Voices in an Empty Room (12 page)

Sybil smiled. ‘I doubt it. He's been taught to be a watchdog and dogs, like people, find it difficult to unlearn what they've been taught.'

‘Oh, shut up!' Henry shouted at the dog, in an attempt to impose this unlearning. But the only result was that the dog began to yap at him instead of at the drawing-room door.

When Mrs Lockit entered to announce her nephews, she gave the still yapping dog a sharp kick. At that, the dog, instead of biting her, as Sybil had hoped, at once retreated under Sybil's chair. ‘The boys are here.'

‘Yes, we saw them from the window.' Henry wondered whether to mention the laburnum branch, now abandoned on the pavement; but he decided not to – it would only put Mrs Lockit into one of her moods and she might then take a day off on her usual pretext of ‘an upset turn'.

Hugo rose. ‘Well, we might as well get moving. Are you coming, Mrs Lockit?'

‘To tell you the truth, Mr Crawfurd, this whole lark is beginning to get on my wick. No, I'll leave you all to it. I've got my hair to wash.' Mrs Lockit, otherwise so grubby, seemed always to be washing her thick, coarse hair, often appearing, not in one of her hats, but with a towel wrapped, like a turban, about her head.

Hugo was relieved.

‘You will take care that that animal doesn't
do
anything, won't you?' Henry said, as they all climbed into his huge, ancient Daimler – Sybil in front with the dog, Hugo and the boys behind.

‘Mr Wu doesn't
do
things in cars. He doesn't even do them on pavements. Do you, Mr Wu?' Sybil put her head down and kissed the Pekinese on one of his silken ears. ‘Mr Wu is excessively well brought-up.'

Henry grunted. Then he clashed the gears noisily, as he changed up.

‘Doesn't this car have automatic transmission?' Lionel leant forward to ask.

‘No, I am afraid it does not.'

‘I don't imagine automatic transmission had been invented when it was made,' Sybil murmured. Henry was even more infuriated when he heard Lionel snigger. But the day was so beautiful, with a sky of eggshell blue and a slight breeze making the tops of the trees tremble as the car lumbered up to the top of the hill on the way out of Brighton, that, as so often, his mood abruptly changed. He began to reminisce. ‘The first car I ever owned was a Morris Cowley, bought for me by my father as a reward for getting a First in Greats. Not new, secondhand – it had belonged to some chappie, a solicitor I think, who had managed to get himself killed in it – or, rather, out of it, since he was flung out on his head in an accident and the car was hardly damaged. Funny, I'd not now want to own a car in which someone had kicked the bucket but then I thought nothing of it. It was an open car, that was why he was thrown out so easily. No seatbelts then, of course. It had a dickey, that car. Sybil here and Hugo will know what I mean by a dickey, I'll be bound. But you two boys won't, you'll never have seen one. No, it's not a false front for a DJ.' He glanced over his shoulder at the two boys, giving that dry, brief laugh of his which sounded like a cough. The boys no more knew what was meant by a DJ than by a dickey. ‘A dickey was a kind of folding seat at the back of a car. When I was in the States, they called it ‘‘a rumble-seat''. Yes, that was what they called it. A rumble-seat. Can't think why.'

He droned on; everyone stopped listening to him.

Hugo, who knew by now that Cyril liked nougat, produced some, specially bought, from his pocket, and held it out silently first to his pale, beautiful darling, his throat so slim and fragile as it emerged from its open collar and his eyes so wide and liquid under the arching brows, and then to the beastly little thug beyond him. Cyril broke off a small piece, which he began daintily to nibble, holding it between thumb and forefinger. Lionel broke off a large one and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing noisily.

‘How does this spot strike you?' Henry asked.

Miraculously, there were no cars, no people. A track led off the road, over a stile and then straight ahead, chalky white on billiard-table green, over a hump of the Downs. The sky seemed extraordinarily close above them, the air extraordinarily thin and sharp.

‘You'd better bring your sweater,' Hugo said to Cyril with the solicitude which had come to irritate Sybil so much. ‘It's quite chilly up here.'

‘Nonsense,' Sybil said. ‘Once we begin walking, we'll be sweating.'

Cyril looked pained, not so much because she had contradicted Hugo as because she had used that word ‘sweating'. Even his mother and his aunt would have been careful to say ‘perspiring'.

As though in defiance of Hugo, Lionel not merely left his pullover behind but, after a few steps along the path, unbuttoned his tartan shirt and pulled it off, placing it over his shoulders and knotting the sleeves. His torso, the muscles well-defined and the skin a bluish white, was not that of a pubescent boy but of a grown-up navvy.

‘Have we all the impedimenta?' Henry asked.

‘All the what?' Lionel sniggered. ‘What does that mean?'

‘The cards, the pencils, the paper.' Henry's mood darkened as abruptly as previously it had lightened.

‘They're all here,' Hugo reassured him. He shook the carrier bag that he was carrying.

Sybil strode out, not on the path, but over the springy turf, even though it was still saturated with the rain of the previous day. Both Henry and Hugo, unknown to each other, felt a grudging admiration for her vigour and health. Her cheeks were glowing, her eyes bright. Mr Wu bobbed along, now just in front of her and now just behind, making the snuffling noise of someone with a bad head-cold and without a handkerchief.

Eventually Henry stopped. ‘This seems a good spot.' Ahead of him was a brow of the Downs. ‘No habitation, no people!' He turned to Hugo. ‘I suggest you and Cyril go up to the top over there and I'll stay down here with Lionel. Sybil can go with you and wave her scarf each time you're ready for the next card. How's that?'

‘Fine,' Hugo said. ‘ Come along, Cyril.'

Sybil noticed that, as so often now, her brother was completely ignoring her. Bitterness rose within her, corrosive as water-brash.

‘Oh, I mustn't forget the cards and your sheet,' Hugo turned back to say. He inserted a hand into the carrier bag.

‘What distance would you say it was from here to the brow?' Henry asked.

‘A hundred and fifty, two hundred yards? Anyway, I'll pace it out. Far further than we've ever attempted before.'

‘I hope it'll work,' Cyril said anxiously.

‘It'll work if you believe it'll work,' Hugo jollied him along, a hand on his shoulder.

Hugo, the boy, Sybil and the dog began to make for the brow of the hill before them. At one point, Mr Wu placed his flattened muzzle against a rabbit hole and seemed, like the fox in the story of the Three Little Pigs, determined to huff and to puff until he had somehow blown it apart. ‘Come along, Mr Wu!' Sybil ordered sharply. ‘Leave that alone!' Mr Wu scampered after her, his muzzle covered in earth. Soon she was far ahead of the other two; and there then came to her an absurd, irrational desire simply to walk on and on, not stopping at the brow of the hill, and so eventually to walk out of this particular experiment and all future experiments with the boys – and even perhaps out of Hugo's life. But she resisted it.

‘Gorgeous,' Hugo panted, joining her where she stood, the wind whipping her skirt about her magnificent legs and tossing her thick mane of hair, black streaked with grey. He shaded his eyes and stared downwards to where, far off, the sea glittered under a sky so strangely near. ‘Now let me get things out.' He removed from the carrier bag the clipboard, paper and pencil. He turned to Cyril, ‘Which would you prefer to do. Sit or stand?'

Cyril, visibly nervous, as always before a session, dithered for a moment. Then he said, ‘I think I'd like to stand.'

‘Of course they can see each other from up here. Indoors, one arranges it that they can't. They could make signals.' Sybil talked as though Cyril were not with them.

‘Well, that'll be your job,' Hugo replied with an irritation beyond his ability to control. ‘You'll have to watch very carefully, as I shall do, to make sure no signals pass. What sort of signals did you have in mind?'

‘Do I have to tell you? You have much more experience of psychic research than I have. Hands. Legs. Even eye movements. You've not forgotten that woman investigated by Houdini, have you? She and her accomplice could speak volumes to each other merely by fluttering their eyelids.'

‘I don't think the boys can see the fluttering of each other's eyelids over a distance like this. But, yes, you can watch for that too,' he added sarcastically.

Sybil unwound her scarf from her neck and gave it a shake at Mr Wu, who ran forward in an attempt to snatch it in his jaws. ‘Oh, Mr Wu, Mr Wu!' she laughed. Hugo, who did not care for dogs, only for cats, thought her behaviour silly. What would her pupils think if they could see her?

‘Now you stand here, Cyril. And I'll stand here beside you. And Sybil can go up on to that mound over there and wave her scarf when we tell her. All right, Sybil?'

‘Aye, aye, sir.' Sybil gave a mock salute, arm stiffly raised and legs at attention.

Cyril licked his lips, emitted a ladylike little cough and followed that, as so often during sittings, with a quiet burp behind the raised fingertips of his right hand. ‘Pardon,' he said. Areophagia: suddenly, the word arrowed, unsought, into Hugo's mind, much as, he supposed, the denomination of a card arrowed into Cyril's.

‘All right. Let's have the first, Sybil.'

Sybil raised an arm and the fine, beige cashmere scarf streamed away from it. She waved the arm back and forth. Then Hugo saw Henry turn up a card and show it to Lionel. Cyril drew his brows together, in intense concentration. His body was trembling slightly and, as in the past, the old sheen was glistening on his forehead.

Then yap-yap-yap. Mr Wu, who had been seated on his haunches, leapt up, his ears cocked. Was some walker about to appear? Hugo looked around him but the whole landscape lay deserted. ‘Oh, do tell that dog to shut up!' he shouted at Sybil.

‘Mr Wu! Come here! Come!' Mr Wu reluctantly moved towards her. ‘Naughty!' He now began to slide along the ground. Then, having reached her, he rested his head on one of her shoes.

‘Sorry, Cyril. Did you get that?'

‘I – I think so, Hugo.' By now, Cyril had learned to address Hugo by his Christian name. A large drop of sweat trickled off the end of his nose and fell on to his shirt. ‘Queen,' he whispered. Hugo lifted his clipboard and wrote a ‘Q' under the column headed One.

‘All right, Sybil. Let's have the next.'

Sybil, Mr Wu still resting his head on her shoe, raised the scarf in the air to be tugged by the wind. Far away, a tiny Henry moved towards an even more tiny Lionel. Henry's arm went out, presumably with the card. Sunlight flashed on his gold-rimmed glasses, mended at one side with some grubby Elastoplast.

There was a silence, as Cyril clearly strained himself, his jaws tense and his eyes half closed. Then, again, Mr Wu began to yap, in an ever-increasing frenzy. ‘Mr Wu!' Sybil shouted. But, as she did so, the dog shot off, bouncing along the path, towards Henry and Lionel. ‘Mr Wu! Mr Wu!' Her voice seemed to wail, as though in lamentation; but the wind snatched at it and she could only assume that, indomitably bouncing over stones and tussocks, he did not hear her. On and on, he bounced, on his short but powerful legs, his tail an orange plume. Eventually, in the distance, he looked more like a rabbit than a dog.

Suddenly it came to Hugo. He felt a terrible pain behind his breastbone. Dying must feel like this, he thought, the excruciating pain at the centre of one's being, the world tipping sideways, the feeling that all stable relationships with the everyday things around one were on the verge of disintegration. He gazed at Cyril. Cyril opened his mouth, a thread of saliva glistening in the sunlight before the wind snapped it. ‘ Ten.' Hugo saw, rather than heard, what he said. ‘Ten,' the boy repeated.

‘Oh, fuck ten!' Hugo swung round. ‘That's it,' he said to Sybil.

Sybil was astounded that the trivial annoyance of the dog should have affected her brother so deeply. ‘Oh, don't be silly. I'll go and get him and put him on the lead.'

‘He'll bark just the same. That's it. Come on. Come on, Cyril!'

She had heard him often enough speak with that roughness to Audrey, the girls and even to herself, but never to the boy. Hugo began to stride towards Henry and Lionel, from time to time tripping, as though he were walking in darkness, over the same tussocks and protruding stones over which the gallant little dog had bounced. Sybil looked across at Cyril, who was standing motionless, his eyes fixed, wide open, on Hugo's retreating figure. Suddenly she felt sorry for the boy, as she had never thought that she would do. She shrugged at him, gave a nervous smile. ‘Well, we'd better go too. No point in waiting here. But what a lot of fuss about nothing.'

She began to walk off; then, glancing over her shoulder, saw that, instead of accompanying her, the boy had remained on the same spot, as though petrified, that ashen hair, sculpted around his face, seeming miraculously impervious to the slapping and tugging of the wind which was sending her own whirling about her. ‘Aren't you coming?' she shouted. ‘No use to wait there.' A dread came over her, like the cloud which at that same moment briefly obscured the sun. The cloud passed, in seconds as it seemed; the dread somehow remained.

Suddenly Cyril began to totter, rather than ran towards her, his knees close together and his feet kicking outwards, as Sybil had so often seen unathletic, booksy girls run at her school. She waited for him, pardy compassionate and partly contemptuous. What a poor, pitiful creature he was!

As they reached the others, Henry was saying, ‘I don't see why we shouldn't have another go. Sybil could take the dog for a walk. Or we could put him in the car.'