Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  ‘Oh, I’m glad’ – and clearly he was.

  She and the young actor walked in silence down the path to the gate and the young actor opened the gate for her, with a mock bow, and they emerged on to the dim, suburban street. ‘Strange,’ the actor said, taking her by the arm in that casual intimacy which, among stage people, has so little meaning. ‘ Strange?’ she echoed. ‘That scarf might have been mine,’ he said. She asked him what he meant. Then he explained that, at that moment, he was writing his first play and the play was about d‘Annunzio and Duse. ‘Everything he said was not about you and Keith –’ Keith was her former husband ‘– but about d’Annunzio and Duse. They were lovers, she had tuberculosis, he wrote a part for her in Jorio’s Daughter – the part of a lifetime, and then he gave it to someone else, someone younger, whom he seduced.’

  The women now look at each other. ‘Then he got something,’ Sybil says.

  ‘Yes, he got something. But that’s what is so infuriating. People get something, all the time they keep getting something. But the something is not what one wants. It’s all so incalculable and uncontrollable.’

  ‘ESP,’ Sybil says. ‘ He got it out of the mind of your friend, not from the scarf.’

  Lavinia nods. ‘Precisely.’

  Sybil says on an impulse, ‘Shall I take you to Mrs Roberts?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Sybil is amazed that someone should never have heard of this famous medium. She explains.

  Lavinia says, ‘Why not? It’s worth a try. I’m prepared to try anything – in the state in which I find myself. Shall I give you my address?’

  Sybil gets an address book out of her bag and Lavinia opens her own bag and takes out of it what looks like a miniature book of tickets.

  She tears out one of the tickets and sticks it into the address book which Sybil has opened for her. That done, she smiles at Sybil. ‘I’m glad I met you. Otherwise, it would have been an even more boring party than usual.’ Sybil nods. ‘I’m glad I met you. My brother was a great friend of Henry’s. I could never understand it.’

  ‘Perhaps Henry has qualities invisible to us.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or my brother may have liked him for his absence of qualities. He sometimes did that with people.’

  ‘So did my son.’ Lavinia looks at the Cartier watch, beautiful but impractical with its absence of numerals, which she wears on a gold filigree bracelet. ‘Gracious! Henry hates one to overstay one’s welcome. He always puts six to seven-thirty on his invitations and after seven-thirty Lucy begins to collect the glasses.’

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘Mrs Lockit. It’s a little Village joke. I think I started it.’ She gets to her feet. ‘Then you’ll be in touch?’

  ‘Yes. As soon as I’ve got on to Mrs Roberts. She’s always busy.’

  ‘And makes a lot of money.’

  Sybil nods. ‘ But I don’t think money is important to her.’

  ‘I always envy people for whom money’s not important. It must make life so much easier for them.’

  They laugh. Then Lavinia wanders off, her bag under her arm. Sybil sits on, glad of their conversation and of the late evening sunlight filtering down through the willow tree on to the shoddy table before her.

  Eventually, Henry comes out. ‘Thank God,’ he says. ‘The last of them have gone. Those vulgar people next door – not Lavinia Trent, the ones on the other side – stuck it out to the last. It’s always the moot guests who are the first to come and the last to go. Have you noticed that?’ He takes the chair in which Lavinia has been sitting, stretching his legs out to show woollen socks rumpled about his thin, blue-veined ankles, and plunging his hands deep into his trouser pockets. ‘The amount people drink! Each year they seem to get through more and more. I was afraid we’d run out. I was determined not to produce any of my Dos Palmas for a party. In fact, I had to restrain Mrs L from opening a bottle.’

  Sybil says, ‘I liked Lavinia Trent.’

  ‘Yes. Poor woman.’ Henry stoops, retrieves a cigarette-end from under the table and, at first at a loss how to dispose of it, eventually puts it in a pocket. ‘Mind you, she never seemed to show any particular interest in that good-for-nothing son of hers until he was dead. Now, of course, she’s gone into retirement. Which is sad. Fine actress.’

  ‘Probably our best.’

  ‘Oh, do you think so? I wouldn’t have said that. Though I don’t go to the theatre all that much nowadays. Kitchen sink.’ Sybil restrains herself from telling him that the kitchen sink was dismantled years ago. He fiddles with the ravelled end of his old Wykehamist tie. ‘All right for you if we have a bite at about eight? That’ll give the invaluable Mrs Lockit time to clear up.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not hungry,’ Sybil lies. During the party she has eaten two potato crisps and a salted peanut. She opens her bag, ‘There was something I wanted to show you.’

  ‘Yes?’ Henry sounds wary.

  ‘You know I do this automatic writing. Have done for years.’

  Henry nods. ‘ Hugo told me you had had some remarkable results. But then Hugo was always so …’ He is about to say ‘gullible’ but restrains himself in time.

  Sybil takes out a sheet of paper, covered in her writing.

  On the Tuesday of the previous week, Audrey drove over to visit her, with one of the dogs beside her on the front seat of the battered stationwagon and the other dog and the two girls behind. The school is deserted, it now being the summer holidays, and so Sybil, equally indifferent to animals and small children, at once said to Audrey, ‘I expect the girls would like to play out of doors with the dogs.’ Audrey nodded reluctantly, feeling as she always did on these occasions, like a hospital visitor to a long-standing patient, whose whims must be gratified. Sybil’s malady was her obsession with the memory of Hugo; and just as she wished to talk incessantly about his death, so Audrey kept trying to divert her to some subject less morbid and inward-turning. Physically, the children might be out in the garden; but as Audrey prattled on and on about them – Angela seemed to be developing a jealousy of Betsy, Betsy was showing remarkable promise as a rider – Sybil grew more and more irritated by their constant intrusion. Audrey was determined to forget Hugo. Sybil was no less determined to remember him.

  They had a picnic luncheon out under a chestnut tree, with the dogs, a dachshund and the dishevelled collie, perpetually pawing at them and jumping up for scraps. Angela tore the fat off her cold beef in her fingers and dropped it to the ground. Betsy, having eaten two spoonfuls of the lemon mousse prepared by Sybil, complained ‘Oh, it’s sour’ and put her plate between her legs, to be demolished by the dachshund. Sybil all but reproved them, as she would have reproved her pupils in similar circumstances; but she had learned by now that Audrey, so lethargically tolerant in every other respect, could become ferocious if she felt that either her brats or her beasts (as Sybil thought of them) were under attack.

  ‘It was so kind of you to drive over on such a hot day,’ Sybil said, as they all began to pile into the stationwagon.

  ‘It was so kind of you to prepare us that lovely meal. You must remember to let me have the recipe for the mousse.’ Audrey was already thinking of the milking. She had once again forgotten to ask one of the two boys from the neighbouring farm to come by to do it for her.

  ‘How brave you are, Audrey!’ What Sybil really meant was that she thought Audrey callous to have forgotten Hugo so quickly.

  Audrey, who knew that she meant this, did not answer.

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Sybil,’ Angela called out from behind the collie. She had suddenly remembered that her mother had told her and her sister that they must be sure to thank their aunt. Betsy echoed, ‘Thank you, Aunt Sybil.’ Already more socially adroit, though younger, than her sister, she added, ‘That was a super mousse.’

  ‘Well, the dogs seemed to like it.’

  The car had already begun to move forward. Sybil, remorseful, hoped that they had not heard her.

  She walked back into the deserted scho
ol building and, instead of going upstairs to her flat, wandered from classroom to classroom. The windows were all shut, imprisoning not merely the oppressive heat of the day but a host of flies, buzzing in angry frustration against their panes. In one classroom, she found a turd deposited on the podium, just below the blackboard. The children must have come in here, bringing the dogs with them. Sybil stared at it, then decided to leave it to the caretaker.

  She wandered on, like a patient unable to sit still because of a constantly gnawing, unappeasable ache. Oh, that it were possible to hold but two hours converse with the dead, oh, that it were.… The words revolved within her, making her feel giddy and nauseated until, in another classroom, she sank on to a cramped seat before a desk too low for her. She stared out of the window beside her at the redbrick building, little more than a shed, that housed the science laboratory. Her head throbbed, her throat felt dry, from the effort of talking all day about things totally without any interest to her. On the desk there were some sheets of foolscap paper and a blunt pencil, its end gnawed. She picked up the pencil and drew a circle on the top piece of paper, a triangle within the circle, a circle within the triangle. The inner circle swelled as she looked at it, an iridescent bubble. She drew a deep breath. She began to write, her eyes half-closed.

  It is what she wrote, in that sealed classroom, the light green enough and the air humid enough to make her feel imprisoned under water, that she now holds out to Henry.

  Henry is reluctant to take the sheet, because he feels it to be as much an intimate part of this woman whom he does not like as some excretion from her body. But he overcomes his distaste. He looks down through his thick, gold-rimmed spectacles, he reads.

  The travellers journey. The traveller’s journey? In a land of sand and ruin. Infinity in the palm of your hand. Eternity in an hour. Join the great majority. Mogadon …

  As that last word halts him, clanging down in the tranquil, evening garden (‘I suppose you couldn’t spare me some sleeping pills?’), Sybil, who has been leaning forward, her eyes watching his eyes moving back and forth across the page, says, ‘ That first bit obviously refers to Madge and her mother. Madge is one of my teachers, her mother has been desperately ill for weeks. Now she has taken her to North Africa for her convalescence. Hell at this time of year but that’s where the old girl wished to go, because as a child she lived there – her father was a businessman in Casablanca. The old girl will die out there, that passage convinces me. ‘‘The traveller’s journey is done.’’ ‘‘Joined the great majority’’ – Petronius’s Abiit plures. I expect it’ll happen in Mogador. That’s one of their stops.’

  Mogador! In the hurried, erratic scrawl, so unlike her usual neat, well-formed writing, the word had appeared to him as ‘Mogadon’. Strange. Disturbing. But in a world in which there are a finite number of happenings and a finite number of words, coincidences are inevitable – as he often told Hugo, excited by some such conjunction, in the past. He decides to say nothing, merely nodding his head before he goes on reading.

  … Like Lucifer. Son of the mourning. Tired of his dark dominion. So shorten I the stature of my soul. Betrayed by what is false within. As fly to wanton. Tired of his dark. Dominion? But death hath no. Henry. Ask. Love casteth in.

  The writing ends with a fine serpenting away, ever fainter, from that last ‘n’. Henry looks over at Sybil, who is still crouched forward in her chair, her eyes, relentlessly burning, fixed on his eyes.

  ‘Well.…’ he says oh a long exhalation. He realizes that, while he was reading the final words, he must have been holding his breath.

  Sybil begins to explain the text as though to some dim-witted pupil. She has forgotten that Henry, unlike Audrey, is highly educated. ‘ ‘‘Like Lucifer’’. That, of course, is from Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII. ‘‘And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again.’’ Which links up with the Biblical description of Lucifer as ‘‘The son of the morning’’ – except that here ‘‘morning’’ has become ‘‘mourning’’ with a U. ‘‘ So shorten I the stature of my soul’’ – that, of course, is Meredith’s ‘‘And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul.’’ Again Meredith – ‘‘ Betrayed by what is false within.’’ Then a Lear reference, which comes out merely as ‘‘As fly to wanton.’’ ‘‘Tired of his dark’’ – a return to the Lucifer image, again Meredith. Of course the full quotation is ‘‘Tired of his dark dominion’’, which is taken up by that ‘‘But death hath no’’, the Biblical ‘‘Death hath no more dominion over him’’. Then your name, followed by ‘‘Ask’’. And finally ‘‘Love Casteth in’’, which is a peculiar variant of ‘‘ Love casteth out fear.’’ ’

  Henry listens with growing impatience and annoyance. Because she teaches English in a snob Home Counties girls’ school, this beautiful, self-contained, demanding woman thinks that she can patronize him. When she has finished, he tweaks at one of the socks wrinkled about his ankles, tilts his head to peer, eyes screwed up, into the branches of the trees above them, and then gives her a small smile. ‘Thank you for that, er, exposition. Most enlightening. If this is a message from Hugo, then clearly the dear fellow must still retain his well-stocked mind – or else have access to some celestial dictionary of quotations.’ He speaks so blandly, now leaning forward in his chair, his hands clasped together, that at first Sybil does not realize that he is mocking her. ‘But I wonder, my dear, if all this isn’t merely a case of your subconscious mind working, well, overtime. After all, if Hugo had a well-stocked mind, then so indeed have you. And the sort of scraps that he would have chosen from Meredith and so forth are precisely the sort of scraps that you might choose too. Right?’

  Audrey is stupid and ill educated, Henry is clever and well educated; but Sybil realizes that both of them have reached the same conclusion. In their view, she is suffering from self-delusion. She is certain that she is not but how, how, how can she prove it? If the scripts contained something that could not possibly be known to her, or if other people’s scripts contained something that could not possibly be known to them and yet was known to her, or if there were some kind of link, a cross correspondence, impregnable against any accusation of conscious or unconscious collusion, between one script and another … Suddenly, she looks as vulnerable and uncertain as one of her own pupils under her interrogation. She holds out her hands to him, in submissive appeal, ‘Yes, I know, I know. I can prove nothing. All this–’ she has taken the sheet of paper from him ‘–may just be some kind of gaseous exhalation from that subconscious which, in each of us, bubbles away constantly, waking or sleeping. I know, I know. But I also have this feeling …’ She folds the sheet of paper and puts it away in her bag. Then, in a voice so quiet that it is all but inaudible to Henry, who is getting hard of hearing, she says, ‘ Henry, Henry, tell me. Is there anything you know about Hugo’s death which you’ve never revealed?’

  Henry shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so, my dear.’ (Mogador. Mogadon. ‘I suppose you couldn’t spare me some sleeping pills?’) ‘No, I don’t think so. It was odd, certainly, that he left here, telling me that he was going back home, and then took that room at the Clarendon. But there could have been all kinds of reasons for that. He may suddenly have felt tired. Or ill. Illness – a bad turn – might explain that, er, unwonted and slightly alarming consumption of a variety of spirits. Or he may have had some business of which he did not wish me to know. Or he may have intended all along to stay that night in Brighton but have become bored with me. If it was that last eventuality, I’d not be surprised – I often become bored with myself. At all events, we’ll now never know.’

  ‘I think we might. You see, I do believe – yes, I do believe – in life after death. I believe that if we want it enough and if they want it enough, then the living and the dead can somehow have converse with each other.’