illness. The holiday will be good for Caroline. We still need each other.’ Also he thought, ‘I love the girl.’ And his excitement at the thought of unravelling his grandmother’s mysteries somehow made Caroline more lovable.
She was dressed and had packed for them both, to make up to Laurence for his concession. It was half past five. Laurence was telephoning a wire to his grandmother, to expect them about eight o’clock.
She probably prepared lunch,’ he said, as he put down the receiver.
‘Laurence, that’s too bad of us.’
‘But she’ll be so happy when we arrive, she won’t say a word. Are you ready?’
Standing by her desk when he had finished phoning, Laurence had torn a few outdated pages off the calendar.
‘That brings you up to date,’ he said.
She remarked ruefully, ‘I tear off the weeks automatically, when I’m sitting at the desk. It’s a reproach when the calendar gets behind the times. Really, I must get down to my book soon.’
They were ready to leave. Laurence lifted the suitcases. But she was still staring at the calendar.
‘What’s today?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t November the first, is it?’
‘That’s right. November already. Do make haste.’
‘All Saints’ Day,’ she continued, ‘you know what that means?’ Like most people who are brought up in the Catholic faith, Laurence was quick in recollecting such things. ‘A Holiday of Obligation,’ he said.
‘And I haven’t been to Mass!’
‘Oh, it can’t be helped. Don’t worry. It isn’t considered a mortal sin if you genuinely forgot.’
‘But I’m obliged to attend a Mass if there’s an opportunity, since I have remembered. There’s probably a late Mass at the Oratory. Probably at six-thirty. I’ll have to go to that. You do see that, don’t you, Laurence?’
‘Yes, I quite see that.’ So he did; he found it easy to see the obligations of the Catholic religion; it was part of his environment. He found it much easier to cope with Caroline’s new-found Catholicism than her new-found psychicism He also found it easy to say, ‘We can’t let Grandmother down again. Wouldn’t that be a valid excuse for missing Mass?’
And he quite expected her reply, ‘You go ahead by car, and I’ll come by a later train.’
And therefore, happy at regaining his liberty on the question of taking his car, he said with ease, ‘It would be more fun if we both went by car after your Mass. We could make it by eight o’clock.’
She felt relieved on the whole. Her great desire to travel by train was dispersed by the obvious necessities of going to Mass, and of not messing Laurence around any further.
Presently he said, ‘Sure you won’t mind,’ for he understood the question was safely settled for her, and he did not wish to play the tyrant. So he had the luxury of asking her several times, ‘Quite sure, dear, it’s all right? You don’t mind coming by car?’
‘After all,’ she told him, ‘it isn’t a moral defeat. The Mass is a proper obligation. But to acquiesce in the requirements of someone’s novel would have been ignoble.’
He gave academic consideration to this statement and observed, ‘The acquiescence is accidental, in which sense the nobility must oblige.’
She thought, ‘The hell of it, he understands that much. Why isn’t he a Catholic, then?’ She smiled at him over her drink, for their immediate haste was over and Laurence had fished out the bottle which she had packed in his suitcase, very carefully in its proper corner.
Brompton Oratory oppressed her when it was full of people, such a big monster of a place. As usual, when she entered, the line from the Book of Job came to her mind, ‘Behold now Behemoth which I made with thee.’
Before the Mass started, this being the Feast of All Saints, there was a great amount of devotion going on before the fat stone statues. The things worth looking at were the votive candles, crowds of these twinklers round every altar; Caroline added her own candle to the nearest cluster. It occurred to her that the Oratory was the sort of place which might become endeared in memory, after a long absence. She could not immediately cope with this huge full-blown environment, for it antagonized the diligence with which Caroline coped with things, bit by bit.
Having been much in Laurence’s company for the fortnight past, and now alone in this company of faces, in the midst of the terrifying collective, she remembered more acutely than ever her isolation by ordeal. She was now fully conscious that she was under observation intermittently by an intruder. And presently her thoughts were away, dwelling on the new strangeness of her life, and although her eyes and ears had been following the Mass throughout, it was not until the Offertory verse that she collected her wits;
‘You’re always bad-tempered after Mass,’ Laurence observed as they cruised through the built-up areas.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the proofs of the Faith so far as I’m concerned. It’s evidence of the truth of the Mass, don’t you see? The flesh despairs.’
‘Pure subjectivism,’ he said. ‘You’re something of a Quietist, I think. And quite Manichaean. A Catharist.’ He had been schooled in the detection of heresies.
‘Anything else?’
‘Scribe and Pharisee,’ he said, ‘alternately according to mood.’
‘The decor of Brompton Oratory makes me ill,’ she told him, as another excuse. For when he had met her after the Mass she had turned most sour.
‘You don’t refer to the “decor” of a church,’ he said — ‘at least, I think not.’
‘What is it then?’
‘I’m not sure of the correct term. I’ve never heard it called a “decor.
