Voices in an Empty Room (25 page)

Mrs O'Connor does not appreciate the drift of the question, though she has been vaguely aware that all the experts – social workers, policemen, the health officer, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research and the Institute of Paranormal Studies, even the ‘reverent' (as she calls the epicene High Church clergyman) – suspect that Maureen has been having everyone on. To Mrs O'Connor that idea is preposterous. Only last week, the girl was tumbled out of her bed, with the bed on top of her, and there was that time when she, Mrs O'Connor, hunted high and low for her brassière, for minutes on end, before Sean spotted it, inaccessible except with a ladder, inside the unlit light-globe in the kitchen. Mrs O'Connor nods, ‘Yes, she was here. I wish she hadn't been. Sean takes it all so calmly but you can see that it's getting on Maureen's wick. She spends a lot of her time away from home now, mixing with undesirables. I tell her to be home by ten but often she's later. What can one do?'

There is a terrible helplessness about this woman, at the mercy not only of her poverty and her recalcitrant daughter but of the demons who smash her crockery, rip the clothes off her and her children, and interrupt her sleep. Bridget has succumbed to that pathos, slipping money to Mrs O'Connor, buying Maureen a tennis racket, and always remembering to bring sweets for Sean. She can understand the erratic, malevolent demons; such demons have wrecked her life, just as they are now wrecking this cramped and dingy flat high up on the nineteenth floor of a tower block already due for demolition less than a dozen years after its erection.

‘That sounds like Maureen.' The lock of the front door has clicked. Mrs O'Connor hurriedly pushes the wizened boy to one side and calls out, ‘Is that you, Maureen? The ladies are here.'

‘Which ladies?' There have been so many visitors in the past weeks, some sympathetically credulous and others aggressively sceptical; many of them have been women.

‘Miss Crawfurd and Mrs Nagel.'

Maureen does not care for Sybil, who treats her as though she were one of her pupils; but she likes Bridget, who is soft, hesitant and, above all, generous. Maureen now sidles reluctantly into the room, in white tennis shorts, which reveal her thin, wiry legs, a white aertex blouse, the points of the nipples of her small breasts visible beneath it, and once-white shoes scuffed with an orange dust. Her hair has recently been cropped as short as a boy's and she has used peroxide to bleach one strand, springing up from her low, slightly bulging forehead, a brilliant, unreal ochre.

‘Hello, Maureen dear,' Bridget greets her. ‘I'm glad you're using the racket. How's the tennis going?'

‘I beat ' im,' Maureen states, in a flat, staccato, nasal Cockney, unlike her mother's sing-song brogue. She does not specify who her opponent was. ‘And ' e's been playing for more'n two years,' she adds.

‘Wonderful!'

‘You won't be wanting your tea yet awhile,' Mrs O'Connor says.

Maureen shakes her head, stooping to pick negligently a scab on her shin. ‘I've some ' omework to do.' She looks boldly at Sybil, ‘Perhaps Miss Crawfurd would like to 'elp me?' Sybil does not respond. She notices that the girl's elbows, knees and ankles are grey. What she clearly needs is a bath.

Maureen goes out, whistling ‘Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' with all the perky shrillness of a boy. When Bridget realizes what it is that she is whistling, a grey film seems suddenly to have appeared between her and the three other people in this damp, dingy flat. It was on the Falklands, only seven weeks ago, that her husband was killed. Surely Maureen, who has been so persistently inquisitive about his death – Was he shot or blown up or burned? Did he die instantly? Where have they buried him? – could not have chosen that tune on purpose.

Mrs O'Connor says, ‘ I'd expect you'd like a cup of tea.'

‘Well, that would be very nice,' Sybil says briskly. ‘Very nice indeed.' She would rather have a drink, since she feels tired after wandering around London in this heat, but she will have to wait for that.

Mrs O'Connor gets to her feet with a sigh. A hand is pressed to the small of her back, where she has had a constant pain for some days. She does not want to go through all the bother of making the tea but she feels that she owes it to these two ladies who have given her both time and money. Sybil rises with her and follows her into the kitchen.

Alone, Bridget puts her hands to her cheeks. She is a small, pretty woman of forty-eight, her crisp, short-cut hair arranged in small curls around her trianglar face. Her three children, one of whom is married to an American and living in New York, one at an ashram near Delhi and one spending part of the summer holidays with a cousin in France, all mock at her for her belief in ‘ spooks'. But they cannot shake it. She has no doubt that somehow, somewhere – she cannot be specific – she and Roy will be reunited, just as she and her father will be reunited. Love conquers death and love casts out fear.

This room is so gloomy. The light is oddly opaque as it filters through the thick, grimy net curtains beside her, there is a crack across the ceiling, and everything has about it a sour odour, as though someone a long time ago had vomited in it and no one had bothered to clear up the mess. Yet she feels at peace. What, she wonders, lies behind the net curtains? Is there a balcony or merely a sheer drop? She puts out a hand and, as she does so, an extraordinary thing happens. One of the net curtains, as stiff as a flap of wood on a hinge, rises up, so that all at once the sunlight previously diffused behind it floods into the room. Beautiful! She feels such joy at this unexpected illumination that, for a moment, she does not question the manner in which it has happened. The sun is on her face, on her bare arms, on one of her legs. Then the flap crumbles, disintegrates, subsides into the dirt-engrained fabric of net. She stares at it.

Mrs O'Connor comes crablike into the room, the plastic tray with the tea things on it held in her hands. First Sean and then Sybil follow her. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, dear. That kettle's all furred up, it takes an age to boil.'

Bridget is staring straight ahead, her eyes glazed and a smile on the corners of her lips, her cheeks puckered slightly.

‘Are you all right, Bridget?' Sybil asks. There is something about the withdrawn expression and the rigid posture of her friend which alarms her.

Bridget gives a little shudder. ‘ Yes, oh, yes.' She can still feel, though the room is now dim, that sunlight on face, arms, leg. ‘I – I had an odd experience while you were gone.'

‘Odd? How?'

Bridget describes it. Sybil listens to her attentively, but Mrs O'Connor, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, goes on with her pouring out of the dark, stewed tea from the brown teapot which dribbles because of a chip in its spout.

When Bridget has finished, Sybil says, ‘ How extraordinary,' and simultaneously Sean, who has been sitting on the sofa, absolutely still, his eyes fixed on Bridget's, cries out, ‘I see'd that too. I see'd it!'

Sybil turns to him, ‘Do you mean that you've also seen the curtain rise up like that – stiff, of its own accord?'

There is something stern and inquisitorial in her voice and it may be this that prevents him from answering her. He jumps off the sofa, with a little squeak, runs to his mother and hugs her about a knee. She runs a hand, affectionate and protective, through his tousled hair.

‘I felt so happy,' Bridget says. ‘For a moment, I felt so happy. And some of that happiness remains.'

Suddenly, Maureen is there in the room. They have none of them heard her approaching or opening the door. Her far from clean feet, with their talonlike nails, are bare. She is wearing a dressing-gown over pyjamas. She stares at Sybil with a hungry intensity.

Mrs O'Connor puts a hand to her forehead and then lowers it over her eyes, as though to shut out a glare. ‘Bless me if I'm not starting one of my heads again. Get me a Paracetamol from the kitchen, Maureen, there's a pet.'

Maureen goes out as silently as she entered.

Sybil, adept at organizing other people's lives for them, says, ‘I do wish you'd let me take you to the Migraine Clinic. I'm sure they could do something there to help you.'

‘I've tried everything,' Mrs O'Connor says. ‘Every blessed thing. Nothing seems any good.'

‘Diet is very important,' Sybil tells her. ‘You probably don't eat the right things. Or eat the wrong ones. At the Migraine Clinic they'd tell you.'

Maureen returns with two tablets in the palm of one hand and a glass of misty water in the other.

‘Bless you,' Mrs O'Connor says. She takes the tablets and glass from her, and then, having put one of the tablets on her tongue and having sipped at the water, she throws her head back abruptly a number of times, the muscles in her neck going into spasm. ‘ It's all I can do to swallow the blessed things,' she says, having at last succeeded with the first. She then goes through the same process with the second.

Sybil tells her, ‘I'm sure you'd find it just as easy or even easier if you didn't tilt back your head.' But Mrs O'Connor, as so often when people give her advice, does not seem to have heard.

Eventually, the two women get up to go. Not a moment too soon, Mrs O'Connor thinks. The kids want their tea. Bridget hands Maureen a five-pound note – ‘Use that for something for yourself and your brother.' In giving the money to the girl, instead of to her mother, it is as though she were acknowledging that that moment of literal illumination by the window had somehow, however obliquely, been Maureen's doing.

On the stairs, Sybil, who is walking ahead, turns round to ask, ‘Are you sure about the curtain?'

Bridget nods. ‘As sure as I'm sure of anything that has ever happened to me.'

‘Interesting that Mrs O'C started one of her migraines immediately after. And that Maureen had just come home.'

When they have left the housing estate, with its broken or blackened trees, each within a circlet of wire, its low garages and coal bunkers daubed with graffiti and its group of children, boys and girls, noisily kicking a football about on a yellowed patch of grass, Sybil says, ‘I could do with a drink.'

‘So could I.'

‘Let's try that pub over there.'

Bridget is surprised. She has never imagined Sybil entering a pub, certainly not one in a working-class district like Stepney. When Sybil asks her what she wants, she giggles and says, ‘I suppose we ought really to settle for port and lemon.' But, in the event, each has a gin and tonic, which they carry over to a corner, where they can sit, inconspicuously behind a pinball machine.

‘Did the police ever retrieve your car?' Sybil asks.

‘Yes. The day before yesterday. In Streatham. It was in an awful mess – the front bumper had been all but knocked off, one headlamp was smashed, there was a scrape and a huge dent along a door. He must have been in a smash. And the inside …!' Bridget pulls a face ever her drink. She does not want to think about the car, much less about the circumstances leading up to its theft. Those demons, erratic and malevolent, will not leave her alone.

‘What a brute!' Sybil says. ‘One would like to see him flogged within an inch of his life.' Neither Bridget nor she herself is wholly certain that she is joking. ‘And after all you've been through already.'

To Bridget it seems that she has not been through the events of the last months but that they, like some corrosive poison, have been through her.

Sybil begins to talk about her automatic writing. Before the Falklands crisis occurred and before she knew anything about the Islands, a sentence appeared in one of the scripts: ‘The goose walks the green, the white flag is black.' She thinks now, with her knowledge of Goose Green and of what happened there to Bridget's husband, that it must have been prophetic. Bridget shares her belief.

‘I've spent the last days combing through my scripts, reams and reams of them. And, since that letter of mine in the Journal last month, a number of people have begun to send me theirs. I'm deluged with them! Most of them are useless. But there
are
oddities, cross correspondences. For example, as you probably know, Hugo's chief scholarly interest, before he and I began to collaborate on our edition of the Meredith Letters, was in early drama and, in particular, in tropes and liturgical plays.' Bridget who is an unliterary woman, has no idea what is meant by tropes or liturgical plays but she nods, as though she did. ‘I expect you've heard of the tenth-century
Quem Quaeritis
– some people have called it the first modern play, even though it consists of only four lines.' Something in Bridget's expression tells Sybil that, for all her pretence of eager comprehension, she is wholly at sea. Sybil adopts the tone which she uses to one of her dimmer pupils, ‘ The play was performed in churches at Easter. A priest would stand by the altar. He would be playing the role of the Angel who acted as guard at Christ's sepulchre. Three other priests in drag – impersonating the three Marys – would approach him and ask for the whereabouts of Christ. Now Hugo of course knew the four lines by heart; but of the three scripts between which I have found cross correspondences, one emanates from me – I, of course, know the lines – and two from housewives who are extremely unlikely ever to have heard them, much less to have memorized them. Embedded in my script is the sentence in Latin
Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, O Christicolae?
– ‘‘Who is it that you are seeking in the sepulchre, O Christian women.'' In a script, of almost the same date, from a farmer's wife in Yorkshire, I found the words, ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth'' repeated four times – and
Jesum Nasarenum crucifixum
or ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified'' is the answer given by the Angel. In another script, also of approximately the same date, produced by a shop assistant in Bath – unknown both to the farmer's wife and to me until she got in touch with me – I found ‘‘He has arisen.'' And ‘‘He has arisen'' or, in Latin,
Surrexit
, is what the Angel then goes on to assure the three women.'