The Comforters

thought, a person could go through life with one little crank and remain perfectly normal in every other respect. Perhaps it was only in regard to the imaginary aural impressions that Caroline was a child.

He said, ‘Mrs Hogg read the letter I sent to you at St Philumena’s.’

‘You mean, she opened my letter and read it?’

‘Yes, it’s appalling. In fact, it’s criminal.’

Caroline smiled a little at this. Laurence remembered the same sort of smile fleeting on his mother’s face that afternoon in spite of her worry. He realized what it was the two women had smiled the same smile about.

‘I admit that I’ve read other people’s letters myself. I quite see that. But this is a different case. It’s frightful, actually.’

Having established, with her smile, the fact that she considered him not altogether adult, Caroline said, ‘On the level, is it serious?’ And she began to question him as an equal.

They switched off the fires and light, still talking, and left the flat.

At about half past eleven, since they had decided to make a night of it, they went to dance at a place called the Pylon in Dover Street. There was hardly any light, and Caroline thought, Thank God for that.

For, after dinner at a restaurant in Knightsbridge, they had been to Soho. First, to a pub where some B.B.C. people were unexpectedly forgathered who called Laurence ‘Larry’; and this was a washout so far as Laurence was concerned. His mind was on his grandmother, and the spoiling of his disinterestedness, his peace, by Mrs Hogg. He was on leave, moreover, and did not reckon to meet with his colleagues in those weeks. Next they had gone to a literary pub, where it rapidly became clear that the Baron had spread the story of Caroline and her hysterical night at his flat.

At the first pub, after they had left, a friend of Laurence had said, ‘That’s Larry’s form of perversion — beautiful neurotic women. They have to be neurotic.’

It was understood that every close association between two people was a perversion. Caroline sensed the idea they had left behind them when they left this pub. Laurence, of course, knew it, but he didn’t mind; he accepted that, for instance, ‘perversion’ was his friends’ code-word for anyone’s personal taste in love. While Caroline and Laurence were on their way to the second pub, this friend of Laurence’s was saying, ‘All Larry’s girls have been neurotics.’ This was true, as it happened.

Later, in the taxi, Caroline said to Laurence, ‘Am I noticeably neurotic, do you think?’

Her eyes were huge and deep, unsettled, but she had the power of judgement in other features of her face.

He said, ‘Yes, in a satisfactory way.’ And he said presently, ‘All my girls have been neurotics.’

Caroline knew this but was glad to hear it again from Laurence; his words made articulate her feeling of what was being said in the pub they had left. She knew most of Laurence’s previous neurotic girls; she herself was the enduring one.

Presently again, and Laurence said, ‘There are more interesting particulars about neurotic women. You never know what you mayn’t find on their persons and in their general carry-on.’

In the second pub, where a fair fat poet said to Caroline, ‘Tell me all about your visions, my dear’; and another poet, a woman with a cape and a huge mouth, said, ‘Is there much Satanism going on within the Catholic Church these days?’; and another sort of writer, a man of over fifty, asked Caroline who was her psycho-analyst, and told her who was his — at this pub Caroline collected, one way and another, that the Baron had been mentioning this and that about her, to the ageless boys and girls who dropped in on him at his bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

The fat poet went steadily on about Caroline’s ‘visions’; he said they would be good for her publicity. Caroline and Laurence had been on short drinks, and both were rather lit up.

‘Wonderful publicity,’ they both agreed.

And the over-fifty, in his brown coat of fur-fabric, persisted, ‘I could tell you of a psychiatrist who —’

‘We know one,’ Laurence said, ‘who analyses crazy pavements.’

Caroline told the girl in the cape, did she know that Eleanor Hogarth had deserted the Baron?

‘No!’

‘Yes. He put me up for the night at his flat last week. All her things were gone. Not even a photograph. He only mentioned her once. He said she was away on tour, which was true; he said nothing about the break. Then Laurence found out definitely — he finds out everything, of course.’

‘Gone off with someone else?’

‘Don’t know, really. But she’s left him, not he her; I know that.’

‘Poor Willi.’

‘Oh, one can’t blame her,’ said Caroline, satisfied that the story would now spread.

The girl in the cape said, ‘Have you tried to convert the Baron?’

‘Me? No.’

‘R.C.s usually try to convert everyone, however hopeless. I thought that was a sort of obligation.’

For good measure, Caroline quoted of the Baron what she heard said of someone else: ‘He exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an Englishman.’

Indeed, the Baron was rather scrupulous about his English observances and confident that he had the English idea, so that his contempt for the English, their intellect, their manners, arose from a vexation that they did not conform better to the idea. To this effect, Caroline exchanged her views on the Baron with the girl in the cape.

‘But you know,’ said the girl, ‘there’s another side to Willi Stock. He’s an orgiast on the quiet.’