Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  Lettice suddenly stopped howling. Her usually clear, good-natured face was dark and turbulent as she crossed her arms, one over the other, and then, gazing at her sister, said, ‘You’ve always done and had precisely what you wanted. And to hell with anyone else!’

  ‘Lettice, that’s not fair!’

  ‘And do you think this is fair?’ Lettice cried it out passionately, so that Frank, agonizing over the farm accounts in the next room, looked up and shook his head, a pencil gripped between his teeth. ‘Oh, it was easy enough for you. You paid the bills and you came down here when it suited you and you took him up to London when it suited you. But who had to cope with him day in and day out? Who had to see that he changed his underclothes and brushed his teeth and was not wearing wet socks?’

  ‘I’m sorry it was such a burden.’

  ‘It wasn’t a burden! I was glad of it, Frank was glad of it. But we came to think of him as–’ she all but said ‘as our own’ ‘–as part of our lives here on the farm. Oh, Lavinia, it’s cruel, cruel, cruel!’ Again she began to sob.

  Lavinia perched herself on the edge of the kitchen table, self-possessed and sad. ‘You can have him here often,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to come back to see you. This has been his home for so long.’

  Lettice said, ‘No. If he goes, he goes.’ She spoke with a sudden, cruel obduracy. (In the car, driving back to the farm, the child said, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t take me away again.’) ‘I’d be grateful if you’d clear all his things out of that room. Not at once, of course. But as soon as it’s convenient for you.’

  ‘Oh, Lettice.’

  Lettice began to bang around the kitchen, pulling down the pans that she would need for the supper still ahead of them.

  Keith, suddenly rich from the success of his play on Broadway, in Paris, in Düsseldorf, in Tokyo, bought a large house. To Lavinia’s amazement he insisted that it must be in Richmond, he had always wanted to live there, one of his aunts had once had a house on the Green. ‘ I should think you’ll be the first Trotskyite to own a house on the Green,’ Lavinia commented and Keith, who never cared for people to laugh at him, first blushed and then raised a hand to gnaw at a knuckle in baffled, undirected rage.

  ‘Keith wants you to have this room, darling. Isn’t it lovely? The other people had it as a second sitting room – breakfast room they called it. You could have a ping-pong table in here. And there’ll be space for miles and miles of railway track.’

  Stephen looked bleakly around him. Then he went to one of the four windows, each with a window-seat, and stared down at the Green.

  ‘Don’t you like it? You must like it.’

  ‘I liked my room in the flat.’

  ‘But that was a boxroom. It was tiny. There was hardly any room for anything but your bed.’

  He hung his head, was silent.

  During those holidays, he seemed to get used to the room, spending most of his time alone up there, instead of downstairs with the two adults. ‘Stephen!’ Lavinia would call to him. ‘ Why don’t you come and sit with us in the garden?’ to receive the answer, ‘It’s all right, thank you, Mummy.’ Or Keith would call up, ‘I thought I’d go for a walk in Kew Gardens. Why don’t you come with me?’ to receive the answer, ‘It’s all right, thank you, I’m doing some work.’ The ‘work’ was his carpentry, to which he applied himself with a tense, frowning persistence. Keith had objected to his using a room so elegant for an activity so messy but Lavinia had answered, ‘Oh, what does it matter? There are so many elegant rooms in this house.’ Keith had then complained that with all that noise of hammering and sawing, he couldn’t think clearly, only to be reminded that in another five days the holidays would end and the boy would be gone.

  Even in the then silent house, Keith continued to complain that he could not think clearly; and it was a complaint with which the critics agreed when, with Lavinia in the title role, his Emma Goldman was at last put on at a theatre noted for its near-Communist orthodoxy. Keith suddenly felt ‘ threatened’ (the word was his), not merely by these critics, once so adulatory, who now found his work ‘confused’, ‘dogmatic’, ‘predictable’, ‘wearisome’ but by the suddenness with which, like Antony, he felt the gods to be forsaking him. He had been unable to do anything wrong; now he found that he was unable to do anything right. He astonished and shocked Lavinia by writing vicious and even obscene postcards to his chief detractors – ‘You stupid cunt!’ she read on one as she was carrying it to the post, and he himself, gleefully proud, showed her another on which he had inscribed the name of the critic of one of the leading dailies as ‘Maurice Shithouse Baker’ instead of ‘ Maurice St John Baker’. The childish malevolence of it frightened her.

  The play came off and doggedly he began to write another, while she moved on to a Hedda Gabler acclaimed, not only by Hugo, as the best since Peggy Ashcroft’s. She would hear Keith ceaselessly typing, early in the morning and late into the night; but when she asked how things were going, he would only reply, ‘Bloody. They’re going to hate it.’ ‘They’were the critics. More than once he reminded her that Terence Rattigan had remarked that the average effective life of a playwright was ten years. ‘I’ve almost had those.’

  Stephen came back from school; and then all Keith’s frustrated malevolence – at the contemptuous refusal of any foreign management to take his last play, at his inability to produce even one act of another which satisfied him, at the critics’ sniggering delight at the violent, obscene postcards which he had intended should strike home like so many stabs to their vitals – was directed at the boy. At first, he was sarcastic. ‘Do you think that dear child could possibly do his fretwork in the garage or the potting shed or somewhere? I know it’s of greater artistic importance than my writing but it is, after all, my writing which helps to maintain this enormous mansion in which the three of us live.’ Then he became more vicious. Stephen was late for lunch and ‘Where’s the little bastard?’ he asked. Or Stephen dropped the coffee pot and ‘You bloody little wog!’ he shouted. (‘ Of course you don’t want a wog to touch you anywhere intimate,’ Gaur had told her. She had never once used that word in her life.)

  Stephen never responded either to sarcasm or abuse. He would merely look at his stepfather with a patient curiosity, as though trying to fathom, without rancour, how anyone could be so brutal and crude.

  Eventually Lavinia said, ‘Look, Keith, I can’t have you speak to the boy like that. I’ve told you before. If it goes on, I leave.’

  ‘You leave? Or you both leave? If you leave, you’re not going to dump him on me, as you dumped him on that wretched sister and brother-in-law of yours.’

  During those holidays, Lavinia awoke early one morning, in the bedroom which she and Keith no longer shared, and was drawn, she did not know why, to the open window beyond which the dawn light was still no more than a faint, pearly shimmer. She looked out, she drew the coolness and freshness deep into her lungs. Suddenly, on the spine of the roof of the greenhouse running the length of the furthest garden wall, she saw something – a cat? – edging along. She leant out, peered. Then she realized. It was Stephen on all fours.

  She ran out of the room in nothing hut her nightdress, her feet bare, hurried down the stairs, tugged at the latch of the drawing-room French windows, and then, breathlessly calling, ‘Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!’ raced across the lawn. Her bare feet left marks, as of tarnish, on the silver of the dew.

  He had reached the end of the spine. He jumped down, clumsily landing on the side of a foot, so that he all but toppled over.

  ‘Stephen!’ They stared at each other, she in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. For an absurd moment, the thought came to her that he must have been sleepwalking. Then she demanded, ‘ What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  He did not answer, hanging his head.

  ‘Stephen! Answer me!’

  He mumbled, ‘ I wanted to see if I could do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Walk the whole length of t
he greenhouse without falling in.’

  ‘But you’re crazy. That’s a terribly dangerous thing.’

  He all but answered, ‘That’s the point of it.’ But he said nothing.

  ‘Why did you do it at this hour, when you ought to be in bed?’

  ‘Because otherwise you or Keith or someone might have seen me.’

  ‘Go back to bed this instant. And never, ever do anything like this again. Do you hear me? I forbid you!’

  The paperboy’s bicycle made a figure of eight on the gravel of the drive as he adroitly hurled that Friday’s copies of The Times, the Guardian and the New Statesman into the porch. He saw the woman in her nightdress gesticulating at the boy in his pyjamas, but, a stolid, sleepy youth, he thought little of it.

  Lavinia, however, cried out, ‘Now the paperboy has seen us! It’ll be the gossip of the place!’

  Keith slept on and heard nothing. Lavinia never told him.

  The holidays came to an end. Lavinia went up to Manchester, to appear at the Royal Exchange; Keith stayed in Richmond, to work on his play. Physically distanced from each other, they at once grew emotionally closer. They telephoned each other every evening before Lavinia left her rented flat for the theatre. ‘How’s it going, darling?’ ‘ Fine. I’ve done that second scene. Got it right at last.’ ‘Oh, lovely! I hope you’ve produced something really exciting for me to do.’ ‘Yes. You murder your child.’ Was he making some diabolical joke? But he went on, ‘It’s a really tremendous scene. I got the idea for it when I was rereading Medea. It’ll make those bloody critics sit up and take notice.’

  Stephen’s letters – he had now moved on to public school – were at once adult in tone and empty in content. He always wrote to the Richmond house, so that Keith had to forward them, even though Lavinia reminded him over and over again to use her address in Manchester.

  Lavinia returned to London and, the next day, Stephen was back from school. His voice was breaking, so that at one moment he would be speaking hoarsely as though with a cold, and at the next he would be piping. There was a faint down above his upper lip. On one occasion, when Lavinia came on him unexpectedly, lying out on a deckchair in a corner of the garden invisible from either the house or its neighbours, he stuffed a handkerchief into his pocket, his face scarlet with panicky embarrassment. He had obviously been masturbating. Keith no longer mocked or shouted at him; the two barely spoke to each other or looked at each other.

  It was half-way through those holidays that Lavinia first noticed the slashes. She was at the kitchen sink, Stephen wandered in, as he often did, in search of a biscuit. As he put up an arm to fetch down the biscuit tin from the shelf, his sleeve fell away and, at the same moment, she turned round to ask him something. There were three of the slashes, not deep, each of precisely the same length and distance from each other. If they had been nearer the wrist, they might have severed veins.

  ‘What on earth are those?’

  As she pointed, he tugged down his sleeve.

  ‘I cut myself.’

  ‘Cut yourself? How?’ Keith’s mockery of the down on his chin and upper lip had eventually made him buy a safety razor. Could he have used one of its blades?

  ‘When I was doing some carpentry. The – the chisel slipped.’ The idea of a chisel slipping and inflicting wounds so neatly symmetrical was preposterous; but, obscurely disturbed, she did not pursue the matter. She had a matinee that afternoon; she did not want to be upset before it, and she knew that the truth, if she could ever discover it, might be upsetting.

  A few days later, making up the laundry, she found blood caked on the leg of his pyjamas, where it would have covered his thigh, not far below his crotch. She touched the place wonderingly with the tip of a forefinger, held it close to her eyes, even smelled it. Should she mention it to him? She did not do so. Again, she succumbed to that self-protective instinct so strong with her. She must not be upset.

  At breakfast one morning, she noticed the curious little punctures, like burst blebs, on the backs of his narrow, brown hands. Keith was not there. She said, ‘ Stephen, what have you done to the back of your hands?’

  ‘Some insects must have bitten me when I was sitting in the garden. I scratched the spots and they began to bleed a little.’

  She stared at him; he stared back at her, as though daring her to question him further.

  Soon after that, Stephen now back at school, she realized that her marriage was over. Keith had become a burned-out star and without that former blaze of power to hold it on course, the missile, controlled by that subtle mechanism within it, began to veer away.

  Lavinia went into his study, where he sat hunched over the typewriter which from time to time would chatter out a few lines of effortful dialogue and then fall silent, and put a hand on his shoulder, as though to steady him, before she broke her news. Not merely the gods but his wife was also forsaking him.

  ‘But why? Why?’

  ‘Because the show has had too long a run. It’s going to pieces of its own accord. It’s better to take it off.’

  He looked at her with small, timorous eyes. ‘You can’t hate it more than I can.’

  ‘Hate what?’ She thought that he meant the ‘show’ but could not be certain.

  ‘The stink of my failure.’

  He, like Gaur so many years before, had a talent for making people feel guilty; but she had perseveringly learned how not to succumb to guilt, as she had perseveringly learned so many other things to become a successful actress.

  Keith sold up the house, which he was no longer earning enough money to keep up, and soon after that left England to take up a post as writer-in-residence at some mid-Western university. One of the critics to whom he had sent a number of those violent, obscene postcards remarked, the sterile mocking the sterile, that it would have been more appropriate if his job had been that of non-writer-in-residence.

  Lavinia moved to the house in the Village, found for her by a theatrical knight already living in Brighton. She set aside the basement for Stephen’s bedroom and workroom.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not like that room you had in Richmond.’

  He looked around him. ‘Oh, this is better.’

  She laughed. ‘Nonsense, darling!’ But she was secretly pleased.

  At preparatory school, the reports on his behaviour had always been good; but, now disturbingly, each report contained some such work as ‘rebellious’, ‘ disobedient’, ‘undisciplined’, ‘defiant’. Yet at home, as he sawed and hammered and planed in the basement, he caused not a moment’s trouble. She could not understand it.

  ‘You seem to be such a bad boy at school,’ she said on one occasion. ‘Your work is all right but … look at that.’ She held out the report.

  He did not look. He merely shrugged and gave a small, furtive smile.

  Months later, she met a playwright whose son was not merely at the same school but in the same house as Stephen. The playwright remarked to her, with an envious admiration, ‘By all accounts, your boy’s a real tearaway.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘So I gather.’ He laughed. ‘They don’t beat much at that school, as they did in my day – more’s the pity. But I gather that boy of yours holds the record. And, apparently, he’s got so much guts that he takes six of the best as though it was nothing.’

  The playwright laughed again and Lavinia laughed with him; but really she was shaken.

  When Stephen was seventeen, the headmaster suggested that he might be happier – it was a form of words which he generally used in embarrassing circumstances like this – if Lavinia took him away. No, there had been no major problems – he was basically a thoroughly nice and decent chap – but there had been some minor ones and, since there seemed little likelihood that he would procure a place at a university, the way that he was going, it might be better if she were to have him stay at home and send him to one of the excellent crammer’s, either in Brighton or in London, of which he was forwarding a list.

  But Ste
phen had no intention of going to a crammer’s; and he had no intention of getting a regular job.

  ‘Surely you can afford to keep me,’ he aggressively told Lavinia, when she suggested the job, after he had refused to consider the crammer’s.

  ‘Yes, I can afford to keep you. But the real question is whether you can afford to be kept.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s bad for you. At your age. Demoralizing.’

  ‘I don’t mind being demoralized.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But I mind.’

  ‘If you don’t want to keep me, I can go on the dole.’

  She shrugged. ‘Then do so.’ But from then on, she gave him an allowance.

  Gradually, she became less and less aware of his presence in the house. He would come up to meals from the basement and sit opposite her, pale and silent, while he doggedly ate. Then he would slip away again.

  ‘Stay with me. Why do you always disappear as soon as a meal is finished?’

  Remorselessly he answered, ‘Oh, you don’t really want me with you.’

  ‘But I do, I do!’

  He shook his head, he gave that small, furtive smile. ‘The trouble is, you’ve never loved me, Mother. Never, ever.’

  ‘What a cruel thing to tell me!’

  He shrugged and walked out. Later, she heard him sawing away at a piece of wood. He would be making another of the cupboards, bookcases or chest-of-drawers which he would then sell to some contact with a shop in the warren of squalid, small streets below the station. Each object took him so long to complete that his profits were tiny. He rarely went out.

  Lavinia went for three months to the States, to appear in a film. ‘Lots of lovely money, darling! Why don’t you come with me?’