She felt relieved on the whole. Her great desire to travel by train was dispersed by the obvious necessities of going to Mass, and of not messing Laurence around any further.
Presently he said, ‘Sure you won’t mind,’ for he understood the question was safely settled for her, and he did not wish to play the tyrant. So he had the luxury of asking her several times, ‘Quite sure, dear, it’s all right? You don’t mind coming by car?’
‘After all,’ she told him, ‘it isn’t a moral defeat. The Mass is a proper obligation. But to acquiesce in the requirements of someone’s novel would have been ignoble.’
He gave academic consideration to this statement and observed, ‘The acquiescence is accidental, in which sense the nobility must oblige.’
She thought, ‘The hell of it, he understands that much. Why isn’t he a Catholic, then?’ She smiled at him over her drink, for their immediate haste was over and Laurence had fished out the bottle which she had packed in his suitcase, very carefully in its proper corner.
Brompton Oratory oppressed her when it was full of people, such a big monster of a place. As usual, when she entered, the line from the Book of Job came to her mind, ‘Behold now Behemoth which I made with thee.’
Before the Mass started, this being the Feast of All Saints, there was a great amount of devotion going on before the fat stone statues. The things worth looking at were the votive candles, crowds of these twinklers round every altar; Caroline added her own candle to the nearest cluster. It occurred to her that the Oratory was the sort of place which might become endeared in memory, after a long absence. She could not immediately cope with this huge full-blown environment, for it antagonized the diligence with which Caroline coped with things, bit by bit.
Having been much in Laurence’s company for the fortnight past, and now alone in this company of faces, in the midst of the terrifying collective, she remembered more acutely than ever her isolation by ordeal. She was now fully conscious that she was under observation intermittently by an intruder. And presently her thoughts were away, dwelling on the new strangeness of her life, and although her eyes and ears had been following the Mass throughout, it was not until the Offertory verse that she collected her wits; Justorum animae … from sheer intelligence, the climax of the Mass approaching, she had to let her brood of sufferings go by for the time being.
‘You’re always bad-tempered after Mass,’ Laurence observed as they cruised through the built-up areas.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the proofs of the Faith so far as I’m concerned. It’s evidence of the truth of the Mass, don’t you see? The flesh despairs.’
‘Pure subjectivism,’ he said. ‘You’re something of a Quietist, I think. And quite Manichaean. A Catharist.’ He had been schooled in the detection of heresies.
‘Anything else?’
‘Scribe and Pharisee,’ he said, ‘alternately according to mood.’
‘The decor of Brompton Oratory makes me ill,’ she told him, as another excuse. For when he had met her after the Mass she had turned most sour.
‘You don’t refer to the “decor” of a church,’ he said — ‘at least, I think not.’
‘What is it then?’
‘I’m not sure of the correct term. I’ve never heard it called a “decor.
‘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.