The Voices Read online

  ‘And everything you found was thrown away?’

  ‘Yes. Everything except the monkey. The mirrors were broken, the boards were split. None of it looked valuable. I’m sorry.’

  Loxley shook his head. ‘It’s unfortunate, but how were you to know?’ He smiled, plainly attempting to compensate for the regretful tone of his voice. After making a few more notes he raised his head and continued in a lighter register: ‘Let me tell you what I know about Edward Maybury. It isn’t very much and I trust you won’t be too disappointed, but his career was relatively brief and I don’t suppose he was ever, even at the height of his fame, regarded as a very considerable magician. We know about his act from reviews and he’s mentioned – in passing – by some of his contemporaries. Our most important source is a memoir by George Briscoe, not a performer himself, but a talented engineer who created illusions for others. Now, this Briscoe was an associate of John Nevil Maskelyne, who was, at that time, the most important magician in London. He used to put shows on in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly . . . Just wait here a moment, we have a rare photograph of the Egyptian Hall stage in the library. I won’t be a minute.’ Loxley got up, walked across the room, and ascended a curious staircase made of alternating half-steps. When he returned he was carrying two old volumes. He opened one of them and showed Christopher a grainy view of a proscenium arch, beneath which a distant figure in a suit was holding up a large square of silk. ‘You can’t really tell from this bookplate, but it was a splendid venue – the walls were decorated with hieroglyphs, and papyrus leaf columns supported the balcony. They called it England’s home of mystery.’ Loxley turned a few pages and showed Christopher a line drawing of the auditorium as seen from the stage. A cupola was clearly visible in the centre of the ceiling. ‘Maskelyne hired Maybury to perform at the Egyptian Hall in 1874. Briscoe tells us that Maybury had perfected a vanishing illusion that neither he nor his associates could fathom. It was called the Siamese cabinet.’

  ‘The boards in my attic?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘If so,’ Loxley continued, ‘one wonders whether Maybury had succeeded in fooling Briscoe into believing his methods were more ingenious than they in fact were.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You found mirrors.’

  ‘Is that how it’s done then?’

  Loxley feigned horror. ‘I couldn’t possibly say.’ He took the book back from Christopher. ‘Maybury travelled to America shortly after his Egyptian Hall performances and eight years later he returned to England a wealthy man. He must have made some shrewd investments. As far as I know, he never worked in magical theatre again. Although I suspect there was no love lost.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Harry Vignoles and Arthur Pratt – one a journalist and the other a composer of music-hall songs – mention Maybury in their diaries. They both describe a bitter, rather conceited man, who believed that he had never been given the recognition he deserved. To make his point, Maybury performed a card trick that left Vignoles and his companions utterly astonished, but sadly the reporter didn’t trouble to record the details of the illusion, so it’s difficult to assess whether their astonishment was merited.’ Loxley opened the second book and offered it to Christopher. ‘This, as far as I know, is the only surviving photograph of Edward Maybury.’

  Christopher took the book reverentially and inspected a plate that was discoloured with age. It showed a man in a frock coat and top hat, surrounded by children. They were dressed in rags and looked like street urchins. The photograph was of such poor quality it was impossible to get a very clear idea of what Maybury looked like.

  ‘Who are the children?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘They were part of his act.’

  ‘What did he do with them?’

  ‘He made them disappear.’

  First week in July

  Amanda Ogilvy was sitting up in bed writing a poem. She had thrown a silk scarf over the lamp stand and the walls were patterned with crimson shadows. Two joss sticks burned and crumbled as the album on her Wildcat portable record player revolved and filled the air with sitar music. A mournful melody was augmented by the shimmer of sympathetic strings.

  The feeling of the pencil in her hand and the slight traction of the graphite on the thick, textured paper was gratifying. As the pencil traversed the page, it left a trail of looping, childish script: What was it that she fell for? His beak, plumage, webbed feet . . . or was it the prospect of convenience, a daughter hatched from an egg?

  She was working on one of her satires inspired by Greek mythology – Zeus’s shape-shifting seduction of Leda, for which purpose the god had assumed the form of a swan. Amanda had given it the capricious title ‘Bird Watching’. The theme of the poem was gender differences, a topic she frequently explored in her writing.

  Amanda was a complex person. A pleasure-seeker, a voluptuary, but at the same time, ever since the early years of her adolescence, she had been strongly attracted to anything that betokened intellectualism: the romance of the coffee house, intense conversation, art, revolutionary politics. In her youth, she had yearned for the company of men with vision and purpose (none of whom, she soon discovered, lived anywhere near her parents’ house in Pinner). She would return from juvenile parties drunk, aroused from being kissed – and touched – fall into bed and still feel the need to read before sleep – Kafka, Orwell, Camus. Her mother and father, neither of whom read for pleasure, were vaguely suspicious of her expanding library of second-hand paperbacks. She was attracted to dissident cliques and hung out with like-minded students in smoky bedsits, listening to impassioned conversations about modernism that lasted all night and didn’t end until daybreak.

  All of her lovers at university were would-be novelists, but none of them ever succeeded in getting anything published. Simon was the first ‘real’ artist that she had ever met and this made him irresistible. She would sit for hours watching him improvise at the piano, entranced by the glamour of his authenticity; however, she had had to make concessions. He could be cold and distant, cerebral to the point of frigidity. It had become increasingly difficult to accept the conditions of their compact of late, particularly so since she was now an artist in her own right and generally less impressed by Simon’s accomplishments. From the very beginning the match had been imperfect. Amanda, the pleasure-seeker, the voluptuary, had made significant sacrifices over the years.

  The record came to an end and Amanda got out of bed in order to put it back in its sleeve. She heard the front door opening and Simon’s inept attempt to close it quietly. He crept up the stairs, tripping where the carpet was loose, and entered the bathroom. Amanda slid back between the sheets and waited. She listened to him showering and eventually the door handle turned and he appeared, his hair still dripping. He was fragrant with excessive cologne.

  ‘Still awake?’

  She glanced at the alarm clock. It was one o’clock in the morning. ‘Yes, I’ve been writing. I hadn’t noticed the time. You’re late.’

  ‘Douglas wanted to go out for a drink after the rehearsal.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘We went to a pub first and then on to his club.’ Simon walked over to the lamp stand and pulled the scarf off. The light in the room changed colour from red to yellow.

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t do that. You’ll start a fire.’

  ‘It’s only a thirty-watt bulb. It doesn’t get very hot.’

  He squeezed the scarf. ‘You say that, but . . .’ Suddenly, he lost the urge to argue the point. Instead, he folded the material into a neat triangle and placed it on the dressing table.

  ‘How was the rehearsal?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘Excellent,’ he replied. ‘The cello solo was sublime. Shall I turn this off?’ He tapped the lampshade.

  ‘All right.’

  The room was plunged into darkness.

  Amanda’s body bounced as Simon got into bed. They lay apart for a few moments before she ro
lled onto her side. She slipped her hand beneath his pyjamas and trifled with his chest hair. ‘I’m so tired,’ Simon yawned. ‘It really was a very exhausting evening.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’ A little too much emphasis on the word ‘sure’ introduced scepticism into an otherwise supportive response.

  Simon either didn’t notice or willfully ignored the hint of bad feeling. ‘Another long day tomorrow,’ he said, adding a laboured sigh for effect.

  ‘Yes,’ Amanda repeated, ‘another long day.’

  She closed her eyes and thought once again about Leda surrendering herself to the amorous swan. The emotion that accompanied images of this bizarre union was dangerously close to envy. A half-dream of brightly illuminated down, like falling snow, ensured a smooth transition from wakefulness to sleep.

  When Amanda opened her eyes again it was morning. She could hear Simon’s regular exhalations and felt discomfited by a full bladder. Pulling the covers aside, she got out of bed and went to the bathroom. While seated on the toilet, her gazed wandered. Simon’s clothes were hanging on the back of a chair and he had pushed his shoes between its legs. She noticed that the shoes were dirty. After wiping herself and pulling the chain she went to take a closer look. They were covered in dust, and when she turned them over she saw that mud had collected in the corrugated rubber soles.

  The rehearsal had taken place in a West End church. That’s what Simon had told her. In which case, why were his shoes so filthy?

  Christopher switched off the radio and listened to the new recording. After his introductory remarks an old woman’s voice floated out of the continuous static. ‘God have mercy.’ There was a short pause and the quivering contralto continued: ‘I dare not approach while he reposes near thy heart.’ Somewhere deep in the radio noise, he thought he could hear a distant cry, a dreadful keening. He stopped the tape, rewound it for a few seconds and pressed ‘play’. There was nothing but static. He checked the rev counter but the cry seemed to have disappeared. Christopher’s perplexity was mild. He had become accustomed to the occasional experience of auditory hallucination. Listening to static for long periods of time seemed to encourage the brain to overinterpret the slightest perturbation. He let the tape run on. A young man, desperate, almost hysterical: ‘Ich stehe allein! So ganz allein!’ The voice was unusually clear. I stand alone! So utterly alone! There was a sob, followed by the words: ‘In meinem kleinen Zimmer.’ In my little room. ‘Mir wird so eng!’ I feel trapped. This was followed by two minutes of empty whooshing, after which the static began to ripple with faint, incomprehensible whispers. A burst of flutter preceded the old woman, who returned to issue a warning: ‘Do not heed the speech of shadows.’ The remaining ten minutes of the recording were void. Christopher pressed ‘stop’ and removed his headphones. ‘Not bad,’ he said out loud. It had been a productive night.

  The studio was unbearably hot and when he changed position, he found that his shirt was damp and sticking to his skin. He could smell his own perspiration, his lips were dry and he was thirsty.

  In the kitchen, he poured an inch of concentrated orange juice into a tumbler, filled it with tap water, and stirred the mixture with a fork. He gulped the sweet liquid down his parched throat and put the bottle back in a cupboard. There were some dead ants next to the ant bait. Although tired, he didn’t want to go to bed, so he went to the drawing room and lay down on the sofa. ‘The speech of shadows,’ he said, savouring the alliteration. It would make a good title. Up until that point he had only thought of his composition as ‘the piece’, but giving it a name seemed to advance the project a stage further and he felt a sudden rush of excitement. He imagined seeing those same words printed in the Radio Times or on the front of a concert programme. The prospect of his critical rehabilitation made him feel slightly agitated so he got up and began pacing around the room.

  He had completed several circuits of the sofa before he was halted by his own reflection in the French windows. His hair was sticking up, his shirt was hanging out and he needed a shave. There was something about his selfneglect that made him look older. Through his reflection, Christopher thought he could see a glimmer of light. He walked to the window and peered out into the garden. There was indeed a faint luminescence and he judged that its source was in the vicinity of the gazebo.

  ‘What the . . .’ A slight increase in brightness confirmed his thinking. The gazebo materialized momentarily like a lantern, a skeletal structure of posts and struts. The light was clearly coming from inside. Was it a fire?

  Christopher rushed to the kitchen and found a torch in one of the cupboards. Then he returned to the drawing room, unlocked the French windows and stepped out onto the terrace. The light had vanished. He made his way to the gazebo and flashed the torch around the interior. He saw a blanket, bottles and some newspapers. Nothing was smouldering or scorched; however, he detected a trace of tobacco smoke in the air, which troubled him a little, but not for long. He noticed that the neighbours, who smoked excessively, had left one of their windows open. Christopher scratched his head. He was sure he had seen a flickering light.

  There was a sudden noise – the swish of long grass – and an impression of movement. He swept the torch beam around the garden. An animal, a cat – or was it a fox? – appeared in the circle of illumination and then leapt out of view. There was more sound, scrabbling, a thud, and then silence. His heart, which was hammering in his chest, began to slow down again.

  Christopher walked back to the house and checked the side entrance. The beam of his torch penetrated the darkness, revealing a dustbin and a ladder lying on its side. Mr Ellis – the builder – had neglected to collect the ladder after his departure and Christopher had failed to arrange for its disposal. Beside the dustbin was a cardboard box that had been stuffed to capacity. Its sides bulged and some of the contents had spilled onto the ground. Christopher crouched down to pick up one of several magazines. He was surprised to see that the cover girl was a younger incarnation of Laura. It was a 1960s edition of Glamour. She was pouting at the camera and looking very sexy. The torch beam travelled across the ground and came to rest on another image of his wife. There she was, sitting on a chair, the shortness of her miniskirt revealing the full extent of her slender legs. Her hair was a glorious fountain that fell to her shoulders and curled upwards. She looked like the quintessential sixties ‘dolly bird’. Christopher shone his torch into the box and discovered more magazines of a similar vintage, all of them graced with images of Laura in her elegant prime.

  The following morning Christopher entered the kitchen and found that Laura and Faye had already finished their breakfast. Faye was playing with some plastic farm animals and Laura was inspecting the cupboards to see if any more ants had appeared.

  ‘The bait worked,’ said Laura.

  ‘Good,’ Christopher responded, before inserting a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth. They managed to sustain a superficial conversation, but Christopher wasn’t really listening. He was rehearsing the confrontation that he was about to instigate. He knew that what he intended to do was unnecessarily theatrical, a provocation, but he couldn’t desist. It was as though he had become detached from his own mental processes. He got up, left the kitchen, and returned carrying the box of magazines he had discovered the night before. Like a robot, he held the box over the kitchen table and let it go. The crockery jumped and the spoons rattled. Faye looked at him quizzically then went back to playing with her animals.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Laura asked.

  He removed a magazine from the box and tossed it in Laura’s direction. She looked down at her own image.

  ‘I found them last night. Why on earth did you throw them away?’

  ‘I’ve been having a clear-out.’

  Her face was blank, her lips pressed together. Christopher noticed a burgeoning surplus of flesh beneath her chin.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, throwing his hands up and letting them fall again. ‘I just don’t
understand.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘Why you’d throw these away?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t want them anymore.’

  ‘But it’s your life. It’s what you did.’

  Laura sighed. ‘I modelled clothes, Chris. That’s all.’

  He pulled another magazine out of the box and held it up. ‘Vogue. They put you on the front cover of Vogue.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not now. No. It’s the past.’

  ‘What about Faye?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Don’t you think she’d like to see these magazines when she gets older?’

  ‘I hope not. I hope she’ll be interested in a lot more than clothes and make-up.’

  ‘She’s a girl! Of course she’ll be interested in clothes and make-up. And there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ Laura’s expression encouraged Christopher to reflect on his rhetoric. He responded defensively. ‘Being feminine won’t stop her from becoming a doctor or a lawyer.’

  ‘But being feminine,’ Laura said, inscribing the air with quotations marks, ‘as you put it, makes it hard for a young woman to get taken seriously, especially if being feminine means showing your legs and painting your face. I don’t want Faye to grow up thinking that her mother was particularly proud of being a professional clothes horse.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous. The kind of work you did had genuine artistic value. Some of those shoots really captured the spirit of the time. Children are naturally curious about what their parents got up to when they were young. It’d be nice for Faye to see some of these.’

  ‘Please. Take the box outside and leave it by the dustbin. Those magazines are mine, not yours, and I want to throw them away.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ He was too exasperated to continue speaking. He took a deep breath and tried again. ‘I don’t understand. What’s the matter with you?’