‘What d’you mean?’
‘Obviously your obsession with Eleanor’s former lover is a kind of obsession with Eleanor. You are looking in him for something concealed in her, don’t you see! Obviously you are following the man because you can’t follow Eleanor, she has eluded you, don’t you see?
Obviously —’Physician, heal thyself,’ said the Baron with what he thought was aptness.
‘Oh, I may be wrong,’ said Caroline mildly. The indoor afternoon idea went limp and she was reminded of her imprudence when, in hospital, she had begun to confide her state of mind to the Baron on the occasion of his visits. She knew he would not keep her confidences any more than she his.
But unable to leave well alone she said, ‘Why really does it trouble you even if Hogarth is a diabolist? I could understand your fanaticism if you had any religion to defend. Perhaps unawares you are very religious.
‘I have no religion,’ he said. ‘And I don’t disapprove of diabolism. For my part, it is not a moral interest; simply an intellectual passion.’
She teased him, but did not watch her words. ‘You remind me of an African witch-doctor on the trail of a witch. Perhaps you picked up the spirit of the thing in the Congo — weren’t you born there?’ Then she saw her mistake, and the strange tinge in the whites of his eyes that had made her wonder at times if the Baron had native blood. He was extremely irritated by her remark.
‘At least,’ articulated he, ‘I pursue an intelligible objective. Diabolism exists; the fact can be proved by the card index of any comprehensive library. Diabolism is practised: I can prove it to you if you care to accompany me to Notting Hill Gate on certain nights — unless, of course, you are too bound by the superstitious rules of your Church. Mervyn Hogarth exists. He practises diabolism; that fact is available to anyone who cares to instigate private inquiries into his conduct. You on the other hand,’ he said, ‘assert a number of unascertainable facts. That chorus of voices,’ he said, ‘who but yourself has heard them? Your theories — your speculations about the source of the noises? I think, Caroline
This upset Caroline, whereupon she busied herself with tea-cups, quick movements, tiny clatters of spoons and saucers. As she did this she protested nebulously.
‘The evidence will be in the book itself.’
Now Caroline, one day when the Baron had visited her in hospital, had told him, ‘Those voices, Willi — since I’ve been in hospital I have heard them. But one thing I’m convinced of’ — and she indicated her leg which had swollen slightly within the plaster case so that it hurt quite a lot — ‘this physical pain convinces me that I’m not wholly a fictional character. I have independent life.’
‘Dear me,’ said the Baron, ‘were you ever in doubt of it?’
So she told him, confidentially, of her theory. He was intrigued. She warmed to the sense of conspiracy induced by the soft tones of their conversation, for it was an eight-bed ward.
‘Am I also a charact-er in this mysterious book, Caroline?’ he asked.
‘Yes you are, Willi.’
‘Is everyone a character? — Those people for instance?’ He indicated the seven other beds with their occupants and visiting relatives and fuss.
‘I don’t know,’ Caroline said. ‘I only know what the voices have hinted, small crazy fragments of a novel. There may be characters I’m unaware of.’
The Baron came to see her every week-end. On each occasion they discussed Caroline’s theory. And although, profoundly, she knew he was not to be trusted with a confidence, she would tell herself as he arrived and after he had gone, ‘After all, he is an old friend.’
One day she informed him, ‘The Typing Ghost has not recorded any lively details about this hospital ward. The reason is that the author doesn’t know how to describe a hospital ward. This interlude in my life is not part of the book in consequence. It was by making exasperating remarks like this that Caroline Rose continued to interfere with the book.
The other patients bored and irritated her. She longed to be able to suffer her physical discomforts in peace. When she experienced pain, what made it intolerable was the abrasive presence of the seven other women in the beds, their chatter and complaints, and the crowing and clucking of the administering nurses.
‘The irritant that comes between us and our suffering is the hardest thing of all to suffer. If only we could have our sufferings clean,’ Caroline said to the Baron.
A visiting priest on one occasion advised her to ‘offer up’ her sufferings for the relief of some holy soul in Purgatory.
‘I do so,’ Caroline declared, ‘with the result that my pain is intensified, not at all alleviated. However, I continue to do so.’
‘Come, come,’ said the priest, youthful, blue-eyed behind his glasses, fresh from his seminary.
‘That is a fact, as far as my experience goes,’ said Caroline.
He looked a trifle scared, and never stopped for long at Caroline’s bedside after that.
On those Saturday afternoons the Baron had seemed to bring to Caroline her more proper environment, and for the six weeks of her confinement in the country hospital she insulated herself by the phrase ‘he is an old friend’ against the certainty that the Baron would, without the slightest sense of betrayal, repeat and embellish her sayings and speculations for the benefit of his Charing Cross Road acquaintance. Much was the psycho-analysing of Caroline that went on in those weeks at the back of the Baron’s bookshop, while she lay criticizing the book in the eight-bed ward. Which was an orthopaedic ward, rather untidy as hospital wards go, owing to the plaster casts which were lying here and there, the cages humping over the beds and the trolley at the window end on which was kept the plaster-of-Paris equipment, also a huge pair of plaster-cutting scissors like gardening shears, all of which were covered lumpily with a white sheet; and into which ward there came, at certain times, physiotherapists to exercise, exhort, and manipulate their patients.
The Baron, it is true, while he discussed ‘the book’ with her, had no thought for the Monday next when he should say to this one and that, ‘Caroline is embroiled in a psychic allegory which she is trying to piece together while she lies with her leg in that dreary, dreary ward. I told you of her experience with the voices and the
