The Comforters

Laurence cleared off before the question could become more confused and public. He went into the phone box and asked for Caroline’s number. It was ringing through. Immediately she answered.

‘Caroline?’

‘Laurence, is that you? Oh, I’ve just come home and found a wire. Did you send a wire?’

‘Yes, did you?’

‘Yes, how was it supposed to read? I’m so frightened.’

The little parlour in the Benedictine Priory smelt strongly of polish; the four chairs, the table, the floors, the window-frame gleamed in repose of the polish, as if these wooden things themselves had done some hard industry that day before dawn. Outside, the late October evening sun lit up the front garden strip, and Caroline while she waited in the parlour could hear the familiar incidence of birds and footsteps from the suburban street. She knew this parlour well, with its polish; she had come here weekly for three months to receive her instruction for the Church. She watched a fly alight on the table for a moment; it seemed to Caroline to be in a highly dangerous predicament, as if it might break through the glossy surface on which it skated. But it made off quite easily. Caroline jogged round nervily as the door opened. Then she rose as the priest came in, her friend, ageing Father Jerome. She had known him for so many years that she could not remember their first meeting. They had been in touch and out of touch for long periods. And when, after she had decided to enter the Church, and she went weekly to his Priory, her friends had said, ‘Why do you go so far out of London for instruction? Why don’t you go to Farm Street?’ Caroline replied, ‘Well, I know this priest.’

And if they were Catholics, her friends would say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter about the particular priest. The nearest priest is always the best one.

And Caroline replied, ‘Well, I know this priest.’

She wondered, now, if she did know him. He was, as usual, smiling with his russet face, limping with his bad leg, carrying a faded folder from which emerged an untidy sheaf of crumpled papers. ‘I got two days off last week to copy parts of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady at the British Museum. I’ve got it here. Do you know it? I’ll read you a bit presently. Glorious. What are you writing? You look tired, are you sleeping well? Are you eating proper food? What did you have for breakfast?’

‘I haven’t slept properly for a week,’ said Caroline. Then she told him about the voices.

‘This started after you got back from St Philumena’s?’

‘Yes. That’s a week ago today. And it’s been going on ever since. It happens when I’m alone during the day. Laurence came up from the country. He’s moved into my flat. I can’t bear to be alone at nights.’

‘Sleeping there?’

‘In the other room,’ said Caroline. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘For the time being,’ said the priest absently.

He rose abruptly and went out. The thoughts shot through Caroline’s brain, ‘Perhaps he’s gone to fetch another priest; he thinks I’m dangerous. Has he gone to fetch a doctor? He thinks I should be certified, taken away.’ And she knew those thoughts were foolish, for Father Jerome had a habit of leaving rooms abruptly when he remembered something which had to be done elsewhere. He would be back presently.

He returned very soon and sat down without comment. He was followed almost immediately by a lay brother, bearing a tray with a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits which he placed before her. This brought back to her the familiarity of the monk and the parlour; only last winter in the early dark evenings after they had finished the catechism, Father Jerome would fetch Caroline the big editions of the Christian Fathers from the monastery library, for she had loved to rummage through them. Then, when he had left her in the warm parlour turning the pages and writing out her notes, he had used to send the lay brother to her with a glass of milk and biscuits.

Now, while she sipped the milk, Father Jerome read aloud a part of The Life of Our Lady. He had already started putting it into modern English, and consulted her on one or two points. Caroline felt her old sense of ease with the priest; he never treated her as someone far different from what she was. He treated her not only as a child; not only as an intellectual; not only as a nervy woman; not only as weird; he seemed to assume simply that she was as she was. When he asked, she told him more clearly about the voices.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that they are really different tones of one voice. I think they belong to one person.

She also said, ‘I think I am possessed.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘you are not possessed. You may be obsessed, but I doubt it.’

Caroline said, ‘Do you think this is a delusion?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘No. But you’re ill.’

‘That’s true. D’you think I’m a neurotic?’

‘Of course. That goes without saying.’

Caroline laughed too. There was a time when she could call herself a neurotic without a sense of premonition; a time when it was merely the badge of her tribe.

‘If I’m not mad,’ she said, ‘I soon will be, if this goes on much longer.’

‘Neurotics never go mad,’ he said.

‘But this is intolerable.’

‘Doesn’t it depend on how you take it?’

‘Father,’ she said, almost as if speaking to herself to clarify her mind, ‘if only I knew where the voices came from. I think it is one person. It uses a typewriter. It uses the past tense. It’s exactly as if someone were watching me closely, able to read my thoughts; it’s as if the person was waiting to pounce on some insignificant thought or action, in order to make it signify in a strange distorted way. And how does it know about Laurence and my friends?