Voices in an Empty Room (26 page)

As Bridget stares at Sybil with unnaturally wide-open eyes, the tips of the fingers of one hand pressed to her lower lip, Sybil wonders irritably if she has really seen the point. ‘All this
may
be coincidence. Many people would say that it was. But I feel sure that Hugo has been the controlling communicator, making a definite statement through three entirely different people, all unknown to each other and only one known to him, about the certainty of resurrection. The ingenuity is typical of him. Clearly there was a prearranged plan in the three different communications; but none of us made that plan, since, at the time that the communications were received, I certainly did not know of the existence of the other two, even though, admittedly, they knew of my existence through my writings in the Journal.' Sybil sips her gin and tonic. ‘It's exciting,' she says. ‘Heartening.'

Bridget does her best to look excited and heartened; but what happened to her in that small, frowsty room on the housing estate was far more exciting and heartening, even if – as in the case of that terrible vision of her father's death in the Western Desert, which she had at the age of seven – people would merely ascribe it to hysteria.

Suddenly, Bridget wants to talk about that vision. ‘I've never told you this,' she begins, irritating Sybil with her constant tendency to go off at a tangent (butterfly-brained, Sybil calls her). ‘ It was during the war, when I was seven.'

As she has repeatedly told the story over the years, she has found it harder and harder to distinguish between what actually happened and what she has added, grain by grain, in order to achieve a neater shape and stronger consistency. The father was in the Western Desert, the child had known that; but her mother and her grandparents never told her that he might be in danger, much less killed. One morning she awoke extraordinarily early – Bridget can still hear the birds chirping in the dim garden of the rectory in which her grandparents lived and feel the cool of that summer dawn on her bare arms and legs as she threw off her bedclothes – and she had then known, known with total certainty, that something had happened to her father, though she did not yet know what. She lay in mounting terror on her bed under the open window. Then she heard a strange sound from the washbasin in the corner: a kind of turbulent threshing, as of a fish in water. She got off the bed and went over to the basin and looked down, horrified and fascinated. Blood kept shooting up in spurts from the waste pipe, to splash the sides of the basin and then trickle back. She watched for a long time. Then she ran out of the room, crossed the landing and banged on the door of her grandparents, since that was nearer than her mother's. Her grandfather, the vicar, appeared in his nightshirt, his eyes bleary and his face unshaven and creased down one side. ‘Come, come quickly!' She grabbed him by the hand and dragged him towards the door of her room. ‘Look in the washbasin, look in the washbasin, Grandpa! Look at the blood.'

The old man looked. There was nothing there.

‘What blood?'

‘Oh, it's gone!' She put a hand down, touched the pristine enamel. ‘But it was all splashed, all splashed here, splashed with blood.'

‘Now come on. Get back to bed. It's far too early for all this nonsense. It's not yet five o'clock. Come along! Back to bed!' He lifted her up with a grunt and carried her to the bed and threw her across it. ‘Now, no more of this nonsense, young lady! I have to get my beauty sleep if I'm to give a good sermon.' The day was Sunday.

‘But there was blood, there was!' It was bubbling up. Making a noise. I saw it, heard it.'

The door closed behind him.

Her father had been killed by a sniper's bullet in his throat. He had bled to death before anyone could do anything for him. He had died at the hour of her vision.

‘My family never wished to talk about it. Odd. You'd have thought that people so religious would have found some confirmation of all they believed. But, no, they did not wish to talk about it and they did not wish me to talk about it. I never did until I grew up and read that pamphlet of Hugo's –
Apparitions and Survival
.'

‘You must meet Lavinia Trent,' Sybil says.

‘The actress?'

Sybil nods. There has been something histrionic about the way in which this totally unhistrionic woman has told her story. That is why Sybil has been put in mind of Lavinia. ‘I think you'd get on together. Though you're wholly unlike.' She does not specify the points of unlikeness; it would be too cruel. ‘She, too, has had a recent – death.' Sybil, so straightforward and strong, hates such softening euphemisms as ‘bereavement' or ‘loss'. ‘Her son.'

‘How awful!'

‘Yes.' Then Sybil adds drily, ‘Though I rather doubt if she ever loved her son as you loved Roy. But she's taken his death very badly. Remorse perhaps?'

‘Remorse?'

‘ ‘‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done and done those things which we ought not to have done.'' When people die, that thought haunts one. I know I often think it about Hugo.'

Two youths in overalls, their hair piebald with splashes of white distemper, have come over to the pinball machine. They glance at the two well-dressed, middle-aged women, talking in quietly confidential voices to each other, with empty glasses before them, and then look away. Too old. Hags.

Sybil picks up her bag.

‘Shall we be on our way?'

‘I suppose so.' The terrible thing is that, whenever Bridget is now on her way, she has no idea where that way may be tending.

Sybil calls over her shoulder to the moustached, red-faced man in a blue blazer behind the bar, ‘Goodbye'and he responds, ‘Goodbye, ladies, thank you kindly for your custom,' in a parody of a military voice, which disturbs and startles Bridget.

Outside, Bridget says, ‘Perhaps I'll, give it a try.'

‘Give what a try?' Bridget has this habit, maddening to Sybil, of assuming that others have been miraculously privy to some train of thought that has been going on within her.

‘This automatic writing.'

‘It takes up an awful lot of time.'

‘Oh, I've got time. All the time in the world.'

Bridget's two sons, seventeen-year-old Eric and thirteen-year-old Oliver, moved viewers even more than she did when they appeared on television. All three of them looked and behaved as people would hope themselves to look and behave in such circumstances but, in many cases, would never succeed in doing. They were clearly grief-stricken but they showed none of the wildness, disorder and self-absorption of grief. Bridget was wearing a simple, brown dress, a shade darker than her hair. A puffiness about the eyes suggested that she had been weeping. The boys flanked her, each in grey flannels, tie and pullover, with grave, stoical faces. Friends later told her that she should have refused to be interviewed, it was an unforgivable intrusion; but she replied, ‘ No, I felt it to be my duty.' Then, at least, the friends countered, she should have refused to involve the boys. But the boys, at that brief time of solidarity, had wanted to be involved.

‘This news must have come as a terrible shock to you, Mrs Nagel?'

For a hysterical moment, equally invisible to the interviewer and the camera, Bridget had had the impulse to answer, ‘No, it came as a lovely surprise,' so idiotic was the question. But instead she nodded, putting a protective arm around Oliver's narrow shoulders.

‘Do you find that you regret that the whole operation ever took place?'

‘Well, of course, I'd have preferred it not to have taken place – and him not to have gone.' Oliver, small and beady-eyed, looked up at her, like some baby bird at its mother. He dreaded that she might cry. But her voice was steady, her eyes wholly tearless, as she continued, ‘ Of course, I'd have preferred it if my husband – and so many others, Argentines too – had not been killed. But, well, he was a journalist, a wonderful journalist, and he couldn't miss a story, not one like that. He survived Korea, Vietnam, Salvador …' She lowered her head, biting her lower lip, and then raised it again as though in a valiant, doomed effort to stare down the intrusive camera. ‘I'm proud that he did what the job demanded, did it like that. Yes, I'm proud.'

‘I'm sure your sons feel your pride.'

‘I think so. I believe so.' Again Oliver turned his head upwards, like some famished bird waiting for its mother to feed it. Eric stared ahead of him. He hated the idea of the war and the idea of his father's death but a loyalty to his mother and to the memory of the father with whom he had never really got on made him dissimulate.

He swallowed. ‘Yes, we do,' he said. ‘We feel very proud of what Daddy – my father did. It was typical of him. He did not see why a journalist should be any safer – or have any more privileges – than the men who were fighting.'

When the interview was over, the three of them re-entered the Georgian-modern house on the outskirts of Chichester. Eric resolved, silently, to mow the lawn the next morning, as a kind of propitation of the shade of his father, who would so often exclaim, ‘Oh, for God's sake Eric, you'd think that when I'm not here you'd see to the lawn.' His father had always preferred Oliver, who was docile, unintellectual and so good at games that, at his first term at Dartmouth, he had been chosen as fly-half for the Rugby football second eleven.

‘We must try to go on with our lives in the ordinary way,' Bridget said, not for the first time. ‘That's what Daddy would have wanted.' But it was difficult to go on with one's life in the ordinary way with reporters, cameramen, visitors, telephone calls and letters perpetually distracting one. ‘You must both do what you want to do and not worry about a me.'

But though the boys would have been far happier following this instruction, they felt, guiltily, that they must not abandon their mother. When, forgetting their bereavement, one of them would shout to the other, crack a joke or burst into laughter, a terrible shame would follow; and Bridget would make that shame worse by the bruised, stricken look that would pass across her face.

From New York, Bridget's daughter, Pamela, rang daily. ‘I wish I could come over to be with you. But Mel has this conference in Detroit and I couldn't bring the children and I don't know who'd look after them for me. I feel real bad about it.' She was so impressionable that, after some half-dozen years of marriage, she had already acquired both an American accent and a repertoire of American idioms.

‘Oh, don't do that, dear. I fully understand.'

‘Everyone here is one hundred per cent behind the British,' Pamela assured her, as though she herself had never been British. ‘Don't bother yourself about that hag at the United Nations.' Bridget could not think who this ‘hag' might be. She did not ask.

One night Bridget found Oliver sobbing in bed, his face turned to the wall as the sound, an effortful hiccoughing, reverberated round and round his bedroom. When she tried to comfort him, he pulled away from her arm. ‘Oh, go away!' he cried out fretfully. ‘Go away!' He was ashamed that she had seen him do what he had been so careful not to do in front of those television cameras.

For a few days, Eric ate little, and when he did so, there would be an abstracted look on his face, as he chewed slowly, his eyes carefully avoiding having to look at his mother, his brother or, worst of all, the snapshot of his father in battle-dress in some jungle, in the silver frame on the reproduction Queen Anne walnut sideboard.

For the next few days, friends of the family – two of them women whose husbands were away on service in the Falklands and who, in their visit, kept asking themselves the unspoken question, ‘ Would I behave as well as she is doing?' – continually appeared up the drive, some in cars and some on foot, often accompanied by children and dogs.

‘Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you?' ‘Sure.' ‘Oh, poor Bridget!' Bridget would shrug, her mouth twitching.

Or, ‘Why don't you get away from the house? The change might help. Come and stay with us.' (Pamela had suggested the same thing, though she had added dubiously, ‘I'm sure the two girls won't mind mucking in together so that you can have one of their rooms.') But Bridget would reply that she preferred to be where she was. She had never greatly cared either for travel or for staying with other people. Roy had laughed at her for that – ‘ You made the wrong choice in marrying a hobo like myself.' The wrong choice? Perhaps, after all, she had.

Then, inevitably, the visitors became less frequent, the letters and telephone calls fewer. There was a victory and people told her that they expected that that made her feel better, at least Roy's death and all those other deaths had not been for nothing, and she replied, wanly, that yes, she supposed that it did. Oliver spent more and more time away from home, either sailing with friends at Bosham or bicycling around to make brass rubbings in churches. Eric, shamefaced, asked if his girlfriend could come and stay and Bridget, who had never agreed with Roy's verdict that she was ‘a common little tart', replied, ‘ Yes, of course'. But Eric then announced that, since she had a job in a boutique in the King's Road, it might be easier if he were to go up to London than if she were to come to Chichester. The truth was that Chichester bored her and was beginning to bore him.

‘Yes, do go, darling.' Bridget did not ask where he would be staying, since she already knew that it would be in the flat which the girl shared with four other people, male and female, in Earls Court Square.

‘But are you sure you'll be all right?'

‘Quite sure.'

‘I hate to leave you.'

‘I'll have Oliver.'

‘But he's never here.'

‘And the Nicholsons up the road. I can always go over to them for a bit. They're always asking me.'