Voices in an Empty Room

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• Francis King
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the
Sunday Telegraph
and he reviewed fiction regularly for the
Spectator
. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for
Act of Darkness
(1983). His penultimate book,
The Nick of Time
, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.' Beryl Bainbridge

To
Diana Petre,
staunchest of friends

Sybil goes into her study, then comes out of it again and hangs over the door handle a printed notice which says DO NOT DISTURB. The notice came from the Hilton Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon but, since all her life she has been obsessively honest – returning to a newspaper shop because she has inadvertently taken away two copies of the
Guardian
after having paid for only one, burdening other passengers with the responsibility of handing over her fare to the conductor after she has alighted from a bus, and scrabbling in her purse for the odd coppers to make up the exact sum which she owes to some friend – it was not she who filched it but her brother Hugo.

‘Oh, Hugo! I can't take that!'

‘Well, I don't know what else you can do with it – unless you want to post it back. You're always complaining of your staff and girls bursting in on you. If you think ‘‘Do Not Disturb'' sounds too peremptory, you can always write ‘‘Please'' before the ‘‘Do''.'

Although it is four years since Hugo gave her the notice and five months since his sudden death, she feels uneasily guilty whenever she has it in her hand. In precisely the same way, she feels uneasily guilty if she has some sausages from Cullen's in her shopping basket when she goes into Tesco's. No one from the Hilton is going to say to her ‘You stole that sign from us', any more than anyone from Tesco is going to make the same accusation about the sausages. But the uneasy guilt remains. ‘You're too honest,' Hugo used to tell her, just as, many years ago, in an attempt to explain to her the painful mystery of why no one had ever wished to marry her, he told her. ‘You're too beautiful.' Too honest, too beautiful: was it possible to be either?

When a girl or a member of the staff sees that notice, she at once retreats. Sybil is writing. What she is writing, no one knows; but that she is writing is beyond all dispute. The general assumption is that, after her lifetime collaboration with Hugo on a new edition, eleven volumes in all, of Meredith's Letters, it must be about Meredith. ‘ More admired than read' is Sybil's verdict on Meredith's poems and novels. The same might be said of those eleven volumes.

Sybil has had a long and wearisome day. She woke too early, as she often does now. Then she began to think, with what was a physical ache behind her sternum and across what Henry, a friend of Hugo's, once called, half in irony and half in admiration, her ‘noble brow', of the brother, so profoundly loved and so passionately grieved, who died as a result of a stupid and tragic accident. A stupid and tragic accident: that is how the coroner described it and that is how she thinks of it. But perhaps Hugo himself might not have cared for that phrase. In life, he might have said through the mysticism which wafted about him like a gaseous cloud, no event is stupid and accidental.

After she had dragged herself off her bed, with that recurrent sensation that all her bones are hollow, the marrow somehow shrivelled up, and had gone through the routine of morning prayers, there had been a trying session with the young architect, so brilliant and so self-willed, about the side chapel to be dedicated to Hugo and to be financed out of the money that he left her; then a no less trying meeting of the Governors, followed by a luncheon party for them; and, finally, a lecture, at which she had to introduce the speaker, a novelist whose works she had not merely never read but whose name, to the surprise of the English mistress who had invited him, was totally unknown to her.

She takes out the pad of foolscap paper from the drawer of her desk. She unscrews the top of her broad-nibbed fountain pen. She gazes out of the window, its curtains undrawn, at the croquet hoops on the lawn. Sometimes, at this hour in the summer, the mistresses emerge to play croquet. But if. they, see that the lamp on her desk is lit, they shake their heads at each other, shrug shoulders and retreat. The writing, whatever it is, must not be disturbed.

Sybil feels the imminence of happiness. All day, she has had to choose her words so carefully, concealing some things from the architect and other things from the Governors and never giving away anything of importance to the staff and the girls. Never for a moment has she been wholly spontaneous and wholly herself. Now she is free.

The pen pecks at the paper, with the side of its nib, leaving a single, wavering scratch. It strikes at it again, more firmly. She half-closes her eyes, her breath becomes heavy and even, as though in slumber. The pen tries one word, another, then another, with pauses between, until suddenly, as though the engine of a car had at last, after repeated pressure of the accelerator, coughed and spluttered into life, it begins to speed along the lines. Sybil is writing fast. She is writing far faster than Meredith, with his enormous output, can ever have written.

She is writing what, to Meredith or to any of her staff or to any of her girls would seem to be gibberish. She writes on and on.

Audrey dreads Sybil's visits, even more now than when Hugo was alive. ‘ I can't do with intellectual women,' she would say to Hugo; but it is not so much Sybil's intellectuality as her perspicacity with which she cannot do. People opaque to themselves rarely care for those who have the ability to see through them.

‘Dear Audrey!' Sybil clambers out of her Mini and throws her arms around her sister-in-law. ‘How are you? Let me look at you.' The elongated, grey-haired, still beautiful woman and the small, blonde, plain one stand each holding the other by the forearms, as though in preparation for a wrestling match. It is, as always on such occasions, Audrey who first gives in and lets go. ‘Is everything all right?' Sybil asks, as though she has already assumed that everything is all wrong and has come here to right it.

‘Oh, yes, fine.'

The house is a large, mournful Georgian one, with an unkempt lawn in front, littered with the children's toys, and straggling hedges all around, shutting it in claustrophobically. On the other side of the hedges are the sheds and hutches for the goat, the pony, the donkey, the two cows, and the innumerable hens, guinea-pigs and rabbits which always seem to be needing the attentions of the vet. The cows go dry, because Audrey has forgotten either to milk them herself or to get one of the boys from the neighbouring farm to do so. The eggs tend to be found by the children under the hedges, after they have lain there so long that, when they are cracked, their yolks are a metallic green and they stink of sulphur. It is impossible to cook or even kill one of the rabbits because the children make such a scene.

Audrey was once a dancer. Then she met Hugo, who, to the surprise of his friends and to the consternation of Sybil, married her. Everyone assumed that Audrey would continue with a career already so successful; but she decided that, no, she wanted only to be a wife and mother. She persuaded Hugo to sell his flat in Beaumont Street in Oxford and to move into the country, and she began to collect the animals on what she referred to as ‘the farm'.

‘It's not real, Hugo,' Sybil would protest to him. ‘None of it.'

‘The animals seem real enough to me, when I have to pay the bills for their food.'

‘It's all a performance. This little townee from Crouch End or Tufnell Park or wherever it was, sees herself as an Oxfordshire countrywoman. But there's something sick and sickly about it all.'

That Sybil could speak like this to Hugo about his wife, and that Hugo should not be angry, were indications both of their closeness to each other and of Hugo's distance from Audrey.

‘Even the children aren't real.'

‘Oh, yes they are! You should hear them scream.'

‘I do hear them scream. Whenever I stay here.'

‘Well then!'

‘They still are not real. Those are screams in a nightmare.'

Now the two girls, one five and one three, their hair so blond that it looks almost white, come out to greet Sybil. They hope that she has brought them a present but on this occasion she has forgotten to do so. It has been difficult to remember anything other than what she has to tell to Audrey.

The younger girl, Betsy, wanders off, pulling behind her a horse on wheels, which wags its tail as it jerks across the gravel. The older girL. Angela, who so much resembles Hugo that merely to look at her gives Sybil a pang, says, in that coaxing, wheedling way of hers, ‘Oh, Aunt Sybil, haven't you brought us a surprise? You promised.'

Sybil wants to say: No, the only surprise that I've brought is for your mother. But she shakes her head, genuinely sorry and ashamed, ‘I meant to stop at the toyshop in Woodstock. But my mind was on other things.' Other, far more important things. The child still gazes up at her, with Hugo's long-lashed, pale blue eyes and Hugo's way of resting the tip of his tongue on the overfull upper lip of his half-open mouth. Sybil cannot stand it; and the child mysteriously intuits, in the manner of children, that Sybil cannot stand it. She continues to gaze at her aunt, in this slow, subtle torture. Sybil opens her bag and then her purse inside it. Only notes. She jerks out a pound. ‘This is for the two of you,' she says. ‘ Remember. For Betsy as well. Half and half.'

‘Half and half,' Angela repeats, though the division does not seem a fair one to her and she certainly will not observe it. ‘Oh, thank you, Aunt Sybil!' She gives one of the little bobbing curtsies that Sybil finds so affected and twee, but that always delighted Hugo.