Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  Maureen returns with two tablets in the palm of one hand and a glass of misty water in the other.

  ‘Bless you,’ Mrs O’Connor says. She takes the tablets and glass from her, and then, having put one of the tablets on her tongue and having sipped at the water, she throws her head back abruptly a number of times, the muscles in her neck going into spasm. ‘ It’s all I can do to swallow the blessed things,’ she says, having at last succeeded with the first. She then goes through the same process with the second.

  Sybil tells her, ‘I’m sure you’d find it just as easy or even easier if you didn’t tilt back your head.’ But Mrs O’Connor, as so often when people give her advice, does not seem to have heard.

  Eventually, the two women get up to go. Not a moment too soon, Mrs O’Connor thinks. The kids want their tea. Bridget hands Maureen a five-pound note – ‘Use that for something for yourself and your brother.’ In giving the money to the girl, instead of to her mother, it is as though she were acknowledging that that moment of literal illumination by the window had somehow, however obliquely, been Maureen’s doing.

  On the stairs, Sybil, who is walking ahead, turns round to ask, ‘Are you sure about the curtain?’

  Bridget nods. ‘As sure as I’m sure of anything that has ever happened to me.’

  ‘Interesting that Mrs O’C started one of her migraines immediately after. And that Maureen had just come home.’

  When they have left the housing estate, with its broken or blackened trees, each within a circlet of wire, its low garages and coal bunkers daubed with graffiti and its group of children, boys and girls, noisily kicking a football about on a yellowed patch of grass, Sybil says, ‘I could do with a drink.’

  ‘So could I.’

  ‘Let’s try that pub over there.’

  Bridget is surprised. She has never imagined Sybil entering a pub, certainly not one in a working-class district like Stepney. When Sybil asks her what she wants, she giggles and says, ‘I suppose we ought really to settle for port and lemon.’ But, in the event, each has a gin and tonic, which they carry over to a corner, where they can sit, inconspicuously behind a pinball machine.

  ‘Did the police ever retrieve your car?’ Sybil asks.

  ‘Yes. The day before yesterday. In Streatham. It was in an awful mess – the front bumper had been all but knocked off, one headlamp was smashed, there was a scrape and a huge dent along a door. He must have been in a smash. And the inside …!’ Bridget pulls a face ever her drink. She does not want to think about the car, much less about the circumstances leading up to its theft. Those demons, erratic and malevolent, will not leave her alone.

  ‘What a brute!’ Sybil says. ‘One would like to see him flogged within an inch of his life.’ Neither Bridget nor she herself is wholly certain that she is joking. ‘And after all you’ve been through already.’

  To Bridget it seems that she has not been through the events of the last months but that they, like some corrosive poison, have been through her.

  Sybil begins to talk about her automatic writing. Before the Falklands crisis occurred and before she knew anything about the Islands, a sentence appeared in one of the scripts: ‘The goose walks the green, the white flag is black.’ She thinks now, with her knowledge of Goose Green and of what happened there to Bridget’s husband, that it must have been prophetic. Bridget shares her belief.

  ‘I’ve spent the last days combing through my scripts, reams and reams of them. And, since that letter of mine in the Journal last month, a number of people have begun to send me theirs. I’m deluged with them! Most of them are useless. But there are oddities, cross correspondences. For example, as you probably know, Hugo’s chief scholarly interest, before he and I began to collaborate on our edition of the Meredith Letters, was in early drama and, in particular, in tropes and liturgical plays.’ Bridget who is an unliterary woman, has no idea what is meant by tropes or liturgical plays but she nods, as though she did. ‘I expect you’ve heard of the tenth-century Quem Quaeritis – some people have called it the first modern play, even though it consists of only four lines.’ Something in Bridget’s expression tells Sybil that, for all her pretence of eager comprehension, she is wholly at sea. Sybil adopts the tone which she uses to one of her dimmer pupils, ‘ The play was performed in churches at Easter. A priest would stand by the altar. He would be playing the role of the Angel who acted as guard at Christ’s sepulchre. Three other priests in drag – impersonating the three Marys – would approach him and ask for the whereabouts of Christ. Now Hugo of course knew the four lines by heart; but of the three scripts between which I have found cross correspondences, one emanates from me – I, of course, know the lines – and two from housewives who are extremely unlikely ever to have heard them, much less to have memorized them. Embedded in my script is the sentence in Latin Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, O Christicolae? – ‘‘Who is it that you are seeking in the sepulchre, O Christian women.’’ In a script, of almost the same date, from a farmer’s wife in Yorkshire, I found the words, ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth’’ repeated four times – and Jesum Nasarenum crucifixum or ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified’’ is the answer given by the Angel. In another script, also of approximately the same date, produced by a shop assistant in Bath – unknown both to the farmer’s wife and to me until she got in touch with me – I found ‘‘He has arisen.’’ And ‘‘He has arisen’’ or, in Latin, Surrexit, is what the Angel then goes on to assure the three women.’

  As Bridget stares at Sybil with unnaturally wide-open eyes, the tips of the fingers of one hand pressed to her lower lip, Sybil wonders irritably if she has really seen the point. ‘All this may be coincidence. Many people would say that it was. But I feel sure that Hugo has been the controlling communicator, making a definite statement through three entirely different people, all unknown to each other and only one known to him, about the certainty of resurrection. The ingenuity is typical of him. Clearly there was a prearranged plan in the three different communications; but none of us made that plan, since, at the time that the communications were received, I certainly did not know of the existence of the other two, even though, admittedly, they knew of my existence through my writings in the Journal.’ Sybil sips her gin and tonic. ‘It’s exciting,’ she says. ‘Heartening.’

  Bridget does her best to look excited and heartened; but what happened to her in that small, frowsty room on the housing estate was far more exciting and heartening, even if – as in the case of that terrible vision of her father’s death in the Western Desert, which she had at the age of seven – people would merely ascribe it to hysteria.

  Suddenly, Bridget wants to talk about that vision. ‘I’ve never told you this,’ she begins, irritating Sybil with her constant tendency to go off at a tangent (butterfly-brained, Sybil calls her). ‘ It was during the war, when I was seven.’

  As she has repeatedly told the story over the years, she has found it harder and harder to distinguish between what actually happened and what she has added, grain by grain, in order to achieve a neater shape and stronger consistency. The father was in the Western Desert, the child had known that; but her mother and her grandparents never told her that he might be in danger, much less killed. One morning she awoke extraordinarily early – Bridget can still hear the birds chirping in the dim garden of the rectory in which her grandparents lived and feel the cool of that summer dawn on her bare arms and legs as she threw off her bedclothes – and she had then known, known with total certainty, that something had happened to her father, though she did not yet know what. She lay in mounting terror on her bed under the open window. Then she heard a strange sound from the washbasin in the corner: a kind of turbulent threshing, as of a fish in water. She got off the bed and went over to the basin and looked down, horrified and fascinated. Blood kept shooting up in spurts from the waste pipe, to splash the sides of the basin and then trickle back. She watched for a long time. Then she ran out of the room, crossed the landing and banged on the door of her grandpa
rents, since that was nearer than her mother’s. Her grandfather, the vicar, appeared in his nightshirt, his eyes bleary and his face unshaven and creased down one side. ‘Come, come quickly!’ She grabbed him by the hand and dragged him towards the door of her room. ‘Look in the washbasin, look in the washbasin, Grandpa! Look at the blood.’

  The old man looked. There was nothing there.

  ‘What blood?’

  ‘Oh, it’s gone!’ She put a hand down, touched the pristine enamel. ‘But it was all splashed, all splashed here, splashed with blood.’

  ‘Now come on. Get back to bed. It’s far too early for all this nonsense. It’s not yet five o’clock. Come along! Back to bed!’ He lifted her up with a grunt and carried her to the bed and threw her across it. ‘Now, no more of this nonsense, young lady! I have to get my beauty sleep if I’m to give a good sermon.’ The day was Sunday.

  ‘But there was blood, there was!’ It was bubbling up. Making a noise. I saw it, heard it.’

  The door closed behind him.

  Her father had been killed by a sniper’s bullet in his throat. He had bled to death before anyone could do anything for him. He had died at the hour of her vision.

  ‘My family never wished to talk about it. Odd. You’d have thought that people so religious would have found some confirmation of all they believed. But, no, they did not wish to talk about it and they did not wish me to talk about it. I never did until I grew up and read that pamphlet of Hugo’s – Apparitions and Survival.’

  ‘You must meet Lavinia Trent,’ Sybil says.

  ‘The actress?’

  Sybil nods. There has been something histrionic about the way in which this totally unhistrionic woman has told her story. That is why Sybil has been put in mind of Lavinia. ‘I think you’d get on together. Though you’re wholly unlike.’ She does not specify the points of unlikeness; it would be too cruel. ‘She, too, has had a recent – death.’ Sybil, so straightforward and strong, hates such softening euphemisms as ‘bereavement’ or ‘loss’. ‘Her son.’

  ‘How awful!’

  ‘Yes.’ Then Sybil adds drily, ‘Though I rather doubt if she ever loved her son as you loved Roy. But she’s taken his death very badly. Remorse perhaps?’

  ‘Remorse?’

  ‘ ‘‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done and done those things which we ought not to have done.’’ When people die, that thought haunts one. I know I often think it about Hugo.’

  Two youths in overalls, their hair piebald with splashes of white distemper, have come over to the pinball machine. They glance at the two well-dressed, middle-aged women, talking in quietly confidential voices to each other, with empty glasses before them, and then look away. Too old. Hags.

  Sybil picks up her bag.

  ‘Shall we be on our way?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ The terrible thing is that, whenever Bridget is now on her way, she has no idea where that way may be tending.

  Sybil calls over her shoulder to the moustached, red-faced man in a blue blazer behind the bar, ‘Goodbye’and he responds, ‘Goodbye, ladies, thank you kindly for your custom,’ in a parody of a military voice, which disturbs and startles Bridget.

  Outside, Bridget says, ‘Perhaps I’ll, give it a try.’

  ‘Give what a try?’ Bridget has this habit, maddening to Sybil, of assuming that others have been miraculously privy to some train of thought that has been going on within her.

  ‘This automatic writing.’

  ‘It takes up an awful lot of time.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got time. All the time in the world.’

  Chapter Six

  WAS

  Bridget’s two sons, seventeen-year-old Eric and thirteen-year-old Oliver, moved viewers even more than she did when they appeared on television. All three of them looked and behaved as people would hope themselves to look and behave in such circumstances but, in many cases, would never succeed in doing. They were clearly grief-stricken but they showed none of the wildness, disorder and self-absorption of grief. Bridget was wearing a simple, brown dress, a shade darker than her hair. A puffiness about the eyes suggested that she had been weeping. The boys flanked her, each in grey flannels, tie and pullover, with grave, stoical faces. Friends later told her that she should have refused to be interviewed, it was an unforgivable intrusion; but she replied, ‘ No, I felt it to be my duty.’ Then, at least, the friends countered, she should have refused to involve the boys. But the boys, at that brief time of solidarity, had wanted to be involved.

  ‘This news must have come as a terrible shock to you, Mrs Nagel?’

  For a hysterical moment, equally invisible to the interviewer and the camera, Bridget had had the impulse to answer, ‘No, it came as a lovely surprise,’ so idiotic was the question. But instead she nodded, putting a protective arm around Oliver’s narrow shoulders.

  ‘Do you find that you regret that the whole operation ever took place?’

  ‘Well, of course, I’d have preferred it not to have taken place – and him not to have gone.’ Oliver, small and beady-eyed, looked up at her, like some baby bird at its mother. He dreaded that she might cry. But her voice was steady, her eyes wholly tearless, as she continued, ‘ Of course, I’d have preferred it if my husband – and so many others, Argentines too – had not been killed. But, well, he was a journalist, a wonderful journalist, and he couldn’t miss a story, not one like that. He survived Korea, Vietnam, Salvador …’ She lowered her head, biting her lower lip, and then raised it again as though in a valiant, doomed effort to stare down the intrusive camera. ‘I’m proud that he did what the job demanded, did it like that. Yes, I’m proud.’

  ‘I’m sure your sons feel your pride.’

  ‘I think so. I believe so.’ Again Oliver turned his head upwards, like some famished bird waiting for its mother to feed it. Eric stared ahead of him. He hated the idea of the war and the idea of his father’s death but a loyalty to his mother and to the memory of the father with whom he had never really got on made him dissimulate.

  He swallowed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said. ‘We feel very proud of what Daddy – my father did. It was typical of him. He did not see why a journalist should be any safer – or have any more privileges – than the men who were fighting.’

  When the interview was over, the three of them re-entered the Georgian-modern house on the outskirts of Chichester. Eric resolved, silently, to mow the lawn the next morning, as a kind of propitation of the shade of his father, who would so often exclaim, ‘Oh, for God’s sake Eric, you’d think that when I’m not here you’d see to the lawn.’ His father had always preferred Oliver, who was docile, unintellectual and so good at games that, at his first term at Dartmouth, he had been chosen as fly-half for the Rugby football second eleven.

  ‘We must try to go on with our lives in the ordinary way,’ Bridget said, not for the first time. ‘That’s what Daddy would have wanted.’ But it was difficult to go on with one’s life in the ordinary way with reporters, cameramen, visitors, telephone calls and letters perpetually distracting one. ‘You must both do what you want to do and not worry about a me.’

  But though the boys would have been far happier following this instruction, they felt, guiltily, that they must not abandon their mother. When, forgetting their bereavement, one of them would shout to the other, crack a joke or burst into laughter, a terrible shame would follow; and Bridget would make that shame worse by the bruised, stricken look that would pass across her face.

  From New York, Bridget’s daughter, Pamela, rang daily. ‘I wish I could come over to be with you. But Mel has this conference in Detroit and I couldn’t bring the children and I don’t know who’d look after them for me. I feel real bad about it.’ She was so impressionable that, after some half-dozen years of marriage, she had already acquired both an American accent and a repertoire of American idioms.

  ‘Oh, don’t do that, dear. I fully understand.’

  ‘Everyone here is one hundred per cent behind the Bri
tish,’ Pamela assured her, as though she herself had never been British. ‘Don’t bother yourself about that hag at the United Nations.’ Bridget could not think who this ‘hag’ might be. She did not ask.

  One night Bridget found Oliver sobbing in bed, his face turned to the wall as the sound, an effortful hiccoughing, reverberated round and round his bedroom. When she tried to comfort him, he pulled away from her arm. ‘Oh, go away!’ he cried out fretfully. ‘Go away!’ He was ashamed that she had seen him do what he had been so careful not to do in front of those television cameras.

  For a few days, Eric ate little, and when he did so, there would be an abstracted look on his face, as he chewed slowly, his eyes carefully avoiding having to look at his mother, his brother or, worst of all, the snapshot of his father in battle-dress in some jungle, in the silver frame on the reproduction Queen Anne walnut sideboard.

  For the next few days, friends of the family – two of them women whose husbands were away on service in the Falklands and who, in their visit, kept asking themselves the unspoken question, ‘ Would I behave as well as she is doing?’ – continually appeared up the drive, some in cars and some on foot, often accompanied by children and dogs.

  ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do for you?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Oh, poor Bridget!’ Bridget would shrug, her mouth twitching.

  Or, ‘Why don’t you get away from the house? The change might help. Come and stay with us.’ (Pamela had suggested the same thing, though she had added dubiously, ‘I’m sure the two girls won’t mind mucking in together so that you can have one of their rooms.’) But Bridget would reply that she preferred to be where she was. She had never greatly cared either for travel or for staying with other people. Roy had laughed at her for that – ‘ You made the wrong choice in marrying a hobo like myself.’ The wrong choice? Perhaps, after all, she had.

  Then, inevitably, the visitors became less frequent, the letters and telephone calls fewer. There was a victory and people told her that they expected that that made her feel better, at least Roy’s death and all those other deaths had not been for nothing, and she replied, wanly, that yes, she supposed that it did. Oliver spent more and more time away from home, either sailing with friends at Bosham or bicycling around to make brass rubbings in churches. Eric, shamefaced, asked if his girlfriend could come and stay and Bridget, who had never agreed with Roy’s verdict that she was ‘a common little tart’, replied, ‘ Yes, of course’. But Eric then announced that, since she had a job in a boutique in the King’s Road, it might be easier if he were to go up to London than if she were to come to Chichester. The truth was that Chichester bored her and was beginning to bore him.