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.
That was the sort of thing Helena put up with, partly out of weakness and partly strength.
One day after a long absence Georgina had arrived as of old with her rampant wounded rectitude. On this occasion she kicked the Manders’ cat just as Helena entered the room. Helena pretended not to notice but sat down as usual to hear her story.
‘Lady Manders,’ said Georgina, dabbing her eyes, ‘my son has gone.
Helena thought at first he must be dead.
‘Gone?’ she said.
‘Gone to live with his father,’ Mrs Hogg said. ‘Imagine the deception. That vile man has been seeing my boy in the hostel, behind my back. It’s been going on for months, a great evil, Lady Manders. The father has money you know, and my poor boy, a good Catholic—’
‘The father has taken him away?’
‘Yes. Andrew has gone to live with him.’
‘But surely Mr Hogg has no right. You can demand him back. What were the authorities thinking of? I shall look into this, Georgina.’
‘Andrew is of age. He went of his own free will. I wrote to him, begged him to explain or to see me. He won’t, he just won’t.’
‘Were you not informed by the authorities before Andrew was removed?’ Helena asked.
‘No. It was very sudden. All in an afternoon. They say they had no power to prevent it, and I was in Bristol at the time in that temporary post. It’s a shocking thing, a tragedy.’
Later Helena said to her husband, ‘Poor Mrs Hogg. She had reason to be distressed about it. I wish I could like the woman, but there’s something so unwholesome about her.’
‘Isn’t there!’ he said. ‘The children never cared for her, remember.’
‘I wonder if her son disliked her.’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Perhaps he’s better off with Mr Hogg.’
‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’
There was only one disastrous event which Georgina Hogg omitted to tell the Manders. That was the affair of Mervyn’s bigamous marriage under the assumed name ‘Hogarth’.
Mrs Hogg shifted from the window to turn up the gas fire. She said to Mervyn, ‘Making a criminal out of Andrew.’ ‘He likes the game.’
‘Bigamy,’ she said, ‘and now smuggling. You may get a surprise one day. I’m not going to sit by and watch you ruining Andrew.’
But he knew, she would never dissipate, in open scandal, the precious secret she held against him. He counted always and accurately on the moral blackmailer in Georgina, he had known in his childhood her predatory habits with other people’s seamy secrets. Most of all she cherished those offences which were punishable by law, and for this reason she would jealously keep her prey from the attention of the law. Knowledge of a crime was safe with her, it was the criminal himself she was after, his peace of mind if she could get it. And so Mervyn had exploited her nature without fear of her disclosing to anyone his bigamy (another ‘mistake’ of his), far less his smuggling activities. It was now three years since Mrs Hogg had made her prize discovery of the bigamy. She had simply received an anonymous letter. It informed her that her husband, under the name of Hogarth, had undergone a form of marriage in a register office with the woman who had since shared his home. Georgina thought this very probable — too probable for her even to confide in Helena who might have made investigations, caused a public fuss.
Instead, Georgina made her own investigations. The letter, to start with: on close examination, obviously written by Andrew. She rejoiced at this token of disloyalty as much as the contents agitated her with a form of triumph.
They were true. Georgina turned up at Ladle Sands, Sussex, where the couple were established, and made a scene with Eleanor.
‘You have been living with my husband for some years.’