‘That was the miracle,’ Caroline said.
‘Oh, it was a miracle. My arriving here just when Lady Manders wanted to make a change in the staff. I only came, really, to think things over. But I can tell you, I don’t have much chance to sit on my behind and think. It’s hard work. And I always put duty first, before everything. And I don’t mind the work; Our Lady helps me. When the kitchen girls grumble about the work, I always tell them, “Our Lady will do it for you.” And she does.’
‘In that case, there’s no need for them to do it,’ Caroline said.
‘Now listen to me, Caroline,’ said Mrs Hogg. ‘You want to speak to a priest. You haven’t really got the hang of the Catholic Faith. You want to speak to Father Ingrid.’
‘You are wrong,’ Caroline said. ‘I’ve heard him speaking once from the pulpit. Once was enough. I must go now.
The bell was ringing for Benediction. ‘That’s not the way to the chapel,’ Mrs Hogg called after her as Caroline walked swiftly along the green-walled corridors.
Caroline did not reply. She went to her room and began to pack her things, neatly and calmly. St Philumena’s was a dead loss, Caroline told herself; ‘For one who demands much of life, there is always a certain amount of experience to be discarded as soon as one discovers its fruitlessness.’
She excelled at packing a suitcase. She told herself ‘I’m good at packing a suitcase’, forming these words in her mind to keep other words, other thoughts, from crowding in. The three days of St Philumena’s were bleating to high heaven for formulation, but she kept them at bay as she muttered, ‘Shoes there. Books here. The comb-bag in that corner. Blouses flat on the bed. Fold the arms. Like that. Then fold again. This way, that way. Hot-water bottle. Nothing rattling. Crucifix wedged in cotton wool. Catholic Truth Society pamphlet to read in the train. I am doing what I am doing.’
In this way, she subjugated St Philumena’s for half an hour. She had devised the technique in the British Museum Reading Room almost a year ago, at a time when her brain was like a Guy Fawkes night, ideas cracking off in all directions, dark idiot-figures jumping round a fiery junk-heap in the centre.
In the train Caroline swung her case on to the rack and sat down. The case jutted out at an angle. Caroline got up and pushed it straight. She had the carriage to herself. After a while she rose again and moved the case to the middle of the rack, measuring by the mirror beneath until there was an equal space on either side. Then she sat down in her corner-seat facing it. She sat perfectly still while her thoughts became blind. Every now and then a cynical lucidity would overtake part of her mind, forcing her to comment on the fury of the other half. That was painful. She observed, ‘The mocker is taking over.’
‘Very funny, very funny,’ said Caroline out loud. A woman just then passing in the corridor observed her talking to herself. Caroline thought, Good God, now my trouble is growing noticeable.
The shock of having been observed brought some relief. As her mental pain subsided, Caroline began to reflect. Am I justified?
I bloody well am. Carefully and intently she began to recollect what St Philumena’s had been like.
On her second evening when she had joined the other residents in the recreation-room, ‘I must remember they are called “pilgrims”,’ she thought. She had already made the blunder of referring to them as residents’.
Anyway, there were eight of them besides Caroline. She brought them one by one to mind as she sat, still as a telegraph post, in the train which carried her to London.
That evening she had looked very seldom at her fellow guests, but now revoking, she peered into their eyes, stared up and down at their clothes, scrutinized the very skin on their faces.
She recalled them, first singly, and then in a half-circle round the fireplace; she could even see herself.
And as the train chugged south, her memory dwelling continuously on the fireside group, while at the same time she repeated mentally the formula of the rosary, touched the beads imperceptibly in her pocket, which she did for its outward effect on her person, the automatic act of the rosary prevented her from fidgeting in her agitation, it stopped her talking aloud to herself, made her unnoticeable. For the group round St Philumena’s fire inflamed her; after all, she was a most jumpy woman at the best of times.
Two nights ago that group were exchanging anecdotes about the treatment of Catholics in England by non-Catholics. It was their favourite theme.
‘What do you think, they won’t employ Catholics on the passenger transport where my mother lives.’
‘Not one Catholic child got a scholarship…
‘Forty per cent were Catholics, but not one …
It was well known, said a large florid lady from the West of Ireland, that the University of Cambridge would not take Catholics.
‘Oh no, that’s not true,’ Caroline said at once.
‘And they do their best for to set the Catholics asunder,’ the lady from the West of Ireland went on.
‘Not noticeably,’ Caroline said.
The young lawyer agreed with her, but his testimony was suspect. The lady from Ireland whispered aloud to her neighbour.
‘He’s curing from alcohol, poor lad.’
The lawyer added, ‘Of course, there’s always a prejudice in certain quarters,’ which put him right with the company.
‘My brother in the public library, when they found he was a Catholic …
As the atrocities mounted up, the lady from the West of Ireland continued to ply Caroline, ‘What d’ye make of that?… Isn’t it awful? What d’ye think of it?’
At last, rising to leave, ‘I think it very quaint,’ Caroline answered.
Throughout, Mrs Hogg had been volubly present. She too had offered some relishes, had known what persecution was, and her eyes were frequently directed towards Caroline the suspect.
Recalling these proceedings, Caroline recalled too a similar fireside pattern, her family on the Jewish side with their friends, so long ago left behind her. She saw them again, nursing themselves in a half-circle as they indulged in their debauch of unreal suffering; ‘Prejudice!’ ‘… an outright insult!’ Caroline thought, Catholics and Jews; the Chosen, infatuated with a tragic image of themselves. They are tragic only because they are so comical. But the thought of those fireside martyrs, Jews and Catholics, revolted Caroline with their funniness. She thought she might pull the emergency cord, halt the train, create a blinding distraction: and even while planning this action she reflected that she would not positively perform it.
But in her own rapacity for suffering, Caroline seized and held the images of the world she had left years ago and the world she had newly entered. She tugged and pulled the rosary in her pocket, while her thoughts, fine as teeth, went into action again and again with the fireside congregations of mock martyrs, their incongruity beside the real ones … it was an insult.
It was in the dining-car that Caroline got round once more to Mrs Hogg. Mrs Hogg stuck in her mind like a lump of food on the chest which will move neither up nor down. Suddenly Caroline realized that she was bolting her lunch, and simultaneously the memory of mealtimes at St Philumena’s returned, with the sight of Mrs Hogg chewing in rhythm with the reading from the Scriptures delivered in the sister’s refined modulations: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, love springs from God… . If a man boasts of loving God, while he hates his own brother, he is a liar.., the man who loves God must be one who loves his brother.’
Caroline thought, ‘The demands of the Christian religion are exorbitant, they are outrageous. Christians who don’t realize that from the start are not faithful. They are dishonest; their teachers are talking in their sleep. “Love one another … brethren, beloved … your brother, neighbours, love, love, love” — do they know what they are saying?’