The Comforters

Mrs Hogg said, collecting herself though lopsided, ‘You’re late, Mervyn.’

He sidled into an easy chair while she made to light the gas-ring under the kettle.

‘No tea for me,’ he said. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why you have started interfering. You’ve been to see Mrs Jepp. What’s your game?’

‘I know what yours is,’ she said. ‘Smuggling.’ She sat down in her chair by the window so that the side where her bust-bodice had burst was concealed from him.

‘Mrs Jepp ‘told you that.’

‘Yes, and it’s true. She can afford to be truthful.’

‘Andrew is involved,’ he said.

‘Ah yes, it’s all in keeping, you have ruined Andrew already. It’s only to be expected that you’re making a criminal of him.’

‘Why exactly did you go to Mrs Jepp?’

‘I know I can do her some good if I have the chance. She’s a wicked old woman. But I didn’t know she had got thick with you and Andrew. When she told me “Mervyn and Andrew Hogarth” I was stabbed, stabbed to the heart.’ And taking her handkerchief she stabbed each eye.

Mervyn Hogarth, looking at her, thought, I never pity myself. A weaker mind would be shattered by the perversity of my life. There would be plenty to pity if I were a man who indulged in self-pity.

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.