‘I wouldn’t mind a few weeks’ rest in a nursing home,’ Caroline had told Laurence. ‘I don’t think they could do away with the voices, but they might deafen me to them for a while. It would be a rest.’
Laurence had been altogether against this.
And he had a mystery of his own to solve. ‘I wrote and told you all about it. I’d just posted a letter to St Philumena’s when I got your first wire to say you’d returned to London. I daresay it will be forwarded.’
‘Do tell me.’ Caroline had half-expected to hear of a ‘mystery ‘similar to her own.
‘Well, the thing is, Grandmother is mixed up with some highly suspect parties. At first I thought she was running a gang, but now, all things considered, I think she may be their stooge.’
‘No,’ said Caroline. ‘Quite definitely, your grandmother isn’t anyone’s stooge.’
‘Now, d’you think that, honestly? — That’s what I feel myself really. You must come and see for yourself.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Caroline had said.
Four times during the past week, while Laurence had been out, she had heard the typewriter and the voices.
Then she had told Laurence. ‘I’ll see Father Jerome. If he advises a nursing home, it’s a nursing home. If he says go to your grand-mother’s, I’ll come. I could always go into a nursing home later on.
But she had forgotten to put these alternatives to Father Jerome. And now, she did not feel it mattered.
‘I’ll come to Sussex,’ she said.
‘Really, will you? Is that what the holy pa advised?’
‘No. I forgot to mention it. He advised food and sleep.’
Laurence knew Caroline’s nervous responses to food and sleep at the best of times. But she didn’t laugh with him. Instead, she said, ‘I feel better. I think the worst of my trouble is over; I begin to see daylight.’
He was used to Caroline’s rapid recoveries, but only from physical illness. In past years, he had known her prostrated by the chest complications to which she was subject; bronchitis, pleurisy, pneumonia. Once or twice she had lain for several days, running a temperature, burning with fever. Then, overnight or in the course of an hour in the afternoon, or waking in the late morning after a kindling night, there would come a swift alteration, a lightning revival of her sick body; Caroline would say, ‘I am better. I feel quite well.’ She would sit up and talk. Her temperature would drop to normal. It was almost as though she was under a decision, as if her body, at such times, were only awaiting her word, and she herself submissively waiting for some secret go-ahead within her, permitting her at last to say, ‘I am better. I feel well.’ After such rapid reversals Caroline would feel depressed, would crave that attention due to an invalid which she had not cared about in her real danger. Frequently in the days that followed, she would say, ‘I’m not better yet. I’m still weak.’ But there was never any conviction in this. It became a joke eventually, for Laurence to say for months after her illnesses, ‘You’re still an invalid. You’re not better yet’, and Caroline, too, would tell him, ‘You make breakfast today, dear. I’m still an invalid. I’m feeling
Laurence thought of these things when he heard Caroline, on her return from the Priory, tell him, ‘I feel better… . I begin to see daylight.’ He recognized this signal; he himself had nursed her through her illnesses over the past six years. Those were mostly times of poverty before his parents had accepted his irregular life with Caroline; before he got his job on the B.B.C.; before Caroline had got her literary reputation.
Caroline knew what he was thinking. He had not expected her to recover so abruptly from this sort of illness. He had seen it coming on for the past six months.
And now he was thinking — ‘So she is better. She sees daylight. Is it just like that? Can she be right? No more melancholia. No more panic at the prospect of meeting strangers. No worry, no voices? Only the formal convalescence, the “invalid” period, and then the old Caroline again. Can it be so?’
Caroline saw on his face an expression which she remembered having seen before. It was a look of stumped surprise, the look of one who faces an altogether and irrational new experience; a look partly fearful, partly indignant, partly curious, but predominantly joyful. The other occasion on which she had seen this expression on Laurence’s face was during an argument, when she told him of her decision to enter the Church, with the consequence that they must part. They were both distressed; they hardly knew what they were saying. In reply to some remark of Laurence she had rapped out, nastily, ‘I love God better than you!’ It was then she saw on his face that mixture of surprise and dismay, somehow revealing in its midst an unconscious alien delight, which she witnessed now once more when she told him, ‘The worst is over. I see daylight.’
‘But remember I’m still an invalid,’ she added. He laughed quite a lot. She was sorry to have to disappoint him. She knew he would be expecting her ‘recovery’ to be something different from what it was going to be, and that he was wondering, ‘How does she know she won’t hear those voices again?’
He said, ‘Do you really feel that everything’s going to be all right now, darling?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly O.K. Only a bit tired, but now, you see, I know what the voices are. It’s a creepy experience but I can cope with it. I’m sure I’ve discovered the true cause. I have a plan. I’ll tell you something about it by and by.’
She lay on the divan and closed her eyes.
‘I’m worried about you,’ he said.
‘You mean, the voices. You mean I can’t be well if I go on hearing them.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see if this machine records anything.’
‘All right,’ said Caroline. ‘But supposing it doesn’t, what difference does that make?’
‘Well, in that case, I think you should try to understand the experience in a symbolic light.’
‘But the voices are voices. Of course they are symbols. But they are also voices. There’s the typewriter too — that’s a symbol, but it
‘My Caroline,’ he said, ‘I hope you will hear it no more.
