Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  ‘Yes, do go, darling.’ Bridget did not ask where he would be staying, since she already knew that it would be in the flat which the girl shared with four other people, male and female, in Earls Court Square.

  ‘But are you sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘I hate to leave you.’

  ‘I’ll have Oliver.’

  ‘But he’s never here.’

  ‘And the Nicholsons up the road. I can always go over to them for a bit. They’re always asking me.’

  ‘It’ll only be for tomorrow night and perhaps the night after.’ But, in the event, it was for almost a week.

  Then Oliver reminded his mother that the French cousins, tough boys, with hands greasy from the motorbikes that they were constantly cannibalizing, had asked him to go and stay with them during the summer holidays. In fact, it was their mother, Bridget’s half-sister, married to a French garage-owner, who had asked him. Bridget said that yes, of course, she hadn’t forgotten and he must get away. Oliver felt not so much drawn to the cousins, whom he both admired and dreaded, as driven by bereavement from Chichester. He would not forget his father but he did not want to be reminded of him.

  Then it was Eric, who announced that Carrie wanted to throw up her job and go to stay at an ashram near Delhi and that he would like to accompany her. Otherwise, he explained, he might lose her, lose her forever. His father would probably have replied to that, ‘And a good thing too!’ but Bridget was more sympathetic. Again she said, as she had said to Oliver, that of course he must go, she would be perfectly all right, she might even go somewhere herself. That night, as she lay sleepless in the high double bed which now seemed so vast, she went over her finances in her mind, to decide how much money she could spare each of the boys for their trips. She had never been good at money; she had always left that kind of thing to Roy, even though he had hardly been better at it.

  On the telephone from New York, Pamela was indignant, ‘ Well, I really do think that one of them should have stayed with you. I can’t understand it. It seems to me most thoughtless, even callous.’ But Bridget paid little attention, knowing that the indignation was merely a symptom of guilt.

  Bridget began to spend more and more time at the Institute for Paranormal Studies. When, at the station or on the train, some friends would ask her what she would be doing in London, she would answer vaguely that there was this show she thought she might take in, she had to see a friend of hers in hospital, one of Roy’s relatives had asked her up. She guessed rightly that most of these decent, sensible, down-to-earth people would think it odd and sad if she were to tell them, ‘Actually I‘ m going to attend a seance.’

  At the second of these regular visits to the Institute she had run into Hugo. Instead of treating her, as he usually did, with a vague, distant courtesy, he made an effort, since he had learnt of her bereavement, to be friendly to her, introducing Henry to her and telling her of these two boys, these two quite remarkable boys, who had this amazing ability to transmit information to each other by ESP. There was to be a demonstration at the Institute the following Wednesday – perhaps she had heard about it? Bridget nodded. Then she must be sure to come, Hugo said, and Henry added, ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.’

  But, in the event, she was disappointed, as she had been disappointed in all her efforts to make some kind of contact with Roy. It had been an extremely hot day and the atmosphere in the Institute, with its skylights high up in its vaulted roof, was all but unbearable. The more fragile of the two boys – they were so unlike each other that it was hard to think of them as twins – had suddenly become hysterical, screaming that he could not go on, and had then had what looked like some kind of fit. The combination of the airlessness of the hall and the scene that had taken place in it left her feeling shaken and nauseated long after she. had stepped out into the street.

  On the train home, travelling before the rush hour, she found a first-class carriage to herself by skilfully avoiding the elderly man, a retired naval commander, who had ceaselessly talked to her about his garden throughout the journey up. As she looked out of the window at the parched countryside, she felt a similar parchedness within her. She might have been a husk. All flesh is grass. The dean had said these words at the funeral, plangently sonorous. And not only all flesh but also the bones within it. The lips approached the juddering flame of the candle, they blew. Darkness. ‘I have a message here for a lady – I think the name begins with A but it could be B – a lady with a recent bereavement. It’s her, yes, I think it’s her brother but it could be her husband. Now does that apply to anyone here?’ Nonsense. She wanted to believe that the ‘lady’ was herself, that the B was for Bridget and that the husband was her own. But she couldn’t. She had even come to doubt whether, so many years ago, a seven-year-old girl with plaits dangling to her shoulders had really stood on tiptoe and looked down as, with a turbulent threshing, blood had spurted up from the waste pipe around the sides of a high, old-fashioned basin. Perhaps she had imagined it all. Hysteria. Coincidence. Perhaps. That was why Mrs O’Connor and Maureen and Sean and that disembodied spirit or spirits, mischievously or malevolently smashing milk bottles against the half-open door of the refrigerator, scattering clothes down the hall as though in a paper chase or tipping Mrs O’Connor out of her favourite chair in an ungainly bundle on the floor, so much fascinated her. If, between them, they could defy the physical rules decreeing that in certain circumstances all matter must behave in a certain way, then might it not be possible that that other rule of inevitable decay, death and extinction might not also be defied? She hoped it, she all but believed it.

  As she began walking briskly up from the station, a small, almost childlike figure, in a pale blue coat and skirt and a matching pale blue toque, the retired naval commander, avoided in the train, drew up in his Saab. ‘May I offer you a lift, Mrs Nagel?’

  ‘Oh, that’s very kind of you.’ She was flustered; and to the old widower, with his red, good-natured, slightly lascivious face, that was something nattering. ‘But it’s no distance at all. I could do with a walk.’

  ‘Nonsense. Hop in. It’s far too hot.’

  Reluctantly, she obeyed him.

  ‘Been to the theatre?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Thought I might see that Shaw play. What’s it called? On the Rocks. Well, we’re even more on the rocks now than when he wrote it.’ He chuckled as though the thought gave him satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’ She was thinking of that strange, pale boy, so unlike either Oliver or Eric, screaming out ‘No, no!’ and then writhing and twitching on the floor, with Hugo kneeling beside him.

  The car grated up the drive. ‘My word! Your lawn could do with some cutting.’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so. My husband usually did it. And now my two boys are away. I suppose I must do it myself.’

  ‘I’ll come by. Glad to do it for you. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, if this weather continues. How about that?’

  ‘Oh, really … I don’t want you to take all that trouble …’ She did not know what to say.

  ‘Delighted. Have far too little to occupy me.’

  She got out of the car, ‘Thank you so much.’ She knew that she ought to invite him in for a drink or at least a cup of tea; but she did not do so. ‘Please don’t worry about the lawn. Please!’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  When she went into the kitchen, to get herself a cup of tea, she saw that, in hurrying out that morning, she had left the light on. Leaving lights on was something she was always doing, and to forestall her doing so had been an obsession with Roy. Before they left the house, he would run up the stairs to look in bedroom, bathroom, lavatory, kitchen; and if, despite this vigilance, they returned to find a light none the less burning – in the linen cupboard, in the scullery now used for the washing machine and dishwasher, in one of the two empty guest rooms – he would shout at her, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! Our bills
go up and up and you know we’re not made of money.’ There was no one now to shout at her and, as she stared up at the bulb, she felt a clammy desolation.

  She went to bed early and, after lying awake for a long time, trying not to imagine the exact circumstances in which Roy had died and yet failing to do so, she plunged into sleep as though into a sea full of monsters. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed so much in my life,’ she remarked once to Eric. But when he had asked her to describe her dreams, she had been unable to do so. She only knew that she always awoke with a sense of having endured something unspeakable, while drifting, half-conscious, under an anaesthetic. ‘You must remember something,’ Eric insisted. She shook her head, mute in despair. Now, once again, she plunged into that sea, to suffer that violation of which, on opening her eyes on the first glimmer of dawn, she could remember nothing other than the emotions of horror and pain which it aroused. But with those emotions of horror and pain there were gratitude and relief. For what? One strand of her dreams had been like a rainbow in a sky of otherwise baleful leadenness. But she could not now, her eyes on the ceiling above and her arms resting, above the bedclothes, straight along her sides, remember the details, hard though she tried. She got off the bed, as she always did nowadays, with an ache and stiffness of the bones such as might have followed some long, arduous climb of the kind which Roy, who punished others as well as himself in his pursuit of self-discipline, would inflict on her on their holidays in the Lake District or on the Welsh mountains. It was only just past five.

  She had an impulse to go out into the cool garden and weed the herbaceous border in nothing but her nightdress and slippers; but the paperboy or the milkman, both always early, would see her and there would be talk, not malicious but pitying, among the neighbours, and she did not want that. So, instead, she went into the kitchen and began to cream the butter and sugar for a cake, until, suddenly, she remembered that she herself did not eat cake, the boys were away and Roy was dead. She ran hot water from the tap into the bowl and then tipped out the mixture, her hand to the switch of the waste-disposal unit. Grease still clung to the sides of the stainless-steel sink; she did not bother.

  The daily, a young girl married to one of the electricians at the theatre, arrived with a packet of passiflora tea. She was a vegetarian, who enjoyed describing how she had had her only child at home, standing up, by the natural method. The tea, she said, was not dangerous like those tranquillizers and sleeping pills that Bridget was always swallowing. In fact, though Bridget’s doctor had prescribed both tranquillizers and sleeping pills, Bridget rarely took them. But she did not argue with the girl, who treated her with the same slightly hectoring protectiveness with which she treated the child brought with her. Instead, she put the packet of tea on a shelf in the kitchen, among all the things bought, like so many of her clothes, on an extravagant impulse and then never used. ‘How kind of you,’ she said; and, yes, the girl was kind, genuinely kind.

  Later, the two of them drank cups of the tea together and ate crumbling, wholemeal biscuits. The tea had a bitter, vaguely unpleasant taste but Bridget, not wishing to hurt the girl’s feelings, persisted with it. The child lay, fat and contented, in its pram beside them. So calm was it that it might have sucked passiflora and not milk from its mother when, unselfconsciously, she had unbuttoned her blouse and pulled out one of her firm, white breasts. ‘Any news of the boys?’ the girl asked. Like everyone else, she thought that they should not have left their mother at such a time. ‘I had a card from Oliver and a telephone call from Eric.’ Bridget did not add that the postcard had nothing more informative on it than ‘Having a super time, Love Oliver’ or that Eric had reversed the charges – which must have been enormous from India – and had then said little except that he was getting over a go of dysentery and was running out of money.

  Eventually, the girl left. Bridget stood at the window and watched her, as with that gracefully swaying walk of hers, her head held high, she pushed the pram down the drive and out into the lane. ‘She’s happy,’ Bridget thought with a pang of envy. ‘Absolutely happy.’ On her feet, the girl was wearing a pair of raffia sandals, laced about the ankles, which, she had told Bridget proudly, her husband had made for her. She was now on her way to make him a leek-and-potato pie. She had promised that she would also make a small pie for Bridget, to bring with her the following morning, even though Bridget, careful about her figure, never touched either potatoes or pastry.

  It was as Bridget was eating a solitary luncheon of cold chicken wing and a watercress salad that she heard the front door chime. The chimes had been there when she and Roy had bought the house and, though Roy had frequently said that they were as horribly twee and lower-middle-class as gnomes in the garden or flying ducks on the wall and that they really must have them removed and a bell installed, somehow, like so many other improvements, which they promised each other, the change was never made. Hell! It. must be the naval commander come to mow the grass, she. had forgotten about his promise. Running her tongue over her teeth to remove any traces of food, she went to the door and opened it.

  It was not the commander but an extraordinarily handsome, extraordinarily pale young man, with one foot in plaster, the toes bare. He was in slacks and open-necked, short-sleeved shirt.

  ‘Mrs Nagel?’ he asked hesitantly.

  She nodded.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my ringing your bell like this – on an off-chance.’

  She stared at him, waiting for an explanation, but, as he edged nearer the door, the iron under the plaster scraping on the paving, he seemed to be in no hurry to give her one. He screwed up his eyes, the muscles of his jaws tensing, as though the movement forward had caused him pain. Then he smiled. ‘I was passing through here on my way home to the West Country. And I suddenly thought ‘‘ That’s where Roy had his home’’ and so I looked in my address book … Of course I should have rung first. Bad manners, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So you knew my husband?’

  He nodded. She stood aside for him and he limped in. In the hall, he looked around him, as unhurried as someone returning home, and then, turning to her, said, ‘I’d better introduce myself. Michelmore, Tim Michelmore. I expect your husband mentioned me.’

  She frowned.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I daresay he did.’

  ‘Lieutenant. He was attached to our unit.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ She began to walk down the hall towards the sitting room and he limped behind her. She could hear the clank, clank, clank of that iron on the stone floor, wherever there was no rug. ‘Have you eaten or can I offer you something?’

  ‘Well, to tell the truth, I haven’t eaten. But if you’ve already done so, please don’t bother.’

  ‘No bother. None at all. I’ve just had some cold chicken and salad. There’s a lot more left. Would that do for you?’

  ‘Smashing.’ There was something boyishly immature about the choice of word and the way in which he said it, just as there was something boyishly immature about his whole appearance.

  ‘Do you mind eating in the kitchen? I do most of my eating there now.’

  ‘Good God, no!’

  ‘Roy hated kitchen meals. He said they were squalid.’

  ‘Well, he was something of a stickler, wasn’t he?’

  She nodded ruefully, as she began to get down a plate for him.

  ‘Of course, we admired him for that. The way he always kept up appearances, insisted that everything should be as normal as possible, however abnormal the conditions.’ He sucked in his breath. ‘Yes, we admired him for that. Terrific chap.’

  She began to set out plate, knife, fork, napkin, opposite the disorder of her own half-finished meal. ‘ Would you like some beer or some wine? We have both.’ She often found herself saying ‘we’, when she should now say ‘I’.

  ‘I’m not really a beer drinker. But don’t bother about opening a bottle of wine just for me. Water will be terrific.’

  ‘Oh,
I’ll join you in a glass. Why not?’ She opened the door from the kitchen to the cellar. She had rarely been down there, not once since Roy’s death. It was he who would fetch up the wine. After his death, it was Eric who would do so. ‘Come and help me choose.’ She switched on the light and began to descend the steps, with him limping, the handle of his stick over his arm, behind her. ‘Are you sure you can manage? I didn’t think about your foot.’

  ‘Yes, I can manage, thank you.’

  ‘White or red? Roy always said it was just chichi to insist on white with chicken.’

  ‘Yes. I remember his saying that.’ He was eager to confirm it. ‘He used to prefer red with chicken. Didn’t he?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well, then, let’s have a red.’’

  She held up a bottle. ‘This?’ She did not know it but Roy had been extremely proud of that Beychevelle 1966.

  The young man squinted at the label with eyes, green and dark-ringed, which were set wide apart in his triangular face. ‘Super.’

  They remounted and, after the young man had opened’the bottle, seated themselves, facing each other, at the kitchen table. He looked around him appreciatively, ‘ Cosy,’ he said. ‘Roy was wrong. I’d much rather be here than in the dining room.’