‘There are spiritual dangers in everything. From the Catholic point of view the chief danger about a conviction is the temptation to deny it.’
‘But you ought to subject it to reason.’
‘I’m doing so,’ Caroline said. ‘I have started investigations,’ and she was becoming delighted with this talk.
He said then, ‘Don’t you think the idea of an invisible person tuning in to your life might possibly upset your faith?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s why he ought to be subjected to reason!’
‘Well,’ he said wearily, ‘I’ve never heard of a Catholic being allowed to traffic with the unknown like this.’
‘The author is doing all the trafficking,’ she explained. ‘But I’m going to make it difficult for him, you’ll see.’
‘The whole thing is far too gnostic,’ he said.
That did amuse her. ‘That does amuse me,’ she said; ‘you expressing yourself so orthodox.’
‘It makes damn all difference to me if you’re a heretic, darling, because you’re sweet. But sooner or later you’ll come bump against authority. Did you tell Father Jerome about this idea?’
‘I mentioned the possibility. I had only just realized it.’
‘Didn’t he object?’
‘No, why should he? It isn’t a sin to be a little cracked in the head.’ She added, ‘I know that I am slightly insane.’
‘No,’ he said gently, ‘you are quite sane, Caroline.’
‘From your point of view,’ she insisted, ‘I am out of my senses. It would be a human indignity to deny it.’
He thought, How cunning of her to get round it that way, and he remembered that with madness comes cunning.
‘You have a mild nervous disorder,’ he said.
‘I have what you ought to call a delusion. In any normal opinion that’s a fact.’
‘Caroline, don’t distress yourself, dear.’
‘The normal opinion is bound to distress me because it’s a fact like the fact of the author and the facts of the Faith. They are all painful to me in different ways.
‘What can I do?’ he said, as he had said many times in the past days. ‘What can I do to help you?’
‘Will you be able to make an occasional concession to the logic of my madness?’ she asked him. ‘Because that will be necessary between us. Otherwise, we shall be really separated.’ She was terrified of being entirely separated from Laurence.
‘Haven’t I always tried to enter your world?’
‘Yes, but this is a very remote world I’m in now.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘You’re as good as normal in every other way.’ He wondered if she was hurt by this. He wondered he had not courage enough to make her see a mental doctor.
She said, ‘We shall have to keep this secret. I don’t want the reputation of being crackers more than necessary. The Baron has broadcast enough already.’
It was a pact. But less than a couple of hours later he saw how irksome it could be.
They had already frittered the best part of the day, and it was past four when Laurence, after telephoning the station about the trains, said, ‘We’d better go by car. It’s O.K. for the one trip, and I can get it seen to at Hayward’s Heath quite quickly. Then we can have the use of it, much more convenient.’
‘Oh, you can hire a car at Hayward’s Heath,’ Caroline said quickly. ‘I want to go by train. We must go by train.’
‘Don’t be awkward. Get dressed, and I’ll get the car out. Trains are hateful if you have the alternative of a car.’
‘Awkward is just what I’m going to be,’ Caroline said.
She started hunting for her notebook.
‘I’ve just jerked up to the fact,’ she said, ‘that our day is doing what the voices said it would. Now, we chatted about Eleanor. Then about ourselves. All right. We’ve frittered the day. The narrative says we went by car; all right, we must go by train. You do see that, don’t you, Laurence? It’s a matter of asserting free will.’
He quite saw. He thought, ‘Why the hell should we be enslaved by her secret fantasy?’
‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘why we should be inconvenienced by it one way or another. Let’s act naturally.’
But he saw that Caroline had it very much on the brain that her phantom should be outwitted in this one particular.
‘Very well,’ he said. He felt his honesty under threat of strangling. He desired their relationship to continue with the least possible change, but ever since her conversion it had been altering. Laurence could not feel that they were further apart than before, but he felt, now, that Caroline was on shifting ground, liable to be swept beyond his reach at any moment. He was not sure if he was agile enough to keep contact with her, nor that the effort would be worth it beyond a point at which Caroline might become unrecognizable.
These misgivings nearly choked him while he said to Caroline, ‘All right, we’ll go by train.’
But when, at this, she turned gay, he thought Predominantly, ‘She will help me with Grandmother in spite of her
