Word: pinfold
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...Aboard the S.S. Caliban, bound out of Liverpool for Rangoon, things get worse. The lascar stewards curse foully-yet only Pinfold seems to hear. Something, he thinks, is wrong with the ship's ventilating gear; by some acoustic or electrical freak, he hears conversations, snatches of music, and a dog snuffling in the night. Then he somehow listens to an obscene lecture on sex by some evangelical clergyman (though none appears on the passenger list). New voices make themselves heard. They become menacing and are well-informed on Pinfold's private affairs...
...That wouldn't stop Pinfold. He doesn't really believe in his religion, you know. He just pretends to because he thinks it aristocratic. It goes with being Lord of the Manor...
Torture by Radio. Other voices make sinister suggestions that Pinfold is a Communist and a pansy, and that he caused the suicide of a tenant and a brother officer during the war. The voices are heard composing a petition to have Pinfold removed from the captain's table...
Most horrifying of all (to a novelist), Pinfold hears a man called Clutton-Cornforth reviewing his books on the BBC: "The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel . . . may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot; falseness of characterization; morbid sentimentality; gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity...
...Pinfold clearly cannot take much more of this punishment; he begins to behave oddly in front of the other passengers and to send enigmatic messages to his wife. But he still struggles on against his ghostly tormentors, who possess "a huge but incomplete and wildly inaccurate dossier covering the whole of Mr. Pinfold's private life." Then, as suddenly as they began, the voices cease. He had been taking sleeping draughts, and when he stopped, the voices stopped...