For a year she made these visits frequently, until at length Mervyn threatened to give himself up to the police. ‘Six to twelve months in jail would be worth it for a little peace,’ he declared.
‘Good idea,’ said Andrew.
‘You are possessed by the Devil,’ his mother told him as she departed for the last time with a contemptuous glance at some broken plaster statuettes lying on a table. ‘Mervyn has taken up modelling, no doubt!’
Mervyn continued to tell himself, as he sat in that room in Chiswick late in the afternoon, that if he were a man given to indulge in self-pity he would have plenty of scope. It was one mistake after another. It came to mind that on one occasion, during his matrimonial years with Eleanor, he had slipped while crossing her very polished dancing floor. Polished floors were a mistake, he had broken an eye-tooth, and in consequence, so he maintained, he had lost his sense of smell. Other calamities, other mistakes came flooding back.
It was not any disclosure of his crimes that he feared from Georgina, he was frightened of the damage she could do to body and soul by her fanatical moral intrusiveness, so near to an utterly primitive mania.
Georgina was speaking. ‘Repent and be converted, Mervyn.’
He shuddered, all hunched in the chair as he was, penetrated by the chill of danger. Georgina’s lust for converts to the Faith was terrifying, for by the Faith she meant herself. He felt himself shrink to a sizable item of prey, hovering on the shores of her monstrous mouth to be masticated to a pulp and to slither unrecognizably down that abominable gully, that throat he could almost see as she smiled her smile of all-forgetting. ‘Repent, Mervyn. Be converted.’ And in case he should be converted perhaps chemically into an intimate cell of her great nothingness he stood up quickly and shed a snigger.
‘Change your evil life,’ said she. ‘Get out of the clutches of Mrs Jepp.’
‘You don’t know what evil is,’ he said defensively, ‘nor the difference between right and wrong … confuse God with the Inland Revenue and God knows what.’ And he recalled at that moment several instances of Georgina’s muddled morals, and he thought again of his mistakes in life, his lost art and skill, his marriages, the slippery day when he broke the eye-tooth and another occasion not long ago when he had missed his travellers’ cheques after spending half an hour in Boulogne with an acquaintance of his youth whom he had happened to meet. Added to this, he had a stomach ulcer, due to all these mistakes. He thought of Ernest Manders, the hush money. He sat down again and set about to defy Georgina.
‘I’ll tell you what has happened thanks to your interference in my affairs. The Manders are on our trail.’
‘The Manders? They dare not act. When I saw Lady Manders about my suspicions she was very very frightened about her mother.’
‘You told Lady Manders? You’ve been busy. No wonder the affair is almost common property.’
‘She was more frightened than grieved, I’m sorry to say,’ Georgina said. ‘She dare not act because of the mother being involved.’
‘The old woman takes a very minor part in our scheme. Do you suppose we put ourselves in the hands of that senile hag?’
‘She isn’t senile, that one.
‘Mrs Jepp has very little to do with us. Almost nothing. The Manders are after us; they intend to make a big fuss. You see their line? — Preying on a defenceless old lady. That was the line Ernest Manders took when I met him today.’
‘Ernest Manders,’ Georgina said, ‘you’ve been seeing that pervert.’
‘Yes, he’s blackmailing us. Thanks to your interference. But I won’t be intimidated. A few years in prison wouldn’t worry me after all I’ve been through. Andrew will get off, I daresay, on account of his condition. A special probationary home for him, I reckon. He wouldn’t care a damn. Our real name would come out of course and you would be called as witness. Andrew doesn’t care. Only the other day he said, “I don’t care a damn”.’
‘You’ve ruined Andrew,’ she declared, as she always did.
He replied: ‘I was just about to take Andrew on a pilgrimage to the shrine at Einsiedeln, but we’ve had to cancel it thanks to your interference.’
‘
Sir Edwin Manders had been in retreat for two weeks.
‘Edwin has been in retreat for two weeks,’ said Helena.
Ernest, dining with her, noticed that she had said this three times since his arrival, speaking almost to herself. ‘I suppose,’ he thought, ‘she must love him,’ and he was struck by the strangeness of this love, whatever its nature might be; not that his brother was unlovable in the great magnanimous sense, but it was difficult to imagine wifely affection stretching out towards Edwin of these late years, for he had grown remote to the world though always amiable, always amiable, with a uniform amiability.
For himself, trying to approach his brother was an unendurable embarrassment. Ernest had decided that his last attempt was to remain the last.
‘A temporary difficulty, Edwin. We had expensive alterations carried out at the studio. Unfortunately Eleanor has no head for business. She was under the impression that Baron Stock’s financial interests in the school were secure from any personal — I mean to say any personal — you see, whereas in fact the Baron’s commitments were
Edwin had said, all amiable, ‘To be honest now, Ernest, I have no real attraction to investing in dancing schools. But look, I’ll write you a cheque. You are not to think of repayment. I am sure that is the best way to solve your problem.’
He handed Ernest the slip he had signed and folded neatly and properly. He was obviously at ease in his gesture; nothing
Ernest began to effuse. ‘I can’t begin to thank you, Edwin, I can’t say how pleased Eleanor …’ What he had meant to say was: ‘We don’t want a gift — this is a business proposition’, but the very sight of his smiling brother blotted out the words.
