Voices in an Empty Room Read Online Free PDF

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