Voices in an Empty Room (3 page)

‘I feel that, at last, Hugo is coming through. Oh, I've had vague inklings that things in my script must have derived from him, but now I'm certain, absolutely certain. Read this, for example.' She pushes one of the sheets across at Audrey and Audrey frowns at the passage down the side of which Sybil has drawn a single thick line in red ink.

… Impotently, imperfectly, imperishably. Immortal. With Life and Death I walked. I want to. Try to. Must. So difficult. You have had that dream. One wishes to move, cannot, Wishes to speak, cannot. Or that other dream. One moves, no one sees one. One speaks, no one hears one. I want to. Try to. Must. She says, I wish only to die. Wish. Only. If only. The secret of the shrouded death. But not, not by lifting up the lid of the white eye. Fire to reach to fire. A yonder to all ends …

Audrey finds it hard enough to read anything other than the
Daily Express
or a cookbook. She takes a long time to read this brief passage, and at the end she looks up at Sybil, who has been watching her intently, with bewildered exasperation.

‘I don't get it,' she says.

Sybil has long since decided that there is a lot that Audrey does not get. Common clay. But she decides that she must be patient, since further down the page – she points to the words, underlined in red ink – there is written:

… Audrey. Tell. Comfort
.

‘It's his message to us.'

‘But I still don't get it.' In her fretfulness, Audrey sounds as though she were on the verge of tears.

‘No. I can see that. I can understand that.' Audrey feels at her most uncomfortable with Sybil when she adopts this kind of superior, sarcastic tone. Well, let me try to explain, dear. Firstly, there's a poem called ‘‘Hymn to Colour'' by–'

‘Meredith!' Audrey all but shouts, as though in a game of snap.

‘Yes, Meredith. Precisely. You know it?'

‘No.'

‘Well … it's an extraordinary poem. Not known to many people. Not known like, say, ‘‘Modern Love'' or ‘‘Love in the Valley''.'

Audrey remembers those embarrassing minutes, an endless chain of them, link on link, when she sat perched on the hard edge of her bed in the Athens hotel and Hugo, lying full length, in stockinged feet and underpants, on his next to it, had read to her, in a sing-song voice, almost a chant, first the whole of ‘ Love in the Valley' and then the beginning of ‘ Modern Love'. But she had had a tiring and trying day, first jolting out to Daphni with him on a crowded bus, then trekking all the way round the Plaka to find that taverna where he and Sybil had once eaten such a wonderful meal for a song but which now seemed no longer to exist, and then panting up to the Acropolis and listening patiently to his lecture on the vulgarity of the Parthenon (‘a garishly painted table with too many legs') as it once must have been. She managed to keep herself from slumping back on the bed, she even managed to keep her eyes from closing. But after suppressing one yawn, which merely made her nostrils dilate imperceptibly, she could not suppress the next and her mouth gaped. Hugo quietly put down the book. ‘I'm boring you, I can see. I'm sorry.' ‘Oh, no, Hugo, no! Do go on!' But he threw the book on to the bed, as he jumped off it. Audrey reached out a hand, as though she wanted not so much to retrieve the book as to rescue something drowning between them. But Hugo stopped her with the whipcrack of his, ‘No, Audrey, leave it. Leave it, please.' Common clay.

‘Well, of course, I know ‘‘Modern Love'' and – er, ‘‘ Love in the Valley'',' Audrey says. She begins to blush, as she always does after having told what she calls a whopper.

‘I'm not going to give you a whole lecture on the poem or even to attempt a rapid exegesis.' Sybil wants to add: If I did, I'd be wasting your time and mine. ‘ But the point is that the ‘‘Hymn to Colour'' is a highly complex poem – complex in its rhythm, even more complex in its imagery – about Life and Death.' The way she speaks those last two words endows them with the capitals that they bear in the text. ‘And in that piece of automatic writing which no doubt struck you as meaningless, there are, remarkably, innumerable references to that poem. ‘‘With Life and Death I walked'' – that's the beginning of the whole poem, and it goes on ‘‘when Love appeared''. That's his Love for you, for me, for both of us. For the children too, of course,' Sybil adds, though this is the first time she has connected them with that Love. ‘ Then there's that phrase ‘‘ The secret of the shrouded death''.' Sybil runs her forefinger, head twisted round in order to see properly, under the words. ‘It's followed by that reference to ‘‘the lid of the white eye''. Now the key passage in the poem is a stanza which runs –'

Sybil gazes out of the window and, in that same sing-song voice which Audrey found so embarrassing when Hugo used to assume it, she begins to quote:

‘Shall man into the mystery of breath
From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy?
Or learn the secret of the shrouded death.
But lifting up the lid of a white eye?
Cleave thou the way with fathering desire
Of fire to reach to fire.'

Sybil opens her eyes. ‘Of fire to reach to fire,' she repeats. ‘That of course, is also a phrase in the script. There.' Again the pointed, unvarnished nail of her forefinger indicates the words.'

‘Well!' Audrey exclaims, hoping that this one monosyllable will convey the requisite understanding, amazement and gratitude to her sister-in-law. But Sybil is far too perceptive to be taken in for a moment. The little ninny obviously hasn't a notion what she's going on about.

‘To put it briefly, this is a poem about Life subsumed in Death and Death subsumed in Life.' Subsumed? Silly to use that kind of word to a woman so uneducated. ‘They are coexistent, each is a part of the other, just as, just as –' the simile, now that she has started on it, somehow embarrasses her ‘– two lovers are part of each other.' She stares at Audrey, who, discomfited, looks down at the sheets of script, fingering the edge of one of them as though to test its physical reality. Sybil goes on, ‘Well, of course, that was what Hugo believed, believed so passionately and so whole-heartedly. For him, Life and Death
were
one.' She pauses, ‘Then there's that sentence ‘‘She says, I wish only to die.'' Well, that's clearly a reference to …' She stops. A desolate reticence inhibits her from continuing. ‘To another Sybil, the Sybil of Cumae. People asked her, ‘‘What do you wish?'' and ‘‘ I wish only to die'' she replied. Like her, I, too, have wished only to die since Hugo's death.'

‘So you think – you think that he …?' Audrey suddenly wonders what the children are up to; she remembers that it is long past the time to milk the cow; she can hear one of the hens squawking from the hedge by the road – presumably she has laid an egg.

‘I'm certain of it. You see, Audrey dear, there's something very odd about the fact that this particular poem, of all Meredith's poems, should have come through. And I'll tell you why. You know how Hugo loved to read poetry aloud?' Audrey nods; she knows it only too well. ‘ In fact, he used to say that that was the only way to read it. Anyway, when I last saw him – when we went to Brighton together and I left him there and then that terrible accident happened – he read ‘‘Hymn to Colour'' to me during our train journey. There he was, opposite to me in the carriage, in such a state of elation that I thought to myself, Well, if there's such a thing as a truly happy man, then there's one before you! He read the poem so beautifully. I had never fully understood it before – as with so many of Meredith's poems, I felt that there was always one last veil between me and the final, essential meaning. But that veil had been rent. It had disintegrated. Hugo had worked a kind of magic.'

Audrey is now rolling up one corner of the script between a thumb and forefinger. Sybil has an impulse to reach out and slap her hand, as she has seen Audrey herself reach out and slap Betsy's hand, when she is picking the almonds off one of her home-made Dundee cakes. Audrey is also frowning, in the manner of a schoolgirl who has given up all hope of solving an equation but wishes to give the impression that she is still working at it. She heaves a deep sigh.

‘Now it's odd, to say the least, that what should have come through is references to a poem in which Hugo's own affirmation of the oneness of the living and the dead achieved so magnificent an expression. But it's even odder that that should have been the last poem that he ever read, aloud to me – probably the last poem that he ever read aloud to anyone – on the day on which he died. Isn't it?'

Audrey is silent, her cheek supported on a hand and her eyes still fixed on the script. She seems to be sulking.

‘Isn't it?'

Audrey looks up and suddenly, in those eyes which are usually submissive, there flashes a sudden anger. Sybil is as much taken aback as she would be if, on a clear summer day like this, lightning were to fork down on to the table between them. Audrey's lips tremble. Then she says, ‘But why do you think it was Hugo who wrote all this?'

‘Why do I –?' Sybil is astounded. ‘Well, who else could have written it. Who else?'

Audrey glances fearfully at her sister-in-law. She wishes that she could go out to milk the cow or to call to the children or to look for that egg in the hedge by the road. She swallows. ‘ You,' she says.

‘Me?'

‘Well, what I mean is – your subconscious.'

‘My subconscious?'

‘I mean – this – this writing comes out of your subconscious, doesn't it? And you told me, told me only last week, that not a day, not an hour passes when Hugo's wholly out of your mind. So couldn't it be that …?' Her voice fades away in a diminuendo of embarrassment and dread.

‘Couldn't it be …?' Sybil prompts. But, all at once, so intelligent, she feels like a chess-master suddenly checkmated by a novice.

‘Well, couldn't it be that you yourself wrote – subconsciously of course – what you wanted Hugo to write? I mean, it's only natural. One wants to believe. One wants proof. Wants that –' she swallows ‘– that consolation.'

Sybil draws air deep into her lungs. Then she puts out her strong, capable hands and draws the script towards her. She smooths out the edge of the sheet which Audrey's restless forefinger and thumb curled up. Then she raises all the sheets and taps them against the table, so that they fall exactly into place. She replaces the sheets in her handbag. All without a word.

‘Well, you may be right,' she says drily.

Audrey says: ‘I wonder what has happened to the children.' She jumps up from her chair.

Class is over, outside the sun is shining.

Sybil often told Hugo that, in her life with him, Audrey was acting out a role in a play. What Hugo never told Sybil was that the play was a two-hander in which he was the other actor. It was not until he was forty-one that they had married each other, so that it might be said that he was late in discovering his vocation; but, once he had discovered it, it was with the realization, common to actors, that he was really far happier being someone else than being himself.

With the exception of Sybil, his senior by two years, women, though he had found them vaguely attractive, had always embarrassed and irritated him. They demanded too much, they responded too fervently. As exemplified by his girl students, they had this inability to move from the general to the particular, to see the trees for the wood. They also smelled odd: not unpleasant but odd, in the way that food can smell odd and so blunt one's appetite. He had had women friends, of course, most of them older than himself and most of them married either to their work or to colleagues of his. But neither they nor he had ever supposed that he would, on a whim as it seemed, suddenly forsake his bachelor life in his one room in college and his two rooms in Beaumont Street, in order to marry someone both so much junior to himself and so much his intellectual inferior.

‘Why do you want to do it?' another bachelor don had asked him with a mixture of puzzlement and pique; and Hugo had then replied, ‘ I suppose that, like Hedda Gabler, I feel my time has come.' But that was disingenuous. For months and months before meeting Audrey, he had day-dreamed, as the middle-aged often do, of the paths which, at each crossroads in his life, the mere choice of other paths had prevented him from exploring. What if he had opted for that job with
The Times
, instead of for his fellowship? What if he had accepted that chair in Australia, instead of sticking where he was? What if he had continued with his work on tropes and liturgical plays, instead of devoting all those years to the Meredith correspondence? Above all, what if he had married, had sired children, and had acquired a multitude of possessions? It was this last ‘what if' which began to obsess him. Though there was nothing in his life to make him unhappy, he knew that he was not happy; and though his colleagues would certainly maintain that his career had been productive – after all, there were the eleven volumes of the Letters to prove it – none the less, he had a sensation of barrenness.

When he and Audrey were playing Peter Pan and Wendy in their dank Cotswold farmhouse, he would often think to himself, Yes, this is the life – with the inevitable corollary, and that was the death, of those years now behind him. ‘I'll bath the baby, dear, you go and put your feet up, you've had such a hectic day.… I want to try this recipe for taramasalata, I found it in the
Guardian
.… Betsy said the funniest thing, I went into the sitting room and there she was lying, motionless and flat on her back, with her arms outstretched and I asked her, ‘‘Betsy, what on earth are you doing there?'' and she said, you won't believe this, she said, ‘‘Sh, Daddy, I'm Christ on the Cross.'' … Yes, it
does
look rather a peculiar colour, I'll give Dr Duncan a call and ask him to drop in.…' It was with remarkable conviction that he delivered such lines. ‘Who would ever have supposed that Hugo would have become so uxorious and domesticated?' one of those wives of his colleagues remarked admiringly to Sybil as, kneeling on the carpet, Kleenex in his hand, Hugo wiped up some cat vomit. ‘There was a time when he would never have allowed a cat into his rooms. And if a cat
had
got in and, horror of horrors, had also vomited, he would have summoned a scout.' But Sybil could not share the speaker's admiration. She found it painful to see this distinguished scholar humiliate himself in so grovelling a manner – for so it appeared to her.