Voices in an Empty Room (8 page)

‘I scarcely see you now.' Sybil's voice became suddenly mournful and resigned. Not at all her usual self, she might have been Audrey.

‘This won't go on forever.'

‘Won't it?'

Putting down the receiver, Hugo felt an acute pang of guilt, a spasm of the bowels. It was almost as bad as when he has first broken the news to Sybil that he was going to get married; and what, on this occasion, intensified the guilt was his knowledge that, for some reason still obscure to himself, he did not really want to bring together Sybil and the boys, even though he had been perfectly happy to bring together Sybil and Audrey.

By now, both Cyril and Lionel were, in their separate ways, bored by sitting after sitting. Cyril, though compliant, veered towards tears as an afternoon progressed. Lionel could be cheeky and rebellious – ‘ Oh, no, Christ no, not another try!' On such occasions Hugo and Henry ceased to resent the continual presence of Mrs Lockit, who was always able to quell him with a stern, ‘That's enough of that, my boy. You do what the gentlemen tell you to do.'

To relieve the boredom, Hugo devised other tests. On one occasion, Lionel was asked to draw something simple on a sheet of paper in the drawing room, while Cyril, for once seated instead of standing, tried to reproduce it. On another occasion, Henry produced a series of objects, previously unseen by either boy – pencil, salt-cellar, handkerchief, paperclip, toothbrush and so forth – off a covered tray and Lionel was encouraged to attempt to transmit the image of each in turn to his twin in the hall. ‘Nah, can't do that,' Lionel announced of both experiments; and, when he had at last been coaxed at any rate to try, he proved himself right. In the hall, Cyril began to whimper, ‘It's impossible, sir, no, sir, nothing's coming through.' After three runs without a single convincing score – when Lionel had inexpertly drawn a cat, Mrs Lockit had, it is true, claimed to see a likeness between it and the sausage-like object produced by Cyril – both these experiments were abandoned. Far more successful was a variation of the original experiment, for which Hugo produced five different targets, a lion, an ostrich, a giraffe, an elephant and a parrot, from a card game played by his girls. (There had been some angry screaming from Betsy when he had announced that he was ‘borrowing' the pack.) On each card, he wrote the initial letter of the animal (L, O, G, E, P) and he and Henry used these letters for their recording. At first, the change nonplussed the twins; but after two or three unremarkable runs, Lionel grunted, ‘Yeah, OK, I get it now, let's give it another whirl,' and the results from then on proved to be as amazing as with the playing cards.

‘It's anything out of the ordinary that upsets them,' Mrs Lockit gave as her opinion.

Hugo nodded. ‘A common phenomenon.'

No doubt this was the reason, he and Henry decided, that the exhibition at the Institute proved to be such a failure. Both boys showed extreme reluctance to make the journey to London and perform in such a large assembly. ‘It's only natural,' Mrs Lockit said. ‘They're just a couple of ordinary lads – apart from their gift. They don't want to mix with a lot of grand people, scientists and scholars and such like. They're not used to it. With you both it's different, they're used to you by now. But I can tell you that at first I had a real job persuading them to come here.'

Eventually, Hugo's offer of first fifty pounds, then of seventy-five pounds and finally of a hundred pounds, all expenses paid, overcame the boys' reluctance.

In the first-class carriage on the journey from Brighton to London, Lionel spent the hour alternately peering out of the window, that irritating, toneless whistling of his emerging from between his lips, and reading a comic; Cyril, sitting for most of the time on his hands, nervously answered Henry's or Hugo's questions, in between long silences during which he gazed at the reflection of his face, in all its wan perfection, on the window-pane beside him; and Mrs Lockit viciously clacked away at some knitting taken out of a plastic shopping bag, her mouth bunched and her wild, dark eyes squinting from under knotted brows.

There were about sixty people eventually seated in the small hall, once an artist's studio, of the Institute. The day was a sultry one, of alternating brilliance and sudden downpours. Even when there was sunshine, thunder could he heard rumbling about the building. The sunlight, filtering down from the vaulted ceiling through skylights left uncleaned for years, made the atmosphere all but unbearable. The rain, spattering on the glass, was so deafening that even people conversing next to each other found that they had to shout in order to be heard.

While the audience collected, Hugo, Henry, the two boys, Mrs Lockit and the President and the Secretary of the Institute sat in the Secretary's office. Except for an occasional sympathetic glance or smile from Hugo to Cyril, the boys and their aunt, who had resumed her violent knitting, were totally ignored. SWS and REM states, ontological status, ostensible reincarnation, radiesthesia, organic disease relationships … As the Secretary, a small woman with coarse grey hair cut in a fringe across a bulging forehead, leaned forward, relentlessly talking, Cyril listened to her, his eyes half-closed, in a semi-trance of bewilderment and apprehension. Meanwhile Lionel gazed about him: at the untidy shelves of books, the used teacups covered in a sour film, the ancient tape recorder, the plaster cast of a pair of hands, the photograph of a genteel, middle-aged woman, her hair parted in the middle, with what appeared to be cheesecloth protruding from her wide-open mouth.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door and Sybil burst in, her handsome face flushed and beaded with sweat under its thick coating of powder.

‘Sybil!' Hugo rose, displeased with her for having disobeyed his instructions to wait until the end of the session before making contact. ‘I hope you've found yourself a seat. The hall will be packed.'

‘Yes, yes,' she replied impatiently. ‘I have a seat. I left my
Times
and a book on it. I don't imagine anyone will take it.'

‘We can always place you in the row reserved for committee members.' The Secretary got to her feet. ‘How nice to see you, Miss Crawfurd.' Sybil was a member of the Institute. The President, a retired science don from a redbrick university, had also lumbered up. ‘Hello, there,' he said in his North Country accent, thumbs hitched in the pockets of the tweed waistcoat which, incredibly, he was wearing under his jacket on a day as hot as this.

‘I think it would really be better if you didn't join us now,' Hugo said. Though he knew that he did not want her with them, he could not have given his reason. However, he attempted a pretext, ‘It tends to upset the boys if, just before a session, they have to cope with the presence of a stranger.'

Sybil laughed. ‘Am I the only stranger?' She looked first at the Secretary and then at the President. Then she looked at Cyril and Lionel. She nodded and smiled. ‘Hello, boys. I'm Mr Crawfurd's sister.'

Lionel stared at her with an unnerving contempt. Cyril all but bobbed to his feet from his chair, as he whispered, ‘ Pleased to meet you.' Mrs Lockit, whom Sybil had met in the past in Brighton, nodded and went on knitting. Sybil had made no acknowledgment of Mrs Lockit's presence; but that one had always been full of airs and hoity-toity, Mrs Lockit told herself, with a contempt that matched Lionel's.

‘This is so exciting,' Sybil said. She looked around her, ‘Isn't it?'

Lionel muttered, ‘ It isn't going to work.'

Before the arrival of the audience, he and Cyril had mounted the narrow stage and inspected the canvas screen, five-foot high and eleven foot broad, set up between two tables as widely separated from each other as possible. Hugo was to sit, as usual, with Cyril, and the President was to join them, as a monitor; Henry, again as usual, was to show the cards, previously shuffled by both the President and the Secretary, to Lionel, with the Secretary as a monitor. It would be the President who would each time shout out ‘Next!' Since there had been a suggestion from one of the more sceptical members of the Institute that Mrs Lockit might be involved with the boys in some still undiscovered deception, Henry, as her employer, had been deputed to tell her not to enter the hall. She had taken this badly, muttering to herself, ‘Well, fancy that!' ‘ Blow me!' and ‘I could have spared myself the journey.'

Sybil took a handkerchief out of her bag and pressed it to her forehead. The previously musty room filled with the scent, old-fashioned and cloying, of lily-of-the-valley. ‘You do all look solemn!'

‘Well, this is a serious occasion, after all,' Henry said tartly. He had never cared for Sybil, finding her bossy and opinionated, though there was no doubt, in his opinion, that she was more intelligent than Hugo, and that, but for her, the edition of the Letters would never have been completed.

‘Not a parlour game,' Hugo added.

The President looked at his watch. ‘ Perhaps we ought to …'

‘Yes, indeed.' Hugo made for the door. ‘Come along, boys.'

‘Are you sure you'll be all right here on your own, Mrs – er …?' the Secretary asked, as she tried to remember whether she had locked the stamp drawer and the petty-cash box. ‘If you get bored, there are some back numbers of our Journal over there.'

‘Thank you,' Mrs Lockit replied with aggrieved dignity. She raised her amorphous knitting by its two thick needles, ‘I have this to occupy me. But thank you all the same.'

Hugo held open the door and Sybil, head high and elbows close to her sides, her crocodile-leather bag dangling from a wrist, was the first to go through. Henry followed, then the two boys, then Hugo and then the President and the Secretary. Cyril turned to Hugo, his face so puckered and green that it would have been no surprise if he had suddenly vomited, and whispered, ‘I can't sir, I can't.' Hugo had often told him to call him Hugo, not sir, to no avail.

‘Of course you can. There's nothing to it. Just forget about all those people out there. Just imagine we're back in Sir Henry's house and there are just the five of us.' He took the boy's arm, so fragile that it seemed as if the slightest jar might snap it, and gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘I rely on you.'

‘Oh, sir!'

Lionel, by now in the doorway to the hall, looked over his shoulder. ‘That hall is jam-packed,' he announced. ‘They must think us a bloody circus.' Mrs Lockit had insisted that, in spite of the heat, both boys should wear blazers and ties. Lionel now removed his blazer, throwing it over his arm, and loosened his tie. His coarse, dark hair stuck to his low forehead in a number of spikes.

The chatter, reverberating in the high, vaulted roof of the former studio, now became hushed. Sybil had slipped away to her place in the front row, where she had found a young man in her chair, her book and her copy of
The Times
in his lap. She had quietly but decisively ejected him. The President stood in front of the screen, cleared his throat and began his introduction. ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am glad that so many of you have foregone the pleasures of sunbathing, having a siesta or watching Wimbledon in order to come here. I am sure that you will find it well worth your while. Most of you will have already read – I hope in our Journal but possibly also in the popular press – about the two remarkable twin brothers from Brighton, whom our old friend and Committee member, Hugo Crawfurd, has been so tirelessly investigating during the last months. In his investigations, he has had the assistance, the invaluable assistance, of a former diplomat, a highly distinguished man, not, I regret to say, yet a member of our Institute but none the less a sharer in our interest.' He pointed to his right, where Henry and Lionel had seated themselves at their table. ‘Sir Henry Latymer.' Henry half rose and gave a little bobbing bow, as some desultory clapping broke out. ‘Now I don't want to waste your time …' But whatever he wanted, the President proceeded to do exactly that, for some ten minutes more. He recalled past cases of telepathy; he spoke, more scientifically than Mrs Lockit had done, about the curious, sometimes even miraculous, affinities existing between twins.

Hugo looked at Cyril. His complexion still had the same greenish pallor, the skin oddly scaly. His hands clenched in his lap, the knuckles white, he was biting his lower lip so hard that it was surprising that it did not bleed. First his jaw began to tremble; then one leg, the one closest to Hugo's; then his whole body. He might have been suffering from the sudden onslaught of some tropical fever.

Everyone in the hall was gazing, not at the President, but at the twins; and everyone was amazed, as Henry and Hugo had been at their first encounter, by the physical differences between them.

At last the President ceased, gave a hitch to the baggy trousers which hung low on his ample hips, and said, ‘Right then. Let's get on with things.' He walked over to where Henry and Hugo were seated and took the remaining chair, leaning back in it as though to test whether its back would support his weight. Then he called across, ‘ OK, Sir Henry?'

‘We're ready over here.'

‘Fine. Then let's have – the first!' He slapped his fist down on the table with so much vehemence that Cyril cringed away with an involuntary, startled ‘Oh!'

Henry turned up a card. Lionel, as in the past, gave it only a glance. Then he gazed out, with bored insolence, at the audience before him.

Cyril screwed up his face, shot Hugo a look of terrified appeal and at last, his hand trembling so much that he could hardly write, inscribed the letter ‘K' on the sheet of paper before him.

‘Next!' the President boomed, his North Country voice echoing in the vault of the ceiling above him.

Henry turned another card.

Suddenly Hugo was conscious of that strange odour which he had originally smelled when he and Cyril had first stood side by side – how long ago it seemed now – under the fanlight in Henry's murky hallway. Oats, Harris tweed, new-mown hay, pot? He now knew the answer to the question which had baffled him. This was the smell of none of those things but of wild, uncontrolled, animal terror. It was far stronger now than on that previous occasion.