Voices in an Empty Room Read online

  Henry shrugs and gives a faint smile. All at once he feels compassion for her, at once so invulnerably sophisticated and so vulnerably superstitious, ‘ Oh, Sybil,’ he says, half in this new compassion and half in the old mockery.

  Sybil does not care to be simultaneously pitied and mocked. ‘Well, I can see you think me a self-deceiving idiot.’

  ‘Not at all. I only wish I could share your faith.’ He spreads his hands. ‘ESP, yes. Or, rather, perhaps.’ He makes that qualification because, suddenly, he has had a vision of Hugo, white-faced and implacable, holding out the dog whistle on the palm of a trembling hand. ‘But the idea that the dead can speak to us …’ He shakes his head sadly.

  ‘Those boys,’ Sybil says.

  Henry feels panic. Surely she can have no inkling of all that sordid business. ‘What about those boys?’

  ‘Are you going on with the sittings?’

  ‘Dear me, no. Without Hugo, I lost heart for all that. And in any case, they were getting more and more reluctant to continue. A scientific researcher has the motivation to reproduce the same experiment over and over. But what motivation …?’

  ‘Other than money,’ Sybil puts in quietly.

  ‘Well, yes, Hugo gave them pocket-money. And very useful too, I should guess. But still and all.’ He sighs.

  As though she had overheard this mention of her nephews, even though the tree under which Sybil and Henry are seated is too far from the house for her to have done so, Mrs Lockit suddenly appears at the garden door. ‘I’ll be ready for you in five minutes,’ she calls. ‘Tomato soup, baked beans on toast, peaches. All right for you?’ She reels off this menu, every item from a tin, with the relish of a sadist prescribing a course of punishment.

  ‘Lovely, Mrs L,’ Henry calls back, without irony.

  Mrs Roberts is staying in the Knightsbridge house of her most fervent and frequent client, Lady Telzer. All those who visit her there are at once struck by the contrast between the vastness of the American woman and the tininess of the sitting room, once two even tinier rooms, in which she receives them. It is as though some fleshy, exotic plant were about to burst the pot in which it has been confined for far too long.

  In the thirties, there was a terrible scandal when Lady Telzer, married to an ageing politician, deserted both him and their three children, all under ten, to live in Rome with a woman poet of doubtful accomplishment and even more doubtful reputation. The politician, a pompous and tricky womanizer, had never been liked; and so, in an attempt to excuse conduct inexcusable by the standards of the period, people told each other that the reason for the desertion was that he had infected his wife with syphilis. The true reason was more simple and less squalid: Lady Telzer had become bored with domesticity and had fallen in love for the first time in her life.

  Soon, the woman poet died; and Lady Telzer then devoted the next forty or so years to attempts to get in touch with her often recalcitrant spirit. To this end, Mrs Roberts and her French communicator, Estelle, allegedly an aristocratic seventeen-year-old girl guillotined during the Reign of Terror, had proved particularly helpful.

  Lady Telzer, who is now so shrivelled that she seems to drift through her little house like a dead leaf, answers the bell. She is wearing an old-fashioned deaf-aid, with a wire which trails down to what looks like a small transistor radio worn on her right breast. She has met Sybil several times but she never recognizes her, even though Sybil is not someone whom people usually forget.

  ‘Hello, Lady Telzer,’ Sybil greets her, thinking how, despite all her money, much of it inherited from the poet, the old woman had let the house get into a dreadful state of disrepair and mess. ‘You don’t remember me,’ she goes on, though she has difficulty in believing it. ‘Sybil Crawfurd.’

  ‘Oh, yes! The wife of Hugo Crawfurd. How sad that was!’

  ‘No, not the wife, the sister.’

  ‘The sister, the sister!’ Lady Telzer repeats insistently, as though to someone invisible beside her.

  ‘May I introduce my friend Lavinia Trent? Miss Trent has a sitting with Mrs Roberts.’

  The old woman, who until now has looked so haggard and dispirited, brightens as she glances at Lavinia. ‘Lavinia Trent! Oh, you’ve given me so much pleasure over the years!’

  Lavinia laughs. ‘Let’s not calculate how many years!’ Like most actresses, she constantly jokes about her age, since otherwise it would frighten and depress her.

  The old woman opens the door into the sitting room and says, ‘Clare, Clare, your sitter.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The voice is deep and breathy. Then Mrs Roberts appears, her lips purple and her hands and ankles swollen from the heart condition which has made her doctor repeatedly tell her that she must both lose weight and cease to subject herself to the strain of seance after seance. But she cannot obey him in either of these matters. In a curious way the seances and the overeating are compulsions inextricably linked. After she has come out of a trance, she must at once devour a bar of chocolate, several sweet biscuits or a thick slice of toast soaked in melted butter and spread thick with jam. She talks of this phenomenon with the same nervous jocularity with which Lavinia talks of her age. ‘ It takes it out of one and one has to put it back,’ is something she often says, in that unattractive Brooklyn accent of hers, followed by a deep chuckle, which causes her chins to wobble above a three-strand necklace of real pearls, the gift of Lady Telzer.

  She is a simple, kindly, snobbish woman – probably Jewish, Sybil has always thought – who, when she says, with transparent self-satisfaction, ‘Yes, I think on balance I have an interesting crowd of regulars,’ means by ‘interesting’that they are famous or well-born. She does not really care about money, though her husband, a dentist now dead, certainly did. She would not mind if someone as well-known as Lavinia never paid her. It is enough for her to be able to open Time Magazine or Newsweek, see a photograph and say, not even to someone else but merely to herself, ‘Oh, I gave her a sitting when last in Britain.’

  ‘I’ll sit over here,’ she says, when the introductions and the small-talk are over. ‘ I like the light behind me. You sit there, Sybil dear–’ she points ‘–and you there, Miss Trent. I don’t know how this is going to work out, I just don’t, know. Estelle has been a naughty girl lately – mischievous, impatient, sassy. From time to time she goes through a bad time and then she comes out of it.’

  Lavinia suddenly feels depressed, as one does when one visits a doctor about some mysterious symptom and, as he hovers, clears his throat and pulls his prescription pad towards him, one suddenly realizes that he is totally at a loss for a diagnosis or cure and one’s money has been wasted. The rotund medium, dressed all in black with her dark, greasy skin, suggests a huge, overripe olive. Many rings bite deep into her swollen fingers and she has a small tic at one corner of her purple lips.

  ‘Now,’ she says. ‘ Let’s see. You want to get into touch with a loved one.’

  Lavinia nods. A loved one? Of all Stephen’s accusations the most hysterical and the most frequent was ‘You don’t love me! You’ve never loved me! You don’t know what love means!’ But to someone like Mrs Roberts all the dead must be loved ones.

  ‘Her son,’ Sybil puts in. Lavinia wishes she had not done so. It makes trickery so much easier.

  Mrs Roberts nods. ‘ Might one know his name?’

  ‘Stephen,’ Lavinia answers, feeling a sudden, terrible anguish at having to say it.

  ‘Stephen.’ Mrs Roberts seems to ruminate on the name with a faint distaste. Then she turns her whole cumbrous body round in her chair towards Lavinia, ‘You’ve been to a seance before, of course?’ Lavinia shakes her head. ‘ Well, all I want you to do at present is merely to relax. Then, if Estelle can get through to Stephen, you can put your questions. I don’t have to tell Sybil all this. She’s had so many sittings with me, both alone and with her brother.’ She smiles, ‘It may be a good day, it may be a bad one.’

  Lavinia knows precisely what she means. Ill, tired o
r distracted, she has often felt a mysterious charge surging through her as she has emerged on to the stage. Or the opposite: fit, buoyant and concentrated, she has found herself functioning on a wattage so low that her performance has constantly flickered on the verge of extinction. It comes to her that her profession and Mrs Roberts’s have much in common.

  Mrs Roberts gently taps with the fingertips of her swollen right hand on the pie-crust edge of the small, circular Victorian table beside her. The tapping becomes louder, drums. She closes her eyes, her head pressing into the back of the winged armchair with the disconcerting effect of making it seem as if all her features had been pushed forward and together. She begins to breathe fast, with shallow gulps. Hyperventilation, Lavinia remembers from something read somewhere. The hand on the table now moves with the frenzied agility of some maestro of the keyboard, thumb and little finger alternately punishing the table-top. The eyes open, with a baleful, squinting expression in them. The jaw falls, saliva dribbles over the lower purple lip and hangs in a string to the wobbling chin. Lavinia feels repelled. She has always had an irrational horror of epileptic fits and this seems to be so like one. Sybil looks across at her and her gaze is reassuring.

  ‘Estelle. Are you there, dear?’ In her breathy, contralto voice Mrs Roberts might be calling to some naughty grandchild of hers, who had hidden herself in the darkness of an attic or the depth of a shrubbery. ‘Estelle!’

  Then in a totally different voice, high-pitched and clear, as of a young American repertory actress playing a French maid in some college production, there comes the answer, ‘Oui, tante Clare! Me voici! ’Ere I am!’

  ‘Good, Estelle. That’s fine.’

  There follow two or three minutes in which Mrs Roberts and Estelle carry on a trivial conversation. Then Mrs Roberts asks Estelle if she can fetch Stephen. Estelle giggles and says that he bores her, she’s tired, she can’t be bothered. In a heavy, stubborn voice, Mrs Roberts tells her, ‘Now, Estelle, I don’t want any trouble. Do what I tell you.’. Finally, after some argument, Estelle agrees.

  It is all so preposterous that Lavinia wishes that she could get up, place on the Victorian side table the money she has brought with her in an envelope, and quit the house.

  Estelle is piping on and on. Lavinia forces herself to listen.

  ‘Stephen, ’e say that ’is mother must turn ’er face to ze future, not look back to ze past. ’E say, ‘‘Remember Lot’s wife.’ ’’ Estelle giggles and Mrs Roberts prompts her, ‘Yes, Estelle. Yes, tell him to go on.’ Estelle continues. ‘ ’E say, Il la faut être sensible – She must be sensible. She must think of ’er career, must return to ze stage. Zat is what ’e wants for ’er. Most important.’

  Mrs Roberts asks, not looking at Lavinia but staring with a squinting, baleful expression straight ahead of her, ‘Are there any questions you want to put to him?’

  Lavinia can think of nothing. It is all such a farce. Then she says, ‘I want to be sure that it is really him. Can he – can he give me some sign?’

  The trail of saliva suddenly extends from Mrs Roberts’s chin to the crisp broderie anglaise around the neck of her blouse. She makes a curious shying movement of the head, like a mettlesome horse surprised by a sudden movement on the other side of a hedge. Her breathing quickens again.

  Then Estelle is speaking, ‘ ’E say, ’e say, does ’is mother remember ze scarf? Cashmere. Brown. She gave it ’im. Present. ’ Er last present to ’im.’

  Lavinia nods. ‘Yes,’ she says in a low, bewildered voice. ‘Yes.’

  Estelle gives a trilling, artificial laugh. ‘Now I go! I go to play!’

  ‘Wait a moment, Estelle. Estelle, wait! Sybil wants a word with you too. And I’m sure that Miss Trent has other things to ask Stephen. Estelle! Naughty girl!’

  Estelle has gone.

  Mrs Roberts shifts in her chair, takes a handkerchief from a pocket and wipes at her chin. She pulls at the hem of her skirt, as though afraid that it might have ridden up, clears her throat, then yawns prodigiously, four times in succession.

  ‘How was it?’ she asks.

  Sybil looks at Lavinia. Lavinia says, ‘Yes, something … something emerged.’

  Mrs Roberts rises and stretches. Sweat stains darken the fabric of the blouse under the plump arms raised above her. Her feet are tiny in their court shoes under swollen ankles. ‘I could do with a bite,’ she says. She goes to the door and opens it.

  ‘Finished, dear?’, Lady Telzer calls down the narrow corridor from the kitchen. ‘That was quick. I’ll bring in your tray.’

  The little old woman, with her curved back and her small, shuffling steps, arrives, carrying a tray on which she has set out a strawberry milk-shake and a slice of chocolate mille-feuille. ‘ What about you two?’ she asks, ‘Some coffee? A drink?’

  Simultaneously the two women shake their heads. Each would like something to slake a thirst that has become insistent in the heat of this little room but each is reluctant to put this frail, hunchbacked woman to any trouble.

  ‘No?’ Lady Telzer goes over to a tarnished silver box and takes from it a cigarillo and a book of matches. She lights the cigarillo, sucking on it greedily, like a wrinkled baby on a teat, and then, agitating a knobbly hand in front of her hooded eyes, waves away the thick, blueish smoke.

  ‘How did it go?’ She seats herself on a pouffe, crossing one leg high over the other and leaning forward, the cigarillo held oddly between middle finger and ring finger.

  Sybil is clearly not going to answer and so Lavinia, after a hesitation, repeats what she told Mrs Roberts, ‘Yes, something … something emerged.’ She is still bewildered.

  ‘Clare has such a gift,’ the old woman says, looking over with a hungry devotion at the vast American, who is now totally absorbed in alternately gobbling the cake and gulping from the milk-shake on the tray over her lap. ‘But things don’t come through at once. One has to be patient Our successes were so few in the beginning, I became discouraged. But now my friend talks to me as easily as I’m talking to you now. Advises me. I’d do nothing important without her. She was the one with all the brains, you see. She made all the decisions for us. She even dictated some poems. They’ve been published, you know. I must show them to you some time.’

  Quietly persistent, Mrs Roberts is scraping chocolate filling off the plate. Then she raises the seemingly empty glass to her lips, tilts back her head and lets the last drops, trickle down into her open mouth. It is the action not of an adult but of a child; and she is like a child (‘Wipe your mouth, dear’) when she pulls a handkerchief out of her pocket and runs it over her lips. She sighs gratefully to Lady Telzel. ‘Oh, I was glad of that.’

  ‘Another slice?’

  ‘I’d love to say yes but I really must say no. My figure!’

  ‘Some people are born to be thin and others are born to be –’ Lady Telzel hesitates ‘– well covered. It’s silly to try to go against nature.’

  Suddenly Lavinia leans forward, ‘Mrs Roberts – may I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘Of course, dear.’ She smiles. ‘But I can’t promise to give an answer.’

  ‘Do you believe there’s personal survival after death?’

  Clearly Mrs Roberts has been often asked this question, since it does not embarrass or fluster her. She strokes her large knees, wide open under her voluminous skirt, and puts her head on one side. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what to say. I have this gift, the dead seem to talk through me. Those who seek my help–’ she does not like to use the word ‘clients’ since that suggests a purely financial transaction ‘–often go away convinced, even if they have come to me as doubters.’ She screws up her eyes, genuinely attempting yet again to reach some solution which has always eluded her. ‘Am I possessed? Am I obsessed? What happens when Estelle or one of my other controls takes over? I don’t know, dear, I just don’t know.’

  ‘But you get such amazing results!’ Lady Telzer protests, ascribing this doubt, as she always does, not to the genuin
e bewilderment felt by the medium but to the modesty which she knows, from years of friendship, to be an essential part of her nature.

  Mrs Roberts acknowledges that, with a nod. But she goes on, ‘I’m such an ordinary woman, as you can see. My gift only revealed itself when I was over forty. My husband took me to a seance after the death of our second daughter and I went into a trance soon after the medium had done so. I’ve never wanted this gift and yet I must not ignore it – must not waste it.’

  Her simplicity is moving. The three women stare down at the carpet, each with her separate thoughts of the person lost to her.

  As they walk away from the house, Sybil links her arm in Lavinia’s, a gesture of comradeship. Normally, she does not care for physical contacts, least of all with women. ‘ Was there anything in all that or were you being polite?’

  ‘Do you remember my telling you about the psychometrist to whom I took Stephen’s scarf?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sybil at first is hazy. But then the recollection grows more vivid. ‘ Yes, yes, I do!’

  ‘Well, the scarf was the last present that I gave to him. And it was cashmere and it was brown. I didn’t tell you that detail, did I?’

  ‘No.’ Sybil is thinking, with a disturbing sense of displacement, of a brown cashmere scarf that she herself waved on top of the Downs on the day of Hugo’s death.

  ‘So that’s – that’s something.’ Lavinia is all but persuaded that Estelle and Stephen must both still exist in some other dimension; but then she says, ‘ It’s not very easy to believe in Estelle. Is it? I mean, if she’s a French aristocrat, it’s odd that she should make the howler of imagining that ‘‘Il la faut être sensible’’ is the French equivalent of ‘‘She must be sensible.’’ If she’d said ‘‘Il la faut être raisonnable’’, even in that appalling French accent of hers, it might have been more convincing.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think for one moment that Estelle ever actually existed, any more than Stainton Moses’s mawkish ‘ Little Dicky’ or Mrs Leonard’s Red Indian Feda. In each case, it’s a secondary personality – the result of dissociation. You know, don’t you, that Meredith claimed that Harry Richmond’s father had achieved sufficient independence to carry on conversations with him?’ Lavinia has not known; she has never read a word of Meredith, except his ‘Modern Love’. ‘And that Dickens claimed the same about Sairey Gamp? But even if Estelle is a subconscious dramatization – as I’m inclined to think her – that is not inconsistent with her being a vehicle for the transmission of paranormal knowledge, any more than the fact that Prince Myshkin or Alyosha is merely a fiction is inconsistent with his telling us something new about the nature of human goodness.’