Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  Lavinia nods, preoccupied. She is not a woman who often reads; and when she does read, it is certainly not Meredith, Dickens or Dostoievsky. She is thinking of the scarf. She has not told Sybil the story of the scarf. She will never tell anyone its story.

  Chapter Four

  WAS

  The two sisters, Lettice and Lavinia, were perched side by side, their legs bare and brown, on the stile that Frank was always saying that he must mend. Below them the Long Field fell away in the slanting sunlight of evening. At the bottom of it, the tractor, coughing blue smoke, droned back and forth and the heavy sheaves tumbled.

  ‘What name will he have?’ In the years to come, his name would be important.

  Lavinia stared ahead of her, her eyes heavy with the stubbornness of her grief. ‘Well, Stephen, of course. What else?’

  Lettice nibbled on the succulent blade of grass that she had snatched from beside her. She felt a terrible compassion for her sister and a no less terrible joy. ‘ I didn’t mean that. I meant – what surname?’

  Lavinia turned, as though she were going to strike her. ‘Trent. He could hardly be Stephen Mukerjee. Even if he had any right to that name – which he hasn’t – it might be something of a burden.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Lettice had hoped that Lavinia would say, ‘ Perhaps Frank would agree to his having yours.’ Stephen Cobbold: it sounded both right and desirable. At boarding school, the girls had had Cash’s nametapes sewn into their clothes. Each nametape gave the right of possession.

  Lavinia slipped off the stile. ‘I know you’ll look after him as if he were your own.’

  Lettice shielded her eyes, since the sun, slanting lower through a wavering haze of heat, now struck into them if she turned towards her sister. ‘ Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. That goes without saying.’ She would look after him as though he were her own because a child of her own was something which, through a surgeon’s catastrophic error, she would never have.

  As Lavinia, changed now into her city clothes, climbed into the taxi, Stephen, whom she had scooped up in her arms, to hold him tighter and tighter against her chest before once again laying him out on the strange, narrow bed, stumbled out, barefoot and in his nightshirt, between Lettice and Frank. Lavinia saw his hands raised, his mouth opening, preparatory to a scream. Then Frank stooped and lifted him high against his chest.

  ‘The station, please.’

  ‘Yes, madam, the station.’

  Gaur Mukerjee had occupied the room next to hers while reading for the bar. He had been to an English public school, where there had been other boys from India; but he had been picked on, he told Lavinia, because, unlike them, he had been useless at games and brilliant at work. It was his use of that word ‘brilliant’ that had first interested her in him. It suggested an extraordinary degree of self-knowledge, of self-confidence or of vanity.

  His family, who were rich landowners, exploited their peasants; but here, in this alien country, alternately snubbed and patronized, it was as one of the exploited that he thought of himself. When their landlady asked him not to leave his washing things in the bathroom he was convinced that it was because she thought that they would somehow contaminate those of the other lodgers; and when, entertaining some of her friends from RADA, Lavinia did not ask him to come in and join them, merely because she thought that he would be bored by their theatrical chatter, he accused her of being ashamed of him.

  He would give her extravagant presents and then chide her for not wearing them or using them. He would cook her curries, himself pounding the spices in a mortar with a dogged, defiant expression on his narrow, pale, face, and then, when she refused a second helping merely because she was careful about her figure, he would snatch away her plate with an angry, ‘It was no good. You don’t have to pretend.’ He would sew on the button that he found dangling from her overcoat, take her temperature when she complained of a sore throat, and bring an umbrella to Earls Court tube station when it was raining and he knew that she had gone to RADA without one. But he also kicked her violently and publicly, on the leg, when she arrived so late at Covent Garden that they were not admitted until the first act of Pelléas et Melisande was over, borrowed money off her which he forgot to return, and told her brutally in the middle of their love-making that she should use a deodorant, she stank. When he made that unfair accusation, it seemed confirmation of her persistent fear that his violent, derisive love-making was merely a way of getting back at all those people who had caused him so much imagined and so much real humiliation in this country which he both admired and loathed.

  Leaning on his elbow, naked beside her on the bed in her room – he fastidiously refused ever to use his own bed for their love-making – he lectured her on the hideous scars left on his country by the Raj. India, as he saw it, had been a prelapsarian paradise before the arrival of people who were second-rate, middle-class trash; and now that the trash had been swept away, the attitudes that they had inculcated still hung on. ‘I know nothing of all this,’ she protested. ‘No, of course, you don’t. You’re just an ignoramus.’

  She was uncertain if she loved him; but in the middle of a voice class or movement class, she would suddenly think of that pale, narrow face and that pale, thin body and she would want only to get back to her room, strip off her clothes and draw him down on top of her. But often he would say ‘No, no, I’m not in the mood,’ or ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ or ‘Do you never think of anything else?’ She had only first given herself to him because, when she had withdrawn, dishevelled and flushed from his embrace on her sofa, he had rasped at her bitterly, ‘Well, of course, you don’t want a wog to touch you anywhere intimate.’ Wog? She had never used the word in the whole of her life. He was an expert in making others guilty; he was also an expert in giving pain. Guilt, pain: she despised herself, as he despised her, for needing them.

  His father died; but, though by then he had passed his Bar Finals, he was strangely reluctant to go back to India and so to become one of the exploiters, instead of one of the exploited. If she needed to be hurt and to be made to feel guilt, then he needed to be humiliated and to inflict guilt on others. There were also his political activities, shadowy and sinister to her, of which he would never talk. He would go out to ‘attend a meeting’ or just ‘to see someone’, or else he would be visited by people so various that the only thing which they seemed to have in common was their resentment of Lavinia’s presence.

  ‘You’re just a silly little actress. You’d better keep out of it,’ he warned, when once she asked him, ‘ But, Gaur, what’s it all about?’ She persisted, ‘If it concerns you, then of course it concerns me.’ But at that he shook his head. ‘A false corollary. No.’

  He refused ever to wear a sheath and, in those days before the pill, she herself was often careless. When she became pregnant, it was more with amazement than horror. ‘Oh, Christ, you would, you would!’ he shouted at her. ‘But what are we going to do?’ ‘We? You mean – what are you going to do?’ But later he was remorseful. He took her out to an expensive restaurant, at which he took pleasure in chiding the waiters for the defects both of their service and of the food, and then to a nightclub, where he insisted on dancing on and on with her, into the early hours, even though she was dropping with fatigue and the strain of wondering about her pregnancy.

  Soon after that, he vanished, leaving no word behind him. She had been on a weekend visit to Lettice and Frank in the country, throughout which she had thought of nothing but Gaur. Coming home, she had turned the key in the door of her room and had seen first the duplicate key, which she had given to him, lying out on the carpet, and then the envelope propped up on the toast-rack on the table. She had opened the envelope and inside had found the twenty five-pound notes. Nothing else. The landlady said that he had paid up, packed and left on Saturday evening. He had behaved like a gentleman, she went on, insisting on paying for the week of notice that he had failed to give. No, she had no idea where he had gone. He had said that
he would write and give her a forwarding address as soon as he had one.

  Some men came to interrogate the landlady and, no doubt tipped off by her or one of the other tenants, they also knocked on Lavinia’s door. If they knew that he had been her lover and that she was carrying his child, they did not reveal it. Had she any idea of where he might have gone? Had he ever behaved suspiciously in any manner? Could she tell them anything about his visitors? No, no, no, to each of these questions in turn. ‘ He was always – kind. Quiet. No trouble.’ The two men left.

  There were many students at the drama school as gifted as Lavinia, some even more so, but not one of them had her quiet, stubborn persistence. She had little knowledge of what went on within her, but of her exterior – the texture of her skin and hair, the coarseness of her nose in her otherwise delicate face, the effect of this or that gesture or expression – she knew everything. Long before she had thought of the stage as her career, she had scrupulously monitored herself, as though attending to the demands and needs of some delicate, exotic plant. She. was soon aware, for example, that her walk, which was similar to Lettice’s, suggested, with its roll and energetic swing of arms and shoulders, some countrywoman striding out over ploughed fields, and, a girl of only fourteen, she had then set herself the task of patiently remaking it. In that process of remaking, there was an invisible other self who, as choreographer, stood outside her, watched with narrowed eyes and corrected now the tilt of the head, now the angle of an elbow and now the raising of a heel.

  Later, at drama school, she also became aware that her taste in clothes was fallible; and so it was that, with no conscious intention, she set about making friends with the Greek boyfriend of one of the male students. Panos, having won as many prizes at art college as she was eventually to win at drama school, was already, at the age of twenty-three, designing sets and costumes for provincial theatres and even for an opera company. Delicate-boned, quiet and touchy, he immediately recognized in Lavinia an intensity of purpose as ruthless as his own. It suited him to have this beautiful girl, with her triangular face, the thick, yellow hair coming down in a widow’s peak to a wide, serene forehead, as his companion to art galleries, parties and shows. He even referred to her, to her face, as his ‘cover girl’. He was using her and she in turn was using him to tell her things like ‘No, darling, frankly that blouse does nothing for you,’ or ‘You can’t wear shoes like that, they make you look like a tart literally down on her uppers.’ There was little affection between them; but their relationship, built on self-interest, was as durable as that between two dancers who, however much distrust or even dislike may exist between them, know that each needs the other to achieve complete success.

  At the drama school there was a once famous actor who, ruined by a lack of self-discipline – he disappeared on alcoholic fugues, was late for rehearsals and even for performances, threw tantrums, changed his lines, dried – now, with the dazed moroseness of the reformed alcoholic, took a few classes each week, not because he was a good teacher but because the Principal felt sorry for him. He would become aware of Lavinia staring at him with a disconcerting fixity and, being vain, would wonder if, like some of the other girls, she had a crush on him. Once, meeting her by chance in the street, he even suggested that she should have a drink with him and was then affronted by the casual way in which she said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t now, thank you,’ with no excuse offered, before she moved on. He did not realize that what fascinated Lavinia was not his past success but his present failure. She would never end up like that, she would tell herself.

  Long after she had left the school and had made a name for herself, she met this actor in a television studio, when she was playing the lead and he merely a walk-on two. He had come up to her, truculently drunk and had said, ‘My, you have got on since those days when you used to gaze at me with those beautiful sheep’s eyes of yours!’ He had disturbed her; but she was by now adept at concealing disturbance and so she smiled at him and said, ‘How nice to see you again.’ ‘Is it?’ Then a terrible thing happened. He sank into the chair opposite to her, put a hand, its palm strangely flushed, to his forehead, and began to emit one gulping, gasping sob after another. Fortunately no one was near enough to notice.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  For a long time he did not answer, his shoulders heaving and those gulping, gasping sobs going on and on, while she took in the shabbiness of his suit, the crack over the instep of the shoe on his left foot and the unshaven area around the curve of his jaw. Then he said, in a voice thick with hatred, ‘You have everything, I have nothing.’

  She stared at him with a cold detachment, wondering, Why doesn’t this upset me, why doesn’t it move me?

  He took his hand away from his eyes and she saw, with disgust, that some greenish snot was caking one of his nostrils. ‘I’ve lost it all,’ he said. ‘My memory, my job at the school, my marriage, my house, my nerve.’ My nerve. She remembered that. That was the all-important thing.

  She got to her feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘ I really am sorry.’

  As she walked away, he shouted after her, ‘ Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!’

  Whenever it was physically possible on a Sunday, she would make the journey, however long, tedious and expensive, down to Devon to see her son. He would always be waiting for her, standing at the attic window, high up in the steeply sloping roof of the farmhouse, of the little room which was his. As she walked or was driven up the drive, Lavinia got into the habit of looking up there. She would wave, as soon as she could make out his face, and he would wave back. Then he would rush down the narrow stairs, so that, at the sound, Lettice would look up from her pastry or her potato-scraping or her bean-stringing and shake her head in mingled sorrow and annoyance. Arms extended, he would rush out crying ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’

  While he was still a small child, Lavinia would then sweep him up into her arms and he would hang round her neck, his cheek pressed to hers, as he breathed in that smell, exotic and potent, which he associated only with her. Once, when he was four, he found an empty bottle of that scent in the waste-paper basket of the room that she used. He removed it, carried it up to his room, which was next to the room of the Danish au pair who helped both in the house and with looking after him, and hid it among his toys. From time to time, when he was alone, he would take it out, unscrew its stopper and hold it to his nostrils. Then, slowly the scent thinned, faded, became a mere ghost. He buried the bottle in the garden, under a lanky lilac tree which never produced more than a few weak blooms.

  Often, in those early years, he would say to her, ‘Why do you have to go away again? Why? Why?’

  ‘Because I must earn money for us both.’

  ‘Let me come with you,’ he would also say; and she would then have to explain that she was living in lodgings, going on a British Council tour to the Middle East, was out all day and late into the evening and so could not possibly look after him. She would also often tell him that a city or a town was no place for a child. He was much better off here, in the countryside with his Aunt Lettice and his Uncle Frank and Inge.

  There were holidays, of course, between one job and another; and then she would come down to fetch him or Lettice would bring him to London. His hair cut and brushed, in the grey flannel suit that Lavinia had bought for him at Harrod’s, he would look touchingly solemn and adult. She would drive him, in the MG sports car acquired after a part in an American him, up north to Scotiand or west into Cornwall or even across the Channel. He was always taciturn – ‘rather a boring little boy’, one of Lavinia’s friends commented to another, not knowing that Lavinia could hear her. He would sit in the car, glancing now at the road ahead and now up at the face of the woman beside him. When Lavinia asked him what he wanted to do, he never seemed to know. ‘Oh, what you want,’ he would answer. Then patiently he would follow her round country houses, picture galleries and churches; would laugh when she laughed, in cinemas and theatres, and look tense or sorrowful when she look
ed tense or sorrowful; would eat the same meals that she ate and even sip some of the same wine.

  When he was a little over eight, a strange and disconcerting thing happened. They had been up to Edinburgh for the Festival and though Lavinia had taken the boy along to what an aunt of hers, resident in the suburbs of the city, regarded as the most unsuitable places for a child – the Festival Club, the Traverse Theatre, the Howtowdie – he had, in his still, silent way, clearly been happy. Then, as they approached the village outside which Lettice and Frank had their farmhouse, Lavinia had noticed that he was looking less and less at the road ahead of them and more and more up at her face. She began to feel troubled by his scrutiny and eventually she asked, ‘What is it, darling? Have I a smut on my nose?’ He did not answer. ‘Stephen!’

  Then he said, in a constricted, grieving voice, which she would always remember, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t take me away again. Ever.’

  ‘What do you mean? Haven’t you enjoyed yourself? Oh, darling!’

  He now stared straight ahead of him; and that narrow, paleface, so like his father’s, under the blackest of hair, was immobile.

  ‘Haven’t you, darling?’ she repeated.