The Comforters

by Muriel Spark

  The Baron had set up a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, one of those which keep themselves exclusively intellectual. ‘Intellect-u-al,’ the Baron pronounced it. He would say, ‘Of course there are no intellect-u-als in England.’

  It had been the delight of Caroline and Laurence to recall the day when they looked in on the Baron at Charing Cross Road, to find him being accosted by a tiny woman with the request:

  ‘D’you have any railway books for children?’

  The Baron reared high and thin on the central expanse of grey carpet and regarded her silently for half a second.

  ‘Railway books for children,’ she repeated. ‘Books with pictures of trains and railways.’

  The Baron said: ‘Railway books for children, Madam? I do not think so, Madam.’ His arm languidly indicated the shelves. ‘We have Histor-ay, Biograph-ay, Theolog-ay, Theosoph-ay, Psycholog-ay, Religio-n, Poetr-ay, but railway books for children. … Try Foyles across the road, Madam.’

  He raised his shoulders and eyebrows as he turned to Laurence and Caroline. ‘My father,’ he said, ‘knew a man in the Belgian Diplomatic Service who was the author of a railway book for children. It was very popular and sold quickly. A copy was sent to a family in Yugoslavia. Of course, the book contained a code message. The author was revising the book for the second edition when he was arrested. That story is my total experience of railway books for children. Have you read this work on Kafka? — it has just come in, my darlings, my Laurence and my Caroline.’

  In this way, Baron Stock was an old friend.

  Caroline lay in the dark warm room on a made-up sofa bed. The Baron had left her just after four had struck. She had stopped crying. In case she should want them, the Baron had left a bottle of aspirins on a chair by the sofa. Caroline reached out for the bottle, unscrewed the cap and extracted the twist of cotton wool which she had hoped to find. She stuffed a piece in each ear. Now she was alone, it seemed to her that she had been playing a false role with the Baron. It was the inevitable consequence of her arrival at his flat in a panic, at a late hour; ‘Willi! Let me in, I’ve been hearing voices!’

  After that, she was forced to accept his protection, his friendliness; was glad of it. And when he had settled her by the fire:

  ‘Caroline, my dear, how slender and febrile you’ve become! What kind of voices? How extremely interesting. Was it a religi-ous experience?’

  She had begun to weep, to apologize.

  ‘Caroline, my dear, as you know, I never go to bed. Seriously, I never go to bed unless it’s the last possible alternative. I am delighted beyond words — Caroline, my dear, I am so honoured — your distress, my dear — if you can realize how I feel.’

  And so she had to play the part. Now, alone in the dark, she thought, ‘I should have faced it out at the flat. I shouldn’t have run away.

  The Baron, of course, was convinced she was suffering from a delusion.

  ‘It happens to many many people, my dear. It is quite nothing to worry about. If the experience should recur you will have a course of analysis or take some pills and the voices will go away. But I doubt that the phenomenon will recur. You have been under a considerable strain from what I hear of your severed relations with Laurence.’

  ‘We haven’t parted, really, you know.’

  ‘But you now have separate establishments?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got rooms in Kensington. Laurence is keeping on the flat for the time being. He’s away in the country. I must get in touch with him tomorrow, first thing.’ She gave the deliberate impression of not wanting to talk any more.

  ‘In Sussex? With Mrs Jepp?’ — a genuine curiosity in his voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I met her one day about three years ago. Laurence introduced me. A fine old lady. Wonderful for her age. Quite excellent. Do you see much of her?’

  ‘I saw her last Easter,’ Caroline said, ‘she was grand.’

  ‘Yes, she is grand. She doesn’t visit London, of course?’

  ‘No,’ Caroline said. ‘That must have been her last trip when you met her. She hasn’t been to London since.

  ‘She doesn’t care for the Hampstead ménage?’

  ‘Well, she’s an independent soul,’ said Caroline absently.

  She had only half taken in the Baron’s chatter, although he continued to speak of Louisa.

  ‘I must get in touch with Laurence first thing,’ Caroline repeated. ‘Mrs Jepp isn’t on the phone. I’ll send a wire. Oh, Willi! — those voices, it was Hell!’

  Now, lying awake in the dark, Caroline recalled the conversation, regretting that she had shown such a supine dependence on the Baron. More and more she thought, ‘I should have stayed at home and faced whatever was to be faced.’ She knew she had tough resources. And as she tormented herself, now, into confronting her weakness, painfully she recollected the past hour; some of the talk which she had let slip so drowsily through her mind came back to her. It had struck her in passing that the Baron had seemed extraordinarily interested in Laurence’s grandmother. He was the last person one would expect to have remembered — and by name — an undistinguished old lady to whom he had been introduced casually three years ago. Mrs Jepp was not immediately impressive to strangers; was not at all the type to impress the Baron.

  Through the darkness, from beside the fireplace, Caroline heard a sound. Tap. The typewriter. She sat up as the voices followed:

  The Baron had seemed extraordinarily interested in Laurence’s grandmother. He was the last person one would expect to have remembered — and by name — an undistinguished old lady to whom he had been introduced casually three years ago. Mrs Jepp was not immediately impressive to strangers.

  Caroline yelled, ‘Willi! Oh, my God, the voices… . Willi!’

  Through the wall she heard him stir.

  ‘Did you call, Caroline?’

  Eventually he shuffled in and switched on the light.

  Caroline pulled the bulky borrowed dressing-gown over her shoulders, her eyes blue and hard with fright. She had grasped the rosary which she had tucked under the cushion at her head. Her fingers clung shakily to the beads as a child clings to its abracadabra toy.

  ‘My dear Caroline, what a charming picture you make! Don’t move for a second, don’t move: I am trying to recall — some moment, some scene in the past or a forgotten canvas — One of my sister’s friends perhaps — or my nurse. Caroline, my dear, there is no more exquisite sight than that of a woman taken unawares with a rosary.

  Caroline slung the beads on the post of the chair. The thought flashed upon her, ‘He is indecent.’ She looked up at him sharply and caught him off his guard; his mouth and eyes drooped deadly tired, and he was resisting a yawn. She thought, ‘After all, he is kind; it was only a pose.’

  ‘Tell me about the voices,’ he said. ‘I heard nothing, myself. From what direction did they come?’

  ‘Over there, beside the fireplace,’ she answered.

  ‘Would you like some tea? I think there is tea.’

  ‘Oh, coffee. Could I have some coffee? I don’t think I’m likely to sleep.’

  ‘We shall both have some coffee. Stay where you are.

  Caroline thought, ‘He means that he isn’t likely to sleep, either.’ She said, ‘I’m awfully sorry about this, Willi. It sounds so foolish, but it really is appalling. And you must be dead tired.’

  ‘Coffee and aspirins. My Caroline, you are not to apologize, I am delighted —’

  But he could hardly conceal his sleepiness. As he returned bearing their coffee, with a bottle of brandy on a tray, he said, as one who keeps the conversation flowing, notwithstanding a tiger in the garden, ‘You must tell me all about the voices.’ He saw her removing the cottonwool plugs from her ears, but pretended not to notice. ‘I have always believed that disembodied beings inhabit this room,’ he went on, ‘and now I’m sure. Seriously, I’m sure— indissuasibly convinced, Caroline, that you are in touch with something. I do so wish I had been able to give you some ph
enobarbitone, an excellent sedative; or something to make you sleep. But of course I shall sit up with you, it’s nearly five already. …

  He said no more about hallucinations, by which Caroline understood that he now really believed that she was crazy. She sipped her coffee submissively and jerkily, weeping all the time. She told him to leave her.

  ‘Of course not. I want to hear about the voices. It’s most intriguing, really.’

  She felt better for the effort to describe what had happened, although the fact gnawed at her that the Baron was finding the episode a strain and a nuisance. But ruthlessly, in her own interest, she talked on and on. And as she talked she realized that the Baron was making the best of it, had resigned himself, was attending to her, but as one who regards another’s words, not as symbols but as symptoms.

  He got out of her that the clicking of the typewriter always preceded the voices, and sometimes accompanied their speech. How many voices there were, she could not say. Male or female? Both, she told him. It was impossible to disconnect the separate voices, because they came in complete concert; only by the varying timbres could the chorus be distinguished from one voice. ‘In fact,’ she went on, wound-up and talking rapidly, ‘it sounds like one person speaking in several tones at once.

  ‘And always using the past tense?’

  ‘Yes. Mocking voices.’

  ‘And you say this chorus comments on your thoughts and actions?’

  ‘Not always,’ said Caroline, ‘that’s the strange thing. It says “Caroline was thinking or doing this or that” — then sometimes it adds a remark of its own.’

  ‘Give me an example, dear. I’m so stupid — I can never grasp —’ ‘Well,’ said Caroline, unwhelming herself of a sudden access of confidence in the Baron’s disinterestedness, ‘take tonight. I was dropping off, and thinking over my conversation with you —’ ‘— as one does —’ she added, ‘— and it drifted to my mind how you had remembered meeting Laurence’s grandmother; I thought it strange you should do so. Next thing, I heard the typewriter and the voices. They repeated my thought, something like, “It came to her that the Baron” — you know we always call you the Baron, “— that the Baron had been extraordinarily interested in Laurence’s grandmother.” That’s what the voices said. And then they added something to the effect that the Baron was the last person who would remember, and remember by name, an old woman like Mrs Jepp merely from a passing introduction three years ago. You see, Willi, the words are immaterial —’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said the Baron abruptly.

  Caroline felt relieved at these words, although, and in a way because, they confirmed her distress. It was a relief to hear the Baron speak his true mind, it gave her exactly what she had anticipated, what seemed to her a normal person’s reaction to her story. Fearing this, she had been purposely vague when, earlier in the evening, she had explained her distress: ‘A typewriter followed by voices. They speak in the past tense. They mock me.’

  Now that she had been more explicit, and had been told she was mad, she felt a perverse satisfaction at the same time as a suffocating sense that she might never communicate the reality of what she had heard.

  The Baron hastily recovered. ‘I use “mad” of course in the colloquial sense. In the way that we’re all mad, you know. A little crazy, you know. Amongst ourselves, I mean — the intelligentsia are all a little mad and, my dear Caroline, that’s what makes us so nice. The sane are not worth noticing.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Caroline. ‘I know what you mean.’ But she was wondering, now, why he had spoken so viciously: ‘You’re mad!’ — like a dog snapping at a fly. She felt she had been tactless. She wished she had chosen to cite a different example of the voices.

  ‘Someone is haunting me, that’s what it is,’ Caroline said, hoping to discard responsibility for offending the Baron.

  He seemed to have forgotten his role as the intrigued questioner; his air of disinterested curiosity was suspended while he told Caroline exactly why and how Mrs Jepp had impressed him. ‘You see, she is a character. So small and yet her strength — her aged yet vivid face. So dark, so small. I could never forget that face.’

  With surprise, Caroline thought, ‘He is defending himself.’

  ‘And she looked so debonair, my dear, in a deep blue velvet hat. Her brown wrinkles. Quite a picture.’

  ‘Three years ago, was it, Willi?’

  ‘Almost three years — I remember it well. Laurence brought her into the shop, and she said, “What a lot of books!”‘

  He gave an affectionate chuckle, but Caroline did not join him. She was thinking of Louisa Jepp’s last visit to London, three years ago. Certainly, she did not possess her blue hat at that time, Caroline was acquainted with all Louisa’s hats. They were purchased at long intervals, on rare occasions. And only last Easter, Caroline had accompanied the old lady to Hayward’s Heath where they had spent the afternoon, eventually deciding on that blue velvet hat which had so pleased Louisa that she had worn it on every occasion since.

  ‘A blue hat?’ said Caroline.

  ‘My dear, believe it or not, a blue. I recall it distinctly. Blue velvet, curling close to her head, with a fluffy black feather at the side. I shall never forget that hat nor the face beneath it.’

  That was the hat all right.

  In the face of the Baron’s apparent lie — to what purpose? — and the obvious fact that her account of the voices had somehow provoked it, Caroline began to gather her own strength. The glimmering of a puzzle distinct from her own problem was a merciful antidote to her bewilderment. She kept her peace and sipped her coffee, knowing that she was delivered at least from this second mockery, the Baron posing as a credulous sympathizer, his maddening chatter about psychic phenomena, while in reality he waited for the morning, when he could hand her over to Laurence or someone responsible. The Baron might think her mentally unhinged, but by a mercy she had made it clear, though quite unintentionally, that her condition was dangerous for him. In fact, she had forced him to take her seriously, to the extent that he made excuses for himself and lied.

  She considered this, but when she looked at him, saw him still courteous in his extreme tiredness, her tears returned.

  ‘Oh, Willi! How can I ever thank you? You are so kind.

  ‘So kind,’ she repeated, she herself like a tired infant whose tongue cannot extricate itself from a single phrase, ‘So kind, so kind —’ And so, in her gratitude, she gave away what advantage she had gained and became once more a distracted woman seeking the protection of an old friend.

  The Baron, as if he too would make a concession, and anxious to place her in a less pathetic light, asked, ‘What are you writing these days?’

  ‘Oh, the same book. But I haven’t done much lately.’

  ‘The work on the twentieth-century novel?’

  ‘That’s right. Form in the Modern Novel.’

  ‘How’s it going so far?’

  ‘Not bad. I’m having difficulty with the chapter on realism.’

  Suddenly she felt furious with the voices for having upset her arrangements. She had planned to start work that week; to put all her personal troubles out of her mind. And now, this ghastly humiliating experience.

  She broke down again. ‘It ought not to have happened to me! This sort of thing shouldn’t happen to an intelligent woman!’

  ‘It is precisely to the intelligent that these things happen,’ said the Baron. Both he and Caroline were drinking brandy neat.

  After a while the Baron made more coffee, and then, thank God, it was dawn.

  The Baron had put up a protest, but eventually he had let her leave his flat. By daylight she had revived, with that unaccountable energy to which nervous people have access, not only in spite of a sleepless and harrowing night, but almost because of it. The Baron had put up a protest but he had let her go after she had promised to keep in touch with him during the day. She wanted to be out of his flat. She wanted to return to Kensington. And to contact
Laurence; he would return to London. She would have to face the housekeeper at her flat; she was sure the other tenants must have complained of the last night’s turmoil. ‘The housekeeper is a brute, Willi,’ Caroline had said, as she collected her things.

  ‘Give her ten shill-ings,’ said the Baron.

  ‘It’s a man.’

  ‘Give him two pounds.’

  ‘Perhaps a pound,’ said Caroline. ‘Well, Willi, I do thank you.’

  ‘Two pounds would be on the safe side,’ pursued the Baron.

  ‘I’ll make it thirty shillings,’ said Caroline, seriously.

  The Baron began to giggle quietly. Then Caroline, thinking it over, was taken with laughter too.

  ‘I like to haggle.’

  ‘All women do.’

  On the way to Hampstead underground, she sent Laurence a wire. ‘Come immediately something mysterious going on.’

  ‘The voices may never come back,’ she thought. In a way she hoped they would. Laurence might easily be the means of tracking them down by some sheer innocent remark. That was the sort of thing he could do. She did not think the voices would speak to her if she was with anyone else. But Laurence would investigate. She had almost a sense of adventure in her unnatural exhilaration. It was a sharp sunny day. In the train, she put a pound note and a ten-shilling note in a separate place in her handbag, and smiled; that was for the housekeeper. On the whole, she hoped the voices would return, would give her a chance to establish their existence, and to trace their source.

  It was nearly nine-thirty when she reached Queen’s Gate. A convenient time. The tenants had left for their offices, and the housekeeper had not yet emerged. She closed the door quietly and crept upstairs.

  Laurence kept the door of the telephone box open to let in the sun and air of the autumn morning.

  ‘Still no reply?’

  ‘Sorry, no reply.’

  ‘Sure you’ve got the right —?’