Voices in an Empty Room (10 page)

Hugo smiled into the glass that Henry had handed him. ‘Cyril enjoyed it, at any rate.'

‘Little snob.'

‘Not at all. I found that – that awe of his really rather touching.'

‘I found it really rather – awful.' Henry gave that dry, susurrating laugh of his, which was so like a cough.

There was a loud knock at the door and, as usual, Mrs Lockit burst in before anyone had had time to answer. ‘Well, I've seen that lot off,' she announced, in precisely the same tone, briskly triumphant, and in precisely the same words with which she would announce that she had dealt with a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, two nuns collecting for the blind or canvassers for a local election. ‘They were worn out, even Lionel, and you can see how tough he is. Which reminded me …' She came further into the room, brown hands pressing into sides and her teeth bristling large and sharp as she smiled at them. ‘You haven't forgotten, have you?'

Henry stared at her, his pale grey eyes as cloudy and chilly as a winter sky. ‘Forgotten?'

‘What you promised. The boys.'

‘No, I have it here,' Hugo said; and again, as on a previous occasion, Henry pulled a face, frowned and shook his head at him, even as the wallet was being opened. On one side of the wallet there were miscellaneous five and one-pound notes; on the other side there were five twenty ones. Mrs Lockit hovered hawk-like above. Hugo drew out the five twenty-pound notes, folded them in two, and handed them to her.

‘That's very kind of you, Mr Crawfurd. The boys will be happy.'

‘And they bloody well ought to be happy!' Henry exclaimed as soon as Mrs Lockit had shut the door behind her.

‘It's what we promised.'

‘I don't see why we should deliver if they fail to do so.'

It was, in fact, only Hugo who had ‘ delivered' to Mrs Lockit but, careless about money and tolerant of the idiosyncracies of his friends, he forebore to point this out.

‘That wasn't their fault. They tried, they failed. They'll succeed on some other occasion.'

‘A hundred quid seems an awful lot of money,' Henry grumbled, as he had grumbled so often before.

‘Yes, I know. It
is
an awful lot of money.' Hugo thought guiltily of his refusal to buy Angela the bicycle for which she had been asking – ‘You'll have to wait for your birthday,' he had told her. ‘But there it is. If we were conducting tangible instead of intangible experiments, we'd still have to spend money. Probably even more.'

Henry sipped his sherry, his inflamed nose hanging over the glass. Then he looked up. ‘ I hope this whole thing isn't becoming an obsession with you.'

‘An obsession?'

Henry nodded. ‘It seems to be taking over more and more of your life. I foresee the danger that it might, well, obliterate it.'

‘I thought you shared my enthusiasm.'

Henry sipped again. ‘Up to a point, up to a point.'

‘I'm still waiting to see the boys show their paces,' Sybil suddenly said to Hugo when, seated side by side at the wide partners' desk in her study, they were going through a recently discovered letter written by Meredith to one of his neighbours. (‘Alas, Friday will not be possible for me, nor indeed will Saturday, dearly though I should like to see you. I shall be away, taking a cure …')

‘We've had some remarkable sessions recently. After that fiasco.'

‘So I gather.'

‘I'll have to speak to Henry.'

‘Oh, I can't do with Henry. He's such a terrible old woman. And so stingy!'

‘Henry and I are conducting the investigation as a team. You know that.'

‘Why don't you bring the boys to London for the day?'

‘I suppose I could do that.' Hugo was reluctant. ‘But you know how that turned out last time.'

‘I don't mean a demonstration in front of a lot of people. Informal. Just you, me, them.'

‘And Mrs Lockit?'

‘No, not Mrs Lockit. I can't take that woman.'

‘Well, it might be possible.'

‘Try. Do try. I'm going to be in London next Saturday and Sunday.' Ever since the fiasco at the Institute, Sybil had had an obsessive craving – totally irrational, she had told herself – to see the twins once again. Unlike Hugo, she was as much fascinated by Lionel as by Cyril.

‘I'll have a word with Mrs Lockit.'

‘Have a word with the boys. Wouldn't that be better?'

Hugo gave Sybil a smile of fraying patience. ‘They're not adults, Sybil. It's not for them to decide whether they make trips to London or not. In theory, their mother decides. In practice, Mrs Lockit decides.'

‘Sinister creature!'

‘I don't know why you say that.' But secretly Hugo agreed with her. There was something baleful about Mrs Lockit, even when she was at her briskest and jolliest

‘Those boys are rather sinister too,' Sybil mused, wondering to herself if that was why they fascinated her.

‘Rubbish. They're perfectly harmless and ordinary.'

‘An ordinary boy of – what – twelve, thirteen? – doesn't wear a ring on his forefinger.'

‘No, these days he'd more likely to be wearing it in his ear,' Hugo retorted sarcastically.

‘And that other boy. So gross and grubby.'

‘I don't have to tell you, with all your experience of psychical research, that the people who have the most remarkable psychic powers are often those who seem to be furthest from spirituality. Eusapia Palladio by all accounts was a ghastly old bag. Lecherous, smelly, greedy, ignorant, cunning. And yet she was probably the greatest of them all.'

‘The greatest medium, or the greatest fraud?'

Hugo laughed. ‘Both.'

It was, as Hugo later put it to Sybil, a ‘tricky business' to get Mrs Lockit's assent to the boys' journey up to London without Henry or, more important, herself; and, surprisingly, it was a hardly less tricky business to get Henry's.

‘Oh, I don't know about that,' Mrs Lockit said, bunching her mouth and screwing up her eyes, as though making some calculation in mental arithmetic. ‘I don't know if their mother would agree to that. They're only kids still. And you know what London is like these days.'

‘I'll be with them all the time. I won't let them out of my sight for a moment. And my sister will be with us.'

‘I don't see why your sister doesn't want me,' Mrs Lockit challenged, with sudden belligerence. But she knew perfectly well: ‘that one' had taken against her from the start.

‘Of course I'll make it worth your – their – while,' Hugo said, adopting Mrs Lockit's constant euphemism. ‘A trip to London for a sitting involves much more than a sitting in this house. So naturally …'

Mrs Lockit at once became more pliant. ‘I suppose they can come to no harm with you to keep an eye on them. And I don't really want another journey up the smoke – not in this weather, thank you.'

To Hugo's surprise, Henry's initial reaction was as unfavourable as Mrs Lockit's.

‘The boys are used to the two of us. It's always been like that. If I'm not there, it just may not work. You know very well that if, in this field, one varies the conditions of an experiment in the smallest degree, it can end in disaster. Look what happened at the Institute.'

Henry nodded. ‘The conditions there might have daunted adults. But if Sybil and I and the two boys conduct some tests together – with no one else taking part – I don't really think …'

‘Do what you like, do what you like!' Henry cried pettishly. ‘But I can't see why Sybil doesn't make the journey here. Far simpler.'

‘Because you've never asked her.'

‘Good God, I don't have to
ask
her. She's only to ask herself.' And quite capable of doing so too, he almost added.

‘She'd by shy of doing that. Embarrassed.'

‘Shy! Embarrassed? Sybil!' Henry was scornful.

When Hugo and the two boys arrived outside Sybil's door, repeated ringing of the bell failed to produce an answer.

‘You must have got the date wrong,' Lionel said, as he examined the nameplates on the other front doors on that landing.

‘No, I haven't. Perhaps she's been held up. It's unlike her to be late. Never mind.' He searched in his pockets. ‘I have a key.'

‘Did she give that to you?' Lionel asked.

‘I'd have hardly stolen it,' Hugo replied.

On the hall table of a flat which to Hugo always Seemed to be as unfitted to contain Sybil's effulgent presence as a pinchbeck setting for a diamond, a note had been propped up against a pile of books:

Hugo. Sorry. Tried to ring Henry's but he said you'd already left. Have had to help Madge out urgently – emergency op, St Thomas's. Back by about six. Cakes in tin. Love, S.

Madge was the games mistress at Sybil's school. Could the op. have been so much of an emergency as to justify the absence? Were there not ambulances and taxis? Hugo was annoyed, sensing that, in some subtle way, this was his sister's way of avenging herself on both him and, more important, the boys.

He pulled out the watch which, attached to his lapel by a gold chain, he kept in his breast pocket, and glanced at it.

‘Does that watch chime?' Lionel asked, momentarily interested.

‘No, I'm afraid not.'

‘Mr Petrie's does.'

‘Well, we've almost two hours free. My sister must just have left. Shall I make you some tea?'

‘Nah.' They had both drunk Tizer on the train. ‘But what's all that about cake in a tin?'

‘You can have some of it.'

The three of them went into the neat, bare kitchen, where Hugo lifted down the tin and eased off its lid.

‘Cripes! Fruit cake! Wouldn't you have known?' Lionel was scornful.

‘Well, it's take it or leave it.'

Both boys decided to leave it. They also decided to leave the petit beurre biscuits that Hugo found in another tin.

‘We could go to Holland Park,' Hugo suddenly said, remembering how, in their by now remote childhood, Sybil and he used to go there to feed the birds and squirrels.

‘A
park!
' Lionel was scornful.

But Cyril said eagerly, ‘Oh, yes, sir, I'd like that.'

‘We could feed the birds there. And the squirrels.' He cut a thick wedge of cake, found a used paper bag in the dustbin and began to crumble the cake into it between his fingers. The two boys watched. He would have to tell Sybil that they had eaten some of the cake. But what if the boys should then reveal the lie? Oh hell! Never mind.

‘Is it far?' Lionel asked.

‘No. Five minutes.'

‘Walking?

‘Well, I'm not going to take you in a taxi.' Increasingly the boy had begun to get on his nerves.

Cyril kept close to Hugo's side, as though afraid of the traffic that roared and squealed by them, along Kensington High Street. But Lionel kept either running ahead or loitering behind. When he loitered it was usually to stare into some shop stocking electronic equipment. Soon, Cyril began to break out into a sweat which beaded his full upper lip and gave a ghostly shimmer to the pallor of his forehead.

‘It's huge,' Cyril said, gazing over the railings between the woodland and the cement path up which they had climbed. Then he pointed: ‘Ooh, look! What's that?' High in the branches of a tree, a jay looked down, unwinking at them.

‘A jay.'

‘Is it dangerous?'

‘Dangerous! Of course not. But it's shy. You rarely see them in the park. It steals the eggs of other birds. It even eats the nestlings.'

‘Horrid thing!'

‘Yes, jays are rather horrid.'

Lionel ran back to them. ‘What's that building over there?' He indicated a roof shimmering in the sunlight.

‘The Commonwealth Institute.'

‘I've heard of that.' At first it seemed unlikely, but then he went on, ‘Some of the senior boys were taken on an expedition there. Can we go?'

Hugo shook his head. ‘We've come to see the park. Haven't we?'

‘
You
have,' Lionel retorted. ‘I want to see that Institute place!' He hurried on for a few paces, head lowered, and then turned, ‘Tell you what. You go to the park, I'll nip down there. I'll meet you by these seats. OK?'

Hugo hesitated. He had repeatedly assured Mrs Lockit that he would never let either of the twins out of his sight; but to have Lionel out of his sight and Cyril alone was an irresistible temptation. ‘Oh, very well.' Again he fished his watch out of the breast pocket of his suit. ‘It's now five-fifteen. I suggest we meet here at six. All right? You've got a watch have you?'

Lionel held out his wrist to show that he had. ‘Analogue quartz,' he said. Hugo supposed, bitterly, that it was his money which had paid for it.

In the green space in front of the youth hostel, there were a lot of large women in doubtful charge of small dogs and a lot of small men in no less doubtful charge of large ones. ‘Toby, come here, come here at
once?
‘No, leave, leave,
leave!
' ‘Naughty dog! Naughty, naughty, naughty!' ‘Midas – heel! Heel!' A huge sheepdog, wagging his tail, romped up to Hugo and Cyril and then, having sniffed at Cyril's ankles and hand, jumped up on him. Cyril let out a squeal. ‘Midas! What did I say? Heel!' The tiny, elderly man in a white suit and panama hat, a cane in his hand, looked scornfully at Cyril from eyes as hard and bright as chips of mica. ‘I've always been afraid of dogs,' Cyril explained to Hugo. ‘Ever since one nipped me on the Front. Not bad, mind. But the place went septic and it took a long time to heal.' He stopped and held out his hand. ‘You can see the scar.' Hugo raised the hand in his and peered down at it. There was a tiny, upraised squiggle at the base of the thumb where the skin was even smoother and whiter than that which surrounded it.

‘That's the youth hostel over there. And that's all that's left of Holland House. I can so well remember watching it burn as a schoolboy home on holiday. During the war that was. My mother and father lived quite near where Sybil now has her flat …' He went on to tell the boy how the firebombs had rained down on to London and how, only twelve at the time, the same age as Cyril, he had felt no fear at all of them. ‘ I couldn't believe that anything could happen to me. And neither could Sybil. We'd refuse to go down to the shelter, our mother and father had terrible difficulty with us. Eventually they whisked us off to the country – when we weren't at school in the country anyway. Now I'd be scared stiff if I found myself in an air-raid.'