Voices in an Empty Room Page 11

  There was no mistaking the true meaning of what she was trying to say to him, as she picked at a hair lodged in the bristles of the brush and pulled it out between finger and forefinger as though it were a length of thread she was drawing from a needle. Her tongue, sharp and red, appeared between her teeth.

  He thought: Oh, Christ, Christ, Christ! How much did this dark, baleful woman know and how much had she guessed? He had been so careful. ‘Cyril and I thought we’d go and feed the birds in the Park. But I know that bores you. Would you rather go down to the Odeon if I give you the money?’ ‘You won’t mind, will you, Sybil, if I use the flat tomorrow. I have a group of visiting Americans to see and it’ll be difficult for them to get down here, because of their itinerary.’ ‘This is our secret, Cyril. You must never, ever tell anyone about it. Other people wouldn’t understand. They might even try to keep us apart. One day, it’ll be different. When you’re older. Then we’ll have a flat like this of our own and we’ll meet in it whenever we want and to hell with everyone else.’ He had been so careful; but, as Mrs Lockit had told him, he had made a fool of himself – or let others make a fool of him.

  ‘I’m always willing to do anything I can to help, either boy.’

  ‘Well, as I say, Cyril’s the special case. His father’s not in a position to do anything for him. Just a drunken lay-about, as you know. Yes, he’s a special sort of boy and he deserves a special sort of treatment. If you get my meaning.’ The final sentence lilted upwards, vaguely interrogative.

  His head still turned away from her, to look out of the window at the mock-orange frothing behind it, Hugo nodded.

  Mrs Lockit put down the brush. ‘I think we understand each other. I think Cyril can rely on you?’ The hands palpated the stomach. ‘ He’ll be happy about that.’ She walked towards the door, then turned. ‘ Oh, what a silly I am, it all but slipped my mind. And I promised the boys. You haven’t forgotten the usual, have you?’

  ‘The usual?’

  ‘For their trouble. The ten quid each.’

  Hugo all but shouted, ‘Go to hell. I’m bloody well not going to fork out my money for being taken for a ride!’ But he knew he could not do that, now or in the future stretching ahead of him.

  He got off the bed, and put out a hand to steady himself against the edge of the dressing-table, as he felt everything suddenly whirling and darkening, undisciplined particles caught in a maelstrom from which they struggled in vain to free themselves. He put his hand to his inner breast pocket, drew out his wallet. Things steadied, came into focus. Mrs Lockit ran the tip of that sharp, red tongue over her lower lip, watching him. He drew out four five-pound notes, so crisp from the cash dispenser that when he had offered one of their fellows to the girl at the counter in Smith’s in order to buy a Guardian and Spectator, she had produced the old joke, ‘Have you just made these yourself?’ Such notes often stuck together, but he was now beyond counting them with any care.

  ‘There you are, Mrs Lockit:’

  ‘Much obliged, Mr Crawfurd.’ She put her hand oh the doorknob. ‘I can understand you not wanting to see the boys again, given the circumstances. But it’s nice to know you’ll continue to take an interest in our Cyril.’ As she opened the door he put out a hand, as though to restrain her. ‘Was there something else?’ She sounded surprised and suspicious.

  ‘I just wondered … Tell me …’ (Yes, yes, he had to know) ‘Who was it who originally thought of the idea?’

  ‘What idea?’ She peered round the door and down the corridor to make sure that Henry was not listening.

  ‘The whistle, the bulb. Was it yours?’

  She laughed. ‘Good gracious me. I haven’t the education or the brains to think of a thing like that. And Lionel wouldn’t be capable of thinking of it. No, it was Cyril. We were all walking on the Front one day and he heard this whistling, kept hearing this whistling. But his mum couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t hear it, even Lionel couldn’t hear it. At first, we all thought it was something in his head. But then he figured it out. It was this woman with a dog. She kept blowing the whistle far out by the sea and, wherever she was, that dog would run to her. Then a funny thing happened, don’t ask me why. We waited there, on the promenade, to see the woman and the dog come back over the sand and pass us. In fact, I was going to ask her about that whistle, never having seen one like it in all my life. But as they came near to us, the dog – a spitz-like dog it was – suddenly rushed forward and bit Cyril on the hand. It was as though it was angry with him for having discovered its secret.’

  Under the gloom of overarching trees, Hugo raised a limp, cold hand and pressed lips to the upraised squiggle, even shinier and whiter than the flesh around it, which made a small boss on the fleshy area just below the thumb.

  ‘So it was Cyril whose idea it was,’ Hugo said softly, in, a tone of anguished wonder.

  ‘As I say, at first it was just a prank. To take in the other boys at the school – and some of the masters too. And then, well, we played the same prank on you and Sir Henry. It was naughty of us, I know.’ She shrugged and smiled, as though that deception and that extraction of money in the past and this blackmail now were of equally small account. ‘Are you going to be in to supper?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. No. I have to get back to London. To see my sister.’ He had no arrangement with Sybil but it was the first pretext that came to him.

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame! I got a rabbit in the market and I’ve already skinned it for supper.’

  He felt an uprising of nausea, as, involuntarily, he envisaged those blunt, tanned hands tearing the fur away from the shiny, bluish carcase beneath it. He gulped. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mrs Lockit went out, shutting the door quietly behind her. That he would see her again, he had no doubt. But would it be here? He could not bear the thought of remaining in, or returning to, this house in which he had been so disastrously cheated. He pulled his suitcase out from under the high brass bedstead, opened it and, usually so tidy, began to thrust into it, piecemeal, shirts, socks, shoes, underclothes, pyjamas, dressing-gown, shaving things. He stared down at his hairbrush in his hand. She had touched it, before removing from it that long, ashen hair. Somewhere, on the carpet, the hair would now be lying. He felt an impulse to go on his hands and knees to retrieve it. He threw the hairbrush on top of the things already in the suitcase. He looked around him. Had he forgotten anything? He opened the window, leant out and smelled the overpowering exhalation from the mock-orange on the still evening air. He, Henry and the boys stood under it. ‘What’s that smell?’ It was as though Cyril had never smelled mock-orange in his life. Henry told him. ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ the boy said. Henry was irritated, as so often, by his girlishly lisping voice; and he was even more irritated when Hugo reached upwards and broke off a stem for him. The boy held it to his nose, breathing deeply. ‘Oh, lovely, lovely.’

  Hugo returned to the bed, closed the hasps of the suitcase, and looked around him. Anything forgotten? No, everything remembered, as it would always be remembered, as long as. he lived. As long as he lived. He went to the door, case in hand, hesitated, and then swiftly made his way along the corridor and down the stairs.

  Henry had been waiting for him. He had heard Mrs Lockit go up, he had tried to hear what they had been saying to each other. He knew that something far more terrible had happened than the discovery of the deception and he was beginning to know, without being told, what it was. He felt both a pity and an. anger, like a sulky fire attempting to burst forth under damp wood, for this friend who had made such an ass of himself.

  ‘You’re not off, are you, dear fellow?’

  Henry peered up, the gold rim of his spectacles above his left eye glinting fire from the reflection of late evening sun through the fanlight above him. ‘I thought you were going to stay tonight. I thought you were going to give me my revenge at chess.’

  Hugo shook his head. He could hardly frame a sentence, let alone utter it. ‘Must return. Promised Sybil.’


  ‘She said nothing about seeing you this evening. Why didn’t you travel together?’ Henry’s voice was the stern one of a schoolmaster catching a pupil out in a clumsy lie.

  ‘She had to do something first. She was in a hurry. In any case, I didn’t want her here when I – I unmasked the two boys.’

  ‘But you’ll tell her about it?’ Henry’s tone was as sharp as his gaze.

  Hugo descended the last step. ‘Henry – may I ask something of you?’

  ‘Of course. Go ahead.’

  ‘Henry – please don’t say anything to Sybil about – about the deception. Eventually, I’ll tell her myself. But don’t tell her. And don’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘But Hugo, I can’t see …’

  ‘Please, Henry. I ask it of you. Say nothing. Nothing to anyone. I want you to leave it all to me.’

  Henry looked at his friend, whose face had the expression, sickened and stunned, of someone who has just been pulled, unhurt, out of some terrible pile-up. He felt a sudden tenderness, even love, as though the sun had penetrated, by some miracle, through the thick, obdurate shell of an ancient tortoise. He held Hugo’s arm, tentatively, above the elbow, then exerted a squeeze. To Hugo it was a terrible travesty of the way in which he himself had touched another arm. ‘I’ll tell no one,’ he said. ‘Not to worry. I’ll leave it to you.’

  ‘Thank you, Henry.’

  Hugo began to walk towards the front door. Then he said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight, not after what has happened. I suppose you couldn’t spare me some sleeping pills? As you know, I never usually take them.’

  ‘Of course, dear chap, of course.’ With a spryness amazing for a man of his age with a heart condition, Henry raced up the stairs. Hugo waited dumbly. Then Henry raced down again, a bottle in his hand. ‘Let me give you two. But these are pretty strong, mind.’

  Hugo wanted to snatch the whole bottle. Mogadon. Henry had spoken of them only two or three days before. I suppose you couldn’t spare me the whole bottle, could you? No, impossible. Even if he said that, Henry would refuse. The whole bottle, old fellow? I’m awfully sorry. But take another one, if you like.

  Hugo took the two pills and slipped them into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Thank you, Henry,’ he said, not knowing whether he was thanking him for all his hospitality during the last weeks or for the two useless pills. ‘ Good of you.’

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ Henry said. There was a pathos in the upward inflection he gave to the words. So many people had moved, a procession drawn by other, more exciting music, out of his life. He did not want Hugo also to move out of it.

  ‘Oh, yes, soon.’

  Hugo opened the door, crossed the threshold and then, without looking round, hurried through a cloud of perfume from the mock-orange, ducked his head where the branches of the laburnum trailed above the path, and emerged on to the pavement.

  He began to stride out for the station; but then there crowded in on him memories of his face buried in those slim thighs, with their tantalising, vaguely musty odour, of the wretched little dog first yapping and then bouncing off over tussocks and stones, of Audrey saying, ‘Oh, not again; not again, we never seem to see you for a single weekend,’ of Sybil saying, ‘I must say I do find both of them singularly unappealing,’ of that hair in his mouth, that earlobe, that choking bitterness, and then that gypsylike woman, hands palpating the side of her stomach, strands of her coarse black hair trailing across her cheek, and her voice reminding him that though the expensive dream had ended, the expenditure itself would never do so …

  He paused, looking around him at the twee, gimcrack Regency houses, with their brass carriage lamps, glistening front doors, hanging baskets of flowers and extravagant wrought-iron gates. Then, his mind suddenly made up, he turned back. He began to stride, hands in pockets and head lowered, as though in the face of a gale, away from the station. Towards the sea front.

  The hotel, when he, Sybil and their parents, had stayed in it before the War, had been rambling and old. Since then, a fire had swept through it, what remained of the historical structure had been ruthlessly demolished, and a gaunt sky-scraper had been erected in its place. Henry hated the change but at that moment he could think of nowhere else to go.

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It’s lucky it’s tonight and not tomorrow. We have the conference tomorrow.’

  Conservative, Labour, Liberal? IBM, Ciba, BP? Hugo cared too little to ask.

  In the clean, bright, boxlike bedroom, far above the promenade, he sat on his bed, his case unopened, and rested his head in his hands. After a while, he patted the breast pocket of his jacket. Two Mogadon. Useless. He and Henry had been talking about death and survival after death, and Henry – who, unlike Hugo, believed that ‘we just go out like a light switched off by an invisible, arbitrary hand’ (a click of the fingers) – had described how he had procured from Exit a booklet of instructions about ‘doing away with oneself as effectively as possible’. One had to swallow a hundred and ten Mogadon tablets, Henry said, his eyes wide behind their thick lenses. ‘Can you imagine it? A hundred and ten. And I have difficulty in swallowing a single pill. Hugo had laughed, ‘ I suppose that’s what coroners call ‘‘a massive dose’’.’ Useless. A hundred and ten.

  A small refrigerator in a corner of the room suddenly set up a hum, as though to say to him, as discreetly as possible: I’m here, why don’t you visit me, I might be able to comfort you. Hugo went over and pulled open the door. He stared at the miniatures. Then he picked up one, Black and White whisky, and unscrewed the cap. He put it to his mouth, swallowed. He picked up another. Another. But though the liquor burned horribly as it went down his gullet, – he felt that he might have been swallowing molten lead, so quickly and so strangely did it seem to solidify on reaching his stomach – none of the expected lightening of mood or blurring of senses followed. The reverse. He felt a dragging within him, so that it was all that he could do not to sink to his knees. At the same time, all his perceptions – of the late evening light slanting through the French windows from the balcony beyond them, of the jazzy, zigzag motif, black on white, of the curtains, of the rush of some distant plumbing – were sharpened to preternatural acuteness. He took another miniature bottle out of the mini-bar, unscrewed its cap and swallowed once again. He looked at the bottle: gin. Standing beside the mini-bar, the bottle to his lips, there came back to him a memory of opening a similar mini-bar in an African hotel and standing back, horrified, as huge, shiny cockroaches cascaded out of it.

  The sun was now only a reddening stain, seeping wider and wider across the horizon visible through the windows. He pulled open one of the doors on to the balcony, then the other. For a long time he stood there, as the traffic, infinitesimally small termites beneath him, crawled, stopped, crawled, with a strange hum, like a far-off wail, arising from it, and the sky and the water began to darken. He felt a mortal sickness, at the thought of the domesticity of his life on the farm, of the tedious hours spent with Sybil over their shared labours, of the wrangles of claims and counter-claims, superstition and scepticism at the Institute, and, above all, of the deception and the separation and the weeks and weeks and months and months and perhaps even years and years of paying out money.

  The awning over the balcony hung askew. Some instinct for order, undying when everything else within him seemed to be dying, made him go back into the room and press the electric switch which operated it. The strut that had already descended trembled and then began to rattle as he kept his finger on the switch; the other strut would not move.

  That same instinct for order made him pick up the telephone.

  ‘Yes, sir. Can I help you?’ A female voice.

  ‘The awning on my balcony doesn’t come down properly.’

  ‘What doesn’t what, sir?’

  Patiently he explained.

  ‘Just one moment, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Can I help you, sir?’ A male voice.

  Hugo repeated
what he had said already.

  ‘I’ll send someone up first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s far too late now, sir. In any case, there’s no sun on the balconies now, is there?’

  Hugo put down the telephone. He went back on to the, balcony. Again he looked out at the darkening sea and sky. After the heat of the long day, a breeze was arising, to make his trousers flap about his legs and untidy his hair. He put both hands to his head, partly to keep his hair from flying about and partly because he felt that everything within it was about to explode.

  Suddenly, on an impulse, he hoisted himself up on to the balcony railing, one hand to the strut of the awning which would not descend. He looked down. That strange wail from the traffic grew louder, shriller. Nothing was moving except a single motorcyclist – he could see his yellow jacket – weaving constantly between the stationary cars. ‘As soon as he’s old enough, Lionel wants a motorbike. I’d be terrified to ride one of those things. Dangerous.’ ‘Perhaps you’d prefer a car.’ ‘Yes, I’d prefer a car.’ ‘Well, when you’re old enough, I’ll buy you one and you can drive it for me.’

  The cars began to move again.

  Hugo’s body swayed outwards, regained its equilibrium, then swayed outwards again. So easy. Easier, far easier than swallowing all those Mogadon tablets. Let go. Just let go. But at the moment of falling, he could not let go. A hand shot up, grabbed at the awning. The awning held him a moment, then the fabric split and he hurtled down, a streamer of the jolly red-and-white canvas clutched in his fist.

  It was clear, the coroner said, that the deceased had been drinking to excess; three miniatures of whisky, one of vodka and one of gin had been found scattered on the floor around the mini-bar. No doubt that excess of alcohol had made him so truculent in his demands that the electric equipment which operated the awning should be repaired, had caused him to try recklessly to repair it himself when told that no one could see to it until the next day, and had resulted in his loss of balance.