‘I am lonely by no means. I shall give no such foolish message to Master Laurence. If you have any grievance against him, I suggest you write to Sir Edwin. My grandson is not to be troubled at present.’
‘There is the matter of slander. In my position my character in the world is very important.’
‘You have got hold of Master Laurence’s letter to Miss Caroline,’ Louisa said in a voice she sometimes used when she had played a successful hand at rummy through guesswork.
‘You really must remember your age,’ said Mrs Hogg. ‘No good carrying on as if you were in your prime.’
‘I will not have you to stay with me,’ Louisa said.
‘You need a companion.
‘I am not feeble. I trust I shall never be so feeble as to choose you for a companion.’
‘Why do you keep diamonds in the bread?’
Louisa hardly moved nor paused at all. Indeed it entered her mind: how like Laurence to have found the hiding place!
‘I will not deny, that is my habit.’
‘You are full of sin.’
‘Crime,’ said Louisa. ‘I would hardly say “full”. …
Mrs Hogg rose then, her lashless eyes screwed on Louisa’s brown hands on her brown lap. Was the woman really senile, then?
‘Wait. Sit down,’ Louisa said, ‘I should like to tell you all about the crime.’ She looked up, her black old eyes open to Mrs Hogg. The appealing glance was quite convincing.
Thus encouraged, ‘You must see a priest,’ said Mrs Hogg. None the less, she sat down to hear Louisa’s confession.
‘I am in smuggling,’ said Louisa. ‘I shan’t go into the whys and hows because of my memory, but I have a gang of my own, my dear Georgina, what do you think of that?’ Louisa peered at Mrs Hogg from the corner of her eye and pursed her lips as if she were kissing the breeze. Mrs Hogg stared. Was she drunk perhaps? But at seventy-eight, after all —’A gang?’ said Mrs Hogg at last.
‘A gang. We are four. I am the leader. The other three are gentlemen. They smuggle diamonds from abroad.’
‘In loaves of bread?’
‘I won’t go into the ways and whats. Then I dispose of the diamonds through my contact in London.’
Mrs Hogg said, ‘Your daughter doesn’t know this. If it’s true.’
‘You have been to see Lady Manders, of course? You have told her what was in that letter you stole?’
‘Lady Manders is very worried about you.’
‘Ah yes. I will put that right. Well, let me tell you the names of the parties involved in my smuggling arrangements. If you know every-thing I’m sure you won’t want to worry my daughter any more.
‘You can trust me,’ said Mrs Hogg.
‘I’m sure. There is a Mr Webster, he is a local baker. A real fine person, he doesn’t go abroad himself. I had better not say what part he plays in my smuggling arrangements. Then there’s a father and son — such a sad affair, the boy’s a cripple but it does him so much good the trips abroad, the father too. Their name is Hogarth. Mervyn is the father and Andrew is the son. That is my gang.
But Mrs Hogg looked in a bad way just then. The dreadful fluffy fur slipped awry on her shoulder. Violently she said, ‘Mervyn and Andrew!’
‘That is correct. Hogarth they call themselves.’
‘You are evil,’ said Mrs Hogg.
‘You won’t be needing that letter,’ said Louisa, ‘but you may keep it just the same.
Mrs Hogg gathered her fur cape around her huge breasts, and speaking without a movement of her upper lip in a way that fascinated Louisa by its oddity, she said, ‘You’re an evil woman. A criminal evil old, a wicked old’, and talking like that, she made off. Louisa climbed to her attic, from where she could see the railway station set in a dip of the land, and, through her father’s old spyglass, Mrs Hogg eventually appeared like a shady yellow wasp on the platform.
When Louisa came downstairs, she said to her charwoman, ‘That visitor I had just now.’
‘Yes, Mrs Jepp?’
‘She wanted to come and look after me as I’m getting so old.’
‘Coo.’
Louisa opened a drawer in the kitchen dresser, took out a folded white cloth, placed it carefully at the window end of the table. She brought out her air-mail writing paper and her fountain pen and wrote a note of six lines. Next she folded the letter and laid it on the dresser while she replaced the white cloth in the drawer. She put away her fountain pen, then the writing paper, took up the note and went out into her garden. There she sat in the November mildness, uttering repeatedly and softly ‘Coo, Coo-oo!’ Soon a pigeon flashed out from its high loft and descended to the seat beside her. She folded the thin paper into a tiny pellet, fixed it into the band on the silver bird’s leg, stroked its bill with her brown fingers, and let it go. Off it flew, in the direction of Ladle Sands.
It is possible for a man matured in religion by half a century of punctilious observance, having advanced himself in devotion the slow and exquisite way, trustfully ascending his winding stair, and, to make assurance doubly sure, supplementing his meditations by deep-breathing exercises twice daily, to go into a flat spin when faced with some trouble which does not come within a familiar category. Should this occur, it causes dismay in others. To anyone accustomed to respect the wisdom and control of a contemplative creature, the evidence of his failure to cope with a normal emergency is distressing. Only the spiritual extremists rejoice — the Devil on account of his crude triumph, and the very holy souls because they discern in such behaviour a testimony to the truth that human nature is apt to fail in spite of regular prayer and deep breathing.
But fortunately that situation rarely happens. The common instinct knows how to gauge the limits of a man’s sanctity, and anyone who has earned a reputation for piety by prayer, deep breathing and one or two acceptable good works has gained this much for his trouble, that few people bring him any extraordinary problem.
That is why hardly anyone asked Sir Edwin Manders for a peculiar favour or said weird things to him.
He had coped, it was true, with the shock of the car accident; Laurence and Caroline were seen into safe hands. He floated over Helena’s anxiety on the strength of his stout character. He might have managed to do something suave and comforting about Helena’s other worry — her mother’s suspected criminal activities. He might have turned this upset of his social tranquillity to some personal and spiritual advantage, but then he might not. Helena instinctively did not try him with this problem. She did not know what Louisa was up to, but she understood that the difficulty was not one which the Manders’ cheque book could solve. Helena would not have liked to see her husband in a state of bewilderment. He went to Mass every morning, confession once a week, entertained Cardinals. He would sit, contemplating deeply, for a full hour in a silence so still you could hear a moth breathe. And Helena thought, ‘No, simply no’ when she tried to envisage the same Edwin grappling also with the knowledge that his mother-in-law ran a gang, kept diamonds in the bread — stolen diamonds possibly. Helena took her troubles to his brother Ernest who sailed through life wherever the fairest wind should waft him, and for whom she had always prayed so hard.
‘I feel I ought not to worry Edwin about this. He has a certain sanctity. You understand, don’t you, Ernest?’
‘Yes, of course, dear Helena, but I’m the last person, as you know, to cope with Louisa’s great gangsters. If I could invite them to lunch at my club —’
‘I’m sure you could if they are my mother’s associates,’ Helena said.
A week later, Helena went to the flat at Queen’s Gate where Caroline had lodged. It was the job of packing up the girl’s possessions. Caroline’s fracture would keep her in hospital for another month at least. The housekeeper, a thin ill-looking man, who, on Helena’s delicate inquiries, proved not to be ill but merely a retired lightweight boxer, let her in. Nice man, she thought, telling herself that she had a way with people: Laurence and Caroline had said he was frightful.