Voices in an Empty Room (11 page)

‘I'd have been terrified,' Cyril said.

On the other side of Holland House, on an expanse of grass singed yellow by the sun, there were bicycles, half-naked people hurling frisbees, kicking footballs at each other or lying beside or on top of each other, children climbing trees, and transistor sets blaring. ‘ Oh, dear, how all this has changed!' Hugo exclaimed. It was something that he now found himself remarking more and more frequently.

‘You'd think they'd be ashamed,' Cyril said primly, turning his head away from a near-naked couple, squirming on top of each other. Then he added, ‘It's the same on the beach. People just strip off there not caring what you can see.'

‘Oh, I don't mind about the nudity. That's fine as far as I'm concerned. But the crowds, the filth, the noise! Let's go along here. I'll show you the peacocks.'

The bird enclosure was surrounded by people, many of them foreign and many of them, like Hugo, clutching paper bags. A peacock was strutting around an insignificant. peahen, its fan clicking and its beak opening and shutting as though in a serenade inaudible to human ears.

‘I've seen one of those only once before,' Cyril said, ‘At Chessington with my auntie.'

‘Beautiful, isn't it?'

The peacock screeched and screeched again, making Cyril start. ‘But its voice is hardly beautiful.'

Now an emu strutted over, bedraggled and drab, and, head tilted sideways, fixed Hugo with a single, mournful eye. Hugo got out some cake-crumbs and held them out on his palm. Cyril retreated. The emu gobbled the cake-crumbs with a rocking of head on sinuous neck. ‘He might bite you,' Cyril warned.

Hugo laughed. ‘Oh, I don't think so. He wouldn't find me edible.'

They walked on, along winding, baked paths, deeper and deeper into the woods. Like a corpse deliquescing in the sunlight, an old man lay stretched out on a bench, with his boots and an empty cider bottle beside him. His mouth was open, his face was seamed with dirt, the nails were like talons on his bare feet. A couple, the girl's head on the boy's shoulder, wandered towards them. A man with the wire of a deaf-aid dangling from an ear, held a hand full of bread-crumbs up into a tree and called, ‘Come, come, come!' But no bird came.

‘Look – a squirrel!' Hugo touched the boy's arm. ‘Let's see if he'll come and take an almond. There ought to be one or two in the cake.' He peered into the paper bag and then brought out an almond. He held it out between finger and thumb. Seated on his haunches, in a jagged patch of sunshine in the centre of shade, the animal gazed at him tremulously wary. Then he raced to a tree and ran a few feet up it. He hung there, head downwards, his sides heaving. Still he watched. Then he descended the tree and scampered up another one, even closer. Suddenly he ran down that tree, zigzagged through the grass, and stopped, snout upturned to them, in the grass on the other side of the wooden palisade against which they were leaning.

‘He's like a rat,' Cyril said, retreating.

‘Sh! Don't make a noise. Don't move.'

They stood still. Then the squirrel ran towards one of the posts of the fence, raced up it and sat motionless on top. Hugo extended his hand, with the nut, towards him. The squirrel seemed about to flee; then he edged along the fence, cautious step by step, opened his mouth, seized the nut. He retreated along the top of the fence, leaping from stake to stake. Halting on one sufficiently far from them, he raised the nut between his two front paws and began contentedly to nibble.

‘He's eating it!' Cyril exclaimed, amazed.

‘Yes, he's eating it.' Hugo's tone was dry; but he was suddenly moved by the boy's tone of wonder, absurd though it was, in a way that he was never moved, only irritated, by the same tone of wonder when used by the girls.

‘May I try?'

‘Of course.'

Hugo handed Cyril an almond from the bag. Cyril held it out in his palm. ‘I hope he doesn't bite.'

After some hesitation, the squirrel scampered back along the top of the fence, put his front paws on to Cyril's cold, moist palm, lowered his head and took the almond. Cyril, who had squeezed his eyes shut at the moment of contact and drawn his body in on itself, gave a gasp of amazement. ‘He took it from me! He took it from me!' Hugo all but said, ‘Why not? He's hungry. And he's used to people.' But, not wishing to spoil the pleasure of this strange, timorous child, he merely confirmed, ‘Yes, he took it from you.'

‘May I try again?'

‘Why not?'

Hugo turned over the crumbs in the paper bag and found another almond. The boy held it out. The squirrel, seated on the post, eyed him beadily. Then he whisked down the post and loped off into tangles of grass and stunted bushes. The boy remained standing there, the almond on his palm, with a look of consternation. As he did so, a blue tit skimmed down from a tree, snatched up the nut and was off again. The boy was astounded, ‘What was that? What took it?'

‘A tit. A blue tit, I think. They're even tamer in the winter. They sit on one's palm – like the robins.'

‘I want to come here again. It's wonderful.'

‘Well, there's no reason why you shouldn't. I'll bring you when next you come to London. But what about Preston Park? There must be birds there. There, may even be squirrels.'

‘I've never been there,' Cyril replied. Amazing.

‘But it's not far from you.'

‘Isn't it?'

‘Or you could go to the Downs.'

‘My uncle – the one in the Army – took us there once. But I don't remember birds.'

‘There must have been some.'

They began to walk away to where the trees were even thicker and the contrast between sun and shade even more pronounced. ‘There are no dogs here,' Cyril said.

‘No. People have to keep them on the lead in this area. Not that they always obey.'

Cyril raised his palm and examined it. ‘ It's funny, that scar,' he said. ‘A small dog, a small bite. A long time ago. But I suppose I'll have it always.'

Hugo took the hand and again looked down on that tiny, upraised squiggle, even whiter and smoother than the flesh around it. Then, after a furtive glance about him, he raised the hand to his lips and, on a crazy impulse, put his lips to it.

The boy's mouth fell open. ‘Why did you do that?' he asked in a tone which Hugo, panic-stricken now, tried to interpret. Annoyance? Shock? Pleasure?

He forced himself to laugh, as though at a joke which the boy had failed to see, ‘To make it better of course.'

The green eyes, large and moist, stared into his, as Cyril stroked the palm of the hand which Hugo had kissed with the fingers of the other.

‘We'd better go back. Otherwise Lionel will wonder what has happened to us.' Hugo still felt fearful.

But then Cyril gave a long, tremulous sigh and Hugo knew, somehow, that it would all be all right. ‘Oh, I wish we could stay here forever!'

‘So do I. But there it is. Lionel will be waiting for us and then my sister will be waiting for us. Life sometimes seems to consist of nothing but waiting and being waited for.'

‘I wait for the days when we come to you.'

‘Do you? Do you really? I thought you found it boring. That's what your aunt always tells me.'

‘Oh,
that!
Yes, that's boring now. It's all the same. But I like coming to your house – to Sir Henry's house, that is.' Cyril gave a small, secret smile – to himself, so it seemed. ‘I wish I could live with you in that house.'

‘So do I, Perhaps one day … Oh, who knows!'

Lionel was not on the bench where they had all agreed to meet, even though it was several minutes past the time fixed. Then they saw him, walking negligently up the path, his hands in his pockets. A dog scampered past him and he must have whistled or clicked his fingers at it, because it stopped, looked back and then raced after him, leaping around him. A middle-aged woman with a red face and a lead round her neck, looked over her shoulder, calling, ‘Maisie! Come along! Come!' Lionel stopped, picked up a stick from under a tree and hurled it for the dog in the opposite direction to that in which the woman was walking. The dog raced off. Hugo could see Lionel grinning.

When Lionel arrived, there were burs sticking to his hair and to the seat of his trousers. Hugo doubted if he had been to the Commonwealth Institute, but he was too little interested in what he had been doing – in fact, he had been lying in the long grass of the recreation ground, watching a couple making awkward love – to ask him what it was.

‘We'd better get moving,' Hugo said.

‘What have you two been up to?'

There seemed to be something in the tone, at once snide and insinuating, which caused Hugo a momentary perturbation. But then he decided that he had only imagined it.

‘Couldn't you stay the night and let the boys go home alone on the train?' Hugo often slept on the put-u-up in the small, stuffy sitting room, after he and Sybil had spent a day together in London. But now he shook his head. ‘I promised Mrs Lockit. I must take them home.'

‘They aren't babies!'

‘We'll be all right on our own,' Lionel said. ‘Won't we, Cyril?'

Again Hugo shook his head. ‘A promise is a promise,' he said, unmindful of all the promises that he had made to Sybil, to Audrey and to the girls in the recent past and had then heedlessly broken.

Sybil gave a bitter smile. ‘Some promises are.'

‘Anyway, I hope you're now satisfied the boys do have a quite special gift.'

Sybil would like to have uncovered some evidence of fraud; but she had to admit that yes, they had a quite special gift. Time after time, Cyril, closeted not with Hugo but, at her insistence, with her, in the tiny bedroom, had infallibly guessed the card shown to Lionel by Hugo in the no less tiny sitting room. Admittedly, the doors had been open – ‘It seems to work better like that,' Hugo had said – but there had been no way in which the boys could have seen each other for signals to pass.

Of course there was always the possibility – insidiously, it only then suggested itself to her – that Hugo himself was their accomplice. After all, Harry Price and Soal, whom both of them had known and had regarded as incorruptible, had now been revealed each to have manufactured evidence. But she could not believe such a thing of Hugo. All their lives, she and he had longed to believe in the possibility that the so-called laws of nature could, however briefly, intermittently and inexplicably, be suspended; but it was herself, not others, that she wished to convince of this, and she felt sure that it was the same with Hugo. In his years of investigating trance-mediums, psychometrists, metal-benders, water-dowsers and a host of other people possessing or claiming to possess paranormal powers, he had no more. been in search of personal glory or notoriety than she had been in her years of automatic writing.

Guilty at leaving her, Hugo said, ‘How will you spend your evening?'

Sybil shrugged. ‘We might have tried to get tickets at the last moment for
Amide
. You've always wanted to hear it. But never mind. Oh, I expect I'll just sit at home and read.'

‘Anyway, I'm glad it was Madge's mother you had to rush to hospital and not Madge, And glad too that it was not an ulcer after all.'

But in fact, he felt entirely neutral about a colleague of Sybil's for whom he had never cared and an old woman whom he had never met.

As the boys ran down the stairs, in a contest to see who could reach the ground floor first, Sybil touched Hugo's arm before he entered the lift. Thinking of it later, the gesture struck him as one not so much of affection as of warning. But warning of what? ‘Take care, my dear.'

‘And you too.'

‘Oh, I always take care.' She gave a brief laugh.

Hugo looked upwards, through the grille, as the lift descended. Sybil stood above him, handsome and imposing. She looked down. There was a curious look, half of hurt and half of apprehension, on her face.

Henry was not pleased to have Sybil to luncheon; he was even less pleased that she should be accompanied by a dog, and such a smelly and snappy little dog. ‘What is it?' he asked, in a tone which suggested that he expected her to answer, ‘A giant flea.' In fact, the dog was a Pekinese, belonging to Madge, who had taken her ailing mother away on a cruise and who had asked Sybil to look after him, explaining that the last time that he had been in kennels, he had come home with mange.

Sybil, though not a dog lover, had become attached to Mr Wu. Could it be, she had asked herself with her usual probing ruthlessness towards her own motives and emotions, that she cherished this tiny creature because Hugo, far more remote now than when he had first married Audrey, no longer allowed her to cherish him. She lifted the dog into her lap and, with the tips of two fingers, began to stroke his domed forehead above his bulging eyes.

‘I hope he's not soiling that chair,' Henry said. The cretonne of the chair was dull and worn from years of use.

‘No. If he's soiling anything, he's soiling my skirt.'

‘Such a pretty skirt,' Hugo said placatingly.

Henry got up and went to the window. ‘What a lovely day! What a lovely summer! It was a good idea of yours, Hugo, to suggest we should test the boys on the Downs.'

‘I didn't suggest it because it's such a lovely day. I suggested it because it seemed to me that it would provide an interesting variation. After all, we've never had them out of doors before.'

‘Ah, there they are!' Then Henry's face suddenly darkened with wrath. ‘ That wretched little brat has tugged a branch off the laburnum.' Hugo did not have to inquire whether the little brat was Lionel or Cyril.

As Henry spoke, the Pekinese leapt off Sybil's lap, rushed to the door, and began a persistent, high-pitched yapping.

‘Do you think you could silence that dog, Sybil?' Henry asked spikily.