Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  He heaved the suitcase off the bed. Then she insisted on taking it from him. ‘You’ll find it easier to get down the stairs without it to obstruct you. I can manage it. It’s no weight at all. And I’m good at carrying things. Roy trained me on our hikes.’

  ‘He even tried to train us!’ He laughed. ‘God, how we sometimes hated that keenness of his – even while we loved him.’

  She put the suitcase into the boot of the Mercedes, suddenly sad, after her previous exhilaration, that Roy’s messenger would drive off now, that she would go back into an empty house, and that, except when he returned briefly to give back the car, she might never again see him.

  He looked into her face, stooping slightly, with the tender concern of a parent looking into the face of an unhappy child. ‘You’ve been so kind to me. So welcoming and hospitable. I’ll write from Osborne – with my cheque of course – just as soon as everything is sorted out. But don’t be too impatient. As I said, it may take a day or two.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry.’

  ‘At all events, I’ll be back with the car and the suitcase and the other things this time two weeks hence.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother about the suitcase and the things. Just be sure to bring back the car,’ she answered in joke.

  ‘Of course. Everything … Goodbye.’ Then he did a startling thing. He moved shyly towards her, bent down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Thanks.’

  She stood on the porch, one hand shielding her eyes against the late evening sun, as the car crunched round the half-oval of the drive and then gathered speed towards the gate. A hand came out of the window, it waved. She could not see him, with the sunlight flashing on the back window. She raised her hand, she waved it from side to side. Her hand felt strangely heavy, as though it were not a part of her.

  The days passed. No letter came from Osborne. Could it be that he had not arrived there safely? Eventually she telephoned. A brisk woman’s voice answered. ‘Lieutenant Michelmore? One moment please.’ A silence. Then, ‘There’s no one of that name here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, quite sure. I’ve just been through the list.’

  ‘He’d have arrived, oh, on Monday of last week.’

  ‘One moment, please.’ Another silence. Then, ‘No, I’m afraid we’ve no note of a Lieutenant Michelmore arriving that day – or since. I think there must have been some mistake.’

  ‘You are the officers’ convalescent home?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And there’s no other one on the island?’

  ‘No, no other. Of course, there are a lot of private convalescent homes.’ The woman was trying to be helpful. ‘And a lot of hospitals and nursing homes.’

  ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  Bridget stood for a long time by the telephone, hearing, in memory, that grate of the iron on the flagstones at which she was now staring down. Grate, grate. Hard, remorseless. But surely no one, no one in this world, could be so cruel? Something must have happened to him, there must have been some mistake.

  Ellen arrived, swaying up the drive as she pushed the pram before her. She had been lying out in the sun and her face, bare arms and legs were attractively tanned. She was talking to the child, fixedly staring up at her, as though he were an adult. Bridget could hear her through the open window, ‘I must remember to call in at the cleaner’s on the way back. I forgot yesterday and the day before that. I must remember. Otherwise Daddy’s going to be cross with me.’ Ellen was constantly forgetting things.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Ellen asked as soon as she saw Bridget’s pale, unhappy face gleaming at her from the chair at the far end of the shadowy hall. ‘Has something happened?’

  Bridget put a hand on the telephone beside her, as though to assure herself of its reality and therefore of the reality of the conversation that had just taken place. ‘I’ve had a shock,’ she said.

  ‘You look as if you had. What is it?’

  Ellen, hugging the child to her with one hand, came over and put the other hand, firm and consolatory, on Bridget’s shoulder.

  Bridget told her.

  Ellen, who had now perched, the child still held against her, on a chest in the hall, drew in her breath, her brows knitted. ‘Well, I did wonder,’ she said. ‘ But I didn’t like to say anything.’

  She was always amazed by the extent of Bridget’s innocence and credulity. She was now in her forties, she had had three children, she had lived in Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuwait; and yet she believed anything that anyone told her, just as she believed in all that spiritualistic nonsense of hers.

  ‘Oh, I wish you had!’

  ‘I didn’t feel it was really my place.’ Once Ellen had attempted to argue with Bridget about a local medium, and that had been the only occasion on which the two of them. had all but had a row.

  ‘I wonder what I should do.’

  ‘Go to the police! That’s the first thing.’

  ‘I find it so hard to believe … Almost impossible … I mean – he was so convincing.’

  ‘Conmen always are. It’s their profession, after all.’

  Bridget still found it almost impossible to believe after she had been in touch with the police. Two plain clothes men drove round to see her and then, having heard her story, they suggested that she could go down to the station to look at some photographs. She turned over the pages of the album, thinking, in ingenuous amazement, as she looked at one perfectly ordinary face after another, ‘But they all look just like anyone else!’ At last she found his. He did not look just like anyone else. He maintained his delicate, aristocratic distinction even in the unflattering photograph, face turned straight to the camera, on the table before her.

  The detective said, ‘Yep. That figures.’

  Later she learned that the man whom she thought of as ‘Tim Michelmore’ had a number of aliases but was really Arthur Ainsworth; that he made a speciality of following up obituary notices in the The Times; and that he had been repeatedly convicted for the theft of expensive cars.

  ‘Was the plaster cast also fake?’ she asked the detective who told her all this.

  He stared at this pretty, middle-aged woman, obscurely touched, as Ellen always was, by her air of forlorn, childish innocence. ‘What plaster cast?’

  ‘On his foot.’

  He shrugged and looked down at the paper before him. ‘There’s nothing here about his being lame.’

  Bridget went home. She did not care about the money, the clothes, the electric razor or even the car. But she was profoundly troubled by the chasm into which, once alone in the house, she found herself peering down with a giddy nausea. There were two realities and the chasm plunged between them. There was the reality of that consolatory dream which, unlike all her other dreams of Roy, was still vivid in her mind, of the boy’s concern for her, expressed in that final kiss, and of that message that he brought back from Roy and all the other dead ‘Love conquers death and love casts out fear’; and there was the opposing reality of her telephone call to Osborne, of the empty space in the garage, and of that photograph of a fragile, aristocratic-looking youth in an open-necked shirt staring defiantly into the lens of an invisible police camera.

  She felt herself falling into the chasm, as one falls in a dream, on and on, silently screaming, and never reaching its bottom.

  Chapter Seven

  WILL BE?

  Today the three women, Sybil, Lavinia and Bridget, will meet.

  The term will start tomorrow at Sybil’s school and she wakes up, far too late, in a state of irritability. We have left undone the things which we ought to have done and done the things which we ought not to have done and there is no goodness in us. There is no goodness in her staff, Sybil feels. Madge telephoned the previous evening to say that she would be arriving two days late, since she had to settle her mother into a new home in Worthing. ‘Surely you could have done that sooner?’ Sybil demanded acidly. Madge replied that, no, it was only the prev
ious day that a row had blown up between her mother and the perfectly foul people who ran the home in which she had been living ever since their return from Morocco. ‘It’s highly inconvenient,’ Sybil said, adding, with an illogicality unusual to her, ‘I do think you might have given me more notice.’ At that Madge shouted down the telephone, ‘ But I didn’t know until yesterday evening! As I told you, it was only then that the whole row blew up.’

  The bursar has failed to have the water heater serviced, though Sybil has repeatedly reminded him; the windows are in need of cleaning; and. there are deadheads on the roses. If the staff do not set an example of efficiency to the girls, then they cannot expect it of them.

  Sybil brushes her teeth with such violence that the gums start to bleed. She might be cleaning out the water heater, scouring the windows or slashing at the deadheads. One can rely on no one, one must do every fucking thing oneself. She spits into the basin, as though to void herself not merely of the saliva and toothpaste streaked with blood but of the acid bubbling within her. Then she remembers. Mrs Lockit is coming to see her this morning.

  What can the woman want? On the telephone she was, by turns, cagey and coy. No, she wouldn’t like to say what it was that she wanted to discuss. Yes, it was a matter of some importance – to both of them. It would be easy enough to come along to the school, because, by a strange chance, she would be going for an interview for a housekeeper’s position in the neighbouring town and gathered that there was a bus stop right by the school gates. Dreadful creature!

  Eleven days ago, Henry died of a heart attack. He had been out to a party given by some friends down the hill from the Village and, when he left, it had started to pour. The friends had suggested either that he should wait until one of the other guests could give him a lift or that they should telephone for a taxi. Henry replied that Mrs Lockit always had his supper ready at seven-thirty and that, as a matter of principle, he never took taxis. He would walk. He walked too fast and collapsed outside a pub, where he lay for some time, in a moribund condition, the rain pelting down on him, because at first every passer-by assumed him to be drunk. Eventually, two elderly women, returning from Evensong, had stooped over him and peered. They had realized that he was not drunk but extremely ill. He never regained consciousness.

  Reading his obituary in The Times, Sybil wondered whether she should make the journey to Brighton for the funeral. Hugo would have wanted her to do so; but she had never cared for the old boy, so scratchy, snobbish and stingy, and there was so much to do at the school before the new term. She eventually appeased her conscience by ordering far too elaborate a wreath just as, in the past, before Hugo’s marriage, she had appeased her conscience for having refused to allow Hugo to invite Henry to join them on a cruise of the Greek Islands by bringing back, at enormous expense and inconvenience, an outsize tin of Kalamata olives. On that occasion, Henry had said ungraciously, ‘ Oh, what a kind thought! I never eat olives, as Hugo should have told you, they always give me wind. But they’ll come in useful for my next Village party! No doubt, if he could now speak to her from beyond the grave, he would say of the flowers, ‘Oh, what a kind thought. Flowers always give me hay fever, but I’m sure they’ll be appreciated at the hospital to which they will eventually go.’

  After a hurried breakfast, Sybil clears away into a drawer the sheets of paper, covered in automatic writing, which have been lying under the blotter on her desk, and then settles down to examine the untidy draft of the timetable prepared by the Senior Mistress. Each timetable of the previous Senior Mistress was, as Sybil would often tell her, a real work of art. If this timetable is a work of art, it is of a kind produced by one of the less gifted girls for her O Levels. Sybil grimaces, picks up a red biro and begins to slash in a number of deletions and emendations.

  She is still doing this when there is a knock at the door and the timorous little Filippino girl, who arrived only two days before to act as parlourmaid, comes in to announce, in an almost unintelligible accent, that there is a visitor to see her. Sybil looks at her watch. It must be Mrs Lockit. ‘Show her in.’ The girl looks bemused. ‘Bring – her – here,’ Sybil says loudly and slowly, as though addressing a deaf-mute. The girl scuttles off.

  Mrs Lockit eventually appears, without the girl, who has left the door to the study open.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Lockit.’ Sybil rises and holds out her hand across the desk. But Mrs Lockit, who has never visited the school, is peering around her. Then she asks, ‘What nationality might she have been?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one who let me in.’

  ‘Filippino.’

  Mrs Lockit shakes her head, as though in disapproval, selects, not the chair intended for her by Sybil, opposite her own at the desk, but another one, by the fireplace, and then, having deposited handbag, string bag and Marks and Spencer plastic bag, seats herself, legs wide apart and fingers interlocked. Her hat looks like a coal scuttle, trimmed with grey net. Beneath it, her eyes are cunning and wary. ‘ I never thought to see you at your school.’

  ‘I never expected to see you here either.’

  ‘Big.’

  ‘Over four hundred girls. Quite a responsibility.’

  ‘But you like responsibility.’ It is plainly not a compliment.

  ‘I hope you got the job,’ Sybil says, moving round the desk and taking the chair originally intended for her visitor.

  Mrs Lockit pulls a face. ‘Turned it down. They should have told me, instead of dragging me all this way on a wild goose chase. Just the one room, no central heating, no bathroom or kitchen to myself. ‘‘ There’s been some mistake,’’ the old girl said to me. ‘‘You bet your life there has!’’ I told her.’ Mrs Lockit smiles to herself at the memory of this exchange between a frail widow, no longer able to look after herself, and her sturdy self, so competent to do so. ‘ Still and all,’ she goes on, ‘ it’s given me a chance to see the school. Otherwise, we’d have met in that flat of yours in London.’ She does not think much of the flat, so poky and bare.

  ‘What did you want to discuss with me? Not the school, I’m sure.’

  Sarky! Mrs Lockit draws in her chin and adjusts the folds of her pale blue crimplene skirt over her ample thighs. ‘Your brother,’ she says.

  ‘My brother?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Sybil waits. She feels vaguely frightened.

  ‘Those experiments of his with my two nephews. I didn’t approve of those.’ She shakes her head. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You didn’t seem to discourage them.’

  ‘Well, it was difficult – to discourage them. I mean – my sister living in such circumstances.’

  Again Sybil waits. Her vague fear intensifies.

  ‘She needed the money. Not to put too fine a point on it. But those boys, they oughtn’t to have deceived him. No, that was wrong and I’m sorry now that, as soon as I learned what they were up to, I didn’t put a stop to it. But there it is.’

  ‘Deceived him? How exactly do you mean?’ Sybil manages, for all her inner turmoil, to appear calm.

  ‘You didn’t believe all that thought-transference malarkey did you? A woman with your education!’ She chuckles, enjoying the look of shock that, temporarily suppressed, is now appearing on the handsome face of the woman opposite her. ‘They used a dog whistle,’ she explains, ‘or something similar – with a bulb attached. Cyril could hear it, most kids can. But your brother couldn’t, Sir Henry couldn’t, you couldn’t, I couldn’t. No, they oughtn’t to have done that. A joke’s a joke but I didn’t approve of that.’

  ‘Did Sir Henry learn about this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Sybil is bewildered. ‘He never told me. I wonder why.’

  Mrs Lockit shrugs. ‘There were probably other things he didn’t tell you either.’

  Fear grips Sybil’s heart. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, it’s one thing to tamper with children’s minds – as, in a sense, your brother was doing, wasn’t he?
But to tamper with …’ She draws down the corners of her mouth. ‘ If it hadn’t been for Sir Henry, I’d have gone to the police when I came to hear of it. But I wanted to spare him a scandal. And then, of course, when your brother died like that, there no longer seemed any point.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say, Mrs Lockit, but I absolutely refuse to believe that my brother behaved incorrectly towards either of your nephews.’

  ‘Incorrectly!’ Mrs Lockit laughs. That’s one word for it. I like that!’

  Sybil gazes out of the window at the lawn and, beyond it, the straggling rosebushes, with their deadheads. She sees a figure first somersault and then hurtle down a sheer cliff of cement. She shuts her eyes, she puts a hand up to cover her mouth, as though she were about to vomit. She no longer suspects, she knows now. Hugo killed himself.

  In a quiet, steely voice, she asks, ‘What precisely do you want?’

  Mrs Lockit shifts her weight in her chair. ‘Your brother was generous to the boys.’ She smirks. ‘He had reason to be. Now that you’ve got all that money of Sir Henry’s – which was intended for him – well, I think your brother would have liked some of it to come the way of Cyril.’

  Sybil rises, her beautiful hands, with their tapering fingers and carefully kept nails, clasped before her. ‘Money? What are you talking about?’

  Mrs Lockit is disconcerted. ‘The money that old Sir Henry left.’

  ‘Sir Henry left nothing to me.’

  ‘To your brother.’

  ‘He intended to make my brother his residuary legatee.’ After a bequest of five hundred pounds to Mrs Lockit, of another five hundred pounds to a former colleague, and of pictures to some half-dozen friends, Henry willed his whole fortune, far larger than anyone had ever imagined, to Hugo. But Hugo was dead. ‘But, as you will know very well, my brother predeceased him. Died before him,’ she adds, as though contemptuously assuming that ‘predeceased’ is a word unintelligible to Mrs Lockit.

  ‘But surely the money then comes to you and his wife?’