And if they were Catholics, her friends would say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter about the particular priest. The nearest priest is always the best one.
And Caroline replied, ‘Well, I know this priest.’
She wondered, now, if she did know him. He was, as usual, smiling with his russet face, limping with his bad leg, carrying a faded folder from which emerged an untidy sheaf of crumpled papers. ‘I got two days off last week to copy parts of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady at the British Museum. I’ve got it here. Do you know it? I’ll read you a bit presently. Glorious. What are you writing? You look tired, are you sleeping well? Are you eating proper food? What did you have for breakfast?’
‘I haven’t slept properly for a week,’ said Caroline. Then she told him about the voices.
‘This started after you got back from St Philumena’s?’
‘Yes. That’s a week ago today. And it’s been going on ever since. It happens when I’m alone during the day. Laurence came up from the country. He’s moved into my flat. I can’t bear to be alone at nights.’
‘Sleeping there?’
‘In the other room,’ said Caroline. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘For the time being,’ said the priest absently.
He rose abruptly and went out. The thoughts shot through Caroline’s brain, ‘Perhaps he’s gone to fetch another priest; he thinks I’m dangerous. Has he gone to fetch a doctor? He thinks I should be certified, taken away.’ And she knew those thoughts were foolish, for Father Jerome had a habit of leaving rooms abruptly when he remembered something which had to be done elsewhere. He would be back presently.
He returned very soon and sat down without comment. He was followed almost immediately by a lay brother, bearing a tray with a glass of milk and a plate of biscuits which he placed before her. This brought back to her the familiarity of the monk and the parlour; only last winter in the early dark evenings after they had finished the catechism, Father Jerome would fetch Caroline the big editions of the Christian Fathers from the monastery library, for she had loved to rummage through them. Then, when he had left her in the warm parlour turning the pages and writing out her notes, he had used to send the lay brother to her with a glass of milk and biscuits.
Now, while she sipped the milk, Father Jerome read aloud a part of The Life of Our Lady. He had already started putting it into modern English, and consulted her on one or two points. Caroline felt her old sense of ease with the priest; he never treated her as someone far different from what she was. He treated her not only as a child; not only as an intellectual; not only as a nervy woman; not only as weird; he seemed to assume simply that she was as she was. When he asked, she told him more clearly about the voices.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that they are really different tones of one voice. I think they belong to one person.
She also said, ‘I think I am possessed.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you are not possessed. You may be obsessed, but I doubt it.’
Caroline said, ‘Do you think this is a delusion?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No. But you’re ill.’
‘That’s true. D’you think I’m a neurotic?’
‘Of course. That goes without saying.’
Caroline laughed too. There was a time when she could call herself a neurotic without a sense of premonition; a time when it was merely the badge of her tribe.
‘If I’m not mad,’ she said, ‘I soon will be, if this goes on much longer.’
‘Neurotics never go mad,’ he said.
‘But this is intolerable.’
‘Doesn’t it depend on how you take it?’
‘Father,’ she said, almost as if speaking to herself to clarify her mind, ‘if only I knew where the voices came from. I think it is one person. It uses a typewriter. It uses the past tense. It’s exactly as if someone were watching me closely, able to read my thoughts; it’s as if the person was waiting to pounce on some insignificant thought or action, in order to make it signify in a strange distorted way. And how does it know about Laurence and my friends? And then there was a strange coincidence the other day. Laurence and I sent each other a wire with exactly the same words, at the same time. It was horrifying. Like predestination.’
‘These things can happen,’ said Father Jerome. ‘Coincidence or some kind of telepathy.’
‘But the typewriter and the voices — it is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us.’ As soon as she had said these words, Caroline knew that she had hit on the truth. After that she said no more to him on the subject.
As she was leaving he asked her how she had liked St Philumena’s.
‘Awful,’ she said, ‘I only stayed three days.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think it was your sort of place. You should have gone to a Benedictine convent. They are more your sort.’
‘But it was you recommended St Philumena’s! Don’t you remember, that afternoon at Lady Manders’, you were both so keen on my going there?’
‘Oh sorry. Yes, I suppose we were. What didn’t you like?’
‘The people.’
He chuckled. ‘Yes, the people. It’s a matter of how you take them.’
‘I believe it is,’ said Caroline as though she had just thought of something.
‘Well, God bless you. Get some sleep and keep in touch.’ She found Laurence in when she returned to the flat in Queen’s Gate. He was fiddling about with a black box-like object which at first she took to be a large typewriter.
‘What’s that?’ she said, when she saw it closer.
‘Listen,’ said Laurence.
He pressed a key. There was a whirring sound and the box began to talk with a male voice pitched on a peculiarly forced husky note. It said, ‘Caroline darling, I have a suggestion to make.’ Then it went on to say something funny but unprintable.
Caroline subsided with laughter and relief on to the divan.
Laurence did something to the instrument and the words rumbled forth again.
‘I knew your voice right away,’ Caroline said.
‘I bet you didn’t. I disguised it admirably. Listen again.’
‘No!’ said Caroline. ‘Someone might overhear it. Dirty beast you are.
He replayed the record and they both laughed helplessly.
‘What have you brought that thing here for?’ Caroline said. ‘It might have given me a dreadful fright.’
‘To record your spook-voices. Now see. I’m placing this disc in here. If you hear them again, you press that. Then it records any voice within hearing distance.’
He had placed it against the wall where the voices came from.
‘Afterwards,’ he explained, ‘we can take out the disc and play it back.’
‘Maybe those voices won’t record,’ Caroline said.
‘They will if they’re in the air. Any sound causes an occurrence. If the sound has objective existence it will be recorded.’
‘This sound might have another sort of existence and still be real.’
‘Well, let’s first exhaust the possibilities of the natural order —’
‘But we don’t know all the possibilities of the natural order.’
‘If the sound doesn’t record, we can take it for granted that it either doesn’t exist, or it exists in some supernatural order,’ he explained.
She insisted, ‘It does exist. I think it’s a natural sound. I don’t think that machine will record it.’
‘Don’t you want to try it?’ He seemed disappointed almost.
‘Of course. It’s a lovely idea.’
‘And better,’ he said, ‘than any ideas you’ve had so far.’
‘I’ve got a good one now,’ Caroline said. ‘I’m sure it’s the right one. It came to me while I was talking to Father Jerome.’