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  Contents

  Francis King

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Francis King

  Voices in an Empty Room

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  Dedication

  To

  Diana Petre,

  staunchest of friends

  Chapter One

  IS

  Sybil goes into her study, then comes out of it again and hangs over the door handle a printed notice which says DO NOT DISTURB. The notice came from the Hilton Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon but, since all her life she has been obsessively honest – returning to a newspaper shop because she has inadvertently taken away two copies of the Guardian after having paid for only one, burdening other passengers with the responsibility of handing over her fare to the conductor after she has alighted from a bus, and scrabbling in her purse for the odd coppers to make up the exact sum which she owes to some friend – it was not she who filched it but her brother Hugo.

  ‘Oh, Hugo! I can’t take that!’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what else you can do with it – unless you want to post it back. You’re always complaining of your staff and girls bursting in on you. If you think ‘‘Do Not Disturb’’ sounds too peremptory, you can always write ‘‘Please’’ before the ‘‘Do’’.’

  Although it is four years since Hugo gave her the notice and five months since his sudden death, she feels uneasily guilty whenever she has it in her hand. In precisely the same way, she feels uneasily guilty if she has some sausages from Cullen’s in her shopping basket when she goes into Tesco’s. No one from the Hilton is going to say to her ‘You stole that sign from us’, any more than anyone from Tesco is going to make the same accusation about the sausages. But the uneasy guilt remains. ‘You’re too honest,’ Hugo used to tell her, just as, many years ago, in an attempt to explain to her the painful mystery of why no one had ever wished to marry her, he told her. ‘You’re too beautiful.’ Too honest, too beautiful: was it possible to be either?

  When a girl or a member of the staff sees that notice, she at once retreats. Sybil is writing. What she is writing, no one knows; but that she is writing is beyond all dispute. The general assumption is that, after her lifetime collaboration with Hugo on a new edition, eleven volumes in all, of Meredith’s Letters, it must be about Meredith. ‘ More admired than read’ is Sybil’s verdict on Meredith’s poems and novels. The same might be said of those eleven volumes.

  Sybil has had a long and wearisome day. She woke too early, as she often does now. Then she began to think, with what was a physical ache behind her sternum and across what Henry, a friend of Hugo’s, once called, half in irony and half in admiration, her ‘noble brow’, of the brother, so profoundly loved and so passionately grieved, who died as a result of a stupid and tragic accident. A stupid and tragic accident: that is how the coroner described it and that is how she thinks of it. But perhaps Hugo himself might not have cared for that phrase. In life, he might have said through the mysticism which wafted about him like a gaseous cloud, no event is stupid and accidental.

  After she had dragged herself off her bed, with that recurrent sensation that all her bones are hollow, the marrow somehow shrivelled up, and had gone through the routine of morning prayers, there had been a trying session with the young architect, so brilliant and so self-willed, about the side chapel to be dedicated to Hugo and to be financed out of the money that he left her; then a no less trying meeting of the Governors, followed by a luncheon party for them; and, finally, a lecture, at which she had to introduce the speaker, a novelist whose works she had not merely never read but whose name, to the surprise of the English mistress who had invited him, was totally unknown to her.

  She takes out the pad of foolscap paper from the drawer of her desk. She unscrews the top of her broad-nibbed fountain pen. She gazes out of the window, its curtains undrawn, at the croquet hoops on the lawn. Sometimes, at this hour in the summer, the mistresses emerge to play croquet. But if. they, see that the lamp on her desk is lit, they shake their heads at each other, shrug shoulders and retreat. The writing, whatever it is, must not be disturbed.

  Sybil feels the imminence of happiness. All day, she has had to choose her words so carefully, concealing some things from the architect and other things from the Governors and never giving away anything of importance to the staff and the girls. Never for a moment has she been wholly spontaneous and wholly herself. Now she is free.

  The pen pecks at the paper, with the side of its nib, leaving a single, wavering scratch. It strikes at it again, more firmly. She half-closes her eyes, her breath becomes heavy and even, as though in slumber. The pen tries one word, another, then another, with pauses between, until suddenly, as though the engine of a car had at last, after repeated pressure of the accelerator, coughed and spluttered into life, it begins to speed along the lines. Sybil is writing fast. She is writing far faster than Meredith, with his enormous output, can ever have written.

  She is writing what, to Meredith or to any of her staff or to any of her girls would seem to be gibberish. She writes on and on.

  Audrey dreads Sybil’s visits, even more now than when Hugo was alive. ‘ I can’t do with intellectual women,’ she would say to Hugo; but it is not so much Sybil’s intellectuality as her perspicacity with which she cannot do. People opaque to themselves rarely care for those who have the ability to see through them.

  ‘Dear Audrey!’ Sybil clambers out of her Mini and throws her arms around her sister-in-law. ‘How are you? Let me look at you.’ The elongated, grey-haired, still beautiful woman and the small, blonde, plain one stand each holding the other by the forearms, as though in preparation for a wrestling match. It is, as always on such occasions, Audrey who first gives in and lets go. ‘Is everything all right?’ Sybil asks, as though she has already assumed that everything is all wrong and has come here to right it.

  ‘Oh, yes, fine.’

  The house is a large, mournful Georgian one, with an unkempt lawn in front, littered with the children’s toys, and straggling hedges all around, shutting it in claustrophobically. On the other side of the hedges are the sheds and hutches for the goat, the pony, the donkey, the two cows, and the innumerable hens, guinea-pigs and rabbits which always seem to be needing the attentions of the vet. The cows go dry, because Aud
rey has forgotten either to milk them herself or to get one of the boys from the neighbouring farm to do so. The eggs tend to be found by the children under the hedges, after they have lain there so long that, when they are cracked, their yolks are a metallic green and they stink of sulphur. It is impossible to cook or even kill one of the rabbits because the children make such a scene.

  Audrey was once a dancer. Then she met Hugo, who, to the surprise of his friends and to the consternation of Sybil, married her. Everyone assumed that Audrey would continue with a career already so successful; but she decided that, no, she wanted only to be a wife and mother. She persuaded Hugo to sell his flat in Beaumont Street in Oxford and to move into the country, and she began to collect the animals on what she referred to as ‘the farm’.

  ‘It’s not real, Hugo,’ Sybil would protest to him. ‘None of it.’

  ‘The animals seem real enough to me, when I have to pay the bills for their food.’

  ‘It’s all a performance. This little townee from Crouch End or Tufnell Park or wherever it was, sees herself as an Oxfordshire countrywoman. But there’s something sick and sickly about it all.’

  That Sybil could speak like this to Hugo about his wife, and that Hugo should not be angry, were indications both of their closeness to each other and of Hugo’s distance from Audrey.

  ‘Even the children aren’t real.’

  ‘Oh, yes they are! You should hear them scream.’

  ‘I do hear them scream. Whenever I stay here.’

  ‘Well then!’

  ‘They still are not real. Those are screams in a nightmare.’

  Now the two girls, one five and one three, their hair so blond that it looks almost white, come out to greet Sybil. They hope that she has brought them a present but on this occasion she has forgotten to do so. It has been difficult to remember anything other than what she has to tell to Audrey.

  The younger girl, Betsy, wanders off, pulling behind her a horse on wheels, which wags its tail as it jerks across the gravel. The older girL. Angela, who so much resembles Hugo that merely to look at her gives Sybil a pang, says, in that coaxing, wheedling way of hers, ‘Oh, Aunt Sybil, haven’t you brought us a surprise? You promised.’

  Sybil wants to say: No, the only surprise that I’ve brought is for your mother. But she shakes her head, genuinely sorry and ashamed, ‘I meant to stop at the toyshop in Woodstock. But my mind was on other things.’ Other, far more important things. The child still gazes up at her, with Hugo’s long-lashed, pale blue eyes and Hugo’s way of resting the tip of his tongue on the overfull upper lip of his half-open mouth. Sybil cannot stand it; and the child mysteriously intuits, in the manner of children, that Sybil cannot stand it. She continues to gaze at her aunt, in this slow, subtle torture. Sybil opens her bag and then her purse inside it. Only notes. She jerks out a pound. ‘This is for the two of you,’ she says. ‘ Remember. For Betsy as well. Half and half.’

  ‘Half and half,’ Angela repeats, though the division does not seem a fair one to her and she certainly will not observe it. ‘Oh, thank you, Aunt Sybil!’ She gives one of the little bobbing curtsies that Sybil finds so affected and twee, but that always delighted Hugo.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Audrey says. She is not being polite; she means it. People, she has been brought up to believe, should not give each other money as presents. It is, she has been brought up to believe, the easy way out. Best of all is to give people presents made by oneself. It is for that reason that last Christmas she gave Sybil a handknitted purple jumper at least two sizes too small for her and the Christmas before that some home-made chutney, with mould whitening the surface under the waxed paper.

  ‘She’s so like Hugo. It always gives me quite a turn.’

  ‘Do you think so? Everyone says she’s so like me.’

  The two women begin to walk slowly towards the house, as though each shrank from the closer proximity to each other which going inside will enforce on them. In the hall, Audrey seats herself on a chest and pulls off first one Wellington boot and then the other. Underneath, she is. wearing coarse Army surplus socks. The chest is a Jacobean one. It would have pained Hugo to see Audrey squat on it, just as, vicariously, it pains Sybil. Audrey pulls off her beret and her hair, blond and dishevelled, tumbles out from under it. It is scarcely believable to Sybil that this is the girl whom she first met, in the Long Bar at Covent Garden, dressed in a trouser suit of soft, honey-coloured suede, her hair cropped, with obviously expensive artistry, close to her head.

  Sybil slips out of her coat and then, feeling the chill of the house, wishes that she had not done so. ‘Audrey is such a wonderful manager,’ Hugo would say. By that he meant that she would enforce the economies that he was too sybaritic to enforce. But perhaps now, Sybil thinks with genuine compassion, the economies are really necessary. Audrey has probably already mishandled the money, as she will go on doing. She is the sort of person who saves two hundred pounds on the heating bills and then loses two thousand on some daft investment.

  ‘I’ve baked a cake,’ Audrey says, as though she were announcing something unusual;. but Audrey is always baking cakes, just as she is always baking the hard, gritty loaves of which, whenever she visits the school, she brings two or three as offerings for Sophie. ‘A carrot cake,’ she adds. ‘We’ve had a glut of carrots. I sometimes think that old Mason planted nothing else in the vegetable garden.’

  The two women go into the kitchen, where Audrey examines the Aga. ‘ Bugger!’ She often swears now that Hugo is not here to chide her gently, as she used often to swear before she married him. ‘I think it’s gone out! I must have forgotten to fill it.’

  Sybil feels a terrible, unwilling pity both for her incompetence and her self-delusion of competence. ‘Let me see,’ she says.

  ‘But you don’t know anything about these things, do you?’

  ‘Yes. Something.’ Hugo used to say that Sybil knew something about everything; and, in doing so, he always seemed to Audrey to be implying that she herself knew nothing about anything.

  Sybil soon has the Aga blazing once more. ‘It wasn’t out,’ she says maddeningly. ‘But you had both those dampers shut.’ Audrey has never really mastered the dampers, now that Hugo is dead. She leaves them to Mrs Pratt, the daily.

  The tea is to be a nursery one at the long, rickety kitchen table, once a highly polished dark mahogany when Audrey bought it at an auction but now bleached – an act of vandalism to Sybil – to the colour of whisky with too much water in it. Hugo hated nursery tea. He would put an arm round Audrey’s shoulders and say, ‘ Look, love, why don’t you give the girls their tea here and Sybil and I will take a tray to the drawing room and have a cosy little chat.’ But Sybil can hardly take a tray to the drawing room by herself, even though she would be glad of a cosy little silence.

  The carrot cake at first tastes delicious, as it crumbles under Sybil’s strong, white teeth. But then she is aware of something spongy and tough. She chews on it, she goes on chewing on it. Eventually she swallows. It is a piece of carrot.

  The younger of the girls, Betsy, is less well mannered. She pulls a piece of carrot out from a corner of her mouth between finger and thumb and holds it out to her mother. ‘What’s this, Mummy?’

  ‘Put it down,’ Audrey hisses. ‘If you don’t like it, leave it.’

  ‘But what is it, Mummy?’

  ‘It’s a piece of carrot,’ Audrey tells her. ‘Now eat it or put it down, but shut up!’ She turns apologetically to Sybil, ‘Those carrots were terribly woody. I wondered if they would do.’

  Sybil says nothing. She thinks, as she has often thought before, how awful it would be to have children. For many years Hugo shared her view. ‘Night after night,’ he would tell people, hoping to shock them, ‘ I go down on my knees and thank the Almighty for having at least spared me the burden of children.’ Then suddenly he married Audrey, on a whim as it seemed; and it seemed to be another, even more eccentric whim when he fathered first the one girl and
then the other in quick succession.

  ‘Remind me to give you some of my gooseberry jam before you go,’ Audrey says. She wishes that she did not always sound as though she were trying to placate her sister-in-law.

  ‘Thank you,’ Sybil says, but she has no intention of reminding Audrey. She knows that gooseberry jam.

  The children give up on their slices of the cake and are each handed a Mars bar, which they clearly much prefer. Sybil thinks that she would rather like to have one herself; but she does not ask and Audrey does not offer. Audrey chatters on and on, with a lot of nervous giggling and clearing of her throat and a lot of those ‘sort ofs’ and ‘you knows’, which caused Hugo so much irritation. What she mostly chatters, on and on about is the village; and the village is of absolutely no interest to Sybil, as it was of absolutely no interest to Hugo.

  ‘May I get down, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, you may. When you’ve wiped the chocolate off your mouth.’ Sybil has the familiar, maddening sensation that, yet again, Audrey is playing a part for which, unlike Odette or Giselle, she has no aptitude.

  ‘May I get down too, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, dear. But wipe your mouth too.’

  The two girls wander off, the older one unwrapping the pound note which she has screwed up in the pocket of her pinafore and showing it to the other.

  The women are alone, with the Aga roaring beside them. Sybil gets up, half closes a damper and then sits down once more. She says, ‘I didn’t come just to see how you were making out.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’ve had a strange experience. Strange. Encouraging.’

  Audrey has already guessed, with the same panic which overcame her when she thought that the Aga had expired, the nature of this experience. It is to do with Hugo. Oh, why can’t Sybil leave him in peace and leave her in peace too!