Voices in an Empty Room (30 page)

She felt herself falling into the chasm, as one falls in a dream, on and on, silently screaming, and never reaching its bottom.

Today the three women, Sybil, Lavinia and Bridget, will meet.

The term will start tomorrow at Sybil's school and she wakes up, far too late, in a state of irritability. We have left undone the things which we ought to have done and done the things which we ought not to have done and there is no goodness in us. There is no goodness in her staff, Sybil feels. Madge telephoned the previous evening to say that she would be arriving two days late, since she had to settle her mother into a new home in Worthing. ‘Surely you could have done that sooner?' Sybil demanded acidly. Madge replied that, no, it was only the previous day that a row had blown up between her mother and the perfectly foul people who ran the home in which she had been living ever since their return from Morocco. ‘It's highly inconvenient,' Sybil said, adding, with an illogicality unusual to her, ‘I do think you might have given me more notice.' At that Madge shouted down the telephone, ‘ But I didn't know until yesterday evening! As I told you, it was only then that the whole row blew up.'

The bursar has failed to have the water heater serviced, though Sybil has repeatedly reminded him; the windows are in need of cleaning; and. there are deadheads on the roses. If the staff do not set an example of efficiency to the girls, then they cannot expect it of them.

Sybil brushes her teeth with such violence that the gums start to bleed. She might be cleaning out the water heater, scouring the windows or slashing at the deadheads. One can rely on no one, one must do every fucking thing oneself. She spits into the basin, as though to void herself not merely of the saliva and toothpaste streaked with blood but of the acid bubbling within her. Then she remembers. Mrs Lockit is coming to see her this morning.

What can the woman want? On the telephone she was, by turns, cagey and coy. No, she wouldn't like to say what it was that she wanted to discuss. Yes, it was a matter of some importance – to both of them. It would be easy enough to come along to the school, because, by a strange chance, she would be going for an interview for a housekeeper's position in the neighbouring town and gathered that there was a bus stop right by the school gates. Dreadful creature!

Eleven days ago, Henry died of a heart attack. He had been out to a party given by some friends down the hill from the Village and, when he left, it had started to pour. The friends had suggested either that he should wait until one of the other guests could give him a lift or that they should telephone for a taxi. Henry replied that Mrs Lockit always had his supper ready at seven-thirty and that, as a matter of principle, he never took taxis. He would walk. He walked too fast and collapsed outside a pub, where he lay for some time, in a moribund condition, the rain pelting down on him, because at first every passer-by assumed him to be drunk. Eventually, two elderly women, returning from Evensong, had stooped over him and peered. They had realized that he was not drunk but extremely ill. He never regained consciousness.

Reading his obituary in
The Times
, Sybil wondered whether she should make the journey to Brighton for the funeral. Hugo would have wanted her to do so; but she had never cared for the old boy, so scratchy, snobbish and stingy, and there was so much to do at the school before the new term. She eventually appeased her conscience by ordering far too elaborate a wreath just as, in the past, before Hugo's marriage, she had appeased her conscience for having refused to allow Hugo to invite Henry to join them on a cruise of the Greek Islands by bringing back, at enormous expense and inconvenience, an outsize tin of Kalamata olives. On that occasion, Henry had said ungraciously, ‘ Oh, what a kind thought! I never eat olives, as Hugo should have told you, they always give me wind. But they'll come in useful for my next Village party! No doubt, if he could now speak to her from beyond the grave, he would say of the flowers, ‘Oh, what a kind thought. Flowers always give me hay fever, but I'm sure they'll be appreciated at the hospital to which they will eventually go.'

After a hurried breakfast, Sybil clears away into a drawer the sheets of paper, covered in automatic writing, which have been lying under the blotter on her desk, and then settles down to examine the untidy draft of the timetable prepared by the Senior Mistress. Each timetable of the previous Senior Mistress was, as Sybil would often tell her, a real work of art. If this timetable is a work of art, it is of a kind produced by one of the less gifted girls for her O Levels. Sybil grimaces, picks up a red biro and begins to slash in a number of deletions and emendations.

She is still doing this when there is a knock at the door and the timorous little Filippino girl, who arrived only two days before to act as parlourmaid, comes in to announce, in an almost unintelligible accent, that there is a visitor to see her. Sybil looks at her watch. It must be Mrs Lockit. ‘Show her in.' The girl looks bemused. ‘Bring – her – here,' Sybil says loudly and slowly, as though addressing a deaf-mute. The girl scuttles off.

Mrs Lockit eventually appears, without the girl, who has left the door to the study open.

‘Hello, Mrs Lockit.' Sybil rises and holds out her hand across the desk. But Mrs Lockit, who has never visited the school, is peering around her. Then she asks, ‘What nationality might she have been?'

‘Who?'

‘The one who let me in.'

‘Filippino.'

Mrs Lockit shakes her head, as though in disapproval, selects, not the chair intended for her by Sybil, opposite her own at the desk, but another one, by the fireplace, and then, having deposited handbag, string bag and Marks and Spencer plastic bag, seats herself, legs wide apart and fingers interlocked. Her hat looks like a coal scuttle, trimmed with grey net. Beneath it, her eyes are cunning and wary. ‘ I never thought to see you at your school.'

‘I never expected to see you here either.'

‘Big.'

‘Over four hundred girls. Quite a responsibility.'

‘But you like responsibility.' It is plainly not a compliment.

‘I hope you got the job,' Sybil says, moving round the desk and taking the chair originally intended for her visitor.

Mrs Lockit pulls a face. ‘Turned it down. They should have told me, instead of dragging me all this way on a wild goose chase. Just the one room, no central heating, no bathroom or kitchen to myself. ‘‘ There's been some mistake,'' the old girl said to me. ‘‘You bet your life there has!'' I told her.' Mrs Lockit smiles to herself at the memory of this exchange between a frail widow, no longer able to look after herself, and her sturdy self, so competent to do so. ‘ Still and all,' she goes on, ‘ it's given me a chance to see the school. Otherwise, we'd have met in that flat of yours in London.' She does not think much of the flat, so poky and bare.

‘What did you want to discuss with me? Not the school, I'm sure.'

Sarky! Mrs Lockit draws in her chin and adjusts the folds of her pale blue crimplene skirt over her ample thighs. ‘Your brother,' she says.

‘My brother?'

‘In a manner of speaking.'

Sybil waits. She feels vaguely frightened.

‘Those experiments of his with my two nephews. I didn't approve of those.' She shakes her head. ‘Not at all.'

‘You didn't seem to discourage them.'

‘Well, it was difficult – to discourage them. I mean – my sister living in such circumstances.'

Again Sybil waits. Her vague fear intensifies.

‘She needed the money. Not to put too fine a point on it. But those boys, they oughtn't to have deceived him. No, that was wrong and I'm sorry now that, as soon as I learned what they were up to, I didn't put a stop to it. But there it is.'

‘Deceived him? How exactly do you mean?' Sybil manages, for all her inner turmoil, to appear calm.

‘You didn't believe all that thought-transference malarkey did you? A woman with your education!' She chuckles, enjoying the look of shock that, temporarily suppressed, is now appearing on the handsome face of the woman opposite her. ‘They used a dog whistle,' she explains, ‘or something similar – with a bulb attached. Cyril could hear it, most kids can. But your brother couldn't, Sir Henry couldn't, you couldn't, I couldn't. No, they oughtn't to have done that. A joke's a joke but I didn't approve of that.'

‘Did Sir Henry learn about this?'

‘Of course.'

Sybil is bewildered. ‘He never told me. I wonder why.'

Mrs Lockit shrugs. ‘There were probably other things he didn't tell you either.'

Fear grips Sybil's heart. ‘Such as?'

‘Well, it's one thing to tamper with children's minds – as, in a sense, your brother was doing, wasn't he? But to tamper with …' She draws down the corners of her mouth. ‘ If it hadn't been for Sir Henry, I'd have gone to the police when I came to hear of it. But I wanted to spare him a scandal. And then, of course, when your brother died like that, there no longer seemed any point.'

‘I don't know what you're trying to say, Mrs Lockit, but I absolutely refuse to believe that my brother behaved incorrectly towards either of your nephews.'

‘Incorrectly!' Mrs Lockit laughs. That's one word for it. I like that!'

Sybil gazes out of the window at the lawn and, beyond it, the straggling rosebushes, with their deadheads. She sees a figure first somersault and then hurtle down a sheer cliff of cement. She shuts her eyes, she puts a hand up to cover her mouth, as though she were about to vomit. She no longer suspects, she knows now. Hugo killed himself.

In a quiet, steely voice, she asks, ‘What precisely do you want?'

Mrs Lockit shifts her weight in her chair. ‘Your brother was generous to the boys.' She smirks. ‘He had reason to be. Now that you've got all that money of Sir Henry's – which was intended for him – well, I think your brother would have liked some of it to come the way of Cyril.'

Sybil rises, her beautiful hands, with their tapering fingers and carefully kept nails, clasped before her. ‘Money? What are you talking about?'

Mrs Lockit is disconcerted. ‘The money that old Sir Henry left.'

‘Sir Henry left nothing to me.'

‘To your brother.'

‘He intended to make my brother his residuary legatee.' After a bequest of five hundred pounds to Mrs Lockit, of another five hundred pounds to a former colleague, and of pictures to some half-dozen friends, Henry willed his whole fortune, far larger than anyone had ever imagined, to Hugo. But Hugo was dead. ‘But, as you will know very well, my brother predeceased him. Died before him,' she adds, as though contemptuously assuming that ‘predeceased' is a word unintelligible to Mrs Lockit.

‘But surely the money then comes to you and his wife?'

‘It comes to neither of us.' Sybil is delighted by the ignorance which has led Mrs Lockit to assume that a sister and spouse should have equal rights to a dead man's estate. She is even more delighted at Mrs Lockit's discomfiture. She smiles, suddenly she is radiant, ‘I'm afraid you've been misinformed. Neither I nor my sister-in-law get a penny of that money. It's sad, in a way, because my sister-in-law and her children could have done with it. It would be no point in your asking her for help. And there is absolutely no point in asking me.'

Mrs Lockit frowns, biting her lower lip between teeth which are as small, white and sharp as those of a ferret. Then she says, ‘There are things that could come out that you wouldn't want to come out.'

‘Nothing could come out that would worry me in the least – or worry my sister-in-law. You can go and tell your lies to the police, you can even get your nephews to corroborate your lies. But the police aren't going to be interested in a dead man. And the newspapers aren't going to be interested in a dead man. No one's interested in a dead man.'

She stops at that. She suddenly realizes what she has said in that last sentence. No one is interested in a dead man. Corollary: a dead man is interested in no one.

Mrs Lockit heaves herself up to her feet. She looks oddly diminished, as though, in the few minutes in which Sybil has defied her, she has suddenly suffered some long, wasting disease. Her face is no longer ruddy, but yellow. She stoops and effortfully picks up handbag, string bag, plastic bag. The straps of the last, which is crammed full, bite into her pudgy wrist. ‘ I'll be on my way,' she says, raising an invisible white flag. Then she gazes at Sybil with a reluctant admiration. ‘Well, fancy that about the legacy. You and his wife must have been pretty sick about that.'

Sybil shakes her head. ‘Not really. We'd have liked the money, of course. But one's never disappointed if one fails to get something which one wasn't expecting anyway. Is one?'

Mrs Lockit edges nearer to Sybil. ‘ I wonder if I might ask you for a favour, mam?' She has never called Sybil ‘mam' before.

Sybil nods graciously; but mixed with the sweetness of her triumph is the bitterness of defeat. Hugo loved that boy, Hugo killed himself. ‘Yes?'

‘I suppose you couldn't spare me a fiver? The fare was more than I expected and I find myself short.'

The impudence of it delights Sybil. It would also have delighted Hugo and Henry, since it would have confirmed their low opinion of humanity in general and of women in particular. ‘ Of course,' Sybil says. She takes up her bag, removes her wallet from it and pulls out a five-pound note. ‘Are you sure that'll be enough?'

Mrs Lockit hesitates. Then she says, ‘Oh, yes, thank you. Ample.'

‘Good.'

Sybil presses the bell beside the fireplace.

‘Who gets all that money then?' Mrs Lockit asks.

‘What money?' Sybil deliberately pretends not to follow.

‘Sir Henry's.'