Voices in an Empty Room (6 page)

Mrs Lockit left, with no further attempt to turn down the bed, and soon after that Hugo, having swept up those ominous cards from the Tarot pack and replaced them in their packet, descended to the drawing room, where Henry, outstretched on the sagging sofa, was asleep under
The Times
.

Hugo failed to arouse him with a cough or with a noisy pushing first up and then down of a sash window on to the street. Then he called his name. Henry sat up,
The Times
slipping to the floor beside him. ‘ Was thinking,' he said. ‘Metal-bending. Metal's grain size.' Henry knew far more about science than Hugo.

‘Mrs Lockit's just been telling me about her nephews. Thought they might be worth investigating.'

‘Her nephews? Didn't know she had any nephews. She has a sister.'

‘And they're that sister's sons.'

‘My God!' Henry threw his legs off the sofa. ‘Well, what about them?'

‘Seems they're sensitives of some kind.' Hugo shrugged. ‘ESP.'

‘And what precise form does this ESP take?' Henry inquired with quiet irony.

‘She wouldn't be specific. But she said she could ask the boys to come here to see me – us. If you had no objection, of course.'

‘I find this most odd. She says nothing to me about having any nephews, let alone about their powers of ESP. But you haven't been in this house for more than two or three hours before she confides the whole bang lot to you.' Henry was pettish.

‘Perhaps she thought you wouldn't be interested,' Hugo placated. ‘She knows by now that the paranormal is of enormous importance to me. Second only to English literature.'

‘Oh, you're far more interested in the paranormal than in English literature. I don't think you're really interested in English literature at all. Though I admit that you know a lot about it.' Henry was still piqued.

‘At all events,' Hugo said equably, ‘shall I or shall I not tell her we'd like to see the boys?'

‘By all means let's see them. Why not?' Henry got off the sofa and walked stiffly to the window. The Gascoynes, flashily dressed, were getting into their equally flashy BMW. Thoughts of tea with or without the milk in first passed through his mind. He scowled at them and continued to scowl even when Mrs Gascoyne, catching sight of him, raised a small, plump hand and waved. Then he turned, ‘Nothing to lose. No skin off our noses. In for a penny, in for a pound.'

Though they had not discussed the matter, Hugo and Henry had both expected the twins to look exactly like each other; but, as Henry put it with that sly malice which had first attracted Hugo to him, it was a case of ‘one pearl and one plain'. The pearl had a startlingly nacreous skin, so delicate that one feared that the slightest blow or jar would chip it. His hair, falling in deep waves over his collar and ears, looked as if it had been sculpted from ivory, so unnaturally pale was its colour and so unnaturally stiff its texture. He had a long neck, around which he was wearing a gold chain with a crucifix visible against his blue-veined skin, just where the flung-open vee of his shirt first came together at a button. The skin round the pale green eyes, with their long lashes, was coloured a bruise-like purple. On his left hand he wore three rings, on his right four, one of them on the forefinger. His name, he said in a husky whisper when Henry asked him, was Cyril, Cyril Creane.

The plain was dark-haired and stout, with the sort of paunch which usually comes from drinking too much beer and the sort of complexion which usually comes from eating too many sweets. The nails on his pudgy hands had been systematically bitten to the quicks and his arms had the appearance of being too long and thin for the stocky torso from which they dangled. Unlike his brother's, his voice had broken. His name, he volunteered, since neither Henry nor Hugo was interested in asking it, was Lionel, Lionel Creane.

Mrs Lockit, who had remained in attendance after ushering them into the drawing room that Sunday morning, said, with evident relish, ‘Well, that's taken you aback, I'll be bound!'

‘What's taken us aback, Mrs Lockit? I don't think I follow.' Henry spoke with glacial dignity.

‘Well, you've only to see the faces on the two of you! You thought that, being twins, they were bound to be alike. Didn't you now? Own up!'

‘Well, that was certainly the natural presumption.'

‘They're certainly twins. But they're not what you'd call identical twins.'

‘No, I can see that. They're not. They're not what anyone would call identical twins.… Well, boys, no need to stand. Why don't you sit over there, er, Lionel and you, Cyril, why don't you come over here?' Henry nodded at Mrs Lockit, a clear invitation to her to leave them and to get on with the preparations of the Sunday dinner; but Mrs Lockit, ignoring him, drew up another chair for herself.

Having sat where he was bidden, Lionel violently stuck out his legs and then tweaked at his trousers where they were pinching his crotch. Cyril, dainty and demure, crossed his hands in his lap and his legs at the ankles, leaning slightly forward, as though eager to hear what next these two gentlemen might have to say to him.

‘Now tell me,' Hugo intervened, feeling that so far Henry had been taking an initiative not rightly his, ‘ what precisely is it that you both, er, do?'

The two boys looked at each other. Then Mrs Lockit ordered, ‘You tell them, Lionel.'

Lionel bit at what was left of the nail of his little finger and then delicately pinched a fragment from his lip, with the gesture of a smoker removing a shred of tobacco. ‘Thought-reading,' he said laconically, applying himself again to the nail.

‘Telepathy,' Hugo corrected prissily.

‘Pardon, sir?' Cyril leant even further forward in his chair, as though he were deaf.

‘That's what we call it. Thought-reading, we call it telepathy.' Hugo suddenly knew, as he always knew on such occasions, that he was on to something, something really big.

‘Yeah. OK.' Lionel spat out a fragment of nail.

‘And what precise form does your telepathy – thought-reading – take?'

Again the twins looked at each other, as though uncertain who should answer. Eventually it was their aunt, her hands resting on the arms of her chair as though preparatory to pushing herself up and hurrying to the kitchen and the already overcooked joint, who spoke up. ‘Well, each of them often seems to know what's going on in the mind of the other. But of course that's hard to prove – scientifically, I mean.' She turned, not to Hugo, but to Henry for confirmation and Henry nodded, and muttered, ‘ Quite, quite.' ‘ There are so many little things. Like the other day, for example, when Cyril was late coming home from his extra art and Lionel at once said, ‘‘He's had a puncture and doesn't know how to mend it'' and he set off and there was Cyril pushing his bike along, a long way from home, and he
had
had a puncture. Or the time when Lionel said, it was even hotter than today, ‘‘Oh, Auntie, what I'd like most in the world at this moment is an ice-lolly'' and I said, ‘‘Well, why be so lazy, go out and get one,'' and, as I said that, Cyril arrived, and, believe it or not, he was carrying two ice-lollies, one for himself and one for his brother. But of course that's not scientific, not really scientific, is it? That might be coincidence. No, what's scientific is the cards, the playing cards.' She looked over to Hugo. ‘Like what you were using.' Clearly she had not realized that there was a difference between an ordinary pack and Henry's Tarot one. ‘Ace, king, queen, jack, ten. Show Lionel one of those and Cyril can tell you which it is, even if you put him out of sight in another room.'

‘Well, that sounds most remarkable.'

‘It's not one hundred per cent,' Mrs Lockit went on. ‘ You wouldn't expect that, would you? But there are far more successes than you or I would score.'

‘When can we have a trial?'

Mrs Lockit looked at the two boys. ‘Well, not today,' she said. ‘They ought to be getting home for their dinners. But tomorrow. After school.' She looked in turn at the two boys. ‘How about that?'

‘Yeah, fine,' Lionel grunted. Cyril merely inclined his delicate head on its long, stalklike neck.

A time was fixed and the boys took their leave. Lionel slouched out, hands so deep in pockets that the seat of his trousers was pulled taut across his swelling buttocks. ‘ Bye then,' he called over his shoulder. Cyril shook hands deferentially first with Hugo and then with Henry. Even on that day of summer heat, the fingers and palm were damp and chilly. His lips moved at each salutation but no sound emerged.

‘Well, I'd better see about dishing-up,' Mrs Lockit said, also leaving the room.

Hugo and Henry faced each other, both of them smiling.

‘I have a feeling–' Henry said.

‘So do I.'

‘On the threshold.'

‘Of something really rather exciting.'

‘What's interesting is that they're not identical twins.'

‘Not out of the same egg.'

‘All our previous experiments have been with identical twins.'

‘This pair couldn't be less identical.'

‘I like the one boy.'

‘But the other.'

‘Dreadful. Spitting bits of fingernail over the carpet.'

‘And his shoes needed cleaning.'

As Mrs Lockit, tongue between lips, carefully placed the shrivelled joint on the tablemat in front of Henry, she said, ‘I hope you won't mind my mentioning one thing, Sir Henry.'

‘Yes?' Henry picked up the carving knife and steel and began to rub the one on the other, with a sound which always got on Hugo's nerves.

‘You'll make it worth the boys' while, won't you? I mean, as I said, it's all really a game to them and they soon get bored with it. If you want them to cooperate, over a period of time, well, it would be advisable to make it worth their while.'

‘Of course, of course,' Hugo said. He was generous by nature and in any case had been inured to paying the subjects whom he investigated.

Henry was not so sure. ‘We hope they're not going to expect too much,' he said, plunging the carving fork into the charred joint of lamb, preliminary to hacking at it.

‘Oh, I'm sure not, Sir Henry. They're not greedy boys. It's just that their father's a waster through and through, and such cash as he brings in to that house instead of spending on the horses or the drink has to go to the housekeeping. So the two of them are always short of spending money. Many's the time their poor old auntie's had to slip them a 50p piece – not that I can really afford it.'

Henry waved the carving knife in the air, obviously irritated. ‘Yes, yes, all right, Mrs Lockit! We'll see them all right. That's understood.'

‘I hope you didn't mind my mentioning it, Sir Henry.'

‘No, no,' Henry replied, though clearly he had.

Hugo attempted to placate Mrs Lockit as she departed for the kitchen. ‘Don't worry, Mrs Lockit. And tell the boys not to worry. I fully appreciate the situation and, of course, we'll pay them for their time.'

Hugo always remembered the principle once enunciated, without any irony, by a previous researcher into paranormal phenomena, S. G. Soal: ‘What the investigation does demonstrate is the all-powerful influence of an intense motivation (in this case the love of money) in maintaining scores at a high level over a period of years.'

On the first day, more exciting than any that followed it, Hugo and Henry did not exercise any of the controls that were to become more and more rigid as more and more of Hugo's colleagues were drawn into their investigations.

‘They always find it difficult when they're not in a familiar place with familiar people,' Mrs Lockit warned.

‘Well, that's only natural,' Hugo said, used to this phenomenon.

Hugo stood in the hall with Cyril, also standing, beside him. In the sitting room off it, the door open but both of them out of sight, Henry and Lionel sat facing each other across the green baize of a card-table. Mrs Lockit moved between the two groups, standing, hands to sides of her stomach with that curious palpating gesture of hers, as she stared fixedly at one or other of her nephews. Hugo and Henry would have preferred her not to be there at all – ‘Is there nothing that needs doing for supper?' Henry asked her pointedly at one moment; but at least they succeeded in preventing her from crossing from hall to sitting room or from sitting room to hall while a run was in progress.

‘Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to sit?' Henry asked Cyril. It seemed to him, even then, that the boy had the etiolated, sappy beauty of some rare plant kept for too long away from the sun in a potting shed. The veins seemed to be as near to the surface of that nacreous skin as the membranes of an egg to its shell, and the skin itself no less fragile. He was so neat, with his carefully pressed grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the crest of his school on its breast pocket; his slim, highly polished moccasins which looked far too expensive for a boy from a family reputedly so poor; his crisp, white shirt, the collar held together around the hard knot of the tie by a gold or rolled-gold tiepin. Plainly he was nervous, clearing his throat or quietly burping with a maidenly ‘Excuse me', or ‘Pardon', fingertips to lips, each time that he did so; and this nervousness filled Hugo with a strong, troubling desire, never felt for his own two girls, to protect him and cherish him.

‘No, I'd rather stand,' the boy replied in that husky voice of his, little more than a whisper.

‘Yes, he finds it easier when standing,' Mrs Lockit confirmed. Then she remarked, ‘ Oh, he's breaking out into a sweat. You can see what a strain it is to him.'

Henry himself had just noticed the sheen that had begun to appear on the nacre of the forehead and cheekbones.

‘Well, this kind of thing
is
a strain,' he said.