Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  She nodded. ‘I prefer it.’

  He lowered his head and began to eat the food before him, picking daintily at now a leaf of lettuce, now a segment of tomato and now a shred of meat and then chewing meditatively, with an occasional smile at her. She watched him. Usually two strangers isolated together feel obliged to talk, however inanely; but, to her surprise, she was free of that compulsion. She was content to wait for him to start.

  He stared out of the window at the grass, white with daisies, sloping up to a little spinney in which, when they were younger, the boys would often camp out on summer nights. ‘ This is a large property,’ he said.

  ‘Not all that large. But too large for me by myself – now that the boys are away.’

  He nodded. ‘ School holidays. Roy was so proud of those boys.’

  ‘Oliver was his favourite.’ Roy had never seemed to her to be proud of Eric, despite his prizes, his performance as Hamlet and his poems and stories in the school magazine.

  ‘Yes, Oliver was his favourite all right. But still …’

  ‘I don’t think he ever really understood Eric. Father and son were so unlike each other. When Eric played Hamlet at his school, he was so disappointed that his father showed so little interest. And yet, I sometimes think, perhaps Eric has taken his death harder than Oliver. He’s so reticent, it’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Strangely, Roy told me about that Hamlet. He seemed to take pride in it then – when he told me about it. So perhaps he really took more pride in all Eric’s achievements than he’d let on. That would have been typical of him.’

  ‘Yes, typical.’ She pushed the salad bowl towards him. ‘Have some more salad.’

  ‘It’s smashing dressing.’

  She did not tell him that the dressing had come, ready-mixed, out of a bottle bought at Marks and Spencer. Roy would never have countenanced that. She supposed ruefully that she was. going to pieces, without him to hold her together.

  ‘You’re on leave?’ she said.

  ‘Sick leave. Convalescing now. I’m on my way by car to the Officers’ Home in Osborne – Isle of Wight. You’ve probably heard of it.’

  ‘Oh yes. Years ago, Roy and I visited a friend of his there – a colonel he’d known in Korea.’

  ‘Nice place. Very grand. Queen Victoria used to live there. Apart from Sandringham. there was nowhere she liked better – in her last years, after her old man died.’

  Bridget wondered if, talking to other people, he would also refer to Roy as her ‘old man’. The phrase somehow jarred.

  ‘Where’s your home?’ she asked and then, when she saw his face suddenly dim and dissolve into a settied melancholy, she wished that she hadn’t.

  ‘My home? Well, it used to be near Norwich. But I don’t really have any home now. I was an only child, you see, and my father died when I was nine. My mother had a struggle. Somehow gave me the best possible education – good prep school, Harrow. Then she died. So …’ He shrugged, put out a hand and lifted up the bottle. ‘ May I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’ll have some more with me?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You must.’ He tilted the bottle, poured. He raised his glass, ‘Saluti!’

  ‘Saluti,’ she muttered. Like that ‘old man’, this ‘saluti’ somehow jarred. She could not imagine Roy saying ‘Saluti’ as he raised his glass to a colleague or, indeed, responding with a ‘ Saluti’ if a colleague said it first.

  He sipped, sipped again, then gulped. ‘ Lovely stuff.’ He turned the label towards him and again stared at it. ‘Roy certainly knew how to choose his wine.’

  ‘Yes, he knew a lot about wine. I suppose it came from having had a grandfather in the trade. Funny he never wanted to go into it himself.’ Funny and sad. If he had gone into it, he would never have been killed.

  ‘Somehow one can’t imagine a chap like Roy in the wine trade. He was all up and go.’

  ‘There’s some cheese if you’d like it. Only mousetrap. Or what about a peach?’

  ‘The peach would be super.’

  With the same delicacy with which he had sliced the tomatoes and cut slivers off his chicken leg, he now began to peel and cut up the peach, between knife and fork, without ever touching it. It took a long dme, he was wholly absorbed.

  Again, Bridget felt no need to keep a conversation going. She watched him, her arms crossed on the table before her and her eyes sad yet expectant.

  He dabbed at his lips with his napkin, the peach eaten. ‘Home-grown?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, heavens, no. I expect it’s from Italy.’

  He thrust back his chair and stretched his long legs before him. The iron clanked.

  ‘Do you want to hear about it or not?’

  ‘About – about what?’

  Suddenly, like a gust of wind revealing some object, a tin can or a fragment of glass, hidden in deep grass, so his question had revealed to her that dream, consolatory but seemingly lost beyond recovery, from which she had awoken. It had been of Roy, yes, she remembered it vividly now, but of Roy, not as he was, greying, paunchy and often irritable, in recent years but as he had been when first she had met him. He had been leaning from the window of a railway carriage and she had been looking up at him and their hands had been clasped. The train had started to move, he had clung on to her hands, she had begun to run beside the train. But she could not keep up, she began to falter, to fall, feeling his grip about to jerk her arms from their sockets. Then he let go. He was shouting, ‘ I’ll send you a parcel! ‘ I’ll not forget! A parcel! A parcel!’

  The boy leant forward, put a hand along her arm. It was a gesture at once intimate and totally devoid of any sexuality. ‘About what?’ he echoed. ‘About his death.’

  ‘You were there?’

  He nodded, the green eyes suddenly darkening with the sympathy and grief which flooded into them. ‘I was there. That’s how I got this.’ He indicated the leg in its plaster.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. She leant forward. Waking, half-waking, dreaming, she had so often imagined his death. Now she would know.

  He told her. Roy had insisted on accompanying the unit with an extraordinary, unnecessary gallantry; but he was so strangely calm that the boy had felt disturbed, it was as though the calm was one of acceptance of imminent death. The Argies (the boy used the word which Bridget could never bring herself to use) had been so eager to run that they had flung aside their weapons with no attempt to retaliate. Then had come the surrenders. White flags. When a white flag had appeared on a mound from which, all day, there had been accurately punishing artillery fire, Roy had gone forward with them. The Argies had machine-gunned him and, briefly, the unit had had to retreat. Tim himself had gone forward again under the protective fire of the British artillery and had found Roy, hoisted him on his shoulder and somehow, God knows how, staggered back with him. Roy was still alive but barely conscious. It was on that interminable journey back that Tim received the bullet that had shattered his ankle. But somehow he had managed to keep going, somehow he got back to British lines.

  ‘Did he ever recover consciousness?’ Bridget stared at him with a hungry intensity as, overcome by his story, he reached out again for the bottle and poured out from it into his glass.

  He nodded. ‘None of us realized how badly he had been wounded. I don’t want to go into details.’ He chewed on his lower lip, staring, out at the lawn; he appeared to be on the verge of tears. ‘I don’t think he suffered, I’m sure he didn’t. He was beyond that. But he – he mentioned your name. Repeated it, repeated it a number of times. And then he whispered to me, I could hardly hear him, I had to put my head down to his lips, he whispered to me in this faint but clear voice, he said, ‘‘ Tell her, it’s not over. Love conquers death and love casts out fear.’’ ’

  Bridget stared at him in amazement. ‘He said that?’

  The boy nodded. ‘Yes. That was what he said. I swear to God.’ He repeated it, in a tone of wonder, as though he had only now heard
it said to him. ‘ ‘‘Love conquers death and love casts out fear.’’ ’

  ‘How strange!’

  ‘Strange?’

  ‘Well, I had this dream … And the message … It’s what I’ve been waiting for during all these weeks.’

  ‘You have?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Above their heads, the chimes of the front-door bell tinkled out. Tim started. ‘What’s that?’ He sounded alarmed.

  ‘The front door. Oh God, it must be Commander Cheston!’

  The boy half-rose, reaching out for his stick.

  ‘You don’t have to go. I’ll pretend I’m not here, I’ll tell him I forgot.’

  The chimes again tinkled. Bridget rose from her chair, went to the kitchen window and peered out around the curtain. She saw the Commander stomping up to the garden shed in which the mower was kept, take the lock in his freckled hand and make as if to attempt to pull it off. Then he thought better of that and stomped away again, in his unfashionably narrow grey flannel trousers and highly polished brogues. ‘He’s going, gone.’ She felt extraordinarily happy and light-hearted as though she, and not the boy, had drunk more than. half the bottle of wine. ‘Let’s go into the sitting room.’

  ‘What about all this?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll see to it later. Plenty of time,’ she added, a fleck of darkness drifting through the sunlight, which now seemed to surround her. ‘All the time in the world.’

  In the sitting room, lying out on the sofa and smoking one after another of the cigarettes that Bridget kept for her guests, Tim talked chiefly about his own life, however much Bridget attempted to make him talk about Roy. He had wanted to be an actor, that was why he had been so interested when Roy had told him about Eric’s success as Hamlet; but his mother had been so eager that he should go into the Army, the Michelmores had been soldiers for generations, his father had been a major in the Army until a wound, received in Malaya, had forced his premature retirement. He had intended to resist his mother’s wishes but then, when she had died, he had felt unable to do so. ‘If I owed anything to her – and I owed a lot – then I owed her that.’ It was a good life, the life of a soldier, in comparison with the lives led by the majority of civilians. Lives of service. Honest. Decent. He had no regrets, none at all.

  ‘That’s what Roy felt. He often wished he’d remained a regular soldier himself. That’s why he wanted one or other of the boys to go into the Army. Well, he was happy that at any rate Oliver decided on the Navy. He’s at Dartmouth, you know.’

  Tim nodded. ‘Yep. Roy told me that. He said, ‘‘Well, if it couldn’t be the Army, then the Navy’s the next best thing.’’ ’

  At last, as the sun lengthened across the unmown lawn, white with its daisies, Tim lifted his lame leg off the sofa, a hand beneath it, and then put down the other. ‘If I’m ever to get to Osborne tonight, I ought to be on my way.’

  ‘You could stay if you wanted.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. But I told them I’d be there this evening and I think I’d better keep my word.’

  She walked slowly beside him as he limped down the drive. ‘I left my car in the lane, I didn’t know if you’d want it in your drive.’

  She laughed. ‘Why shouldn’t I want it there?’

  ‘I hadn’t realized how big your house was.’ He sounded embarrassed. ‘Of course, you have lots of room for parking. You could take twenty cars here and not even notice.’

  ‘We’ve taken as many as fifty – when we’ve given parties.’

  When they got to the gate, he raised his hand, the stick grasped in it, up to his cheek. He stared aghast down the lane. ‘My God!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘My car. It’s vanished. I parked it just there – under those trees. You don’t think the police can have towed it away, do you?’

  ‘Not from here. No. Why should they?’

  ‘Christ, it must have been stolen! My brand new Polo! And – oh Lord – my jacket was in it, with all my cash and my credit cards and my cheque book … I never imagined in a place like this … One knows that in London …’

  ‘You’d better get on to the police!’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He was suddenly fatalistic, ‘Not that they’ll achieve anything. By now, whoever took the car will probably be at least a hundred miles away.’

  ‘Come in and telephone.’

  ‘No, I might as well go to the station. They’ll want all kinds of details.’

  ‘It’s quite a walk.’

  ‘Is it? Well, I must say, in my present condition a walk would not be all that easy.’

  ‘I could run you down.’

  ‘No, no. You don’t want all that bother. But could you – I hate to ask this – could you perhaps lend me your car?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll run in and get the keys.’

  As she raced back towards the house, the thought came to her of Roy’s Mercedes, unused since his death. It somehow seemed appropriate that this messenger from him, the bearer of the promised parcel, should drive in his car. It was the keys to the Mercedes, not her own Mini, that eventually she brought.

  He gazed admiringly at the car in the garage. ‘Roy used to talk about this car. How he loved it!’

  She laughed. ‘I sometimes used to think he loved it more than me.’

  ‘Nonsense. No man could have loved anyone or anything as much as he loved you. I’m telling you that. You’ve got to believe me.’

  He climbed into the car, adjusted the mirror, wound down the window beside him. He was wholly at his ease in it, clearly he had driven such a car or one like it before.

  ‘Tell me the way,’ he said.

  She told him.

  ‘Fine. I’ll be back. As quickly as possible – though, knowing the way police stations work, I should guess that’ll be a long time.’

  Still exhilarated, she returned to the house and began to clear the table and stack the dirty crockery and cutlery in the dishwasher. She had a curious sensation that Roy, who had for so long been totally dead to her, had been suddenly resurrected. The boys had never wished to talk about him to her; her relatives and friends had been too embarrassed to do so. Only this stranger had been prepared to turn the key on that loft in which their shared memories had been gathering dust.

  When she heard the car squealing to a stop outside the porch, she hurried out to it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Pretty useless. They’re sending out a call to all the neighbouring forces. But, unlike this one, the car’s not one anyone would notice or remember. And if he’s a professional thief, well, he’s sure to change the number. The funny thing is that only two or three days ago I was thinking that I must really get some kind of alarm.’

  As he clambered out of the car, Bridget put out a hand to help him, her hand to his elbow.

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her and, as he did so, she thought, in a totally asexual way, ‘ How beautiful he is! What wonderful eyes!’ He held out the key. ‘I’m going to have to do something extremely embarrassing now.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I haven’t got a bean.’ He put his hand in his trouser pocket. ‘Well, that’s not strictly true. I have a few beans.’ He peered down at the coins which he had taken out. ‘To be precise, I have two pennies and three 10p pieces. But that’s the lot.’

  ‘I could lend you something.’

  ‘Could you? Could you really? I’ll send it back to you just as soon as I’ve been on to my bank in London and. got things sorted out.’

  ‘How much would you like?’

  ‘As much as you can spare.’ He laughed. ‘ Coutts’s are a wonderful bank but they can seem awfully, awfully slow when one has an emergency like this.’

  ‘I’ll see what I have.’

  They went back into the house and Tim sat in the hall, his hands resting on his stick, while Bridget ran upstairs and searched in her bag and in the desk drawer in which she also kept money.

  She reappeared. ‘ I can manage forty-f
ive. If you need more desperately, then I could go to the cash dispenser.’

  ‘No, no, that’ll be fine. At least it’ll enable me to buy some basic things. All my luggage has gone too.’

  ‘You could borrow anything of Roy’s you wanted.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it. No, no!’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be only too happy to think of your doing so. Come upstairs and have a look.’

  Eventually, with a show of reluctance, Tim had chosen a pair of pyjamas, two shirts, two ties, a blazer, three pairs of socks and half-a-dozen handkerchiefs. Bridget then pressed on him an electric razor (‘But I can easily buy a cheap razor with blades’), some slippers, a spare, toothbrush, found at the back of the bathroom cupboard, and an unused tube of toothpaste. She fetched down a suitcase and began to pack for him, while he looked on, smilingly grateful.

  At the end he said, ‘I wonder if you could do just one other thing? You’ve been so kind to me.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘It’s difficult to carry a suitcase with this.’ He tapped with his stick on the plaster cast. ‘I’m sure that someone will help me off the train and on and off the boat. People are so good about such things, aren’t they? But I wonder if you could possibly run me down to the station.’

  ‘Oh, yes, certainly.’ Then on an impulse, thinking of this delicate boy – he seemed little more – humping Roy’s semi-conscious body under murderous enemy fire, she suggested, ‘Why don’t you take the car? I never use it, I’m frightened of driving something so huge. I have my Mini.’

  ‘But I couldn’t possibly …’

  ‘Please! You can return it on your way back from Osborne.’

  ‘But I’ll be there two weeks.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I’d been meaning to sell it. Eric wanted it – he’s taking his test – which is why I hesitated to put it on the market. But a car of that size would be far too expensive for him to run. He’d be better off with a Metro or something of that kind.’

  ‘Well, if you honestly think … It’s marvellous of you.’

  ‘It’s only a way of making some small return for – for what you did for Roy. And for me too. I’ll never forget that. Never.’