Voices in an Empty Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

neighbours had put in baths, bidets and low-level lavatory basins where there had been dressing rooms, had constructed Jacuzzi in their basements, and, often at huge expense, had restored period details – a canopy here, some moulding there – destroyed by the vandals before them. But Henry had moved into his house as it was and had left it like that. Worse, whereas everyone else painted their houses cream, and their window-frames and doors black, Henry, through some freak of taste not to be expected of a man with so valuable a collection of nineteenth-century water colours, had opted for a uniform pink, inexpertly applied, so that it looked like strawberry yoghourt, by a jobbing builder whom many thought to have been involved in a subsequent robbery from a neighbouring and far more elegant house.
    Henry’s wiring was ancient, so that Hugo had only to attach his electric razor by its adaptor to the bedside lamp – there was no socket for an electric razor anywhere to be found – for all the lights to fuse. His furniture was equally ancient, without being antique, so that, having lowered themselves on to a settee or an armchair, his visitors found that they were, in effect seated on the ground. Threadbare carpets were scattered over floors sealed by dust with linoleum over it. The hot water spattered orange out of a high, brass tap into a bath, which looked like a bassinet afflicted with elephantiasis, while a gas geyser alternately coughed and roared. In a cupboard beside Hugo’s bed there was a tin chamber-pot.
    Hugo never had occasion to use it; but he was sure that, had he ever done so, he would have found it still full when next he retired.
    Henry was looked after by the woman whom he called ‘My invaluable Mrs Lockit’. Henry’s neighbours, who were the sort of people familiar with The Beggar’s Opera , referred to her, among themselves, as Lucy, though no one, probably not even Henry, knew her real Christian name. It was the general opinion that it was certainly Lucy who had found the jobbing builder to paint the front of the house and probably she who had chosen that nauseating pink, the colour of so many of her hats. Lucy lived in the basement, the curtains of which she usually kept drawn, even though extravagant loops of thick nylon net would, in any case, have prevented anyone from peeping in.
    It was Mrs Lockit (or Lucy) who opened the door to Hugo. ‘Oh, Mr Crawfurd!’ She managed to sound surprised, as she always did when Henry had a visitor. On one occasion when Hugo arrived at the house, she even went on ‘Fancy seeing you!’, making him wonder, until Henry appeared, whether he had come on the wrong weekend.
    â€˜And how are you, Mrs Lockit?’
    â€˜I’ve made a stew for you both, a goulash really, and an upside-down cake,’ she announced as though in answer to his question. The day was Saturday and on Saturday evening she went to her sister in Portslade. ‘You’ve got a new suitcase, I see. Very smart.’
    â€˜How observant you are!’
    Mrs Lockit replied airily, ‘Yes, people often tell me I’d have made a good detective. Nothing escapes me.’
    There was something ominous in the way in which she said that. It made Hugo feel uneasy, as he had often felt uneasy, for no known cause, in the presence of this middle-aged, gypsylike woman, with her wild eyes and twitching mouth and her habit of pressing her hands into the sides of her stomach, as though in a vain attempt to establish the seat of some mysterious pain.
    â€˜Who is – or was – Mr Lockit?’ Hugo once asked Henry, to receive the reply, ‘ Haven’t a clue, old, boy.’
    â€˜And how did she come to you?’ Hugo pursued.
    â€˜Rang the bell, that’s how. Said she’d heard I was looking for a housekeeper. But I can’t think whom she can have heard it from, since I’d told nobody. Perhaps she has that thing