Free Voices in an Empty Room by Francis King Page B

squinting from under knotted brows.
    There were about sixty people eventually seated in the small hall, once an artist’s studio, of the Institute. The day was a sultry one, of alternating brilliance and sudden downpours. Even when there was sunshine, thunder could he heard rumbling about the building. The sunlight, filtering down from the vaulted ceiling through skylights left uncleaned for years, made the atmosphere all but unbearable. The rain, spattering on the glass, was so deafening that even people conversing next to each other found that they had to shout in order to be heard.
    While the audience collected, Hugo, Henry, the two boys, Mrs Lockit and the President and the Secretary of the Institute sat in the Secretary’s office. Except for an occasional sympathetic glance or smile from Hugo to Cyril, the boys and their aunt, who had resumed her violent knitting, were totally ignored. SWS and REM states, ontological status, ostensible reincarnation, radiesthesia, organic disease relationships … As the Secretary, a small woman with coarse grey hair cut in a fringe across a bulging forehead, leaned forward, relentlessly talking, Cyril listened to her, his eyes half-closed, in a semi-trance of bewilderment and apprehension. Meanwhile Lionel gazed about him: at the untidy shelves of books, the used teacups covered in a sour film, the ancient tape recorder, the plaster cast of a pair of hands, the photograph of a genteel, middle-aged woman, her hair parted in the middle, with what appeared to be cheesecloth protruding from her wide-open mouth.
    Suddenly, there was a knock at the door and Sybil burst in, her handsome face flushed and beaded with sweat under its thick coating of powder.
    â€˜Sybil!’ Hugo rose, displeased with her for having disobeyed his instructions to wait until the end of the session before making contact. ‘I hope you’ve found yourself a seat. The hall will be packed.’
    â€˜Yes, yes,’ she replied impatiently. ‘I have a seat. I left my Times and a book on it. I don’t imagine anyone will take it.’
    â€˜We can always place you in the row reserved for committee members.’ The Secretary got to her feet. ‘How nice to see you, Miss Crawfurd.’ Sybil was a member of the Institute. The President, a retired science don from a redbrick university, had also lumbered up. ‘Hello, there,’ he said in his North Country accent, thumbs hitched in the pockets of the tweed waistcoat which, incredibly, he was wearing under his jacket on a day as hot as this.
    â€˜I think it would really be better if you didn’t join us now,’ Hugo said. Though he knew that he did not want her with them, he could not have given his reason. However, he attempted a pretext, ‘It tends to upset the boys if, just before a session, they have to cope with the presence of a stranger.’
    Sybil laughed. ‘Am I the only stranger?’ She looked first at the Secretary and then at the President. Then she looked at Cyril and Lionel. She nodded and smiled. ‘Hello, boys. I’m Mr Crawfurd’s sister.’
    Lionel stared at her with an unnerving contempt. Cyril all but bobbed to his feet from his chair, as he whispered, ‘ Pleased to meet you.’ Mrs Lockit, whom Sybil had met in the past in Brighton, nodded and went on knitting. Sybil had made no acknowledgment of Mrs Lockit’s presence; but that one had always been full of airs and hoity-toity, Mrs Lockit told herself, with a contempt that matched Lionel’s.
    â€˜This is so exciting,’ Sybil said. She looked around her, ‘Isn’t it?’
    Lionel muttered, ‘ It isn’t going to work.’
    Before the arrival of the audience, he and Cyril had mounted the narrow stage and inspected the canvas screen, five-foot high and eleven foot broad, set up between two tables as widely separated from each other as possible. Hugo was to sit, as usual, with Cyril, and the