Voices in an Empty Room (15 page)

The sun was now only a reddening stain, seeping wider and wider across the horizon visible through the windows. He pulled open one of the doors on to the balcony, then the other. For a long time he stood there, as the traffic, infinitesimally small termites beneath him, crawled, stopped, crawled, with a strange hum, like a far-off wail, arising from it, and the sky and the water began to darken. He felt a mortal sickness, at the thought of the domesticity of his life on the farm, of the tedious hours spent with Sybil over their shared labours, of the wrangles of claims and counter-claims, superstition and scepticism at the Institute, and, above all, of the deception and the separation and the weeks and weeks and months and months and perhaps even years and years of paying out money.

The awning over the balcony hung askew. Some instinct for order, undying when everything else within him seemed to be dying, made him go back into the room and press the electric switch which operated it. The strut that had already descended trembled and then began to rattle as he kept his finger on the switch; the other strut would not move.

That same instinct for order made him pick up the telephone.

‘Yes, sir. Can I help you?' A female voice.

‘The awning on my balcony doesn't come down properly.'

‘What doesn't what, sir?'

Patiently he explained.

‘Just one moment, sir.'

‘Yes, sir. Can I help you, sir?' A male voice.

Hugo repeated what he had said already.

‘I'll send someone up first thing tomorrow.'

‘Why not now?'

‘I'm afraid it's far too late now, sir. In any case, there's no sun on the balconies now, is there?'

Hugo put down the telephone. He went back on to the, balcony. Again he looked out at the darkening sea and sky. After the heat of the long day, a breeze was arising, to make his trousers flap about his legs and untidy his hair. He put both hands to his head, partly to keep his hair from flying about and partly because he felt that everything within it was about to explode.

Suddenly, on an impulse, he hoisted himself up on to the balcony railing, one hand to the strut of the awning which would not descend. He looked down. That strange wail from the traffic grew louder, shriller. Nothing was moving except a single motorcyclist – he could see his yellow jacket – weaving constantly between the stationary cars. ‘As soon as he's old enough, Lionel wants a motorbike. I'd be terrified to ride one of those things. Dangerous.' ‘Perhaps you'd prefer a car.' ‘Yes, I'd prefer a car.' ‘Well, when you're old enough, I'll buy you one and you can drive it for me.'

The cars began to move again.

Hugo's body swayed outwards, regained its equilibrium, then swayed outwards again. So easy. Easier, far easier than swallowing all those Mogadon tablets. Let go. Just let go. But at the moment of falling, he could not let go. A hand shot up, grabbed at the awning. The awning held him a moment, then the fabric split and he hurtled down, a streamer of the jolly red-and-white canvas clutched in his fist.

It was clear, the coroner said, that the deceased had been drinking to excess; three miniatures of whisky, one of vodka and one of gin had been found scattered on the floor around the mini-bar. No doubt that excess of alcohol had made him so truculent in his demands that the electric equipment which operated the awning should be repaired, had caused him to try recklessly to repair it himself when told that no one could see to it until the next day, and had resulted in his loss of balance.

Henry sat impassive, his arms folded and his gold-rimmed spectacles low on that nose which, because of its broken veins, made his neighbours commit the injustice of believing that he must be a secret drinker. When Sybil, leaning forward between him and Audrey, began to sob into a handkerchief smelling strongly of lily-of-the-valley, so far from trying to give her comfort, he did not even look at her.

‘A stupid and tragic accident,' the coroner concluded.

Despite the coroner's verdict, the manner of Hugo's death obsesses Sybil.

Suicide? Henry testified, the elaboration of his answers, with their qualifications, their parentheses and their antiquated slang, clearly irritating the brisk, busy coroner, that his friend had seemed quite his usual self, in as far as anyone could be said to be quite his usual self, when he had left the house. No, there was absolutely no indication that anything was worrying or depressing him. One might, indeed, describe his whole mood as jolly, in as far as a man as thoughtful and sensitive as the, er, deceased, was ever jolly. Audrey also testified, her flared electric-blue skirt and pink blouse, open at the neck, making an even less favourable impression on the coroner than Henry's manner had done, that, no, the deceased had had no financial or other worries and, yes, their marriage had been an entirely happy one. But the question remained: why had Hugo taken his leave of Henry, apparently to travel back to Oxford, and then, instead, have installed himself in a room in a Brighton hotel? ‘I've no idea,' Henry said. ‘None at all. Unless he felt – which he had no reason for feeling – that he had outstayed his welcome with me. When one is a guest, that is always something difficult to decide.'

Murder? Hugo had entered the hotel alone, he had had no visitors, the door of the hotel bedroom had been locked from inside, the distance from one of the balconies to another was approximately eleven feet.

Yet Sybil feels that the truth or at least part of it has still to be revealed. What kind of business could have kept Hugo in Brighton and why should he not have stayed on with Henry, having so often stayed with him for days on end in the past? There is also the mystery of those miniature bottles of spirits scattered on the carpet. Hugo was always abstemious, even ascetic. It is difficult to think of him gulping a variety of spirits neat from their bottles. Sybil recalls a visit which the two of them once paid to an American academic, living in a furnished flat in Crouch End while on a sabbatical. Hugo, with his usual generosity, had taken along from his cellar a bottle of Chateau La Mission Haut Brion 1971, as an offering. The American, clearly not appreciating its value, said to his wife, ‘ Look what Hugo's brought us,' and thumped the bottle down on the table already laid for dinner in one corner of the tiny sitting room. Having given Hugo and Sybil the glasses of sherry for which they had asked – ‘Lucky I got some in, Valerie and I never touch the stuff – he had refilled his own and his wife's glasses from a pitcher of Martinis. Hugo had watched their host and hostess for a while; then, able to bear it no longer, he arose, pointed to the bottle of claret and said, in the voice of someone attempting to placate a mugger armed with a knife, ‘I think, old fellow, you'd better put that away for some other time.' The American was puzzled; but he did what Hugo told him.

The manner of Hugo's going does not obsess Henry, as it does Sybil; but Henry often thinks about it. Might that plunge on to the roof of a brand-new Volvo 176 have been deliberate, not accidental? Hugo was certainly in a state (Henry's phrase) when he left the house. There was the discovery of the deception, which he had revealed to Henry; there was also something else, to do with the morbid relationship (again Henry's phrase) between himself and that boy, which he had not. Henry guesses that Mrs Lockit may know the answer but he prefers not to ask her since he prefers not to jeopardize the relationship between them. Mrs Lockit is not perfect, far from it; but he does not want anything to come out into the open that might oblige him to dismiss her. For a number of years the two of them have managed ‘ to rub along together' and though that implies an intermittent abrasiveness, he would not care to make the effort, at his age and in his state of health, of learning to rub along with someone even more prickly. There is also the question of the basement flat. Nowadays one cannot really call one's property one's own. It might be difficult to dislodge Mrs Lockit and the budgie of which Henry has so often heard but which he has never seen, along with all her other possessions, from the basement.

Like baffled detectives in novels and sometimes in real life; Sybil has a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime (or, if the coroner is right, of the accident), just as she so often has a compulsion to return to it in her conversations with Audrey. (‘If he told you he'd be staying two nights with Henry, why on earth did he go to the Clarendon? And why didn't he tell you or Henry where he would be?') Often, lying awake on these summer dawns, she sees him, in her imagination, clutching at that awning, hears the awning ripping. She even closes her eyes, her body rigid on her bed, as his body first somersaults and then hurtles down that sheer concrete face.

She goes over and over her automatic writing in search of the key; and eventually she also rings up Henry, convinced that he has a duplicate to that key secreted somewhere about his person. ‘Oh, Henry, I have to be in Brighton, over at Roedean, on Tuesday. Examining. I wondered if I could pop in and see you some time in the afternoon.' She is lying, she is not examining at Roedean, though she has done so in the past; and Henry, wily as he is, knows from her slightly breathless tone that she is lying. But though he thinks of her, as he thinks of most women, as ‘really rather tiresome', he wants, to see her for precisely the same reason that she wants to see him; she must know something about Hugo which he does not know. So he says, ‘Yes, of course, my dear. I have a little sherry party that evening. My annual one, for my good neighbours. A rather boring occasion, I'm afraid. But if you'd like to come along, well, I'd love to see you.'

Sybil arrives in Brighton early in the afternoon and she walks down from the station, past grimy little shops selling souvenirs, dusty paperbacks and secondhand clothes, to the Front. She is glad of the keen, blustery wind, since it alleviates the vague nausea from which she has been suffering ever since she settled down to
The Times
crossword in a corner of an empty first-class carriage. There is a luxurious coach with wrap-around windows, net curtains and a German number plate in the courtyard outside the hotel, together with some half-dozen cars. A bored youth in uniform, his hands clasped behind his back, is eyeing a girl who is shaking a tablecloth out of a first-floor window of the house next to the hotel. Either he does not notice Sybil at all or, noticing her, has no interest in her. She stares up at the concrete face, its balconies symmetrically cantilevered, some with their awnings up and others with them down. Over the railings of one of the balconies a bathing-towel, striped green, brown and orange, flaps in the wind. Perhaps, like Hugo, it will suddenly fall; but it will fall far more slowly.

Sybil then examines the paving of the courtyard, as though, after all these months, she expects to see some stain on its surface or even a shadow, like that which, tourists on a trip to Japan, she and Hugo once examined in Hiroshima, each thinking mournfully, though neither said it, ‘ That's all that's left of someone once as substantial as ourselves.' She wants to go up to the bored youth, who has now lit a cigarette and is surreptitiously smoking it, holding it cupped in a hand (is it possible that in an age as egalitarian as this he is forbidden to smoke on duty?) and to ask him, ‘ Can you tell me which was the balcony from which my brother fell and where precisely he landed on a Volvo 176, before bouncing off it to the concrete?' But it is unlikely that the boy would be able to enlighten her. She walks on, having learned nothing and, more surprisingly, having felt nothing. On those early mornings when she has lain awake, awaiting the moment when her digital alarm clock begins to buzz, she has always felt so much.

She continues to walk along the front, past serried deck-chairs on which old people lie out, their faces upturned to the sun, past ice-cream stalls and hamburger stalls, with their queues of half-naked trippers, past a pub in which two red-faced Irishmen are having a noisy quarrel. Then she stops and gazes out over the beach. Not many people are swimming today, the wind is far too cold. There is a woman standing, barefoot and motionless in a flimsy cotton frock, a lead about her neck, where the sea meets the shingle. The water laps at her ankles. She puts a hand to her mouth – that is all that Sybil sees – and then a small white dog, separated by a groin, stops rooting in a mound of rubbish left by some picnickers, pricks up its ears and eventually bounds off to join her. Sybil is puzzled. It is as though some kind of extrasensory perception existed between mistress and animal.

She walks on. As children, she and Hugo would wander this beach looking for treasure (as they called it). There would be broken combs, tin spoons, tattered magazines, torn bathing-shoes, cheap toys, halfpennies and pennies. Once, under a deckchair, its seat ripped and sagging, Hugo had glimpsed a set of false-teeth. He wrapped them in his handkerchief and together they sought out the lifeguard, immensely excited. But the muscular, middle-aged man, the skin of his bare torso, legs and face the colour and texture of a ginger-nut, received the offering with an indifference bordering on contempt. ‘OK,' he said, no more. Who would forget a set of false-teeth? Years later, one or other would refer to that childhood mystery.

Henry opens the door. Although it is August, he is wearing a thick double-breasted worsted suit, a stiff collar and an old Wykehamist tie which he has tugged into a small and hard knot. ‘Last but not least,' he says, revealing butter-coloured teeth, real, not false. ‘ I thought I heard the bell. My invaluable Mrs Lockit is getting some ice for someone. Ice with sherry! Well, there's no accounting for taste.' Henry thinks that Sybil is looking unusually pale; Sybil thinks that he is looking unusually flushed.

‘Whom don't you know?'

‘Everyone.'

Henry looks desperately around the room. ‘ I think you'll like Mrs Hanrahan. Her daughter is at Roedean.'

Sybil hopes that Henry will not tell this woman, whose tight, flowered dress makes her look like an excrescence of the sofa on which she is sitting by herself, that she has been examining at the school. Maliciously, knowing that Sybil has been lying, he does so; but the woman laughs and says, ‘Oh, Sir Henry, you're years out of date. Irene is now in Mombasa.'