Voices in an Empty Room (28 page)

She frowned.

‘No?'

‘I can't remember. I daresay he did.'

‘Lieutenant. He was attached to our unit.'

‘Oh, I see,' She began to walk down the hall towards the sitting room and he limped behind her. She could hear the clank, clank, clank of that iron on the stone floor, wherever there was no rug. ‘Have you eaten or can I offer you something?'

‘Well, to tell the truth, I haven't eaten. But if you've already done so, please don't bother.'

‘No bother. None at all. I've just had some cold chicken and salad. There's a lot more left. Would that do for you?'

‘Smashing.' There was something boyishly immature about the choice of word and the way in which he said it, just as there was something boyishly immature about his whole appearance.

‘Do you mind eating in the kitchen? I do most of my eating there now.'

‘Good God, no!'

‘Roy hated kitchen meals. He said they were squalid.'

‘Well, he was something of a stickler, wasn't he?'

She nodded ruefully, as she began to get down a plate for him.

‘Of course, we admired him for that. The way he always kept up appearances, insisted that everything should be as normal as possible, however abnormal the conditions.' He sucked in his breath. ‘Yes, we admired him for that. Terrific chap.'

She began to set out plate, knife, fork, napkin, opposite the disorder of her own half-finished meal. ‘ Would you like some beer or some wine? We have both.' She often found herself saying ‘we', when she should now say ‘I'.

‘I'm not really a beer drinker. But don't bother about opening a bottle of wine just for me. Water will be terrific.'

‘Oh, I'll join you in a glass. Why not?' She opened the door from the kitchen to the cellar. She had rarely been down there, not once since Roy's death. It was he who would fetch up the wine. After his death, it was Eric who would do so. ‘Come and help me choose.' She switched on the light and began to descend the steps, with him limping, the handle of his stick over his arm, behind her. ‘Are you sure you can manage? I didn't think about your foot.'

‘Yes, I can manage, thank you.'

‘White or red? Roy always said it was just chichi to insist on white with chicken.'

‘Yes. I remember his saying that.' He was eager to confirm it. ‘He used to prefer red with chicken. Didn't he?'

She nodded.

‘Well, then, let's have a red.''

She held up a bottle. ‘This?' She did not know it but Roy had been extremely proud of that Beychevelle 1966.

The young man squinted at the label with eyes, green and dark-ringed, which were set wide apart in his triangular face. ‘Super.'

They remounted and, after the young man had opened'the bottle, seated themselves, facing each other, at the kitchen table. He looked around him appreciatively, ‘ Cosy,' he said. ‘Roy was wrong. I'd much rather be here than in the dining room.'

She nodded. ‘I prefer it.'

He lowered his head and began to eat the food before him, picking daintily at now a leaf of lettuce, now a segment of tomato and now a shred of meat and then chewing meditatively, with an occasional smile at her. She watched him. Usually two strangers isolated together feel obliged to talk, however inanely; but, to her surprise, she was free of that compulsion. She was content to wait for him to start.

He stared out of the window at the grass, white with daisies, sloping up to a little spinney in which, when they were younger, the boys would often camp out on summer nights. ‘ This is a large property,' he said.

‘Not all that large. But too large for me by myself – now that the boys are away.'

He nodded. ‘ School holidays. Roy was so proud of those boys.'

‘Oliver was his favourite.' Roy had never seemed to her to be proud of Eric, despite his prizes, his performance as Hamlet and his poems and stories in the school magazine.

‘Yes, Oliver was his favourite all right. But still …'

‘I don't think he ever really understood Eric. Father and son were so unlike each other. When Eric played Hamlet at his school, he was so disappointed that his father showed so little interest. And yet, I sometimes think, perhaps Eric has taken his death harder than Oliver. He's so reticent, it's hard to tell.'

‘Strangely, Roy told me about that Hamlet. He seemed to take pride in it then – when he told me about it. So perhaps he really took more pride in all Eric's achievements than he'd let on. That would have been typical of him.'

‘Yes, typical.' She pushed the salad bowl towards him. ‘Have some more salad.'

‘It's smashing dressing.'

She did not tell him that the dressing had come, ready-mixed, out of a bottle bought at Marks and Spencer. Roy would never have countenanced that. She supposed ruefully that she was. going to pieces, without him to hold her together.

‘You're on leave?' she said.

‘Sick leave. Convalescing now. I'm on my way by car to the Officers' Home in Osborne – Isle of Wight. You've probably heard of it.'

‘Oh yes. Years ago, Roy and I visited a friend of his there – a colonel he'd known in Korea.'

‘Nice place. Very grand. Queen Victoria used to live there. Apart from Sandringham. there was nowhere she liked better – in her last years, after her old man died.'

Bridget wondered if, talking to other people, he would also refer to Roy as her ‘old man'. The phrase somehow jarred.

‘Where's your home?' she asked and then, when she saw his face suddenly dim and dissolve into a settied melancholy, she wished that she hadn't.

‘My home? Well, it used to be near Norwich. But I don't really have any home now. I was an only child, you see, and my father died when I was nine. My mother had a struggle. Somehow gave me the best possible education – good prep school, Harrow. Then
she
died. So …' He shrugged, put out a hand and lifted up the bottle. ‘ May I?'

‘Of course.'

‘You'll have some more with me?'

She shook her head.

‘You must.' He tilted the bottle, poured. He raised his glass, ‘
Saluti!
'

‘
Saluti
,' she muttered. Like that ‘old man', this ‘saluti' somehow jarred. She could not imagine Roy saying ‘Saluti' as he raised his glass to a colleague or, indeed, responding with a ‘ Saluti' if a colleague said it first.

He sipped, sipped again, then gulped. ‘ Lovely stuff.' He turned the label towards him and again stared at it. ‘Roy certainly knew how to choose his wine.'

‘Yes, he knew a lot about wine. I suppose it came from having had a grandfather in the trade. Funny he never wanted to go into it himself.' Funny and sad. If he had gone into it, he would never have been killed.

‘Somehow one can't imagine a chap like Roy in the wine trade. He was all up and go.'

‘There's some cheese if you'd like it. Only mousetrap. Or what about a peach?'

‘The peach would be super.'

With the same delicacy with which he had sliced the tomatoes and cut slivers off his chicken leg, he now began to peel and cut up the peach, between knife and fork, without ever touching it. It took a long dme, he was wholly absorbed.

Again, Bridget felt no need to keep a conversation going. She watched him, her arms crossed on the table before her and her eyes sad yet expectant.

He dabbed at his lips with his napkin, the peach eaten. ‘Home-grown?' he asked.

‘Oh, heavens, no. I expect it's from Italy.'

He thrust back his chair and stretched his long legs before him. The iron clanked.

‘Do you want to hear about it or not?'

‘About – about what?'

Suddenly, like a gust of wind revealing some object, a tin can or a fragment of glass, hidden in deep grass, so his question had revealed to her that dream, consolatory but seemingly lost beyond recovery, from which she had awoken. It had been of Roy, yes, she remembered it vividly now, but of Roy, not as he was, greying, paunchy and often irritable, in recent years but as he had been when first she had met him. He had been leaning from the window of a railway carriage and she had been looking up at him and their hands had been clasped. The train had started to move, he had clung on to her hands, she had begun to run beside the train. But she could not keep up, she began to falter, to fall, feeling his grip about to jerk her arms from their sockets. Then he let go. He was shouting, ‘ I'll send you a parcel! ‘ I'll not forget! A parcel! A parcel!'

The boy leant forward, put a hand along her arm. It was a gesture at once intimate and totally devoid of any sexuality. ‘About what?' he echoed. ‘About his death.'

‘You were there?'

He nodded, the green eyes suddenly darkening with the sympathy and grief which flooded into them. ‘I was there. That's how I got this.' He indicated the leg in its plaster.

‘Tell me,' she said. She leant forward. Waking, half-waking, dreaming, she had so often imagined his death. Now she would know.

He told her. Roy had insisted on accompanying the unit with an extraordinary, unnecessary gallantry; but he was so strangely calm that the boy had felt disturbed, it was as though the calm was one of acceptance of imminent death. The Argies (the boy used the word which Bridget could never bring herself to use) had been so eager to run that they had flung aside their weapons with no attempt to retaliate. Then had come the surrenders. White flags. When a white flag had appeared on a mound from which, all day, there had been accurately punishing artillery fire, Roy had gone forward with them. The Argies had machine-gunned him and, briefly, the unit had had to retreat. Tim himself had gone forward again under the protective fire of the British artillery and had found Roy, hoisted him on his shoulder and somehow, God knows how, staggered back with him. Roy was still alive but barely conscious. It was on that interminable journey back that Tim received the bullet that had shattered his ankle. But somehow he had managed to keep going, somehow he got back to British lines.

‘Did he ever recover consciousness?' Bridget stared at him with a hungry intensity as, overcome by his story, he reached out again for the bottle and poured out from it into his glass.

He nodded. ‘None of us realized how badly he had been wounded. I don't want to go into details.' He chewed on his lower lip, staring, out at the lawn; he appeared to be on the verge of tears. ‘I don't think he suffered, I'm sure he didn't. He was beyond that. But he – he mentioned your name. Repeated it, repeated it a number of times. And then he whispered to me, I could hardly hear him, I had to put my head down to his lips, he whispered to me in this faint but clear voice, he said, ‘‘ Tell her, it's not over. Love conquers death and love casts out fear.'' '

Bridget stared at him in amazement. ‘He said that?'

The boy nodded. ‘Yes. That was what he said. I swear to God.' He repeated it, in a tone of wonder, as though he had only now heard it said to him. ‘ ‘‘Love conquers death and love casts out fear.'' '

‘How strange!'

‘Strange?'

‘Well, I had this dream … And the message … It's what I've been waiting for during all these weeks.'

‘You have?'

She nodded. ‘Yes.'

Above their heads, the chimes of the front-door bell tinkled out. Tim started. ‘What's that?' He sounded alarmed.

‘The front door. Oh God, it must be Commander Cheston!'

The boy half-rose, reaching out for his stick.

‘You don't have to go. I'll pretend I'm not here, I'll tell him I forgot.'

The chimes again tinkled. Bridget rose from her chair, went to the kitchen window and peered out around the curtain. She saw the Commander stomping up to the garden shed in which the mower was kept, take the lock in his freckled hand and make as if to attempt to pull it off. Then he thought better of that and stomped away again, in his unfashionably narrow grey flannel trousers and highly polished brogues. ‘He's going, gone.' She felt extraordinarily happy and light-hearted as though she, and not the boy, had drunk more than. half the bottle of wine. ‘Let's go into the sitting room.'

‘What about all this?'

‘Oh, I'll see to it later. Plenty of time,' she added, a fleck of darkness drifting through the sunlight, which now seemed to surround her. ‘All the time in the world.'

In the sitting room, lying out on the sofa and smoking one after another of the cigarettes that Bridget kept for her guests, Tim talked chiefly about his own life, however much Bridget attempted to make him talk about Roy. He had wanted to be an actor, that was why he had been so interested when Roy had told him about Eric's success as Hamlet; but his mother had been so eager that he should go into the Army, the Michelmores had been soldiers for generations, his father had been a major in the Army until a wound, received in Malaya, had forced his premature retirement. He had intended to resist his mother's wishes but then, when she had died, he had felt unable to do so. ‘If I owed anything to her – and I owed a lot – then I owed her that.' It was a good life, the life of a soldier, in comparison with the lives led by the majority of civilians. Lives of service. Honest. Decent. He had no regrets, none at all.

‘That's what Roy felt. He often wished he'd remained a regular soldier himself. That's why he wanted one or other of the boys to go into the Army. Well, he was happy that at any rate Oliver decided on the Navy. He's at Dartmouth, you know.'

Tim nodded. ‘Yep. Roy told me that. He said, ‘‘Well, if it couldn't be the Army, then the Navy's the next best thing.'' '

At last, as the sun lengthened across the unmown lawn, white with its daisies, Tim lifted his lame leg off the sofa, a hand beneath it, and then put down the other. ‘If I'm ever to get to Osborne tonight, I ought to be on my way.'