‘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.’
