‘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,
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.
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.
…
‘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.
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.
