pub. When they resumed their journey Caroline began patiently to state her case. They had lost half an hour, and Laurence drove swiftly into Sussex.
‘From my point of view it’s clear that you are getting these ideas into your head through the influence of a novelist who is contriving some phoney plot. I can see clearly that your mind is working under the pressure of someone else’s necessity, and under the suggestive power of some irresponsible writer you are allowing yourself to become an amateur sleuth in a cheap mystery piece.’
‘How do you know the plot is phoney?’ he said, which was rather sweet of him.
‘I haven’t been studying novels for three years without knowing some of the technical tricks. In this case it seems to me there’s an attempt being made to organize our lives into a convenient slick plot. Is it likely that your grandmother is a gangster?’
Just ahead of them two girls in a shining black open racer skimmed the wet road. Automatically Laurence put on speed, listening intently to Caroline at the same time, for it was difficult to grasp her mind at this fantastic level.
‘That’s a Sunbeam Alpine,’ he remarked.
‘Are you listening to what I’m saying, dear?’
‘I am, truly,’ he said.
‘Your grandmother being a gangster, it’s taking things too far. She’s an implausible character, don’t you see?’
‘She’s the most plausible person I know. She’d take in anyone. That’s the difficulty.’
‘I mean, as a character, don’t you see? She’s unlikely. So is Mrs Hogg. Is it likely that the pious old cow is a blackmailer?’
‘I think it likely that she’s done
