The Comforters

by Muriel Spark

But the operator had switched off. He was sure she hadn’t got the right number — at least — maybe — Caroline must have gone somewhere else for the night. Perhaps she had gone to Mass.

  He rang his parents’ home. There had been no word from Miss Rose. His mother was at Mass. His father had just left. He sent Caroline a wire from the village post office, and went for an exasperated walk, which turned cheerful as he anticipated Caroline’s coming to stay at his grandmother’s. He had arranged to prolong his holiday for another week. When he reached the cottage half an hour later, he found a wire from Caroline.

  ‘There’s been a mix-up at the post office,’ he told Louisa.

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘I sent Caroline a wire, and apparently Caroline has sent one to me. But they must have got the messages mixed up somehow. This is the message I sent to Caroline. The very words.’

  ‘What dear? Read it out, I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ll go and speak to the post office,’ Laurence said swiftly, leaving at once. He was anxious to avoid the appearance of concealing the wire from his grandmother, after admitting that it contained his own message. He read it again. ‘Come immediately something mysterious going on.’ It ended, ‘love Caroline’.

  At the post office, where a number of Louisa’s neighbours were buying tea and other things, Laurence caused a slight stir. His outgoing message was compared with the one he had just received. He distinctly overheard the postmaster, in their little back office, say to his daughter, ‘They’ve both used the exact same words. It’s a code, or something fishy they’ve arranged beforehand.’

  He came out and said to Laurence, ‘The two telegrams are identical, sir.’

  ‘Well, that’s funny,’ Laurence repeated the words, ‘something mysterious going on’.

  ‘Yes, it seems so,’ said the man.

  Laurence cleared off before the question could become more confused and public. He went into the phone box and asked for Caroline’s number. It was ringing through. Immediately she answered.

  ‘Caroline?’

  ‘Laurence, is that you? Oh, I’ve just come home and found a wire. Did you send a wire?’

  ‘Yes, did you?’

  ‘Yes, how was it supposed to read? I’m so frightened.’

  The little parlour in the Benedictine Priory smelt strongly of polish; the four chairs, the table, the floors, the window-frame gleamed in repose of the polish, as if these wooden things themselves had done some hard industry that day before dawn. Outside, the late October evening sun lit up the front garden strip, and Caroline while she waited in the parlour could hear the familiar incidence of birds and footsteps from the suburban street. She knew this parlour well, with its polish; she had come here weekly for three months to receive her instruction for the Church. She watched a fly alight on the table for a moment; it seemed to Caroline to be in a highly dangerous predicament, as if it might break through the glossy surface on which it skated. But it made off quite easily. Caroline jogged round nervily as the door opened. Then she rose as the priest came in, her friend, ageing Father Jerome. She had known him for so many years that she could not remember their first meeting. They had been in touch and out of touch for long periods. And when, after she had decided to enter the Church, and she went weekly to his Priory, her friends had said, ‘Why do you go so far out of London for instruction? Why don’t you go to Farm Street?’ Caroline replied, ‘Well, I know this priest.’

  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.’

  ‘Let’s have it,’ he said.

  ‘Not yet. I want to assemble the evidence.’

  Caroline was happy. Laurence looked at himself in the mirror, smiled, and told himself, ‘She says I’m a dirty beast.’

  The flat was untidy. Caroline loved to see her own arrangement of things upset by Laurence. It was a double habitation now. They had told the housekeeper that they had got married. He was only half satisfied with the story but he would put the other half on the bill, Laurence predicted. She was used to being called ‘Mrs Manders’: it was easy, as if they had never parted, except for the knowledge that this was an emergency set-up. Another week, at the most, and then something would have to be done. She regretted having disclosed her plight to the Baron. He had been pressing Laurence to get Caroline into a nursing home. She did not mind this suggestion, so much as the implication. ‘A nursing home.’ He meant a refined looney-bin. Laurence opposed it; he wanted to take her back with him to his grandmother. The Baron had carried the story to Helena, who offered to pay Caroline’s expenses at a private nursing home for Catholics. Helena did not mean a looney-bin, however.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a few weeks’ rest in a nursing home,’ Caroline had told Laurence. ‘I don’t think they could do away with the voices, but they might deafen me to them for a while. It would be a rest.’

  Laurence had been altogether against this.

  And he had a mystery of his own to solve. ‘I wrote and told you all about it. I’d just posted a letter to St Philumena’s when I got your first wire to say you’d returned to London. I daresay it will be forwarded.’

  ‘Do tell me.’ Caroline had half-expected to hear of a ‘mystery’ similar to her own.

  ‘Well, the thing is, Grandmother is mixed up with some highly suspect parties. At first I thought she was running a gang, but now, all things considered, I think she may be their stooge.’

  ‘No,’ said Caroline. ‘Quite definitely, your grandmother isn’t anyone’s stooge.’

  ‘Now, d’you think that, honestly? — That’s what I feel myself really. You must come and see for yourself.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Caroline had said.

  Four times during the past week, while Laurence had been out, she had heard the typewriter and the voices.

  Then she had told Laurence. ‘I’ll see Father Jerome. If he advises a nursing home, it’s a nursing home. If he says go to your grand-mother’s, I’ll come. I could always go into a nursing home later on.

  But she had forgotten to put these alternatives to Father Jerome. And now, she did not feel it mattered.

  ‘I’ll come to Sussex,’ she said.

  ‘Really, will you? Is that what the holy pa advised?’

  ‘No. I forgot to mention it. He advised food and sleep.’

  Laurence knew Caroline’s nervous responses to food and sleep at the best of times. But she didn’t laugh with him. Instead, she said, ‘I feel better. I think the worst of my trouble is over; I begin to see daylight.’

  He was used to Caroline’s rapid recoveries, but only from physical illness. In past years, he had known her prostrated by the chest complications to which she was subject; bronchitis, pleurisy, pneumonia. Once or twice she had lain for several days, running a temperature, burning with fever. Then, overnight or in the course of an hour in the afternoon, or waking in the late morning after a kindling night, there would come a swift alteration, a lightning revival of her sick body; Caroline would say, ‘I am better. I feel quite well.’ She would sit up and talk. Her temperature would drop to normal. It was almost as though she was under a decision, as if her body, at such times, were only awaiting her word, and she herself submissively waiting for some secret go-ahead within her, permitting her at last to say, ‘I am better. I feel well.’ After such rapid reversals Caroline would feel depressed, would crave that attention due to an invalid which she had not cared about in her real danger. Frequently in the days that followed, she would say, ‘I’m not better yet. I’m still weak.’ But there was never any conviction in this. It became a joke eventually, for Laurence to say for months after her illnesses, ‘You’re still an invalid. You’re not better yet’, and Caroline, too, would tell him, ‘You make breakfast today, dear. I’m still an invalid. I’m feeling very unwell.’

  Laurence thought of these things when he heard Caroline, on her return from the Priory, tell him, ‘I feel better… . I begin to see daylight.’ He recognized this signal; he himself had nursed her through her illnesses over the past six years. Those were mostly times of poverty before his parents had accepted his irregular life with Caroline; before he got his job on the B.B.C.; before Caroline had got her literar
y reputation.

  Caroline knew what he was thinking. He had not expected her to recover so abruptly from this sort of illness. He had seen it coming on for the past six months.

  And now he was thinking — ‘So she is better. She sees daylight. Is it just like that? Can she be right? No more melancholia. No more panic at the prospect of meeting strangers. No worry, no voices? Only the formal convalescence, the “invalid” period, and then the old Caroline again. Can it be so?’

  Caroline saw on his face an expression which she remembered having seen before. It was a look of stumped surprise, the look of one who faces an altogether and irrational new experience; a look partly fearful, partly indignant, partly curious, but predominantly joyful. The other occasion on which she had seen this expression on Laurence’s face was during an argument, when she told him of her decision to enter the Church, with the consequence that they must part. They were both distressed; they hardly knew what they were saying. In reply to some remark of Laurence she had rapped out, nastily, ‘I love God better than you!’ It was then she saw on his face that mixture of surprise and dismay, somehow revealing in its midst an unconscious alien delight, which she witnessed now once more when she told him, ‘The worst is over. I see daylight.’

  ‘But remember I’m still an invalid,’ she added. He laughed quite a lot. She was sorry to have to disappoint him. She knew he would be expecting her ‘recovery’ to be something different from what it was going to be, and that he was wondering, ‘How does she know she won’t hear those voices again?’

  He said, ‘Do you really feel that everything’s going to be all right now, darling?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly O.K. Only a bit tired, but now, you see, I know what the voices are. It’s a creepy experience but I can cope with it. I’m sure I’ve discovered the true cause. I have a plan. I’ll tell you something about it by and by.’

  She lay on the divan and closed her eyes.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, the voices. You mean I can’t be well if I go on hearing them.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see if this machine records anything.’