Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  ‘I don’t see why we should deliver if they fail to do so.’

  It was, in fact, only Hugo who had ‘ delivered’ to Mrs Lockit but, careless about money and tolerant of the idiosyncracies of his friends, he forebore to point this out.

  ‘That wasn’t their fault. They tried, they failed. They’ll succeed on some other occasion.’

  ‘A hundred quid seems an awful lot of money,’ Henry grumbled, as he had grumbled so often before.

  ‘Yes, I know. It is an awful lot of money.’ Hugo thought guiltily of his refusal to buy Angela the bicycle for which she had been asking – ‘You’ll have to wait for your birthday,’ he had told her. ‘But there it is. If we were conducting tangible instead of intangible experiments, we’d still have to spend money. Probably even more.’

  Henry sipped his sherry, his inflamed nose hanging over the glass. Then he looked up. ‘ I hope this whole thing isn’t becoming an obsession with you.’

  ‘An obsession?’

  Henry nodded. ‘It seems to be taking over more and more of your life. I foresee the danger that it might, well, obliterate it.’

  ‘I thought you shared my enthusiasm.’

  Henry sipped again. ‘Up to a point, up to a point.’

  ‘I’m still waiting to see the boys show their paces,’ Sybil suddenly said to Hugo when, seated side by side at the wide partners’ desk in her study, they were going through a recently discovered letter written by Meredith to one of his neighbours. (‘Alas, Friday will not be possible for me, nor indeed will Saturday, dearly though I should like to see you. I shall be away, taking a cure …’)

  ‘We’ve had some remarkable sessions recently. After that fiasco.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘I’ll have to speak to Henry.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t do with Henry. He’s such a terrible old woman. And so stingy!’

  ‘Henry and I are conducting the investigation as a team. You know that.’

  ‘Why don’t you bring the boys to London for the day?’

  ‘I suppose I could do that.’ Hugo was reluctant. ‘But you know how that turned out last time.’

  ‘I don’t mean a demonstration in front of a lot of people. Informal. Just you, me, them.’

  ‘And Mrs Lockit?’

  ‘No, not Mrs Lockit. I can’t take that woman.’

  ‘Well, it might be possible.’

  ‘Try. Do try. I’m going to be in London next Saturday and Sunday.’ Ever since the fiasco at the Institute, Sybil had had an obsessive craving – totally irrational, she had told herself – to see the twins once again. Unlike Hugo, she was as much fascinated by Lionel as by Cyril.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Lockit.’

  ‘Have a word with the boys. Wouldn’t that be better?’

  Hugo gave Sybil a smile of fraying patience. ‘They’re not adults, Sybil. It’s not for them to decide whether they make trips to London or not. In theory, their mother decides. In practice, Mrs Lockit decides.’

  ‘Sinister creature!’

  ‘I don’t know why you say that.’ But secretly Hugo agreed with her. There was something baleful about Mrs Lockit, even when she was at her briskest and jolliest

  ‘Those boys are rather sinister too,’ Sybil mused, wondering to herself if that was why they fascinated her.

  ‘Rubbish. They’re perfectly harmless and ordinary.’

  ‘An ordinary boy of – what – twelve, thirteen? – doesn’t wear a ring on his forefinger.’

  ‘No, these days he’d more likely to be wearing it in his ear,’ Hugo retorted sarcastically.

  ‘And that other boy. So gross and grubby.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you, with all your experience of psychical research, that the people who have the most remarkable psychic powers are often those who seem to be furthest from spirituality. Eusapia Palladio by all accounts was a ghastly old bag. Lecherous, smelly, greedy, ignorant, cunning. And yet she was probably the greatest of them all.’

  ‘The greatest medium, or the greatest fraud?’

  Hugo laughed. ‘Both.’

  It was, as Hugo later put it to Sybil, a ‘tricky business’ to get Mrs Lockit’s assent to the boys’ journey up to London without Henry or, more important, herself; and, surprisingly, it was a hardly less tricky business to get Henry’s.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Mrs Lockit said, bunching her mouth and screwing up her eyes, as though making some calculation in mental arithmetic. ‘I don’t know if their mother would agree to that. They’re only kids still. And you know what London is like these days.’

  ‘I’ll be with them all the time. I won’t let them out of my sight for a moment. And my sister will be with us.’

  ‘I don’t see why your sister doesn’t want me,’ Mrs Lockit challenged, with sudden belligerence. But she knew perfectly well: ‘that one’ had taken against her from the start.

  ‘Of course I’ll make it worth your – their – while,’ Hugo said, adopting Mrs Lockit’s constant euphemism. ‘A trip to London for a sitting involves much more than a sitting in this house. So naturally …’

  Mrs Lockit at once became more pliant. ‘I suppose they can come to no harm with you to keep an eye on them. And I don’t really want another journey up the smoke – not in this weather, thank you.’

  To Hugo’s surprise, Henry’s initial reaction was as unfavourable as Mrs Lockit’s.

  ‘The boys are used to the two of us. It’s always been like that. If I’m not there, it just may not work. You know very well that if, in this field, one varies the conditions of an experiment in the smallest degree, it can end in disaster. Look what happened at the Institute.’

  Henry nodded. ‘The conditions there might have daunted adults. But if Sybil and I and the two boys conduct some tests together – with no one else taking part – I don’t really think …’

  ‘Do what you like, do what you like!’ Henry cried pettishly. ‘But I can’t see why Sybil doesn’t make the journey here. Far simpler.’

  ‘Because you’ve never asked her.’

  ‘Good God, I don’t have to ask her. She’s only to ask herself.’ And quite capable of doing so too, he almost added.

  ‘She’d by shy of doing that. Embarrassed.’

  ‘Shy! Embarrassed? Sybil!’ Henry was scornful.

  When Hugo and the two boys arrived outside Sybil’s door, repeated ringing of the bell failed to produce an answer.

  ‘You must have got the date wrong,’ Lionel said, as he examined the nameplates on the other front doors on that landing.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Perhaps she’s been held up. It’s unlike her to be late. Never mind.’ He searched in his pockets. ‘I have a key.’

  ‘Did she give that to you?’ Lionel asked.

  ‘I’d have hardly stolen it,’ Hugo replied.

  On the hall table of a flat which to Hugo always Seemed to be as unfitted to contain Sybil’s effulgent presence as a pinchbeck setting for a diamond, a note had been propped up against a pile of books:

  Hugo. Sorry. Tried to ring Henry’s but he said you’d already left. Have had to help Madge out urgently – emergency op, St Thomas’s. Back by about six. Cakes in tin. Love, S.

  Madge was the games mistress at Sybil’s school. Could the op. have been so much of an emergency as to justify the absence? Were there not ambulances and taxis? Hugo was annoyed, sensing that, in some subtle way, this was his sister’s way of avenging herself on both him and, more important, the boys.

  He pulled out the watch which, attached to his lapel by a gold chain, he kept in his breast pocket, and glanced at it.

  ‘Does that watch chime?’ Lionel asked, momentarily interested.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Mr Petrie’s does.’

  ‘Well, we’ve almost two hours free. My sister must just have left. Shall I make you some tea?’

  ‘Nah.’ They had both drunk Tizer on the train. ‘But what’s all that about cake in a tin?’

  �
��You can have some of it.’

  The three of them went into the neat, bare kitchen, where Hugo lifted down the tin and eased off its lid.

  ‘Cripes! Fruit cake! Wouldn’t you have known?’ Lionel was scornful.

  ‘Well, it’s take it or leave it.’

  Both boys decided to leave it. They also decided to leave the petit beurre biscuits that Hugo found in another tin.

  ‘We could go to Holland Park,’ Hugo suddenly said, remembering how, in their by now remote childhood, Sybil and he used to go there to feed the birds and squirrels.

  ‘A park!’ Lionel was scornful.

  But Cyril said eagerly, ‘Oh, yes, sir, I’d like that.’

  ‘We could feed the birds there. And the squirrels.’ He cut a thick wedge of cake, found a used paper bag in the dustbin and began to crumble the cake into it between his fingers. The two boys watched. He would have to tell Sybil that they had eaten some of the cake. But what if the boys should then reveal the lie? Oh hell! Never mind.

  ‘Is it far?’ Lionel asked.

  ‘No. Five minutes.’

  ‘Walking?

  ‘Well, I’m not going to take you in a taxi.’ Increasingly the boy had begun to get on his nerves.

  Cyril kept close to Hugo’s side, as though afraid of the traffic that roared and squealed by them, along Kensington High Street. But Lionel kept either running ahead or loitering behind. When he loitered it was usually to stare into some shop stocking electronic equipment. Soon, Cyril began to break out into a sweat which beaded his full upper lip and gave a ghostly shimmer to the pallor of his forehead.

  ‘It’s huge,’ Cyril said, gazing over the railings between the woodland and the cement path up which they had climbed. Then he pointed: ‘Ooh, look! What’s that?’ High in the branches of a tree, a jay looked down, unwinking at them.

  ‘A jay.’

  ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘Dangerous! Of course not. But it’s shy. You rarely see them in the park. It steals the eggs of other birds. It even eats the nestlings.’

  ‘Horrid thing!’

  ‘Yes, jays are rather horrid.’

  Lionel ran back to them. ‘What’s that building over there?’ He indicated a roof shimmering in the sunlight.

  ‘The Commonwealth Institute.’

  ‘I’ve heard of that.’ At first it seemed unlikely, but then he went on, ‘Some of the senior boys were taken on an expedition there. Can we go?’

  Hugo shook his head. ‘We’ve come to see the park. Haven’t we?’

  ‘You have,’ Lionel retorted. ‘I want to see that Institute place!’ He hurried on for a few paces, head lowered, and then turned, ‘Tell you what. You go to the park, I’ll nip down there. I’ll meet you by these seats. OK?’

  Hugo hesitated. He had repeatedly assured Mrs Lockit that he would never let either of the twins out of his sight; but to have Lionel out of his sight and Cyril alone was an irresistible temptation. ‘Oh, very well.’ Again he fished his watch out of the breast pocket of his suit. ‘It’s now five-fifteen. I suggest we meet here at six. All right? You’ve got a watch have you?’

  Lionel held out his wrist to show that he had. ‘Analogue quartz,’ he said. Hugo supposed, bitterly, that it was his money which had paid for it.

  In the green space in front of the youth hostel, there were a lot of large women in doubtful charge of small dogs and a lot of small men in no less doubtful charge of large ones. ‘Toby, come here, come here at once? ‘No, leave, leave, leave!’ ‘Naughty dog! Naughty, naughty, naughty!’ ‘Midas – heel! Heel!’ A huge sheepdog, wagging his tail, romped up to Hugo and Cyril and then, having sniffed at Cyril’s ankles and hand, jumped up on him. Cyril let out a squeal. ‘Midas! What did I say? Heel!’ The tiny, elderly man in a white suit and panama hat, a cane in his hand, looked scornfully at Cyril from eyes as hard and bright as chips of mica. ‘I’ve always been afraid of dogs,’ Cyril explained to Hugo. ‘Ever since one nipped me on the Front. Not bad, mind. But the place went septic and it took a long time to heal.’ He stopped and held out his hand. ‘You can see the scar.’ Hugo raised the hand in his and peered down at it. There was a tiny, upraised squiggle at the base of the thumb where the skin was even smoother and whiter than that which surrounded it.

  ‘That’s the youth hostel over there. And that’s all that’s left of Holland House. I can so well remember watching it burn as a schoolboy home on holiday. During the war that was. My mother and father lived quite near where Sybil now has her flat …’ He went on to tell the boy how the firebombs had rained down on to London and how, only twelve at the time, the same age as Cyril, he had felt no fear at all of them. ‘ I couldn’t believe that anything could happen to me. And neither could Sybil. We’d refuse to go down to the shelter, our mother and father had terrible difficulty with us. Eventually they whisked us off to the country – when we weren’t at school in the country anyway. Now I’d be scared stiff if I found myself in an air-raid.’

  ‘I’d have been terrified,’ Cyril said.

  On the other side of Holland House, on an expanse of grass singed yellow by the sun, there were bicycles, half-naked people hurling frisbees, kicking footballs at each other or lying beside or on top of each other, children climbing trees, and transistor sets blaring. ‘ Oh, dear, how all this has changed!’ Hugo exclaimed. It was something that he now found himself remarking more and more frequently.

  ‘You’d think they’d be ashamed,’ Cyril said primly, turning his head away from a near-naked couple, squirming on top of each other. Then he added, ‘It’s the same on the beach. People just strip off there not caring what you can see.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind about the nudity. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned. But the crowds, the filth, the noise! Let’s go along here. I’ll show you the peacocks.’

  The bird enclosure was surrounded by people, many of them foreign and many of them, like Hugo, clutching paper bags. A peacock was strutting around an insignificant. peahen, its fan clicking and its beak opening and shutting as though in a serenade inaudible to human ears.

  ‘I’ve seen one of those only once before,’ Cyril said, ‘At Chessington with my auntie.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  The peacock screeched and screeched again, making Cyril start. ‘But its voice is hardly beautiful.’

  Now an emu strutted over, bedraggled and drab, and, head tilted sideways, fixed Hugo with a single, mournful eye. Hugo got out some cake-crumbs and held them out on his palm. Cyril retreated. The emu gobbled the cake-crumbs with a rocking of head on sinuous neck. ‘He might bite you,’ Cyril warned.

  Hugo laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think so. He wouldn’t find me edible.’

  They walked on, along winding, baked paths, deeper and deeper into the woods. Like a corpse deliquescing in the sunlight, an old man lay stretched out on a bench, with his boots and an empty cider bottle beside him. His mouth was open, his face was seamed with dirt, the nails were like talons on his bare feet. A couple, the girl’s head on the boy’s shoulder, wandered towards them. A man with the wire of a deaf-aid dangling from an ear, held a hand full of bread-crumbs up into a tree and called, ‘Come, come, come!’ But no bird came.

  ‘Look – a squirrel!’ Hugo touched the boy’s arm. ‘Let’s see if he’ll come and take an almond. There ought to be one or two in the cake.’ He peered into the paper bag and then brought out an almond. He held it out between finger and thumb. Seated on his haunches, in a jagged patch of sunshine in the centre of shade, the animal gazed at him tremulously wary. Then he raced to a tree and ran a few feet up it. He hung there, head downwards, his sides heaving. Still he watched. Then he descended the tree and scampered up another one, even closer. Suddenly he ran down that tree, zigzagged through the grass, and stopped, snout upturned to them, in the grass on the other side of the wooden palisade against which they were leaning.

  ‘He’s like a rat,’ Cyril said, retreating.

  ‘Sh! Don’t make a noise. Don’t move.’
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br />   They stood still. Then the squirrel ran towards one of the posts of the fence, raced up it and sat motionless on top. Hugo extended his hand, with the nut, towards him. The squirrel seemed about to flee; then he edged along the fence, cautious step by step, opened his mouth, seized the nut. He retreated along the top of the fence, leaping from stake to stake. Halting on one sufficiently far from them, he raised the nut between his two front paws and began contentedly to nibble.

  ‘He’s eating it!’ Cyril exclaimed, amazed.

  ‘Yes, he’s eating it.’ Hugo’s tone was dry; but he was suddenly moved by the boy’s tone of wonder, absurd though it was, in a way that he was never moved, only irritated, by the same tone of wonder when used by the girls.

  ‘May I try?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Hugo handed Cyril an almond from the bag. Cyril held it out in his palm. ‘I hope he doesn’t bite.’

  After some hesitation, the squirrel scampered back along the top of the fence, put his front paws on to Cyril’s cold, moist palm, lowered his head and took the almond. Cyril, who had squeezed his eyes shut at the moment of contact and drawn his body in on itself, gave a gasp of amazement. ‘He took it from me! He took it from me!’ Hugo all but said, ‘Why not? He’s hungry. And he’s used to people.’ But, not wishing to spoil the pleasure of this strange, timorous child, he merely confirmed, ‘Yes, he took it from you.’

  ‘May I try again?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Hugo turned over the crumbs in the paper bag and found another almond. The boy held it out. The squirrel, seated on the post, eyed him beadily. Then he whisked down the post and loped off into tangles of grass and stunted bushes. The boy remained standing there, the almond on his palm, with a look of consternation. As he did so, a blue tit skimmed down from a tree, snatched up the nut and was off again. The boy was astounded, ‘What was that? What took it?’

  ‘A tit. A blue tit, I think. They’re even tamer in the winter. They sit on one’s palm – like the robins.’

  ‘I want to come here again. It’s wonderful.’

  ‘Well, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. I’ll bring you when next you come to London. But what about Preston Park? There must be birds there. There, may even be squirrels.’