Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  ‘You know what we always promised each other?’

  Audrey nods, her panic growing. ‘Whichever of you died first …’

  ‘Would find some means, any means, to get in touch with the other. Yes.’ Sybil closes her large, green eyes under their beautifully arched eyebrows and presses fingers to her temples, as though she had started a headache. ‘Well, I think he has. Has found the means. Has been in touch.’

  ‘Oh.’ Audrey feels sick. It is all such nonsense. Hugo died, in Brighton, in a manner which has always seemed to her mysterious and frightening. They brought his shattered body back here to the village and Father Jessop buried him in the churchyard. Later, there was a memorial service in the college chapel, when everyone present seemed more eager to console with Sybil than with her. Finis.

  Sybil nods, ‘ Yes. I’m sure he’s come through.’

  ‘But you thought that once before,’ Audrey cannot resist telling her, partly although and partly because she knows it will annoy her.

  What happened was that, soon after Hugo’s death, Audrey and Sybil went to Chichester, leaving the two girls in the charge of Audrey’s mother, to see Bernard Shaw’s On the Rocks. Originally, the plan had been that Sybil and Hugo would go, since Audrey did not like to leave either the girls or the animals and, in any case, was not, as she put it, all that certain that she was all that keen on Shaw. But then, after Hugo’s sudden death, Audrey agreed to use his ticket and his reservation at the hotel.

  The evening over, the two women went to bed in their adjoining rooms, and each fell asleep. But before she fell asleep, Sybil, unlike Audrey, who tried not to think about him, made herself think, with intense concentration, about her dead brother. She was woken by a strange sound of jangling, at once awesome and thrilling. She lay in the dark, listening to it, vibrating on and on, until the conviction came to her: ‘It’s Hugo. It’s his way of getting through to me.’ After a while, she got up, pulled on a wrap and, trembling with a mixture of excitement and terror, knocked on Audrey’s door.

  There was no answer and, so having knocked for a second time, Sybil vigorously turned the handle. It was typical of Audrey, in whom a protected, middle-class upbringing in the suburbs had implanted a natural trust, not to have turned the key. It was also typical of Audrey, in whom the same upbringing had failed to impose any sense of order, to have left her suitcase, the lid open, on the floor of the entrance, so that as Sybil hurried forward in the darkness, calling ‘Audrey! Audrey! Audrey!’, she stumbled over it with an even louder ‘ Bugger!’ Audrey, who had been snoring peacefully – it was that snoring that Hugo had used, soon after their marriage, as a pretext for not sleeping in the main bedroom with her, but in the dressing room by himself – sat up with a start. ‘Who is it?’ she asked, in a tone of curiosity rather than of alarm.

  ‘Me. Sybil. Audrey, come at once! To my room! Come on!’

  ‘Why?’ Audrey rubbed an eye with the back of her hand. ‘What’s going on?’ She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.

  ‘Don’t ask questions! Come! If you don’t hurry, it might stop.’

  ‘What might stop?’

  But Audrey began to climb out of her bed, revealing, to Sybil’s surprise, that she was wearing absolutely nothing. Sybil grabbed her C & A wrap off a chair and flung it to her.

  ‘Quick!’

  In Sybil’s bedroom, the two women stood side by side. Puzzled and sleepy, Audrey yawned, stretching one arm above her and then the other and wriggling her shoulders. ‘Listen!’ Sybil hissed. Both of them then listened. Audrey, whose cheeks had been flushed by sleep, visibly paled. The jangling was getting louder and louder and more and more frenetic, until it filled the whole room.

  ‘What is it, Sybil?’

  ‘The sign,’ Sybil whispered. ‘Hugo’s sign.’

  Audrey, her head on one side and a hand cupped to an ear, listened again. Then she walked briskly over to the built-in cupboard in a corner of the room and pulled open the door. The dress which Sybil had worn to the theatre was all that hung in it. All the empty wire coat-hangers were shaking against each other.

  Sybil tried to make some connection between Hugo and coat-hangers. Why should his spirit choose to agitate coat-hangers as his sign to her? Then, with the shock of a blow to the solar plexus, she realized that Audrey was giggling. Yes, giggling; she was one of those women who did not laugh but giggled.

  ‘Audrey!’

  Audrey pointed upwards to the ceiling. ‘ One of those bookies and his floozy must be at it. Well, good luck to them!’

  It was race-week at Goodwood, so that, when the two women had returned from the theatre, they had found the bar of the hotel full of plump, jowly men in unbuttoned, fancy-coloured shirts sprouting grey hair at their wide-open necks and of stringy, sunburned, bangled women with cleavages even more striking. One of the men was apparently called Mr Pymm (or Pym) and, since he was squiring two women, with identical loud, husky voices and identical wigs, seemingly spun out of wire-wool, there was a lot of noisy joking about Pimm’s No 1 and Pimm’s No 2. An unattached, middle-aged man, with drooping eyelids and drooping moustache, asked Audrey, as she and Sybil were buying their drinks, ‘Had any luck today?’ Audrey at first looked affronted; then she realized that he must be referring not to what he had assumed to be her profession but to the races. If she explained to him that she and her sister-in-law were in Chichester not for Goodwood but for a play by Bernard Shaw, he would no doubt think her ‘toffee-nosed’ or something equally uncomplimentary; so she gave him her sweet, girlish smile and said No, she was afraid not, she never did have any luck, in fact she was the most unlucky person in the world. Later, he had come over to their table, glass in hand, to ask if he might join them; but Sybil had replied chillily that they were about to go to bed – even though it was at least twenty minutes before they actually did so.

  Now Audrey can see from the exasperated expression on Sybil’s face that she should not have referred to the incident of the coat-hangers. Sybil wishes to forget all about it, just as Hugo wished to forget all about the occasion when, entertained to a buffet lunch by some of Audrey’s ballet colleagues at a flat in Cornwall Gardens, he had first become feverishly excited about a ‘vision’ which he had experienced, alone on the balcony, of a horse-drawn carriage circling the square below, and had then sunk into embarrassed despondency when Audrey, not yet his wife, had pointed out that it belonged to Dunn’s, the hatters.

  Sybil opens her capacious handbag, with its tortoise-shell clasp, and takes out a sheaf of papers scrawled over in her handwriting.

  She puts the papers on the kitchen table before her and then covers them with a hand.

  ‘I’ve told you of my writing?’

  ‘Writing?’ Audrey thinks of Meredith, and of Hugo’s repeated but always unsuccessful attempts to push her through one of the novels.

  ‘Automatic writing.’

  Audrey nods. Oh, lordy, lordy!

  On the day after the wedding of Audrey and Hugo, Sybil developed trigeminal neuralgia in so ferocious a form that no pain-killers could relieve it. Her doctor, who was also the school doctor, infuriated her by suggesting, in what she called his ‘ usual smart-aleck way’, that her symptoms might be psychosomatic in origin. When she persisted in returning to him, he wearily proposed either a specialist or acupuncture. Meanwhile, Hugo and Audrey had returned from their honeymoon in Greece and Hugo came up with a proposal of his own. A fellow member of the Institute of Paranormal Studies, in constant pain after a motor accident, had received remarkable relief from a psychic healer with the unfortunate name of Cocke. Sybil had consulted the healer, who, on the first of her visits, went into a trance and, on the second, whether intentionally or accidentally, put her into one. After that second visit the pain abated. Cocke told her that, if it returned, she should think herself back into the trance during which she had been healed. The pain did not return but, slumped at her desk one night, a blank piece of paper before her and a pen in her hand, as she wished that
Hugo, away at Harvard, were with her to advise her on the Meredith lecture (‘ Modern Love and The Modern Voice’) which she was preparing to deliver at the Royal Society of Literature, she once again involuntarily slipped away into a trance. When she came to, in a state of exaltation, she found that the piece of paper and several pieces below it had been covered; but what she then read was not the beginning of her lecture but seemingly random words, phrases and sentences. She and Hugo subsequently spent many excited hours interpreting these supernatural effusions and others like them. Sybil, they both decided, was a natural medium.

  ‘I feel that, at last, Hugo is coming through. Oh, I’ve had vague inklings that things in my script must have derived from him, but now I’m certain, absolutely certain. Read this, for example.’ She pushes one of the sheets across at Audrey and Audrey frowns at the passage down the side of which Sybil has drawn a single thick line in red ink.

  … Impotently, imperfectly, imperishably. Immortal. With Life and Death I walked. I want to. Try to. Must. So difficult. You have had that dream. One wishes to move, cannot, Wishes to speak, cannot. Or that other dream. One moves, no one sees one. One speaks, no one hears one. I want to. Try to. Must. She says, I wish only to die. Wish. Only. If only. The secret of the shrouded death. But not, not by lifting up the lid of the white eye. Fire to reach to fire. A yonder to all ends …

  Audrey finds it hard enough to read anything other than the Daily Express or a cookbook. She takes a long time to read this brief passage, and at the end she looks up at Sybil, who has been watching her intently, with bewildered exasperation.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she says.

  Sybil has long since decided that there is a lot that Audrey does not get. Common clay. But she decides that she must be patient, since further down the page – she points to the words, underlined in red ink – there is written:

  … Audrey. Tell. Comfort.

  ‘It’s his message to us.’

  ‘But I still don’t get it.’ In her fretfulness, Audrey sounds as though she were on the verge of tears.

  ‘No. I can see that. I can understand that.’ Audrey feels at her most uncomfortable with Sybil when she adopts this kind of superior, sarcastic tone. Well, let me try to explain, dear. Firstly, there’s a poem called ‘‘Hymn to Colour’’ by–’

  ‘Meredith!’ Audrey all but shouts, as though in a game of snap.

  ‘Yes, Meredith. Precisely. You know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well … it’s an extraordinary poem. Not known to many people. Not known like, say, ‘‘Modern Love’’ or ‘‘Love in the Valley’’.’

  Audrey remembers those embarrassing minutes, an endless chain of them, link on link, when she sat perched on the hard edge of her bed in the Athens hotel and Hugo, lying full length, in stockinged feet and underpants, on his next to it, had read to her, in a sing-song voice, almost a chant, first the whole of ‘ Love in the Valley’ and then the beginning of ‘ Modern Love’. But she had had a tiring and trying day, first jolting out to Daphni with him on a crowded bus, then trekking all the way round the Plaka to find that taverna where he and Sybil had once eaten such a wonderful meal for a song but which now seemed no longer to exist, and then panting up to the Acropolis and listening patiently to his lecture on the vulgarity of the Parthenon (‘a garishly painted table with too many legs’) as it once must have been. She managed to keep herself from slumping back on the bed, she even managed to keep her eyes from closing. But after suppressing one yawn, which merely made her nostrils dilate imperceptibly, she could not suppress the next and her mouth gaped. Hugo quietly put down the book. ‘I’m boring you, I can see. I’m sorry.’ ‘Oh, no, Hugo, no! Do go on!’ But he threw the book on to the bed, as he jumped off it. Audrey reached out a hand, as though she wanted not so much to retrieve the book as to rescue something drowning between them. But Hugo stopped her with the whipcrack of his, ‘No, Audrey, leave it. Leave it, please.’ Common clay.

  ‘Well, of course, I know ‘‘Modern Love’’ and – er, ‘‘ Love in the Valley’’,’ Audrey says. She begins to blush, as she always does after having told what she calls a whopper.

  ‘I’m not going to give you a whole lecture on the poem or even to attempt a rapid exegesis.’ Sybil wants to add: If I did, I’d be wasting your time and mine. ‘ But the point is that the ‘‘Hymn to Colour’’ is a highly complex poem – complex in its rhythm, even more complex in its imagery – about Life and Death.’ The way she speaks those last two words endows them with the capitals that they bear in the text. ‘And in that piece of automatic writing which no doubt struck you as meaningless, there are, remarkably, innumerable references to that poem. ‘‘With Life and Death I walked’’ – that’s the beginning of the whole poem, and it goes on ‘‘when Love appeared’’. That’s his Love for you, for me, for both of us. For the children too, of course,’ Sybil adds, though this is the first time she has connected them with that Love. ‘ Then there’s that phrase ‘‘ The secret of the shrouded death’’.’ Sybil runs her forefinger, head twisted round in order to see properly, under the words. ‘It’s followed by that reference to ‘‘the lid of the white eye’’. Now the key passage in the poem is a stanza which runs –’

  Sybil gazes out of the window and, in that same sing-song voice which Audrey found so embarrassing when Hugo used to assume it, she begins to quote:

  ‘Shall man into the mystery of breath

  From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy?

  Or learn the secret of the shrouded death.

  But lifting up the lid of a white eye?

  Cleave thou the way with fathering desire

  Of fire to reach to fire.’

  Sybil opens her eyes. ‘Of fire to reach to fire,’ she repeats. ‘That of course, is also a phrase in the script. There.’ Again the pointed, unvarnished nail of her forefinger indicates the words.’

  ‘Well!’ Audrey exclaims, hoping that this one monosyllable will convey the requisite understanding, amazement and gratitude to her sister-in-law. But Sybil is far too perceptive to be taken in for a moment. The little ninny obviously hasn’t a notion what she’s going on about.

  ‘To put it briefly, this is a poem about Life subsumed in Death and Death subsumed in Life.’ Subsumed? Silly to use that kind of word to a woman so uneducated. ‘They are coexistent, each is a part of the other, just as, just as –’ the simile, now that she has started on it, somehow embarrasses her ‘– two lovers are part of each other.’ She stares at Audrey, who, discomfited, looks down at the sheets of script, fingering the edge of one of them as though to test its physical reality. Sybil goes on, ‘Well, of course, that was what Hugo believed, believed so passionately and so whole-heartedly. For him, Life and Death were one.’ She pauses, ‘Then there’s that sentence ‘‘She says, I wish only to die.’’ Well, that’s clearly a reference to …’ She stops. A desolate reticence inhibits her from continuing. ‘To another Sybil, the Sybil of Cumae. People asked her, ‘‘What do you wish?’’ and ‘‘ I wish only to die’’ she replied. Like her, I, too, have wished only to die since Hugo’s death.’

  ‘So you think – you think that he …?’ Audrey suddenly wonders what the children are up to; she remembers that it is long past the time to milk the cow; she can hear one of the hens squawking from the hedge by the road – presumably she has laid an egg.

  ‘I’m certain of it. You see, Audrey dear, there’s something very odd about the fact that this particular poem, of all Meredith’s poems, should have come through. And I’ll tell you why. You know how Hugo loved to read poetry aloud?’ Audrey nods; she knows it only too well. ‘ In fact, he used to say that that was the only way to read it. Anyway, when I last saw him – when we went to Brighton together and I left him there and then that terrible accident happened – he read ‘‘Hymn to Colour’’ to me during our train journey. There he was, opposite to me in the carriage, in such a state of elation that I thought to myself, Well, if there’s such a thing as a truly happy man, t
hen there’s one before you! He read the poem so beautifully. I had never fully understood it before – as with so many of Meredith’s poems, I felt that there was always one last veil between me and the final, essential meaning. But that veil had been rent. It had disintegrated. Hugo had worked a kind of magic.’

  Audrey is now rolling up one corner of the script between a thumb and forefinger. Sybil has an impulse to reach out and slap her hand, as she has seen Audrey herself reach out and slap Betsy’s hand, when she is picking the almonds off one of her home-made Dundee cakes. Audrey is also frowning, in the manner of a schoolgirl who has given up all hope of solving an equation but wishes to give the impression that she is still working at it. She heaves a deep sigh.

  ‘Now it’s odd, to say the least, that what should have come through is references to a poem in which Hugo’s own affirmation of the oneness of the living and the dead achieved so magnificent an expression. But it’s even odder that that should have been the last poem that he ever read, aloud to me – probably the last poem that he ever read aloud to anyone – on the day on which he died. Isn’t it?’

  Audrey is silent, her cheek supported on a hand and her eyes still fixed on the script. She seems to be sulking.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Audrey looks up and suddenly, in those eyes which are usually submissive, there flashes a sudden anger. Sybil is as much taken aback as she would be if, on a clear summer day like this, lightning were to fork down on to the table between them. Audrey’s lips tremble. Then she says, ‘But why do you think it was Hugo who wrote all this?’

  ‘Why do I –?’ Sybil is astounded. ‘Well, who else could have written it. Who else?’

  Audrey glances fearfully at her sister-in-law. She wishes that she could go out to milk the cow or to call to the children or to look for that egg in the hedge by the road. She swallows. ‘ You,’ she says.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, what I mean is – your subconscious.’

  ‘My subconscious?’