Free Voices in an Empty Room by Francis King Page A

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.
    â€˜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