Voices in an Empty Room (4 page)

But the actor, however dedicated and however much acclaimed, from time to time craves a respite from his role. Suddenly, at breakfast, Hugo would feel an irritation so intense that it was like a physical eczema, as Audrey dragged herself sleepily back and forth from Aga to table in nightdress, dressing-gown and Wellingtons (she had just returned from milking the cows), the two girls began to flick rice crispies at each other, using their spoons as catapults (‘ For God's sake stop that, you nasty little brats!') and outside the door the muddily dishevelled sheepdog, Bruno (‘Why does no one ever brush or comb him?') was scratching away at the paint. Hugo would make an effort to restrain himself; and then he would say, ‘I think I'll pop over to the school for a night or two to see how Sybil is making out,' or else he would sigh that it was really time that he looked in on Henry, the poor chap was so ill and so lonely. Without complaint, but faintly exasperated, like an actress who realizes that her partner must have a rest for a few days and that she must put up with an understudy, Audrey would accede, ‘All right, darling. Why don't you do that?' and would then often add, though Hugo did not need this reassurance, ‘We'll be perfectly all right on our own.'

It was after such a moment of, metaphorically, stripping off costume, make-up, padding and wig, that Hugo set off on the journey to Brighton which was to have momentous consequences not merely for himself but for many other people, the majority of them unknown to him. He was going to Brighton to visit Henry Latymer, whom he had met when Latymer was ambassador, at the fag-end of a career which had smouldered rather than burned brightly, to a small African state, and Hugo was on a British Council lecture tour. Despite a difference of thirteen years in their ages, the two scholarly, fastidious bachelors, both Wykehamists, at once took to each other, so that, after one night in a concrete shell of a hotel, its air-conditioning defective and its ‘ mini-bar', proudly advertised in its brochure, erupting cockroaches from its otherwise empty interior when he opened its door, Hugo moved into the cool, cleanliness and tranquility of the embassy. He remembered so well what had first made him take to Henry. There was a cocktail party, given by the British Council Representative after his lecture, and at it this tall, stooping man with a large, beaked nose inflamed at the tip, in a white cotton suit so shrunken that at least two inches of socks could be seen below his trousers, came over, took him by the arm and said, ‘Do you see that chap over there? No, not that one, the one who looks as if he were wearing striped pyjamas. Well, that's the Minister of Tourism, believe it or not. And since no tourist has ever been known to visit this benighted country, he asked me for a slogan for some posters which he had in preparation. I came up with ‘‘ Where every prospect pleases'' and I am delighted to say that he used it – without, of course, the five important words which follow.' Henry made the coughing sound, little more than a rustle, as of phlegm, in the back of his throat, that Hugo was later to recognize as his laugh. Though totally unmalicious himself, Hugo admired the neatness of the malice.

Henry eventually retired. Few people asked the question ‘ What on earth became of old Henry Latymer?' and even fewer knew the answer. But Hugo kept up with him, as he kept up with a number of people who struck others as ‘dreary' or ‘boring'. The intimacy between the two men was a curious one of calling each other by their surnames, but never by their Christian names, of discussing literature, art, music and, above all, psychical research but never their private lives, and of faintly adumbrating their emotions through the lightest of allusions. Although he was staying with Henry on the weekend after the Thursday on which Audrey had accepted his proposal (the old-fashioned phrase suits the old-fashioned manner in which the proposal was made), he did not mention it to him; and when, eventually, he sent Henry a wedding invitation, he was surprised neither by his refusal, on the pretext of ill health and the length of the journey from Brighton to Oxford, nor by the munificence of his cheque.

Henry, like many of Hugo's friends, happened to be rich; and when they died, such friends usually happened to leave Hugo, if not money, then an ancient Daimler, a charming little Boudin (Deauville, Les Dunes), six Chippendale dining chairs, a choice item of erotica
(Zephérin ou L'Enfant du plaisir, conte qui n'en est pas un)
, a Georgian tea service. But, son of a wealthy banker, who had left him a legacy far larger than that which he had left to Sybil, Hugo did not need such bequests; and, in no way acquisitive by nature, he neither wanted nor sought them. None the less they continued to come to him, as a reward for having seen in the testators qualities of mind or spirit invisible to others.

Henry lived in an early Victorian, semi-detached villa, looking like a wedding cake left out too long in the sun, on a quiet, upward-sloping street above the centre of Brighton. His neighbours had put in baths, bidets and low-level lavatory basins where there had been dressing rooms, had constructed Jacuzzi in their basements, and, often at huge expense, had restored period details – a canopy here, some moulding there – destroyed by the vandals before them. But Henry had moved into his house as it was and had left it like that. Worse, whereas everyone else painted their houses cream, and their window-frames and doors black, Henry, through some freak of taste not to be expected of a man with so valuable a collection of nineteenth-century water colours, had opted for a uniform pink, inexpertly applied, so that it looked like strawberry yoghourt, by a jobbing builder whom many thought to have been involved in a subsequent robbery from a neighbouring and far more elegant house.

Henry's wiring was ancient, so that Hugo had only to attach his electric razor by its adaptor to the bedside lamp – there was no socket for an electric razor anywhere to be found – for all the lights to fuse. His furniture was equally ancient, without being antique, so that, having lowered themselves on to a settee or an armchair, his visitors found that they were, in effect seated on the ground. Threadbare carpets were scattered over floors sealed by dust with linoleum over it. The hot water spattered orange out of a high, brass tap into a bath, which looked like a bassinet afflicted with elephantiasis, while a gas geyser alternately coughed and roared. In a cupboard beside Hugo's bed there was a tin chamber-pot.

Hugo never had occasion to use it; but he was sure that, had he ever done so, he would have found it still full when next he retired.

Henry was looked after by the woman whom he called ‘My invaluable Mrs Lockit'. Henry's neighbours, who were the sort of people familiar with
The Beggar's Opera
, referred to her, among themselves, as Lucy, though no one, probably not even Henry, knew her real Christian name. It was the general opinion that it was certainly Lucy who had found the jobbing builder to paint the front of the house and probably she who had chosen that nauseating pink, the colour of so many of her hats. Lucy lived in the basement, the curtains of which she usually kept drawn, even though extravagant loops of thick nylon net would, in any case, have prevented anyone from peeping in.

It was Mrs Lockit (or Lucy) who opened the door to Hugo. ‘Oh, Mr Crawfurd!' She managed to sound surprised, as she always did when Henry had a visitor. On one occasion when Hugo arrived at the house, she even went on ‘Fancy seeing you!', making him wonder, until Henry appeared, whether he had come on the wrong weekend.

‘And how are you, Mrs Lockit?'

‘I've made a stew for you both, a goulash really, and an upside-down cake,' she announced as though in answer to his question. The day was Saturday and on Saturday evening she went to her sister in Portslade. ‘You've got a new suitcase, I see. Very smart.'

‘How observant you are!'

Mrs Lockit replied airily, ‘Yes, people often tell me I'd have made a good detective. Nothing escapes me.'

There was something ominous in the way in which she said that. It made Hugo feel uneasy, as he had often felt uneasy, for no known cause, in the presence of this middle-aged, gypsylike woman, with her wild eyes and twitching mouth and her habit of pressing her hands into the sides of her stomach, as though in a vain attempt to establish the seat of some mysterious pain.

‘Who is – or was – Mr Lockit?' Hugo once asked Henry, to receive the reply, ‘ Haven't a clue, old, boy.'

‘And how did she come to you?' Hugo pursued.

‘Rang the bell, that's how. Said she'd heard I was looking for a housekeeper. But I can't think whom she can have heard it from, since I'd told nobody. Perhaps she has that thing you're always going on about.' He clicked his fingers in a pretended effort to recall a phrase perfectly familiar to him.

‘Extrasensory perception.'

‘That's it.'

‘Sir Henry's in the garden. Would you be wanting to go up to your room first or to go straight out to him?'

‘Oh, I'll go straight out to him.'

Hugo put down his suitcase and Mrs Lockit, head on one side as her fingers again palpated the sides of her stomach, examined it once more. ‘Yes, nice. Very nice.'

Henry, who now spent much of his time sleeping, since there was little else to do, opened his eyes as Hugo approached the deckchair in which he lay stretched out. ‘Ah, dear fellow!' He got up, his panama hat tilted over his forehead, so that the brim all but touched the inflamed tip of the nose which made his neighbours suspect, with no justification, that perhaps he was a secret drinker. Then he gripped Hugo's wrist with his left hand, exerting surprising strength, while his right squeezed Hugo's right in a lengthy handshake. It was the only expression of affection that he allowed himself. ‘Did you have a good journey?'

‘Fine.'

‘I'm sure you were extravagant and travelled first class.' Though so rich, Henry never travelled anything but second.

‘I'm afraid I did.'

‘And took a taxi?'

Henry derived the same excitement from Hugo's extravagances as a prude from the behaviour of a libertine.

‘No, that I didn't. I walked.'

‘Mrs Lockit thought that we might have our tea out here in the garden, since it's so hot.'

‘A splendid idea.'

Mrs Lockit was wearing one of her hats, bought at the Oxfam shop, when she appeared dipping and swaying between the rosebeds, as though in a dance. This did not mean that she was about to go off. She sometimes wore a hat even when she was ‘doing the outside toilet' (as she would put it) or serving up what she would call ‘dinner' even if it consisted only of scrambled eggs on toast and a carton of yoghurt for each of them. ‘Who's going to be mother?' she asked.

‘Oh, Mr Crawfurd, Mr Crawfurd,' Henry said. The less that he had to do these days, the less he wanted to do.

Hugo was by now so low in a deckchair that he had to get to his feet to pour out the tea from the much higher wrought-iron table, rusty and in need of a coat of paint, that stood between them. ‘Three lumps and milk in first?'

‘Ah, Hugo, that's what I like about you, that's what I like about you. You always remember.' Henry took the cup held out to him. ‘Silly, snobbish people, who say the milk must go in last. The people next door, what are they called? – yes, the Gascoynes – they were quite affronted when I asked for milk in first.'

Hugo, back in his deckchair, his cup beside him, nibbled at a biscuit, scattering crumbs into the creases of his shirt and jacket. He looked impressive like that, since, when he was seated, there was a less obvious discrepancy between on the one hand the grandeur of his head, with its brown, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, on which out of some odd vanity, he allowed the grey hair to sprout, and on the other the fragility of a body which dwindled, as in a fairground mirror, towards its extremities. He was happy. He could be himself for a while.

Henry stirred his tea, with a tinkle of stainless steel on Denby ware. Upstairs in the attics and downstairs in a basement storeroom, there were tea-chests and cupboards full of valuable silver and crockery inherited from grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins by this last wintry branch of a once burgeoning tree; but Mrs Lockit had given her verdict, she couldn't do with all that stuff, it was more trouble than it was worth.

‘Tell me,' Henry said. ‘ What's the news from over there?'

‘From over there? From where?' Hugo understood perfectly well what Henry meant but he preferred to pretend not to do so. His friend's irony did not offend him, since he knew that it concealed a genuine, passionate interest, even if one which he had always shrunk, with a kind of spinsterly dread, from openly satisfying.

‘From the Other Side.' Hugo put the phrase in inverted commas.

‘Well, interesting things are happening. They keep on happening. We've got several investigations under way at this moment.' When Hugo said ‘we', he meant the Institute of Paranormal Studies, of which he was a former President and now a member of the Council.

‘Tell me.' Henry was like a customer saying to a shop assistant ‘Show me.'

‘Poltergeists?' the shop assistant offered.

‘Ah, poltergeists! Pubescence!'

‘As you say, pubescence.'

Hugo began to describe the strange happenings on a council estate in the East End of London, and, as he did so, it was as though, in a vision, he was reliving his whole visit there, tremendously speeded up. There was the mother, Mrs O'Connor, a Liverpool Irish Roman Catholic, whose husband had left her, just walked out on her, vanished, with no warning, no goodbye, leaving her with the two kids, a teenage girl and a little chap. Hugo could hear her wan, plaintive voice and he could see her chapped hands – she worked in a City diner, washing up most probably – gently stroking her forehead. She was at her wit's end, she couldn't go on living in this place. But the council and most of the neighbours thought that she was inventing everything in order to get moved. Why should she want to invent such things? She was as happy here as she was ever likely to be, given the circumstances. It was so unfair. She couldn't sleep easy at the best of times, she was a martyr to these headaches, blinding they were, she was having one now. And all through the night there would be these hangings and crashings, furniture actually falling over, a chair, even the wardrobe in the room of the girl, and these zigzag flashings, as though lightning were streaking from room to room. It was more than flesh and blood could bear.