Voices in an Empty Room Page 4

  Hugo began to describe the strange happenings on a council estate in the East End of London, and, as he did so, it was as though, in a vision, he was reliving his whole visit there, tremendously speeded up. There was the mother, Mrs O’Connor, a Liverpool Irish Roman Catholic, whose husband had left her, just walked out on her, vanished, with no warning, no goodbye, leaving her with the two kids, a teenage girl and a little chap. Hugo could hear her wan, plaintive voice and he could see her chapped hands – she worked in a City diner, washing up most probably – gently stroking her forehead. She was at her wit’s end, she couldn’t go on living in this place. But the council and most of the neighbours thought that she was inventing everything in order to get moved. Why should she want to invent such things? She was as happy here as she was ever likely to be, given the circumstances. It was so unfair. She couldn’t sleep easy at the best of times, she was a martyr to these headaches, blinding they were, she was having one now. And all through the night there would be these hangings and crashings, furniture actually falling over, a chair, even the wardrobe in the room of the girl, and these zigzag flashings, as though lightning were streaking from room to room. It was more than flesh and blood could bear.

  It was at that precise moment in her narration, delivered in the calm, remote voice of someone who has suffered a recent and catastrophic bereavement, that the saucepan hurtled past Hugo’s left ear, slammed against the wall and then bounced off it to roll across the floor, with an interminable jangling, as of a discordant carillon of bells.

  ‘Christ!’ He was simultaneously shocked and delighted by so energetic a display of what, he was in no doubt, was psychokinesis.

  Mrs O’Connor merely sighed. ‘There it is again,’ she said. She might have been referring to an overloud record player in the flat next door.

  At the moment that the saucepan performed its mysterious levitation, a shrivelled child, boy or girl it was hard to tell from the matted blond curls which clustered around cheeks the colour of lard, appeared beside Hugo, a much-dented model of a vintage Bugatti car tucked under one arm.

  ‘This is my younger one,’ Mrs O’Connor said, leaving Hugo to pick up the saucepan, which had come to rest against an overflowing rubbish-bin. ‘Sean.’

  Sean began to whimper, pulling out of shape what was usually a pretty, if girlish, mouth. ‘It’s started again, mam! Mam, I’m frightened.’

  Mrs O’Connor put her arm round the child and hugged him to her. ‘Oh, my head! It’s so bad, I can hardly make out your face, Mr, Mr …’

  ‘Crawfurd.’

  ‘Mr Crawfurd.’

  ‘Well, as I was saying, we’ve had the health officer here and a social worker and the probation officer that’s been keeping an eye on our Madge since she had her little spot of trouble. Oh, and someone from the council, about whether to move us or not. And, of course, all the newspaper people and your lot from the Institute of Whatever It Is. There was also this psychalist, speciatrist, psychiatrist–’ at last she got it right ‘–who said he thought it was all the older one and that the best thing would be to separate the two kids and put her into care for a time. Well, I’d not stand for that.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Anyway, come into the lounge, Mr Crawfurd, if you’re sure you couldn’t do with a cup of tea or Nes.’ She had suddenly roused herself at the thought of that psychiatrist who wished to see her family split up. Her tone was no longer wan, it had an almost bossy strength to it. ‘Come along, Sean.’ Her arm was still around the child, who gazed up at her with that look of premature experience so common among children of the slums, out of his peaked, wizened face. ‘ We’ll go with the gentleman into the sitting room.’ As she crossed to the kitchen door, propelling Sean before her, she sighed, ‘Oh, what a relief! My head’s almost gone. Like after a thunderstorm.’

  She preceded Hugo down a narrow passage, its wallpaper scratched and torn and, up to three or four feet, scribbled over with variously coloured crayons. There, was a door ajar and, as he walked past it, Hugo could not resist peeping in. He saw clothes scattered on the floor, a wall covered with huge blow-ups of pop stars and, sitting on an unmade bed, facing out to him, the solemn face of a girl, in a wrap-around tartan skirt and white blouse, her skinny legs and feet bare, of – well what? eleven? twelve? – staring not at him, but at something just above his right shoulder with a morose intensity.

  ‘What an attractive room!’ Hugo said automatically, as he tried to erase from his mind that somehow disturbing image of the child on the bed, elbows on knees and face in hands, as she stared out at that thing which might have been perched, an invisible bird, rat, monkey, on his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, it is nice. My hubby – him that’s left me – was a joiner. He made me all these lovely fitted cupboards. He was so happy making them, night after night he’d come home from work and he’d settle down to more of it. You’ll tire yourself out, I’d tell him. Have a little rest. Leave it until the weekend comes. But he was like that, we’d just moved in after waiting, oh, years, for a place of our own, and he wanted everything to be just right. And then–’ the boy, squatting on the floor now, the model of the vintage Bugatti held in a hand, was gazing up at her, as though this were an often-told, ever-fascinating fairy story ‘–then he vanished. Just like that. Never came back from the place where he’d been working. I went there, of course, had a word with the foreman, had a word with one of the bosses. But they was in as much of a fog as me. Said he’d asked for his cards, just like that, and taken off. They’d no complaints against him, none at all. He’d not been in trouble. An excellent worker, that’s what the foreman told me and the boss bore it out. At first, of course, I thought that maybe he’d had an accident or lost his memory, one hears of people losing their memories, not knowing who they are or where they are or anything, doesn’t one? But then I noticed that certain things had gone, his razor, his pipe, clothes, not all of them, some of them, and, oh, all his fishing rods and tackle. He must have got them out secretly, me never noticing.… Well, I know what you want to ask. Was there another woman?’

  She looked directly at Hugo, on the other side of the table from her, and he gave a little start, as an absent-minded pupil does when aroused by the teacher. ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what everyone wants to ask and everyone is too polite to do so. Well, the answer is no. As far as I can give an answer. But of course–’ she huddled into herself now, her arms going across her breasts, her hands on her bony shoulders, and her face drained of its animation ‘–who knows? How can anyone ever know?’

  … Henry, who had been listening to all this intently, his head pressed back into his deckchair, his panama hat tilted over his nose and his eyes shut, now sat up and scratched at an ankle, pulling down a hand-knitted sock, bought from Homebound Craftsmen, in order to do so. ‘ Extraordinary!’

  ‘Yes, extraordinary,’ Hugo agreed. ‘ I only wish I’d more time to spend with the family. Of course, it’s the classical situation for poltergeist phenomena. An unhappy family, the unhappiness is tangible. It’s so tangible that, as the President of the Institute has put it with his unerring flair for a cliché, you can cut it with a knife. A child on the verge of puberty. A little boy who suffers from epileptiform convulsions – yes, I learned that later – and a mother who has migraines, with those common premonitory symptoms of partial blindness, flashing lights and tingling of the extremities. Interestingly, she always starts a migraine just before the phenomena take place.’

  ‘Suggests some excessive discharge of electricity.’

  ‘Or of energy of some kind. Quite. Well … Oxford is a long way from East London – especially if, like myself, one doesn’t drive. And it’s been an unusually busy term, what with one of the other Eng. Lit. men on a sabbatical in the States and the eleventh volume going through the press and first one of the girls and then the other getting impetigo, God knows from where. And so I’ve not really been able to devote all the time I’d have liked to an investig
ation. That’s been in the hands of Bridget Nagel.’

  ‘Bridget …?’

  ‘You met her once, some time ago. We were having a weekend conference down here on metal-bending – remember? – and I brought her to lunch. I also brought that Japanese, Otani or Utani, who has devised or claims to have devised a method of recording electrical signals around the bodies of metal-bending subjects. Something to do with the transient conduction paths between the body and a receiving electrode.’

  Henry nodded. He remembered the Japanese, a clever little monkey; he did not remember the woman, who must have bored him.

  ‘Poor Bridget has been through a particularly tough time. Her father was killed in the Battle of Britain – and, though she was only a child at the time, that’s how she first became interested in parapsychology. Then, only a few weeks ago, she heard that her husband, a journalist with the Task Force, had been killed in the Falklands. So this fascinating case has come at just the right moment, to distract her. She’s a remarkable woman. I’m very fond of her.’

  The sun was now low and Henry, abnormally sensitive to cold, gave a little shiver. ‘A goose must have walked over my grave,’ he said, struggling out of his deckchair. ‘Either I must get myself a rug or we must go in.’

  ‘Let’s go in then.’

  As they passed the open door to the kitchen, Hugo noticed that Mrs Lockit, motionless by the open window, was gazing intently out at their deckchairs and the used tea things on the table beside them. For some reason, he was once again reminded of the child, seated on the narrow bed of the South London flat, her eyes fixed on something invisible above his shoulder.

  Eventually, Hugo went up to his room to unpack his things. Among the underclothes, shirts and socks, there was a bottle of Amontillado from Berry Brothers as a present for Henry, and a pack of Tarot cards as a diversion and consolation for himself. He pushed the clothes into drawers lined with ancient, yellowing newspapers, felt between the sheets to see if they were as damp as he feared (they were) and then, on an impulse, took the cards out of their box in order to do a reading. But he had no sooner laid out the first three of the cards, when there was a knock on the door and Mrs Lockit, still in her hat, burst in before he had had time to tell her to do so.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr Crawfurd. I came to turn down the bed. I hadn’t realized you were in here.’ Never, on any of the occasions when Hugo had stayed with Henry, had Mrs Lockit ever turned down the bed.

  ‘Please don’t bother about it.’ It was on the bed that he had been laying out the cards.

  Mrs Lockit gazed down, the brim of the pink hat almost touching her shoulder, as she turned her sombre, passionate face sideways. ‘Patience?’

  ‘Patience?’ For a moment, he had imagined that she was counselling him to be patient, since the first cards were all so bad. ‘No, oh, no. Tarot.’

  ‘Fortune telling?’

  ‘Yes. I find it helps to clear my mind if I give myself a reading. I don’t often do it for others. Just for myself.’

  Mrs Lockit continued to stare downwards. Hugo almost expected her to say ‘Jack on queen’ or ‘Six on seven’. But instead, ‘I couldn’t help hearing,’ she uttered.

  ‘Couldn’t help hearing?’

  After a peculiarly unpleasant meal of gristly beefburger and sodden chips in the buffet of the train, Hugo had been suffering from wind, so that, as soon as he had reached the privacy of his room, he had indulged in the relief of farting. Could Mrs Lockit possibly have heard and have now arrived with either a complaint or the offer of a remedy?

  ‘What you and Sir Henry were saying in the garden. I was at the kitchen window, trying to draw a breath of fresh air, and you were talking about that London family and those poltergeist phenomena.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Hugo hoped that his chilliness of tone would convey that he did not approve of such eavesdropping. There were occasions when even the most honourable people could not help overhearing a word, a phrase or even a sentence, but clearly Mrs Lockit had done far more than that.

  ‘I have two nephews,’ Mrs Lockit went on, drawing in her chin so that it all but rested on her breastbone. ‘Twins. To meet them you’d think they were two of the most ordinary boys in the whole of Brighton. But they’re psychic.’

  ‘Psychic?’ Hugo involuntarily thrilled to the word, as a man may involuntarily thrill to some such word as pants, knickers, bra, shoe, bottom, chain, leather.

  Mrs Lockit nodded. ‘ No doubt about it. ESP. You mentioned that before you got on to the poltergeists, didn’t you? Well, those boys have an extraordinary gift. Someone should investigate it, someone qualified, someone not out for just the sensation. Scientific. Mind you, the whole thing bores them, that’s the laugh. They look on it as a kind of parlour trick, to amuse the family and their mates. But between twins … well, things go on between twins that defy all explanation. There was that article in one of the Sunday supplements only recently. They traced those twins who’d been separated at birth or as near to birth as made no bit of difference. And there were these two girls, when they were brought together, were found to have exactly the same hairdos and to be wearing the same-coloured dresses; and then it came out that each of them was married to a man several years older than herself, who worked in the rag trade. Oh, and then there were those two men who’d lost the joint of a finger in an accident, not the same finger, one was the little finger and the other the forefinger, but still it makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  Hugo, previously annoyed by the intrusion, was now delighted. ‘Yes, at the Institute we’ve done a lot of research into ESP between twins. We’re still doing it.’

  ‘Well, then!’ Mrs Lockit gave one of her rare smiles, such as Henry had only seen when she had backed a Derby winner, a pound each way.

  ‘How old are these twins – these nephews of yours?’

  ‘Twelve, almost thirteen. Oh, they’re the nicest, politest couple you could hope to meet. I will say that for my sister. Whatever her faults, she’s done wonders with them – seeing the kind of man she’s married.’

  ‘And what form does this – er – ESP take?’

  ‘Well, I’d better leave you to find out that for yourself. When you’ve met them. If, that is, you do want to meet them.’

  ‘Oh, I do, I do. I most certainly do. Can you arrange it?’

  ‘I’m seeing my sister this evening, this being Saturday. Out at Portslade. I expect I’ll see the boys, they’re not great gadabouts. But if I don’t, then of course I can leave a message. You wouldn’t mind them calling here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, no, of course not. But I’ll have to have a word with Sir Henry.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think he’ll mind. He always falls in with your wishes. No trouble about that.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Lockit. This all sounds most promising.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, Mr Crawfurd.’

  Mrs Lockit left, with no further attempt to turn down the bed, and soon after that Hugo, having swept up those ominous cards from the Tarot pack and replaced them in their packet, descended to the drawing room, where Henry, outstretched on the sagging sofa, was asleep under The Times.

  Hugo failed to arouse him with a cough or with a noisy pushing first up and then down of a sash window on to the street. Then he called his name. Henry sat up, The Times slipping to the floor beside him. ‘ Was thinking,’ he said. ‘Metal-bending. Metal’s grain size.’ Henry knew far more about science than Hugo.

  ‘Mrs Lockit’s just been telling me about her nephews. Thought they might be worth investigating.’

  ‘Her nephews? Didn’t know she had any nephews. She has a sister.’

  ‘And they’re that sister’s sons.’

  ‘My God!’ Henry threw his legs off the sofa. ‘Well, what about them?’

  ‘Seems they’re sensitives of some kind.’ Hugo shrugged. ‘ESP.’

  ‘And what precise form does this ESP take?’ Henry inquired with quiet irony.

  ‘She
wouldn’t be specific. But she said she could ask the boys to come here to see me – us. If you had no objection, of course.’

  ‘I find this most odd. She says nothing to me about having any nephews, let alone about their powers of ESP. But you haven’t been in this house for more than two or three hours before she confides the whole bang lot to you.’ Henry was pettish.

  ‘Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t be interested,’ Hugo placated. ‘She knows by now that the paranormal is of enormous importance to me. Second only to English literature.’

  ‘Oh, you’re far more interested in the paranormal than in English literature. I don’t think you’re really interested in English literature at all. Though I admit that you know a lot about it.’ Henry was still piqued.

  ‘At all events,’ Hugo said equably, ‘shall I or shall I not tell her we’d like to see the boys?’

  ‘By all means let’s see them. Why not?’ Henry got off the sofa and walked stiffly to the window. The Gascoynes, flashily dressed, were getting into their equally flashy BMW. Thoughts of tea with or without the milk in first passed through his mind. He scowled at them and continued to scowl even when Mrs Gascoyne, catching sight of him, raised a small, plump hand and waved. Then he turned, ‘Nothing to lose. No skin off our noses. In for a penny, in for a pound.’

  Though they had not discussed the matter, Hugo and Henry had both expected the twins to look exactly like each other; but, as Henry put it with that sly malice which had first attracted Hugo to him, it was a case of ‘one pearl and one plain’. The pearl had a startlingly nacreous skin, so delicate that one feared that the slightest blow or jar would chip it. His hair, falling in deep waves over his collar and ears, looked as if it had been sculpted from ivory, so unnaturally pale was its colour and so unnaturally stiff its texture. He had a long neck, around which he was wearing a gold chain with a crucifix visible against his blue-veined skin, just where the flung-open vee of his shirt first came together at a button. The skin round the pale green eyes, with their long lashes, was coloured a bruise-like purple. On his left hand he wore three rings, on his right four, one of them on the forefinger. His name, he said in a husky whisper when Henry asked him, was Cyril, Cyril Creane.