She had stopped eating, was conscious of two things, a splitting headache and Mrs Hogg. These bemused patterers on the theme of love, had they faced Mrs Hogg in person? Returning to her carriage Caroline passed a married couple who had been staying at St Philumena’s, on their way to the dining-car. They had been among the fireside company. She remembered that they were to have left today.
‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Rose! I didn’t think you were leaving so soon.’ People were pressing to pass, which gave Caroline a chance to escape. ‘I was called away,’ she said, moving off.
The couple had been received into the Church two months ago, so they had told the company round the fire.
Their new-found faith was expressed in a rowdy contempt for the Church of England, in which the woman’s father was a clergyman. ‘Father was furious when we went over to Rome. Of course he’s Anglo-Catholic; they have holy water and the saints; everything bar the Faith; too killing.’ She was a large-boned and muscled woman in her mid-thirties. She had set in her final development, at the stage of athletic senior prefect. She had some hair on her face. Her lower lip had a minor pugilistic twist. Of the two, she made the more noise, but her husband, with his smooth thin face, high pink colouring, who looked as if he never needed to shave, was a good support for his wife as they sat round the fire at St Philumena’s. He said, ‘The wonderful thing about being a Catholic is that it makes life so easy. Everything easy for salvation and you can have a happy life. All the little things that the Protestants hate, like the statues and the medals, they all help us to have a happy life.’ He finished there, as if he had filled up the required page of his school exercise book, and need state no more; he lay back in his chair, wiped his glasses, crossed his legs.
At this point the West of Ireland took over, warning them, ‘Converts have a lot to learn. You can always tell a convert from a cradle Catholic. There’s something different.’
The dipsomaniac lawyer, with his shiny blue suit, said, ‘I like converts’, and smiled weakly at Caroline. His smile faded away before Mrs Hogg’s different smile.
At Crewe, Caroline got the compartment to herself again. She began to reflect that Mrs Hogg could easily become an obsession, the demon of that carnal hypocrisy which struck her mind whenever she came across a gathering of Catholics or Jews engaged in their morbid communal pleasures. She began to think of her life in London, her work, Laurence to whom she must send a wire; he would be amused by her account of St Philumena’s. She began to giggle, felt drowsy, and, settling into her corner, fell asleep.
THREE
When Laurence returned to the cottage after posting his letter to Caroline his grandmother handed him a telegram.
He read it. ‘It’s from Caroline. She’s back in London.’
‘Yes, funny, I had a feeling it was from Caroline.’ Louisa very often revealed a mild form of the gipsy’s psychic faculties. ‘Fancy, what a pity you’ve posted that letter to Liverpool.’
As Laurence set off to the post office again to telephone Caroline, he said, ‘Shall I ask her to come down here?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ Louisa said with that inclination of her head which was a modified form of the regal gesture. When he was small she used to tell Laurence ‘Don’t just answer “Yes”; say “Yes, certainly”, that’s how Queen Mary always answers.
‘How do you know that, Grandmother?’
‘A person told me.’
‘Are you sure the person was telling the truth?’
‘Oh yes, certainly.’
‘Tell Caroline,’ Louisa called after him, ‘that I have some blackberries in my tins,’ meaning by this to tell Laurence of her genuine desire for Caroline’s visit.
‘All right, I will.’
‘And ask the post office to give you back the letter. There’s no reason to send it all the way to Liverpool.’
‘Oh, they won’t fish it out without a fuss,’ Laurence told her. ‘They never give you back a letter, once it’s posted. Not without a fuss.’
‘Oh, what a pity!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Laurence said. ‘I’ll be seeing Caroline. I wonder why she left so soon?’
‘Yes, I wonder why.’
Caroline’s number was engaged when he rang. The sky had cleared and the autumn sun, low in the sky, touched the countryside. He decided to go to Ladle Sands, a half-hour’s walk, from where he could try Caroline’s number again, and by which time the pubs would be open. He was impatient to talk to Caroline. His desire to get her interested and involved in the mystery surrounding his grandmother was almost a fulfilment of a more compelling desire to assert the continuing pattern of their intimacy.
Laurence had no success with Caroline’s phone that night. He pursued the exchange with mounting insistence on the urgency of getting through; they continued to reply in benumbed and fatalistic tones that the phone was out of order, it had been reported.
A queer buzzing sound brought Caroline to the telephone just before midnight. ‘Your receiver has been off. We’ve been trying to get a call through from Sussex.’ They were extremely irate.
‘It hasn’t been off,’ said Caroline.
‘It must have been misplaced. Please replace your receiver.
‘And the call? Are you putting it through?’
‘No. The caller has gone now.
Caroline thought, ‘Well, he will ring in the morning.’ She lay on her divan staring out at the night sky beyond her balcony, too tired to draw the curtains. She was warmed by the knowledge that Laurence was near to hand, wanting to speak to her. She could rely on him to take her side, should there be any difficulty with Helena over her rapid departure from St Philumena’s. On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.
Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.
There seemed, then, to have been more than one voice: it was a recitative, a chanting in unison. It was something like a concurrent series of echoes. Caroline jumped up and over to the door. There was no one on the landing or on the staircase outside. She returned to her sitting-room and shut the door. Everything was quiet. The wall, from which direction the sounds had come, divided her sitting-room from the first-floor landing of a house converted into flats. Caroline’s flat occupied the whole of this floor. She had felt sure the sounds had come from the direction of the landing. Now she searched the tiny flat. The opposite wall separated the bed-sitting-room from the bathroom and kitchen. Everything was quiet there. She went out on to the balcony from where she could see the whole length of Queen’s Gate. Two servicemen clattered up the street and turned into Cromwell Road. The neighbouring balconies were dark and empty. Caroline returned to the room, closed the windows, and drew the curtains.
She had taken the flat four weeks ago. The house held six flats, most of which were occupied by married couples or young men who went out to their offices every day. Caroline knew the other tenants only by sight, greeting them in passing on the staircase. There were occasional noises at night, when someone had a party, but usually the house was quiet. Caroline tried to recall the tenants in the flat above hers. She was not certain; they all passed her landing on their way upstairs and she herself had never gone beyond the first floor.
A typewriter and a chorus of voices: What on earth are they up to at this time of night? Caroline wondered. But what worried her were the words they had used, coinciding so exactly with her own thoughts.
Then it began again. Tap-tappity-tap; the typewriter. And again, the voices: Caroline ran out on to the landing, for it seemed quite certain the sound came from that direction. No one was there. The chanting reached her as she returned to her room, with these words exactly: