Voices in an Empty Room Page 9

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ Cyril replied. Amazing.

  ‘But it’s not far from you.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Or you could go to the Downs.’

  ‘My uncle – the one in the Army – took us there once. But I don’t remember birds.’

  ‘There must have been some.’

  They began to walk away to where the trees were even thicker and the contrast between sun and shade even more pronounced. ‘There are no dogs here,’ Cyril said.

  ‘No. People have to keep them on the lead in this area. Not that they always obey.’

  Cyril raised his palm and examined it. ‘ It’s funny, that scar,’ he said. ‘A small dog, a small bite. A long time ago. But I suppose I’ll have it always.’

  Hugo took the hand and again looked down on that tiny, upraised squiggle, even whiter and smoother than the flesh around it. Then, after a furtive glance about him, he raised the hand to his lips and, on a crazy impulse, put his lips to it.

  The boy’s mouth fell open. ‘Why did you do that?’ he asked in a tone which Hugo, panic-stricken now, tried to interpret. Annoyance? Shock? Pleasure?

  He forced himself to laugh, as though at a joke which the boy had failed to see, ‘To make it better of course.’

  The green eyes, large and moist, stared into his, as Cyril stroked the palm of the hand which Hugo had kissed with the fingers of the other.

  ‘We’d better go back. Otherwise Lionel will wonder what has happened to us.’ Hugo still felt fearful.

  But then Cyril gave a long, tremulous sigh and Hugo knew, somehow, that it would all be all right. ‘Oh, I wish we could stay here forever!’

  ‘So do I. But there it is. Lionel will be waiting for us and then my sister will be waiting for us. Life sometimes seems to consist of nothing but waiting and being waited for.’

  ‘I wait for the days when we come to you.’

  ‘Do you? Do you really? I thought you found it boring. That’s what your aunt always tells me.’

  ‘Oh, that! Yes, that’s boring now. It’s all the same. But I like coming to your house – to Sir Henry’s house, that is.’ Cyril gave a small, secret smile – to himself, so it seemed. ‘I wish I could live with you in that house.’

  ‘So do I, Perhaps one day … Oh, who knows!’

  Lionel was not on the bench where they had all agreed to meet, even though it was several minutes past the time fixed. Then they saw him, walking negligently up the path, his hands in his pockets. A dog scampered past him and he must have whistled or clicked his fingers at it, because it stopped, looked back and then raced after him, leaping around him. A middle-aged woman with a red face and a lead round her neck, looked over her shoulder, calling, ‘Maisie! Come along! Come!’ Lionel stopped, picked up a stick from under a tree and hurled it for the dog in the opposite direction to that in which the woman was walking. The dog raced off. Hugo could see Lionel grinning.

  When Lionel arrived, there were burs sticking to his hair and to the seat of his trousers. Hugo doubted if he had been to the Commonwealth Institute, but he was too little interested in what he had been doing – in fact, he had been lying in the long grass of the recreation ground, watching a couple making awkward love – to ask him what it was.

  ‘We’d better get moving,’ Hugo said.

  ‘What have you two been up to?’

  There seemed to be something in the tone, at once snide and insinuating, which caused Hugo a momentary perturbation. But then he decided that he had only imagined it.

  ‘Couldn’t you stay the night and let the boys go home alone on the train?’ Hugo often slept on the put-u-up in the small, stuffy sitting room, after he and Sybil had spent a day together in London. But now he shook his head. ‘I promised Mrs Lockit. I must take them home.’

  ‘They aren’t babies!’

  ‘We’ll be all right on our own,’ Lionel said. ‘Won’t we, Cyril?’

  Again Hugo shook his head. ‘A promise is a promise,’ he said, unmindful of all the promises that he had made to Sybil, to Audrey and to the girls in the recent past and had then heedlessly broken.

  Sybil gave a bitter smile. ‘Some promises are.’

  ‘Anyway, I hope you’re now satisfied the boys do have a quite special gift.’

  Sybil would like to have uncovered some evidence of fraud; but she had to admit that yes, they had a quite special gift. Time after time, Cyril, closeted not with Hugo but, at her insistence, with her, in the tiny bedroom, had infallibly guessed the card shown to Lionel by Hugo in the no less tiny sitting room. Admittedly, the doors had been open – ‘It seems to work better like that,’ Hugo had said – but there had been no way in which the boys could have seen each other for signals to pass.

  Of course there was always the possibility – insidiously, it only then suggested itself to her – that Hugo himself was their accomplice. After all, Harry Price and Soal, whom both of them had known and had regarded as incorruptible, had now been revealed each to have manufactured evidence. But she could not believe such a thing of Hugo. All their lives, she and he had longed to believe in the possibility that the so-called laws of nature could, however briefly, intermittently and inexplicably, be suspended; but it was herself, not others, that she wished to convince of this, and she felt sure that it was the same with Hugo. In his years of investigating trance-mediums, psychometrists, metal-benders, water-dowsers and a host of other people possessing or claiming to possess paranormal powers, he had no more. been in search of personal glory or notoriety than she had been in her years of automatic writing.

  Guilty at leaving her, Hugo said, ‘How will you spend your evening?’

  Sybil shrugged. ‘We might have tried to get tickets at the last moment for Amide. You’ve always wanted to hear it. But never mind. Oh, I expect I’ll just sit at home and read.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m glad it was Madge’s mother you had to rush to hospital and not Madge, And glad too that it was not an ulcer after all.’

  But in fact, he felt entirely neutral about a colleague of Sybil’s for whom he had never cared and an old woman whom he had never met.

  As the boys ran down the stairs, in a contest to see who could reach the ground floor first, Sybil touched Hugo’s arm before he entered the lift. Thinking of it later, the gesture struck him as one not so much of affection as of warning. But warning of what? ‘Take care, my dear.’

  ‘And you too.’

  ‘Oh, I always take care.’ She gave a brief laugh.

  Hugo looked upwards, through the grille, as the lift descended. Sybil stood above him, handsome and imposing. She looked down. There was a curious look, half of hurt and half of apprehension, on her face.

  Henry was not pleased to have Sybil to luncheon; he was even less pleased that she should be accompanied by a dog, and such a smelly and snappy little dog. ‘What is it?’ he asked, in a tone which suggested that he expected her to answer, ‘A giant flea.’ In fact, the dog was a Pekinese, belonging to Madge, who had taken her ailing mother away on a cruise and who had asked Sybil to look after him, explaining that the last time that he had been in kennels, he had come home with mange.

  Sybil, though not a dog lover, had become attached to Mr Wu. Could it be, she had asked herself with her usual probing ruthlessness towards her own motives and emotions, that she cherished this tiny creature because Hugo, far more remote now than when he had first married Audrey, no longer allowed her to cherish him. She lifted the dog into her lap and, with the tips of two fingers, began to stroke his domed forehead above his bulging eyes.

  ‘I hope he’s not soiling that chair,’ Henry said. The cretonne of the chair was dull and worn from years of use.

  ‘No. If he’s soiling anything, he’s soiling my skirt.’

  ‘Such a pretty skirt,’ Hugo said placatingly.

  Henry got up and went to the window. ‘What a lovely day! What a lovely summer! It was a good idea of yours, Hugo, to suggest we should test the boys on the Downs.’

 
‘I didn’t suggest it because it’s such a lovely day. I suggested it because it seemed to me that it would provide an interesting variation. After all, we’ve never had them out of doors before.’

  ‘Ah, there they are!’ Then Henry’s face suddenly darkened with wrath. ‘ That wretched little brat has tugged a branch off the laburnum.’ Hugo did not have to inquire whether the little brat was Lionel or Cyril.

  As Henry spoke, the Pekinese leapt off Sybil’s lap, rushed to the door, and began a persistent, high-pitched yapping.

  ‘Do you think you could silence that dog, Sybil?’ Henry asked spikily.

  Sybil smiled. ‘I doubt it. He’s been taught to be a watchdog and dogs, like people, find it difficult to unlearn what they’ve been taught.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Henry shouted at the dog, in an attempt to impose this unlearning. But the only result was that the dog began to yap at him instead of at the drawing-room door.

  When Mrs Lockit entered to announce her nephews, she gave the still yapping dog a sharp kick. At that, the dog, instead of biting her, as Sybil had hoped, at once retreated under Sybil’s chair. ‘The boys are here.’

  ‘Yes, we saw them from the window.’ Henry wondered whether to mention the laburnum branch, now abandoned on the pavement; but he decided not to – it would only put Mrs Lockit into one of her moods and she might then take a day off on her usual pretext of ‘an upset turn’.

  Hugo rose. ‘Well, we might as well get moving. Are you coming, Mrs Lockit?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Crawfurd, this whole lark is beginning to get on my wick. No, I’ll leave you all to it. I’ve got my hair to wash.’ Mrs Lockit, otherwise so grubby, seemed always to be washing her thick, coarse hair, often appearing, not in one of her hats, but with a towel wrapped, like a turban, about her head.

  Hugo was relieved.

  ‘You will take care that that animal doesn’t do anything, won’t you?’ Henry said, as they all climbed into his huge, ancient Daimler – Sybil in front with the dog, Hugo and the boys behind.

  ‘Mr Wu doesn’t do things in cars. He doesn’t even do them on pavements. Do you, Mr Wu?’ Sybil put her head down and kissed the Pekinese on one of his silken ears. ‘Mr Wu is excessively well brought-up.’

  Henry grunted. Then he clashed the gears noisily, as he changed up.

  ‘Doesn’t this car have automatic transmission?’ Lionel leant forward to ask.

  ‘No, I am afraid it does not.’

  ‘I don’t imagine automatic transmission had been invented when it was made,’ Sybil murmured. Henry was even more infuriated when he heard Lionel snigger. But the day was so beautiful, with a sky of eggshell blue and a slight breeze making the tops of the trees tremble as the car lumbered up to the top of the hill on the way out of Brighton, that, as so often, his mood abruptly changed. He began to reminisce. ‘The first car I ever owned was a Morris Cowley, bought for me by my father as a reward for getting a First in Greats. Not new, secondhand – it had belonged to some chappie, a solicitor I think, who had managed to get himself killed in it – or, rather, out of it, since he was flung out on his head in an accident and the car was hardly damaged. Funny, I’d not now want to own a car in which someone had kicked the bucket but then I thought nothing of it. It was an open car, that was why he was thrown out so easily. No seatbelts then, of course. It had a dickey, that car. Sybil here and Hugo will know what I mean by a dickey, I’ll be bound. But you two boys won’t, you’ll never have seen one. No, it’s not a false front for a DJ.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the two boys, giving that dry, brief laugh of his which sounded like a cough. The boys no more knew what was meant by a DJ than by a dickey. ‘A dickey was a kind of folding seat at the back of a car. When I was in the States, they called it ‘‘a rumble-seat’’. Yes, that was what they called it. A rumble-seat. Can’t think why.’

  He droned on; everyone stopped listening to him.

  Hugo, who knew by now that Cyril liked nougat, produced some, specially bought, from his pocket, and held it out silently first to his pale, beautiful darling, his throat so slim and fragile as it emerged from its open collar and his eyes so wide and liquid under the arching brows, and then to the beastly little thug beyond him. Cyril broke off a small piece, which he began daintily to nibble, holding it between thumb and forefinger. Lionel broke off a large one and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing noisily.

  ‘How does this spot strike you?’ Henry asked.

  Miraculously, there were no cars, no people. A track led off the road, over a stile and then straight ahead, chalky white on billiard-table green, over a hump of the Downs. The sky seemed extraordinarily close above them, the air extraordinarily thin and sharp.

  ‘You’d better bring your sweater,’ Hugo said to Cyril with the solicitude which had come to irritate Sybil so much. ‘It’s quite chilly up here.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Sybil said. ‘Once we begin walking, we’ll be sweating.’

  Cyril looked pained, not so much because she had contradicted Hugo as because she had used that word ‘sweating’. Even his mother and his aunt would have been careful to say ‘perspiring’.

  As though in defiance of Hugo, Lionel not merely left his pullover behind but, after a few steps along the path, unbuttoned his tartan shirt and pulled it off, placing it over his shoulders and knotting the sleeves. His torso, the muscles well-defined and the skin a bluish white, was not that of a pubescent boy but of a grown-up navvy.

  ‘Have we all the impedimenta?’ Henry asked.

  ‘All the what?’ Lionel sniggered. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The cards, the pencils, the paper.’ Henry’s mood darkened as abruptly as previously it had lightened.

  ‘They’re all here,’ Hugo reassured him. He shook the carrier bag that he was carrying.

  Sybil strode out, not on the path, but over the springy turf, even though it was still saturated with the rain of the previous day. Both Henry and Hugo, unknown to each other, felt a grudging admiration for her vigour and health. Her cheeks were glowing, her eyes bright. Mr Wu bobbed along, now just in front of her and now just behind, making the snuffling noise of someone with a bad head-cold and without a handkerchief.

  Eventually Henry stopped. ‘This seems a good spot.’ Ahead of him was a brow of the Downs. ‘No habitation, no people!’ He turned to Hugo. ‘I suggest you and Cyril go up to the top over there and I’ll stay down here with Lionel. Sybil can go with you and wave her scarf each time you’re ready for the next card. How’s that?’

  ‘Fine,’ Hugo said. ‘ Come along, Cyril.’

  Sybil noticed that, as so often now, her brother was completely ignoring her. Bitterness rose within her, corrosive as water-brash.

  ‘Oh, I mustn’t forget the cards and your sheet,’ Hugo turned back to say. He inserted a hand into the carrier bag.

  ‘What distance would you say it was from here to the brow?’ Henry asked.

  ‘A hundred and fifty, two hundred yards? Anyway, I’ll pace it out. Far further than we’ve ever attempted before.’

  ‘I hope it’ll work,’ Cyril said anxiously.

  ‘It’ll work if you believe it’ll work,’ Hugo jollied him along, a hand on his shoulder.

  Hugo, the boy, Sybil and the dog began to make for the brow of the hill before them. At one point, Mr Wu placed his flattened muzzle against a rabbit hole and seemed, like the fox in the story of the Three Little Pigs, determined to huff and to puff until he had somehow blown it apart. ‘Come along, Mr Wu!’ Sybil ordered sharply. ‘Leave that alone!’ Mr Wu scampered after her, his muzzle covered in earth. Soon she was far ahead of the other two; and there then came to her an absurd, irrational desire simply to walk on and on, not stopping at the brow of the hill, and so eventually to walk out of this particular experiment and all future experiments with the boys – and even perhaps out of Hugo’s life. But she resisted it.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Hugo panted, joining her where she stood, the wind whipping her skirt about her magnificent legs and t
ossing her thick mane of hair, black streaked with grey. He shaded his eyes and stared downwards to where, far off, the sea glittered under a sky so strangely near. ‘Now let me get things out.’ He removed from the carrier bag the clipboard, paper and pencil. He turned to Cyril, ‘Which would you prefer to do. Sit or stand?’

  Cyril, visibly nervous, as always before a session, dithered for a moment. Then he said, ‘I think I’d like to stand.’

  ‘Of course they can see each other from up here. Indoors, one arranges it that they can’t. They could make signals.’ Sybil talked as though Cyril were not with them.

  ‘Well, that’ll be your job,’ Hugo replied with an irritation beyond his ability to control. ‘You’ll have to watch very carefully, as I shall do, to make sure no signals pass. What sort of signals did you have in mind?’

  ‘Do I have to tell you? You have much more experience of psychic research than I have. Hands. Legs. Even eye movements. You’ve not forgotten that woman investigated by Houdini, have you? She and her accomplice could speak volumes to each other merely by fluttering their eyelids.’

  ‘I don’t think the boys can see the fluttering of each other’s eyelids over a distance like this. But, yes, you can watch for that too,’ he added sarcastically.

  Sybil unwound her scarf from her neck and gave it a shake at Mr Wu, who ran forward in an attempt to snatch it in his jaws. ‘Oh, Mr Wu, Mr Wu!’ she laughed. Hugo, who did not care for dogs, only for cats, thought her behaviour silly. What would her pupils think if they could see her?

  ‘Now you stand here, Cyril. And I’ll stand here beside you. And Sybil can go up on to that mound over there and wave her scarf when we tell her. All right, Sybil?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Sybil gave a mock salute, arm stiffly raised and legs at attention.

  Cyril licked his lips, emitted a ladylike little cough and followed that, as so often during sittings, with a quiet burp behind the raised fingertips of his right hand. ‘Pardon,’ he said. Areophagia: suddenly, the word arrowed, unsought, into Hugo’s mind, much as, he supposed, the denomination of a card arrowed into Cyril’s.