Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  Henry sat impassive, his arms folded and his gold-rimmed spectacles low on that nose which, because of its broken veins, made his neighbours commit the injustice of believing that he must be a secret drinker. When Sybil, leaning forward between him and Audrey, began to sob into a handkerchief smelling strongly of lily-of-the-valley, so far from trying to give her comfort, he did not even look at her.

  ‘A stupid and tragic accident,’ the coroner concluded.

  Chapter Three

  IS

  Despite the coroner’s verdict, the manner of Hugo’s death obsesses Sybil.

  Suicide? Henry testified, the elaboration of his answers, with their qualifications, their parentheses and their antiquated slang, clearly irritating the brisk, busy coroner, that his friend had seemed quite his usual self, in as far as anyone could be said to be quite his usual self, when he had left the house. No, there was absolutely no indication that anything was worrying or depressing him. One might, indeed, describe his whole mood as jolly, in as far as a man as thoughtful and sensitive as the, er, deceased, was ever jolly. Audrey also testified, her flared electric-blue skirt and pink blouse, open at the neck, making an even less favourable impression on the coroner than Henry’s manner had done, that, no, the deceased had had no financial or other worries and, yes, their marriage had been an entirely happy one. But the question remained: why had Hugo taken his leave of Henry, apparently to travel back to Oxford, and then, instead, have installed himself in a room in a Brighton hotel? ‘I’ve no idea,’ Henry said. ‘None at all. Unless he felt – which he had no reason for feeling – that he had outstayed his welcome with me. When one is a guest, that is always something difficult to decide.’

  Murder? Hugo had entered the hotel alone, he had had no visitors, the door of the hotel bedroom had been locked from inside, the distance from one of the balconies to another was approximately eleven feet.

  Yet Sybil feels that the truth or at least part of it has still to be revealed. What kind of business could have kept Hugo in Brighton and why should he not have stayed on with Henry, having so often stayed with him for days on end in the past? There is also the mystery of those miniature bottles of spirits scattered on the carpet. Hugo was always abstemious, even ascetic. It is difficult to think of him gulping a variety of spirits neat from their bottles. Sybil recalls a visit which the two of them once paid to an American academic, living in a furnished flat in Crouch End while on a sabbatical. Hugo, with his usual generosity, had taken along from his cellar a bottle of Chateau La Mission Haut Brion 1971, as an offering. The American, clearly not appreciating its value, said to his wife, ‘ Look what Hugo’s brought us,’ and thumped the bottle down on the table already laid for dinner in one corner of the tiny sitting room. Having given Hugo and Sybil the glasses of sherry for which they had asked – ‘Lucky I got some in, Valerie and I never touch the stuff – he had refilled his own and his wife’s glasses from a pitcher of Martinis. Hugo had watched their host and hostess for a while; then, able to bear it no longer, he arose, pointed to the bottle of claret and said, in the voice of someone attempting to placate a mugger armed with a knife, ‘I think, old fellow, you’d better put that away for some other time.’ The American was puzzled; but he did what Hugo told him.

  The manner of Hugo’s going does not obsess Henry, as it does Sybil; but Henry often thinks about it. Might that plunge on to the roof of a brand-new Volvo 176 have been deliberate, not accidental? Hugo was certainly in a state (Henry’s phrase) when he left the house. There was the discovery of the deception, which he had revealed to Henry; there was also something else, to do with the morbid relationship (again Henry’s phrase) between himself and that boy, which he had not. Henry guesses that Mrs Lockit may know the answer but he prefers not to ask her since he prefers not to jeopardize the relationship between them. Mrs Lockit is not perfect, far from it; but he does not want anything to come out into the open that might oblige him to dismiss her. For a number of years the two of them have managed ‘ to rub along together’ and though that implies an intermittent abrasiveness, he would not care to make the effort, at his age and in his state of health, of learning to rub along with someone even more prickly. There is also the question of the basement flat. Nowadays one cannot really call one’s property one’s own. It might be difficult to dislodge Mrs Lockit and the budgie of which Henry has so often heard but which he has never seen, along with all her other possessions, from the basement.

  Like baffled detectives in novels and sometimes in real life; Sybil has a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime (or, if the coroner is right, of the accident), just as she so often has a compulsion to return to it in her conversations with Audrey. (‘If he told you he’d be staying two nights with Henry, why on earth did he go to the Clarendon? And why didn’t he tell you or Henry where he would be?’) Often, lying awake on these summer dawns, she sees him, in her imagination, clutching at that awning, hears the awning ripping. She even closes her eyes, her body rigid on her bed, as his body first somersaults and then hurtles down that sheer concrete face.

  She goes over and over her automatic writing in search of the key; and eventually she also rings up Henry, convinced that he has a duplicate to that key secreted somewhere about his person. ‘Oh, Henry, I have to be in Brighton, over at Roedean, on Tuesday. Examining. I wondered if I could pop in and see you some time in the afternoon.’ She is lying, she is not examining at Roedean, though she has done so in the past; and Henry, wily as he is, knows from her slightly breathless tone that she is lying. But though he thinks of her, as he thinks of most women, as ‘really rather tiresome’, he wants, to see her for precisely the same reason that she wants to see him; she must know something about Hugo which he does not know. So he says, ‘Yes, of course, my dear. I have a little sherry party that evening. My annual one, for my good neighbours. A rather boring occasion, I’m afraid. But if you’d like to come along, well, I’d love to see you.’

  Sybil arrives in Brighton early in the afternoon and she walks down from the station, past grimy little shops selling souvenirs, dusty paperbacks and secondhand clothes, to the Front. She is glad of the keen, blustery wind, since it alleviates the vague nausea from which she has been suffering ever since she settled down to The Times crossword in a corner of an empty first-class carriage. There is a luxurious coach with wrap-around windows, net curtains and a German number plate in the courtyard outside the hotel, together with some half-dozen cars. A bored youth in uniform, his hands clasped behind his back, is eyeing a girl who is shaking a tablecloth out of a first-floor window of the house next to the hotel. Either he does not notice Sybil at all or, noticing her, has no interest in her. She stares up at the concrete face, its balconies symmetrically cantilevered, some with their awnings up and others with them down. Over the railings of one of the balconies a bathing-towel, striped green, brown and orange, flaps in the wind. Perhaps, like Hugo, it will suddenly fall; but it will fall far more slowly.

  Sybil then examines the paving of the courtyard, as though, after all these months, she expects to see some stain on its surface or even a shadow, like that which, tourists on a trip to Japan, she and Hugo once examined in Hiroshima, each thinking mournfully, though neither said it, ‘ That’s all that’s left of someone once as substantial as ourselves.’ She wants to go up to the bored youth, who has now lit a cigarette and is surreptitiously smoking it, holding it cupped in a hand (is it possible that in an age as egalitarian as this he is forbidden to smoke on duty?) and to ask him, ‘ Can you tell me which was the balcony from which my brother fell and where precisely he landed on a Volvo 176, before bouncing off it to the concrete?’ But it is unlikely that the boy would be able to enlighten her. She walks on, having learned nothing and, more surprisingly, having felt nothing. On those early mornings when she has lain awake, awaiting the moment when her digital alarm clock begins to buzz, she has always felt so much.

  She continues to walk along the front, past serried deck-chairs on which old people lie out
, their faces upturned to the sun, past ice-cream stalls and hamburger stalls, with their queues of half-naked trippers, past a pub in which two red-faced Irishmen are having a noisy quarrel. Then she stops and gazes out over the beach. Not many people are swimming today, the wind is far too cold. There is a woman standing, barefoot and motionless in a flimsy cotton frock, a lead about her neck, where the sea meets the shingle. The water laps at her ankles. She puts a hand to her mouth – that is all that Sybil sees – and then a small white dog, separated by a groin, stops rooting in a mound of rubbish left by some picnickers, pricks up its ears and eventually bounds off to join her. Sybil is puzzled. It is as though some kind of extrasensory perception existed between mistress and animal.

  She walks on. As children, she and Hugo would wander this beach looking for treasure (as they called it). There would be broken combs, tin spoons, tattered magazines, torn bathing-shoes, cheap toys, halfpennies and pennies. Once, under a deckchair, its seat ripped and sagging, Hugo had glimpsed a set of false-teeth. He wrapped them in his handkerchief and together they sought out the lifeguard, immensely excited. But the muscular, middle-aged man, the skin of his bare torso, legs and face the colour and texture of a ginger-nut, received the offering with an indifference bordering on contempt. ‘OK,’ he said, no more. Who would forget a set of false-teeth? Years later, one or other would refer to that childhood mystery.

  Henry opens the door. Although it is August, he is wearing a thick double-breasted worsted suit, a stiff collar and an old Wykehamist tie which he has tugged into a small and hard knot. ‘Last but not least,’ he says, revealing butter-coloured teeth, real, not false. ‘ I thought I heard the bell. My invaluable Mrs Lockit is getting some ice for someone. Ice with sherry! Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’ Henry thinks that Sybil is looking unusually pale; Sybil thinks that he is looking unusually flushed.

  ‘Whom don’t you know?’

  ‘Everyone.’

  Henry looks desperately around the room. ‘ I think you’ll like Mrs Hanrahan. Her daughter is at Roedean.’

  Sybil hopes that Henry will not tell this woman, whose tight, flowered dress makes her look like an excrescence of the sofa on which she is sitting by herself, that she has been examining at the school. Maliciously, knowing that Sybil has been lying, he does so; but the woman laughs and says, ‘Oh, Sir Henry, you’re years out of date. Irene is now in Mombasa.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Henry says, as though this fact had momentarily slipped his memory.

  Mrs Lockit eventually arrives with a tray. There is nothing on it except a number of small tumblers, bought from Woolworth’s, half-full of sweet sherry. Sybil takes one, aware that this dark, baleful woman, whom she has never liked, is staring down at her with a peculiar, squinting intensity. ‘And how are you keeping, madam?’ Mrs Lockit asks. She never calls people sir or madam except at these parties.

  ‘Oh, fine, thank you, fine.’ Sybil sips at her glass. Mrs Lockit remains there, almost as though she expected Sybil to drain her glass and then replace it on the tray. ‘And you?’

  ‘Mustn’t complain,’ Mrs Lockit says and at last moves, on.

  ‘Strange woman,’ Mrs Hanrahan murmurs.

  Eventually Major Hanrahan arrives, to remind his wife that they will have to get going if they’re not to be late for the theatre. ‘Pinter,’ he says. ‘God knows what I’ll make of it. My stomach always chooses to rumble in one of those pauses.’ His wife tells him, ‘That’s because you’re thinking of your dinner, instead of the play.’

  Sybil is now alone. Dreadful people, she thinks, as she always tends to do when not with her cronies. She drains what is left of the sherry, places the glass on top of a pile of ancient copies of Blackwood’s Magazine, and wanders out of the room, down the corridor and out into the garden. Mrs Lockit, shaking some potato crisps out of a packet into a bowl in the kitchen, watches her pass and, for a. brief moment, seeing something of Hugo in those fine, aristocratic features, that tilt of the head and that upright carriage, she feels a sudden pang of remorse. But that soon passes. After all, he got what was coming to him, he had only himself to blame.

  Though Henry, panama hat on head, often potters around in it, the garden is dishevelled. The grass between the beds is speckled white with daisies and the beds themselves are thick with weeds between the lanky stems of roses seldom pruned. At the far end, grass forcing itself up between the flagstones, there is a paved area, under a tattered weeping willow. The table and four chairs set out on it look as if they were made of wrought-iron painted white; but in fact they are made of plastic. An elegant woman of about forty, her hair prematurely grey, is seated alone on one of the chairs, hands folded in her lap, while she gazes out before her. She does not seem either to hear or to see Sybil approaching.

  ‘May I join you? It’s so hot and crowded in there.’

  ‘Please.’

  Sybil is sure that she has met this woman somewhere before. A former colleague? A former pupil? Or can she have been at one of Henry’s parties in the past? Except that her nose is too wide and short, almost coarse in its modelling, she is extraordinarily beautiful. She is also dressed with an elegance which, of all the women guests, only Sybil herself can rival.

  Sybil sits facing the woman. The woman looks, not at her, but out at the garden, as she was doing when Sybil approached. But there is no constraint between them.

  Eventually Sybil says, ‘Have you known Henry long?’

  ‘Henry? I hardly know him at all. But I’ve lived in the other half of this house in Codrington Villas, for, oh, five or six years.… Semi-detached acquaintances, that would describe us. We call this the Village, you know.’ Sybil knew this and had always thought it a silly affectation. ‘We each give a Village party, at least once a year. This is Henry’s.’

  ‘I expect that at the other Village parties one can get something other than cheap sherry to drink,’ Sybil says maliciously.

  ‘Usually. Yes.’

  ‘I feel sure we’ve met each other somewhere.’

  ‘Have we? People often think they’ve met actors somewhere. What that means is that they’ve met them on the stage or in cinemas or on their television screens.’

  ‘You’re an actress?’

  The woman nods. ‘Was. That’s more accurate. And you?’

  ‘I teach. I’m headmistress of a school.’

  ‘You don’t look like a headmistress.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  The woman laughs. ‘Far too elegant.’

  ‘Anyway you look like an actress. I should have guessed. You’re much the most elegant woman here.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The woman inclines her head, with the dismissive easiness of someone used to being complimented.

  Sybil looks closely at her. Then she says ‘You’re Lavinia Trent, of course.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘Well, you’re so famous.’ The woman is silent, as though. musing on that. ‘My brother reviewed your Hedda Gabler in the TLS. He said it was the finest he had ever seen. You may remember.’

  The woman shakes her head. ‘It’s strange. I seem to remember only my bad reviews. Anyway, it was kind of your brother. Is he here today?’

  ‘No. He’s dead.’

  The woman looks down at the ring, a diamond set in sapphires, on. her wedding finger, above a band of platinum. She turns it one way, then the other.

  Sybil says, ‘He died here in Brighton. An accident. Seven months ago.’

  ‘How strange. My son died here in Brighton seven months ago. Exactly seven months.’ She looks up into the willow tree, its branches trembling around them. In a low voice (‘ I’m burning your child,’ Sybil can hear her say on the stage of the Old Vic), she murmurs, ‘Oh that we could have some two hours converse with the dead.’

  Sybil feels first a shock of amazement and then one of pleasure. She has repeatedly said that line to herself since Hugo’s going. ‘Yes, if only.’

  ‘I’ve tried’, Lavinia says. ‘How I’ve tri
ed. But …’ She shrugs.

  ‘I’ve tried too. I go on trying.’

  The woman turns the ring, one way, then the other, as though it held some magic. ‘How do you try?’ she asks. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll only laugh. People always do. But I – I do this automatic writing. Sometimes I think – sometimes I believe … But there’s nothing, oh, nothing conclusive.’

  The woman nods.

  ‘And you?’ Sybil asks.

  The woman laughs. ‘Well, last week, a friend, a young actor, took me to this man, a friend of his, who does this – this psychometry.’ The woman looks at Sybil, as though she expects her not to know what psychometry means. Sybil nods. The woman goes on; she tells the story.

  The young actor, who played Tesman to her Hedda, told her about this man, a perfectly ordinary little man, who worked behind a counter at Barker’s during the day and who, in the evenings, would give sittings to people. He lived with his wife, whom Lavinia never saw, and three children, whom she did not see either but whom she heard, rampaging in a room above them, in a semi-detached house in Putney. He had a little, wispy beard, which looked as if it had been stuck on to his chin, large hands and feet, and narrow, sloping shoulders. He spoke with such softness, in a monotonous, nasal voice, that it was often difficult, what with the noise overhead, to catch everything that he was saying. She gave him a scarf which had been her last present to her son and he had placed it over his bony knees and had then run his hands over it. with a slow, smoothing gesture. ‘I see a theatre,’ he said after a while, in a hesitant, puzzled voice, and she had not replied, ‘Well, yes, I’m an actress’ or even nodded, because she and the young actor had agreed that in no way would either of them betray anything. But she was not greatly impressed. No doubt, like Sybil now, he had recognized her and therefore had not been taken in by her assumed name. ‘A theatre. The curtain is rising. An actress. And a famous writer.’ That had given her a jolt, because in the past, well, there had been this famous writer and eventually she had married him, though the marriage had not lasted. ‘ Lovers.’ The hands continued to stroke the scarf, with those long, slow, smoothing gestures and she found herself now looking not at him but at them. He began to speak of constant quarrels between the actress and the writer – and that too had amazed her, because she and that man, whom eventually she had married, had quarrelled incessantly. The actress was ill, dangerously ill, and while she was in – what? a hospital? a sanatorium? – the writer, who had written a play for her, gave the leading role in it to another, younger actress and that actress became his mistress. Now Lavinia was bewildered, because she was as strong as a horse, she had never really been ill in her life, certainly not dangerously ill, and though her former husband had written some plays, some pretty dreadful plays for her, he had never, during their life together, given the leading role in any of them to a rival. The man began to falter, as though he sensed that, having at first won her over to belief, he had now lost her. He began to fold the scarf, picking up either tasselled end in the palms of his hands and flipping them over and then making another, similar fold and another. He held it out to her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do any more. I’m tired.’ He looked at his watch and gave a smile, ‘And my wife and kids will be wanting their supper.’ The young actor who had brought her had already told her that the charge was ten pounds and she had the money ready, not in her bag, but in an envelope in the pocket of her jacket. She drew it out and leaned forward. The man took it from her, with no word of thanks and placed it on an occasional table beside him. Then he gave her a wan smile. ‘ I don’t know if that was any good,’ he said and, not wanting to disappoint him, though she herself, having hoped to hear something of her son, was disappointed, she replied, ‘ Well, part of it was right. A major part of it,’ she added, though that was not strictly true.