Voices in an Empty Room Read online

  The plain was dark-haired and stout, with the sort of paunch which usually comes from drinking too much beer and the sort of complexion which usually comes from eating too many sweets. The nails on his pudgy hands had been systematically bitten to the quicks and his arms had the appearance of being too long and thin for the stocky torso from which they dangled. Unlike his brother’s, his voice had broken. His name, he volunteered, since neither Henry nor Hugo was interested in asking it, was Lionel, Lionel Creane.

  Mrs Lockit, who had remained in attendance after ushering them into the drawing room that Sunday morning, said, with evident relish, ‘Well, that’s taken you aback, I’ll be bound!’

  ‘What’s taken us aback, Mrs Lockit? I don’t think I follow.’ Henry spoke with glacial dignity.

  ‘Well, you’ve only to see the faces on the two of you! You thought that, being twins, they were bound to be alike. Didn’t you now? Own up!’

  ‘Well, that was certainly the natural presumption.’

  ‘They’re certainly twins. But they’re not what you’d call identical twins.’

  ‘No, I can see that. They’re not. They’re not what anyone would call identical twins.… Well, boys, no need to stand. Why don’t you sit over there, er, Lionel and you, Cyril, why don’t you come over here?’ Henry nodded at Mrs Lockit, a clear invitation to her to leave them and to get on with the preparations of the Sunday dinner; but Mrs Lockit, ignoring him, drew up another chair for herself.

  Having sat where he was bidden, Lionel violently stuck out his legs and then tweaked at his trousers where they were pinching his crotch. Cyril, dainty and demure, crossed his hands in his lap and his legs at the ankles, leaning slightly forward, as though eager to hear what next these two gentlemen might have to say to him.

  ‘Now tell me,’ Hugo intervened, feeling that so far Henry had been taking an initiative not rightly his, ‘ what precisely is it that you both, er, do?’

  The two boys looked at each other. Then Mrs Lockit ordered, ‘You tell them, Lionel.’

  Lionel bit at what was left of the nail of his little finger and then delicately pinched a fragment from his lip, with the gesture of a smoker removing a shred of tobacco. ‘Thought-reading,’ he said laconically, applying himself again to the nail.

  ‘Telepathy,’ Hugo corrected prissily.

  ‘Pardon, sir?’ Cyril leant even further forward in his chair, as though he were deaf.

  ‘That’s what we call it. Thought-reading, we call it telepathy.’ Hugo suddenly knew, as he always knew on such occasions, that he was on to something, something really big.

  ‘Yeah. OK.’ Lionel spat out a fragment of nail.

  ‘And what precise form does your telepathy – thought-reading – take?’

  Again the twins looked at each other, as though uncertain who should answer. Eventually it was their aunt, her hands resting on the arms of her chair as though preparatory to pushing herself up and hurrying to the kitchen and the already overcooked joint, who spoke up. ‘Well, each of them often seems to know what’s going on in the mind of the other. But of course that’s hard to prove – scientifically, I mean.’ She turned, not to Hugo, but to Henry for confirmation and Henry nodded, and muttered, ‘ Quite, quite.’ ‘ There are so many little things. Like the other day, for example, when Cyril was late coming home from his extra art and Lionel at once said, ‘‘He’s had a puncture and doesn’t know how to mend it’’ and he set off and there was Cyril pushing his bike along, a long way from home, and he had had a puncture. Or the time when Lionel said, it was even hotter than today, ‘‘Oh, Auntie, what I’d like most in the world at this moment is an ice-lolly’’ and I said, ‘‘Well, why be so lazy, go out and get one,’’ and, as I said that, Cyril arrived, and, believe it or not, he was carrying two ice-lollies, one for himself and one for his brother. But of course that’s not scientific, not really scientific, is it? That might be coincidence. No, what’s scientific is the cards, the playing cards.’ She looked over to Hugo. ‘Like what you were using.’ Clearly she had not realized that there was a difference between an ordinary pack and Henry’s Tarot one. ‘Ace, king, queen, jack, ten. Show Lionel one of those and Cyril can tell you which it is, even if you put him out of sight in another room.’

  ‘Well, that sounds most remarkable.’

  ‘It’s not one hundred per cent,’ Mrs Lockit went on. ‘ You wouldn’t expect that, would you? But there are far more successes than you or I would score.’

  ‘When can we have a trial?’

  Mrs Lockit looked at the two boys. ‘Well, not today,’ she said. ‘They ought to be getting home for their dinners. But tomorrow. After school.’ She looked in turn at the two boys. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ Lionel grunted. Cyril merely inclined his delicate head on its long, stalklike neck.

  A time was fixed and the boys took their leave. Lionel slouched out, hands so deep in pockets that the seat of his trousers was pulled taut across his swelling buttocks. ‘ Bye then,’ he called over his shoulder. Cyril shook hands deferentially first with Hugo and then with Henry. Even on that day of summer heat, the fingers and palm were damp and chilly. His lips moved at each salutation but no sound emerged.

  ‘Well, I’d better see about dishing-up,’ Mrs Lockit said, also leaving the room.

  Hugo and Henry faced each other, both of them smiling.

  ‘I have a feeling–’ Henry said.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘On the threshold.’

  ‘Of something really rather exciting.’

  ‘What’s interesting is that they’re not identical twins.’

  ‘Not out of the same egg.’

  ‘All our previous experiments have been with identical twins.’

  ‘This pair couldn’t be less identical.’

  ‘I like the one boy.’

  ‘But the other.’

  ‘Dreadful. Spitting bits of fingernail over the carpet.’

  ‘And his shoes needed cleaning.’

  As Mrs Lockit, tongue between lips, carefully placed the shrivelled joint on the tablemat in front of Henry, she said, ‘I hope you won’t mind my mentioning one thing, Sir Henry.’

  ‘Yes?’ Henry picked up the carving knife and steel and began to rub the one on the other, with a sound which always got on Hugo’s nerves.

  ‘You’ll make it worth the boys’ while, won’t you? I mean, as I said, it’s all really a game to them and they soon get bored with it. If you want them to cooperate, over a period of time, well, it would be advisable to make it worth their while.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Hugo said. He was generous by nature and in any case had been inured to paying the subjects whom he investigated.

  Henry was not so sure. ‘We hope they’re not going to expect too much,’ he said, plunging the carving fork into the charred joint of lamb, preliminary to hacking at it.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure not, Sir Henry. They’re not greedy boys. It’s just that their father’s a waster through and through, and such cash as he brings in to that house instead of spending on the horses or the drink has to go to the housekeeping. So the two of them are always short of spending money. Many’s the time their poor old auntie’s had to slip them a 50p piece – not that I can really afford it.’

  Henry waved the carving knife in the air, obviously irritated. ‘Yes, yes, all right, Mrs Lockit! We’ll see them all right. That’s understood.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind my mentioning it, Sir Henry.’

  ‘No, no,’ Henry replied, though clearly he had.

  Hugo attempted to placate Mrs Lockit as she departed for the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Lockit. And tell the boys not to worry. I fully appreciate the situation and, of course, we’ll pay them for their time.’

  Hugo always remembered the principle once enunciated, without any irony, by a previous researcher into paranormal phenomena, S. G. Soal: ‘What the investigation does demonstrate is the all-powerful influence of an intense motivation (in this case the l
ove of money) in maintaining scores at a high level over a period of years.’

  On the first day, more exciting than any that followed it, Hugo and Henry did not exercise any of the controls that were to become more and more rigid as more and more of Hugo’s colleagues were drawn into their investigations.

  ‘They always find it difficult when they’re not in a familiar place with familiar people,’ Mrs Lockit warned.

  ‘Well, that’s only natural,’ Hugo said, used to this phenomenon.

  Hugo stood in the hall with Cyril, also standing, beside him. In the sitting room off it, the door open but both of them out of sight, Henry and Lionel sat facing each other across the green baize of a card-table. Mrs Lockit moved between the two groups, standing, hands to sides of her stomach with that curious palpating gesture of hers, as she stared fixedly at one or other of her nephews. Hugo and Henry would have preferred her not to be there at all – ‘Is there nothing that needs doing for supper?’ Henry asked her pointedly at one moment; but at least they succeeded in preventing her from crossing from hall to sitting room or from sitting room to hall while a run was in progress.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to sit?’ Henry asked Cyril. It seemed to him, even then, that the boy had the etiolated, sappy beauty of some rare plant kept for too long away from the sun in a potting shed. The veins seemed to be as near to the surface of that nacreous skin as the membranes of an egg to its shell, and the skin itself no less fragile. He was so neat, with his carefully pressed grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the crest of his school on its breast pocket; his slim, highly polished moccasins which looked far too expensive for a boy from a family reputedly so poor; his crisp, white shirt, the collar held together around the hard knot of the tie by a gold or rolled-gold tiepin. Plainly he was nervous, clearing his throat or quietly burping with a maidenly ‘Excuse me’, or ‘Pardon’, fingertips to lips, each time that he did so; and this nervousness filled Hugo with a strong, troubling desire, never felt for his own two girls, to protect him and cherish him.

  ‘No, I’d rather stand,’ the boy replied in that husky voice of his, little more than a whisper.

  ‘Yes, he finds it easier when standing,’ Mrs Lockit confirmed. Then she remarked, ‘ Oh, he’s breaking out into a sweat. You can see what a strain it is to him.’

  Henry himself had just noticed the sheen that had begun to appear on the nacre of the forehead and cheekbones.

  ‘Well, this kind of thing is a strain,’ he said.

  In the drawing room, Lionel lolled back in the chair opposite to Henry’s at the table, his legs thrust out, as on the previous day, and one hand deep in his trouser pocket while the other picked at a spot on his chin. Time he started to shave, Henry thought fastidiously, noticing the fuzz of hair above his upper lip and along the line of his upper jaw, as it caught the late evening sunlight streaming through the window.

  ‘All right?’ Hugo called.

  Henry looked across at Lionel who, still preoccupied by the spot on his chin, nodded perfunctorily.

  ‘All right,’ Henry called back.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Hugo asked Cyril. Cyril, who had begun to tremble slightly, whispered, ‘Yes, sir. Ready.’ Hugo felt an impulse to put an arm round his shoulder and say, ‘Don’t worry, don’t fret yourself, it’s not all that important,’ even though it was, of course it was, important.

  ‘OK. Let’s have the first.’

  Henry turned over the first of the cards – he and Hugo had put together the ace, king, queen, jack and ten from four packs to make up twenty cards in all – and placed it on the table in front of Lionel. Lionel gave it a glance and then, to Henry’s surprise, looked away from it to gaze out of the window into the street beyond. Could the boys have some confederate out there? But the street was empty. In any case, how could a confederate in the street make contact with Cyril, since the hall had no window other than a fanlight? Lionel showed no strain or even deepening of concentration.

  Beside Hugo, Cyril’s whole body had tensed. The sheen on his forehead had now changed, as though under a magnifying glass, to large drops of sweat. All at once, Hugo was aware of an odour which, from then on, he was always to associate with the boy: not unpleasant but somehow not human and therefore disturbing. Hugo could never really define it to himself but it was akin to the smell of grass recently mown and lying out in the summer sun.

  The boy burped, quietly as before, and, as before, put the tips of those heavily beringed fingers to his lips, with a demure ‘ Excuse me’. Then, ‘Jack,’ he whispered.

  Hugo wrote the number 3 on the sheet of paper on the hall table beside him. He did not know what number Henry had written on a similar sheet of paper in the other room and therefore did not know whether this, the first of the twenty attempts at transmissions, had been successful or not.

  ‘Ten … queen … queen … king … ten …’ The boy was now shivering uncontrollably, his face grey-green under the light filtering down from the cobwebby fanlight. In the other room, legs thrust out, a hand still deep in his pocket and an expression of boredom, even irritation on his face, Lionel glanced for a moment at each card laid down in turn before him and then stared out at the street once again. It was as though all he wanted was to get out there, among the din of cars and the bustle of people, instead of being cooped up in this frowsty, overcrowded room with this decrepit old geezer.

  ‘Right. That’s it. Twenty.’ Hugo picked up the sheet of paper beside him. He saw Cyril totter and then lean forward, both hands on the hall table, as though about to vomit. ‘Are you all right?’ He put an arm round the delicate shoulders. ‘Steady on!’

  ‘I had a sudden turn. Sometimes it affects me like this.’ Cyril straightened, put a hand to his chest. ‘ I’m all right now, thank you, sir.’ The ‘sir’, used for the first time, surprised Hugo. The adult tone surprised him even more.

  Henry, Lionel and Mrs Lockit appeared. Mrs Lockit, her eyes darting hither and thither and her mouth working, came over to Hugo and peered over his shoulder at the sheet in his hand, her breath fanning his ear. He felt a spasm of irritation; he wanted to shout at her ‘ Oh go away woman!’ But he restrained himself, knowing that if there were to be any future with these two subjects, then she would have to share in it.

  ‘He’s got most of them right!’ she exclaimed. Clearly, she had already examined Henry’s sheet.

  Henry and Hugo conferred, Mrs Lockit beside them, while Cyril, still exhausted, sat on the hall chair, his head in his hands, and Lionel wandered about, whistling irritatingly under his breath.

  ‘Remarkable!’ Hugo said at last.

  ‘Fourteen hits out of the twenty trials.’ Henry bared his chipped, yellow teeth in a rare smile. ‘Well, boys, that’s far, far better than we’d ever dared to hope. You failed with the first four but after that …’

  ‘They have to get into the mood of it,’ Mrs Lockit said. Then she went on triumphantly, ‘Well, now, didn’t I tell you they had this amazing gift? But I don’t think you and Mr Crawfurd really believed me. Did you now? Be honest, admit it.’ Hugo wondered as often in the past, why Henry submitted so meekly to such familiarity. With his staff in the embassy, he had been by turns distant, peremptory and waspish.

  ‘Shall we have another run?’ Henry proposed.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Mrs Lockit said. ‘You can see how this one–’ she indicated Cyril, who still sat, head in hands, on the hall chair ‘–has been affected. It drains him.’ She put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Doesn’t it, love?’

  Cyril looked up. The bruise-like shadows under his eyes seemed to have darkened from greenish-violet to dark grey. ‘I feel done in,’ he said. ‘I’d like to oblige but I couldn’t, just couldn’t.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hugo reassured him. ‘We’ve plenty of time ahead of us. If a subject is exhausted, then his performance always diminishes. No point in pressing you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ The boy looked up at him gratefully as he whispered the words.

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bsp; ‘I’ll take them down to my flat to give them a cup of tea and some cake. They’re always hungry after a performance. Aren’t you, boys?’

  Lionel spoke for the first time since they had all come together in the hall. ‘I could do with a fag.’

  ‘I’m afraid neither of us smokes,’ Henry said coldly. ‘And I never keep the fragrant weed – which, I’m afraid, I also regard as the pernicious weed – on the premises. Sorry.’

  ‘The idea!’ exclaimed Mrs Lockit, in an unconvincing performance of being scandalized. ‘You know your mother never allows you to smoke. What sort of impression will Sir Henry and Mr Crawfurd get of you? You should be ashamed.’

  Lionel stumped down the stairs to the basement without a goodbye. Cyril huskily muttered, ‘ Thank you’ to Henry and then, ‘Thank you, sir,’ to Hugo, before he followed. Mrs Lockit went last. Before the door shut on her flat, the two men heard Lionel ask in a loud, aggressive voice, ‘What about the dough then?’ and his aunt tell him, ‘Sh! Wait, wait!’

  ‘The dough,’ mused Henry, padding back into the drawing room, ahead of Hugo. ‘Ah, yes, the dough.’ He sank into the sofa and then used his right hand to lift first one leg and then the other on to it, as though they were inanimate objects.

  ‘Well, we knew about that.’

  ‘Yes, but what we don’t yet know is how much.’

  ‘We’ll have to rely on Mrs Lockit for that,’ Hugo replied, though he was disinclined to rely on her for anything.

  ‘Yes, the invaluable Mrs Lockit! But how odd it is that she should have kept these two nephews and their powers secret from me for so long. I can’t understand it.’

  Had there been any trickery? The two men discussed this possibility, more because, as scientific researchers, they were obliged to do so, than because they experienced any scepticism. Signals? Henry went and stood where Cyril had stood, trembling and sweating, in the hall and Hugo sat where Lionel had sat. They could see nothing of each other reflected on any surface – picture-glass, lincrusta, electric-light bulb. Neither boy had spoken. Henry was sure that Lionel had made no sound of tapping with his feet, much less of clicking with his hands, which had been in his pockets. His breathing had been even.