‘You must be wrong,—’ Caroline told the Baron. ‘Helena knows Georgina Hogg’s affairs. Ask Helena, she’ll confirm that Mrs Hogg has nothing to do with Hogarth.’ Again, she wondered about that crest.
‘Helena does not know,’ said the Baron. ‘And another thing, Caroline. So exciting, Caroline. I am going to see Mervyn Hogarth this afternoon. I have been informed that he is staying at an Abbey a few miles from this spot. Now why should he be staying at a religious house? He must be posing as a Catholic retreatant. I daresay that these are the means he uses for stealing the consecrated elements for use in the Black Mass. After all, he must get them from somewhere —’
Caroline caught his sleeve and nodded towards the hedgerow a few yards from where the car was parked. He looked in that direction. The black hat had just bobbed out of sight.
‘Mrs Hogg has been listening,’ Caroline said in a loud voice.
‘Did you call me, Miss Rose?’
Mrs Hogg came out of hiding as if she had never been in it. ‘Lovely round here,’ she said with her smile. ‘Did you call? I thought you called “Mrs Hogg”.’
Caroline walked away quickly, followed by the Baron, while Mrs Hogg made off along the towpath.
Caroline handed Helena the book. ‘It had slipped down at the very back,’ she said, ‘I had to move everything. I feel as exhausted as if I’d done a hard day’s work.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have — I thought Willi was doing all the heaving. Willi, why didn’t you do all the heaving?’
‘I did so, my Helena,’ said the Baron.
‘Mrs Hogg was bent behind the hedge listening to our conversation,’ Caroline said.
‘I take an oriental view of manual labour myself,’ said Laurence. He was stretched in the dappling shade of a tree.
‘She has nothing in her life,’ Helena said, ‘that’s her trouble. She always has been a nosey type. Simply because she hasn’t any life of her own. I’m sorry I brought her. I dread taking her back.’
Laurence gurgled. ‘I think that’s sweet.’ Helena had not told him of their creepy experience with Georgina that morning.
‘I’ve sent her off for a walk,—’ said Helena, looking round. ‘I wonder if she’ll be all right.’ Georgina was nowhere in sight.
‘Georgina is nowhere in sight,’ she said anxiously.
‘You’ve sent her off; well, she’s gone off,’ Laurence said. ‘Stop jittering. Relax. Read your book. There’s too much talking.’
‘Which way did she go?’ Helena said.
‘Downstream, by the towpath,’ said Caroline.
‘Silence,’ said Laurence. ‘Let nothing disturb thee,’ he chanted, ‘nothing affright thee, all things are passing… .
‘God never changeth,’ Helena continued, surprised that he had remembered the words.
The Baron was examining a map. ‘I should be back just after four,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Laurence. ‘Kindly depart.’
‘The Abbey is on the other side of the river,—’ said the Baron, ‘but there’s a bridge two miles down. I shall be back just after four.’
He set off with his jacket trailing over his arm. Lazily, they watched him until he was out of sight round a bend.
‘I wonder why he wants to see the Abbey,’ said Helena, ‘it isn’t an exceptional place, nothing architecturally speaking.’
‘He’s looking for a man he believes is staying at the Abbey. A man called Mervyn Hogarth,’ Caroline said deliberately.
Helena looked startled. ‘Mervyn Hogarth! Does Willi know him then?’
‘By hearsay,’ Caroline said.
‘That’s the father of the young man who was cured,—’ Helena said. ‘Has Mr Hogarth become a Catholic, I wonder?’
‘The Baron thinks,’ Caroline said, ‘that he is a magician. ‘The Baron believes that Mervyn Hogarth is the leader of a Black Mass circle and that he’s staying at the Abbey under the guise of a retreatant, but really on purpose to steal the consecrated Host.’
‘Oh how frightful, oh how frightful!—’
‘The Baron has a kink,’ Laurence put in.
‘Exactly,’ said Caroline.
‘It does sound a far-fetched story,’ Helena said. ‘There’s nothing in it, you think?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Caroline said. ‘I should be surprised if he found Mervyn Hogarth at the Abbey. And more surprised if his suspicions were true.’
‘It would be dreadful if they were true,’ Helena said. ‘But why should Willi Stock be troubled if they were; does he intend to expose the man?’
‘No, he intends to write a monograph.’
Caroline put the palms of her hands out to the sun to get them browned.
‘He thinks he is aloof from the subject of black magic, merely interested. Whereas he is passionately attracted to it. “My nature,”‘ she quoted, ‘“is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. Pity me then… .”‘
‘Willi always has been eccentric,’ Helena remarked.
‘Part of his cultivated Englishness,’ said Laurence.
‘It will be interesting,’ Helena said, ‘to hear what he says when he comes back.’
‘Don’t mention what I’ve told you,’ Caroline said, ‘he’s touchy, poor Willi.’
She felt a sweet pleasure in her words, ‘Poor Willi!’ They soothed her resentment of the Baron’s ‘Poor Caroline!’ with which he must have ended many an afternoon’s session at Charing Cross Road. Especially with Helena was she pleased to discredit the Baron. Sometimes Helena would inquire gently of Caroline if she was quite happy — nothing worrying her? From which Caroline was sensitive to assume that the Baron had been talking. In fact, Helena had discouraged the Baron’s gossip. One day in the early spring he had asked her plainly, ‘Is it all off between Laurence and Caroline?’
‘No, I don’t think so. They are waiting.—’
‘For what? My dear, they are not chicks,’ said the Baron.
‘I suppose Caroline wants to get her book off her hands. But I don’t know their business at all really. I wish they would do something definite, but there it is.’
‘Caroline’s “book”,—’ he said; ‘do you mean the book she is writing or the one in which she lives?’
‘Now, Willi! Caroline is not a silly girl. She did have a little upset and imagined things, I know. And then there was the accident. But since that time she’s recovered wonderfully.’
‘My dear Helena, I do assure you that Caroline has been receiving communications from her Typing Spooks continuously since that time.’
‘Nonsense. Caroline is perfectly sane. What’s going to win the Lincoln, do you think, Willi?—’
And so, occasionally, when Helena asked Caroline, ‘Quite happy now, dear?’ or ‘Nothing worrying you?’ Caroline would be unhappy and worrying about these inquiries.
So, on the day of the picnic she was especially happy to discuss the Baron’s latest fantasy with Helena.
‘He must have built up a theory,’ said Helena, ‘on rumours and suspicions. I hate,’ she said with unusual force, ‘doubt and suspicion.’
Caroline thought, ‘She is worried about Mrs Hogg. The affair in the car is pressing on her mind. Poor Helena! Perhaps she would not at all like to know things clearly.’
Laurence lay listening to their voices, contentedly oblivious of what they said. He was too somnolent in the warmth of the sun to take part in the conversation and too enchanted by his sense of the summer day to waste it in sleep. He watched the movements of a young fat woman on a houseboat moored nearby. Every now and then she would disappear into the cabin to fetch something. First a bright scarf to protect her head from the sun. Then a cushion. Next she went below for so long a time, as it seemed to Laurence, that he thought she was never coming back. But she did emerge again, with a cup of tea. She drank it propped tubbily on the tiny bridge of the boat. Laurence spent his pleasurable idleness of long meaningless moments in following every sip. He wished the houseboat were his. He wondered where the man of the house could be, for he was sure there must be a man, referred to by Tubby as ‘my friend’. Laurence wished it were possible for him to go on lying drowsily by the river and at the same time to poke about in the cabin of the boat, to pry into the cooking arrangements, the bunks, the engine. A little rowing boat which lay alongside caught Laurence’s fancy.