Voices in an Empty Room (2 page)

‘You shouldn't have done that,' Audrey says. She is not being polite; she means it. People, she has been brought up to believe, should not give each other money as presents. It is, she has been brought up to believe, the easy way out. Best of all is to give people presents made by oneself. It is for that reason that last Christmas she gave Sybil a handknitted purple jumper at least two sizes too small for her and the Christmas before that some home-made chutney, with mould whitening the surface under the waxed paper.

‘She's so like Hugo. It always gives me quite a turn.'

‘Do you think so? Everyone says she's so like me.'

The two women begin to walk slowly towards the house, as though each shrank from the closer proximity to each other which going inside will enforce on them. In the hall, Audrey seats herself on a chest and pulls off first one Wellington boot and then the other. Underneath, she is. wearing coarse Army surplus socks. The chest is a Jacobean one. It would have pained Hugo to see Audrey squat on it, just as, vicariously, it pains Sybil. Audrey pulls off her beret and her hair, blond and dishevelled, tumbles out from under it. It is scarcely believable to Sybil that this is the girl whom she first met, in the Long Bar at Covent Garden, dressed in a trouser suit of soft, honey-coloured suede, her hair cropped, with obviously expensive artistry, close to her head.

Sybil slips out of her coat and then, feeling the chill of the house, wishes that she had not done so. ‘Audrey is such a wonderful manager,' Hugo would say. By that he meant that she would enforce the economies that he was too sybaritic to enforce. But perhaps now, Sybil thinks with genuine compassion, the economies are really necessary. Audrey has probably already mishandled the money, as she will go on doing. She is the sort of person who saves two hundred pounds on the heating bills and then loses two thousand on some daft investment.

‘I've baked a cake,' Audrey says, as though she were announcing something unusual;. but Audrey is always baking cakes, just as she is always baking the hard, gritty loaves of which, whenever she visits the school, she brings two or three as offerings for Sophie. ‘A carrot cake,' she adds. ‘We've had a glut of carrots. I sometimes think that old Mason planted nothing else in the vegetable garden.'

The two women go into the kitchen, where Audrey examines the Aga. ‘ Bugger!' She often swears now that Hugo is not here to chide her gently, as she used often to swear before she married him. ‘I think it's gone out! I must have forgotten to fill it.'

Sybil feels a terrible, unwilling pity both for her incompetence and her self-delusion of competence. ‘Let me see,' she says.

‘But you don't know anything about these things, do you?'

‘Yes. Something.' Hugo used to say that Sybil knew something about everything; and, in doing so, he always seemed to Audrey to be implying that she herself knew nothing about anything.

Sybil soon has the Aga blazing once more. ‘It wasn't out,' she says maddeningly. ‘But you had both those dampers shut.' Audrey has never really mastered the dampers, now that Hugo is dead. She leaves them to Mrs Pratt, the daily.

The tea is to be a nursery one at the long, rickety kitchen table, once a highly polished dark mahogany when Audrey bought it at an auction but now bleached – an act of vandalism to Sybil – to the colour of whisky with too much water in it. Hugo hated nursery tea. He would put an arm round Audrey's shoulders and say, ‘ Look, love, why don't you give the girls their tea here and Sybil and I will take a tray to the drawing room and have a cosy little chat.' But Sybil can hardly take a tray to the drawing room by herself, even though she would be glad of a cosy little silence.

The carrot cake at first tastes delicious, as it crumbles under Sybil's strong, white teeth. But then she is aware of something spongy and tough. She chews on it, she goes on chewing on it. Eventually she swallows. It is a piece of carrot.

The younger of the girls, Betsy, is less well mannered. She pulls a piece of carrot out from a corner of her mouth between finger and thumb and holds it out to her mother. ‘What's this, Mummy?'

‘Put it down,' Audrey hisses. ‘If you don't like it, leave it.'

‘But what is it, Mummy?'

‘It's a piece of carrot,' Audrey tells her. ‘Now eat it or put it down, but shut up!' She turns apologetically to Sybil, ‘Those carrots were terribly woody. I wondered if they would do.'

Sybil says nothing. She thinks, as she has often thought before, how awful it would be to have children. For many years Hugo shared her view. ‘Night after night,' he would tell people, hoping to shock them, ‘ I go down on my knees and thank the Almighty for having at least spared me the burden of children.' Then suddenly he married Audrey, on a whim as it seemed; and it seemed to be another, even more eccentric whim when he fathered first the one girl and then the other in quick succession.

‘Remind me to give you some of my gooseberry jam before you go,' Audrey says. She wishes that she did not always sound as though she were trying to placate her sister-in-law.

‘Thank you,' Sybil says, but she has no intention of reminding Audrey. She knows that gooseberry jam.

The children give up on their slices of the cake and are each handed a Mars bar, which they clearly much prefer. Sybil thinks that she would rather like to have one herself; but she does not ask and Audrey does not offer. Audrey chatters on and on, with a lot of nervous giggling and clearing of her throat and a lot of those ‘sort ofs' and ‘you knows', which caused Hugo so much irritation. What she mostly chatters, on and on about is the village; and the village is of absolutely no interest to Sybil, as it was of absolutely no interest to Hugo.

‘May I get down, Mummy?'

‘Yes, you may. When you've wiped the chocolate off your mouth.' Sybil has the familiar, maddening sensation that, yet again, Audrey is playing a part for which, unlike Odette or Giselle, she has no aptitude.

‘May I get down too, Mummy?'

‘Yes, dear. But wipe your mouth too.'

The two girls wander off, the older one unwrapping the pound note which she has screwed up in the pocket of her pinafore and showing it to the other.

The women are alone, with the Aga roaring beside them. Sybil gets up, half closes a damper and then sits down once more. She says, ‘I didn't come just to see how you were making out.'

‘No?'

‘I've had a strange experience. Strange. Encouraging.'

Audrey has already guessed, with the same panic which overcame her when she thought that the Aga had expired, the nature of this experience. It is to do with Hugo. Oh, why can't Sybil leave him in peace and leave her in peace too!

‘You know what we always promised each other?'

Audrey nods, her panic growing. ‘Whichever of you died first …'

‘Would find some means, any means, to get in touch with the other. Yes.' Sybil closes her large, green eyes under their beautifully arched eyebrows and presses fingers to her temples, as though she had started a headache. ‘Well, I think he has. Has found the means. Has been in touch.'

‘Oh.' Audrey feels sick. It is all such nonsense. Hugo died, in Brighton, in a manner which has always seemed to her mysterious and frightening. They brought his shattered body back here to the village and Father Jessop buried him in the churchyard. Later, there was a memorial service in the college chapel, when everyone present seemed more eager to console with Sybil than with her. Finis.

Sybil nods, ‘ Yes. I'm sure he's come through.'

‘But you thought that once before,' Audrey cannot resist telling her, partly although and partly because she knows it will annoy her.

What happened was that, soon after Hugo's death, Audrey and Sybil went to Chichester, leaving the two girls in the charge of Audrey's mother, to see Bernard Shaw's
On the Rocks
. Originally, the plan had been that Sybil and Hugo would go, since Audrey did not like to leave either the girls or the animals and, in any case, was not, as she put it, all that certain that she was all that keen on Shaw. But then, after Hugo's sudden death, Audrey agreed to use his ticket and his reservation at the hotel.

The evening over, the two women went to bed in their adjoining rooms, and each fell asleep. But before she fell asleep, Sybil, unlike Audrey, who tried not to think about him, made herself think, with intense concentration, about her dead brother. She was woken by a strange sound of jangling, at once awesome and thrilling. She lay in the dark, listening to it, vibrating on and on, until the conviction came to her: ‘It's Hugo. It's his way of getting through to me.' After a while, she got up, pulled on a wrap and, trembling with a mixture of excitement and terror, knocked on Audrey's door.

There was no answer and, so having knocked for a second time, Sybil vigorously turned the handle. It was typical of Audrey, in whom a protected, middle-class upbringing in the suburbs had implanted a natural trust, not to have turned the key. It was also typical of Audrey, in whom the same upbringing had failed to impose any sense of order, to have left her suitcase, the lid open, on the floor of the entrance, so that as Sybil hurried forward in the darkness, calling ‘Audrey! Audrey! Audrey!', she stumbled over it with an even louder ‘ Bugger!' Audrey, who had been snoring peacefully – it was that snoring that Hugo had used, soon after their marriage, as a pretext for not sleeping in the main bedroom with her, but in the dressing room by himself – sat up with a start. ‘Who is it?' she asked, in a tone of curiosity rather than of alarm.

‘Me. Sybil. Audrey, come at once! To my room! Come on!'

‘Why?' Audrey rubbed an eye with the back of her hand. ‘What's going on?' She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.

‘Don't ask questions! Come! If you don't hurry, it might stop.'

‘What might stop?'

But Audrey began to climb out of her bed, revealing, to Sybil's surprise, that she was wearing absolutely nothing. Sybil grabbed her C & A wrap off a chair and flung it to her.

‘Quick!'

In Sybil's bedroom, the two women stood side by side. Puzzled and sleepy, Audrey yawned, stretching one arm above her and then the other and wriggling her shoulders. ‘Listen!' Sybil hissed. Both of them then listened. Audrey, whose cheeks had been flushed by sleep, visibly paled. The jangling was getting louder and louder and more and more frenetic, until it filled the whole room.

‘What is it, Sybil?'

‘The sign,' Sybil whispered. ‘Hugo's sign.'

Audrey, her head on one side and a hand cupped to an ear, listened again. Then she walked briskly over to the built-in cupboard in a corner of the room and pulled open the door. The dress which Sybil had worn to the theatre was all that hung in it. All the empty wire coat-hangers were shaking against each other.

Sybil tried to make some connection between Hugo and coat-hangers. Why should his spirit choose to agitate coat-hangers as his sign to her? Then, with the shock of a blow to the solar plexus, she realized that Audrey was giggling. Yes, giggling; she was one of those women who did not laugh but giggled.

‘Audrey!'

Audrey pointed upwards to the ceiling. ‘ One of those bookies and his floozy must be at it. Well, good luck to them!'

It was race-week at Goodwood, so that, when the two women had returned from the theatre, they had found the bar of the hotel full of plump, jowly men in unbuttoned, fancy-coloured shirts sprouting grey hair at their wide-open necks and of stringy, sunburned, bangled women with cleavages even more striking. One of the men was apparently called Mr Pymm (or Pym) and, since he was squiring two women, with identical loud, husky voices and identical wigs, seemingly spun out of wire-wool, there was a lot of noisy joking about Pimm's No 1 and Pimm's No 2. An unattached, middle-aged man, with drooping eyelids and drooping moustache, asked Audrey, as she and Sybil were buying their drinks, ‘Had any luck today?' Audrey at first looked affronted; then she realized that he must be referring not to what he had assumed to be her profession but to the races. If she explained to him that she and her sister-in-law were in Chichester not for Goodwood but for a play by Bernard Shaw, he would no doubt think her ‘toffee-nosed' or something equally uncomplimentary; so she gave him her sweet, girlish smile and said No, she was afraid not, she never did have any luck, in fact she was the most unlucky person in the world. Later, he had come over to their table, glass in hand, to ask if he might join them; but Sybil had replied chillily that they were about to go to bed – even though it was at least twenty minutes before they actually did so.

Now Audrey can see from the exasperated expression on Sybil's face that she should not have referred to the incident of the coat-hangers. Sybil wishes to forget all about it, just as Hugo wished to forget all about the occasion when, entertained to a buffet lunch by some of Audrey's ballet colleagues at a flat in Cornwall Gardens, he had first become feverishly excited about a ‘vision' which he had experienced, alone on the balcony, of a horse-drawn carriage circling the square below, and had then sunk into embarrassed despondency when Audrey, not yet his wife, had pointed out that it belonged to Dunn's, the hatters.

Sybil opens her capacious handbag, with its tortoise-shell clasp, and takes out a sheaf of papers scrawled over in her handwriting.

She puts the papers on the kitchen table before her and then covers them with a hand.

‘I've told you of my writing?'

‘Writing?' Audrey thinks of Meredith, and of Hugo's repeated but always unsuccessful attempts to push her through one of the novels.

‘Automatic writing.'

Audrey nods. Oh, lordy, lordy!

On the day after the wedding of Audrey and Hugo, Sybil developed trigeminal neuralgia in so ferocious a form that no pain-killers could relieve it. Her doctor, who was also the school doctor, infuriated her by suggesting, in what she called his ‘ usual smart-aleck way', that her symptoms might be psychosomatic in origin. When she persisted in returning to him, he wearily proposed either a specialist or acupuncture. Meanwhile, Hugo and Audrey had returned from their honeymoon in Greece and Hugo came up with a proposal of his own. A fellow member of the Institute of Paranormal Studies, in constant pain after a motor accident, had received remarkable relief from a psychic healer with the unfortunate name of Cocke. Sybil had consulted the healer, who, on the first of her visits, went into a trance and, on the second, whether intentionally or accidentally, put her into one. After that second visit the pain abated. Cocke told her that, if it returned, she should think herself back into the trance during which she had been healed. The pain did not return but, slumped at her desk one night, a blank piece of paper before her and a pen in her hand, as she wished that Hugo, away at Harvard, were with her to advise her on the Meredith lecture (‘ Modern Love and The Modern Voice') which she was preparing to deliver at the Royal Society of Literature, she once again involuntarily slipped away into a trance. When she came to, in a state of exaltation, she found that the piece of paper and several pieces below it had been covered; but what she then read was not the beginning of her lecture but seemingly random words, phrases and sentences. She and Hugo subsequently spent many excited hours interpreting these supernatural effusions and others like them. Sybil, they both decided, was a natural medium.