Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  In the late afternoon, Lavinia took her duplicate key to the flat out of the silver box in which she kept it on the chimneypiece of the sitting room and, once again as unaccountably breathless as when she had climbed the steps out of the area the day before, she descended into the area as into an icy pool. She rang the bell, rang again, kept her finger pressed on the button for seconds on end. Then she inserted the key, turned it, gave the door a little push. Pushed harder. ‘Stephen!’ she called. No answer. If he had gone, he had left everything behind him. His dufflecoat and his brown tweed overcoat hung in the hall, with his greasy cap above them. A pair of sneakers lay in front of her, asymmetrically placed, one on its side, as though he had hurriedly kicked them off. There was some mail: three letters in buff envelopes and a circular. ‘Stephen!’ she called again, her voice rising. ‘Where are you?’

  The curtains of the workroom were closed. She could feel the sawdust softly yielding like sand beneath her feet; she could smell it, pungently resinous. She screwed up her eyes. There was no sign of him.

  In mounting dread, she walked into the tiny, musty kitchen, its refrigerator humming in one corner. There was a magazine open on the table, with a cup and plate, containing a half-eaten piece of buttered wholemeal bread and a single sardine resting in a pool of thick, yellow oil. She assumed the magazine to be one of his motoring ones. She did not look at it. The bedroom, off the other side of the hall, was also empty, with an unmade bed, pyjama trousers flung across it, the figures of a digital alarm clock burning hot, on a flimsy, unpainted table made by himself, and the door of the built-in cupboard hanging ajar, so that she could see herself, pale-faced and anxious, reflected in its tarnished glass.

  She went through the bedroom to the combined bathroom and lavatory beyond it. She looked up, she gave a gasp, fingertips pressed to lips. The first thing she saw was that narrow, long, grey penis, so like his father’s (all through the day at the drama school it would be constantly in her mind). Then the narrow, hairless chest, with its small, prominent nipples, revealed by the unbuttoned red pyjama-jacket. Then the purple face, the tongue protruding. Then the scarf.

  ‘It was only a game,’ she told one of the two young, fresh-faced, visibly appalled policemen who arrived. ‘I know it was only a game, only a game.’

  The coroner confirmed that. In the flat of the deceased, there had been found magazines and implements which suggested that he had been indulging in sado-masochistic fantasies and, it seemed probable, practices as well. It would be an act of unnecessary cruelty to his mother and the other members of his family to be more specific about their nature. But it was clear that, like many people who suffered from the same abnormal condition, the deceased indulged in games of a kind which could only too easily prove either dangerous or, as in this case, fatal. No doubt, he had intended to release himself from the noose of the scarf before he became unconscious, but, sadly, he had been unable to do so.

  On the day after Stephen’s death, Lavinia received a packet by the first post. She saw that it was addressed in Stephen’s hand and so, as Lettice and Frank had both arrived to be with her, she at once carried it upstairs to her bedroom. She stretched herself out on the unmade bed, from which she had so recently arisen, as though in preparation for some operation to be performed without an anaesthetic and then, raising her hands, the envelope between them, high above her head, she tore it open. Photographs and cuttings from newspapers showered down on to her face and body, as the fragments of her cheque had showered over her the day before. She raised herself on an elbow. Something remained within the envelope. She extracted it. It was the birthday card; but now, where she had written ‘From your loving mother’, there was scrawled a thick palimpsest of obscene words of a kind which she had never once, in his whole life, heard from his own lips.

  She dropped the card, so that it fluttered to the floor beside her bed. Then she picked up one of the photographs, stared at it, laid it down. Picked up another. Picked up a cutting …

  Cars were piled up on top of each other with, in the foreground, a single blood-stained boot. A child lay back, its mouth wide open in a rictus of agony, while its abdomen gaped. A woman, a mask obscuring her face, dangled, trussed up like some chicken, her pudgy flesh blue, from a meathook embedded in a cracked, white ceiling. A muscular oriental, his head shaved, slumped stiffly in a corner, with his inert body covered with innumerable lacerations oozing blood. A breast, no more, part of some photograph hugely enlarged …

  She leapt off the bed, rushed to the washbasin and began to vomit, repeatedly, with a force so violent that each spasm was like a blow to her solar plexus.

  Lettice must have heard her. ‘Lavinia, are you all right? Are you all right?’ she called anxiously as she approached down the corridor.

  Lavinia hurried to the door and turned the key.

  ‘Lavinia!’ The handle rattled from side to side. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Something I ate. I’m all right. I’ll just lie down for a moment.’

  ‘Well, let me in. Why’s this door locked?’

  ‘It’s all right. Go away. Go away.’

  ‘Well, if you really …’

  Lavinia could hear her sister’s footsteps. She imagined her standing there, a small, dowdy matron, with a look of perpetual disappointment on that face which had once been so ardent. Then, at long last, she heard her moving off, the floorboards creaking under her slow, dragging tread.

  Lavinia began to amass all the photographs and cuttings. She could not bear to look at any more.

  A note, a note: was there no note?

  Again she read those mindless obscenities scrawled over the card.

  That afternoon, when Lettice and Frank went out to do some shopping (‘Are you sure that you’ll be all right on your own just for half an hour?’) Lavinia carried the envelope, refilled with its contents, down into the sitting room. She took a box of matches off an occasional table, knelt by the hearth and then drew out from the envelope one of the photographs and laid it across the empty bars. She lit a match, applied it. A thick, grey, acrid smoke curled up, to be followed by a licking tongue of flame. She put out a hand, inserted fingers in the envelope beside her, drew out between forefinger and middle finger two of the newspaper cuttings. Then, as though an invisible hand had gripped her arm above the elbow, she found she could not continue. She stared into the grate, where the photograph was now no more than a silvery, friable coil, lying across the bars.

  She got to her feet, the envelope in her hands, once again stared down at the grate and then began to mount, slow step by step, the stairs to her bedroom. She went over to her desk, pulled down its flap, eased open a drawer and thrust the envelope far into the back of it.

  When Frank and Lettice returned, Frank, grizzled, close-cropped head on one side, sniffed the air like some ancient bull terrier. ‘Is something burning?’ he asked.

  ‘There was,’ Lavinia answered calmly. ‘Over now. Only a letter.’

  They did not ask what this ‘letter’ might be and she did not tell either them then or anyone else in the future.

  Chapter Five

  IS

  There is a large, defective television set in one corner of the sitting room. Phantoms flicker across it, playing tennis in what appears to be a snowstorm under a brilliant sun. ‘We’ve interrupted you!’ Sybil exclaimed, as Mrs O’Connor, Sean clinging about her waist, opened the door for her and Bridget Nagel.

  ‘Interrupted me?’ Mrs O’Connor was puzzled.

  ‘Wimbledon,’ Sybil pointed.

  ‘Oh, that!’ Mrs O’Connor crossed over and turned down the sound.

  Now Mrs O’Connor stares morosely at the phantoms, her elbow on the table before her and her chin on her palm. An antiquated sewing machine rests on the table. She has been using it to lower the hem of one of Maureen’s skirts. Maureen seems never to stop growing – unlike Sean who never seems to start.

  Although the housing estate and this flat, giddily high above the wastes of
East London, are depressing to others, Bridget Nagel, who finds herself sinking into a morass of inertia and depression whenever she is at home, finds that they invigorate her. She cannot explain this, either to herself or to her friends. It may be, she sometimes thinks, that all that erratic psychic energy, which hurls pots and pans around the kitchen, overturns a wardrobe and pushes people from their chairs, revitalizes her.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Bridget asks. She knows that she ought to hope for the answer that ‘ It’ has gone; but, if she were to learn that, she would suffer a secret disappointment.

  Mrs O’Connor shrugs, as she puts out a hand and twirls one of the reels on the machine. ‘Better, worse. You never know. We had this reverent in, not a priest, from the Church of England, and he did this, this exorcism lark. For a while – for, oh, five, six days – everything seemed to stop. And then, suddenly, last night, all hell broke loose. Chairs falling over, a cup breaking, the doors slamming. You name it, we had it.’

  Sybil looks up from her contemplation of a peculiar, jagged stain on the carpet between her feet. ‘ Was Maureen here during that period?’

  Mrs O’Connor does not appreciate the drift of the question, though she has been vaguely aware that all the experts – social workers, policemen, the health officer, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research and the Institute of Paranormal Studies, even the ‘reverent’ (as she calls the epicene High Church clergyman) – suspect that Maureen has been having everyone on. To Mrs O’Connor that idea is preposterous. Only last week, the girl was tumbled out of her bed, with the bed on top of her, and there was that time when she, Mrs O’Connor, hunted high and low for her brassière, for minutes on end, before Sean spotted it, inaccessible except with a ladder, inside the unlit light-globe in the kitchen. Mrs O’Connor nods, ‘Yes, she was here. I wish she hadn’t been. Sean takes it all so calmly but you can see that it’s getting on Maureen’s wick. She spends a lot of her time away from home now, mixing with undesirables. I tell her to be home by ten but often she’s later. What can one do?’

  There is a terrible helplessness about this woman, at the mercy not only of her poverty and her recalcitrant daughter but of the demons who smash her crockery, rip the clothes off her and her children, and interrupt her sleep. Bridget has succumbed to that pathos, slipping money to Mrs O’Connor, buying Maureen a tennis racket, and always remembering to bring sweets for Sean. She can understand the erratic, malevolent demons; such demons have wrecked her life, just as they are now wrecking this cramped and dingy flat high up on the nineteenth floor of a tower block already due for demolition less than a dozen years after its erection.

  ‘That sounds like Maureen.’ The lock of the front door has clicked. Mrs O’Connor hurriedly pushes the wizened boy to one side and calls out, ‘Is that you, Maureen? The ladies are here.’

  ‘Which ladies?’ There have been so many visitors in the past weeks, some sympathetically credulous and others aggressively sceptical; many of them have been women.

  ‘Miss Crawfurd and Mrs Nagel.’

  Maureen does not care for Sybil, who treats her as though she were one of her pupils; but she likes Bridget, who is soft, hesitant and, above all, generous. Maureen now sidles reluctantly into the room, in white tennis shorts, which reveal her thin, wiry legs, a white aertex blouse, the points of the nipples of her small breasts visible beneath it, and once-white shoes scuffed with an orange dust. Her hair has recently been cropped as short as a boy’s and she has used peroxide to bleach one strand, springing up from her low, slightly bulging forehead, a brilliant, unreal ochre.

  ‘Hello, Maureen dear,’ Bridget greets her. ‘I’m glad you’re using the racket. How’s the tennis going?’

  ‘I beat ’ im,’ Maureen states, in a flat, staccato, nasal Cockney, unlike her mother’s sing-song brogue. She does not specify who her opponent was. ‘And ’ e’s been playing for more’n two years,’ she adds.

  ‘Wonderful!’

  ‘You won’t be wanting your tea yet awhile,’ Mrs O’Connor says.

  Maureen shakes her head, stooping to pick negligently a scab on her shin. ‘I’ve some ’ omework to do.’ She looks boldly at Sybil, ‘Perhaps Miss Crawfurd would like to ’elp me?’ Sybil does not respond. She notices that the girl’s elbows, knees and ankles are grey. What she clearly needs is a bath.

  Maureen goes out, whistling ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ with all the perky shrillness of a boy. When Bridget realizes what it is that she is whistling, a grey film seems suddenly to have appeared between her and the three other people in this damp, dingy flat. It was on the Falklands, only seven weeks ago, that her husband was killed. Surely Maureen, who has been so persistently inquisitive about his death – Was he shot or blown up or burned? Did he die instantly? Where have they buried him? – could not have chosen that tune on purpose.

  Mrs O’Connor says, ‘ I’d expect you’d like a cup of tea.’

  ‘Well, that would be very nice,’ Sybil says briskly. ‘Very nice indeed.’ She would rather have a drink, since she feels tired after wandering around London in this heat, but she will have to wait for that.

  Mrs O’Connor gets to her feet with a sigh. A hand is pressed to the small of her back, where she has had a constant pain for some days. She does not want to go through all the bother of making the tea but she feels that she owes it to these two ladies who have given her both time and money. Sybil rises with her and follows her into the kitchen.

  Alone, Bridget puts her hands to her cheeks. She is a small, pretty woman of forty-eight, her crisp, short-cut hair arranged in small curls around her trianglar face. Her three children, one of whom is married to an American and living in New York, one at an ashram near Delhi and one spending part of the summer holidays with a cousin in France, all mock at her for her belief in ‘ spooks’. But they cannot shake it. She has no doubt that somehow, somewhere – she cannot be specific – she and Roy will be reunited, just as she and her father will be reunited. Love conquers death and love casts out fear.

  This room is so gloomy. The light is oddly opaque as it filters through the thick, grimy net curtains beside her, there is a crack across the ceiling, and everything has about it a sour odour, as though someone a long time ago had vomited in it and no one had bothered to clear up the mess. Yet she feels at peace. What, she wonders, lies behind the net curtains? Is there a balcony or merely a sheer drop? She puts out a hand and, as she does so, an extraordinary thing happens. One of the net curtains, as stiff as a flap of wood on a hinge, rises up, so that all at once the sunlight previously diffused behind it floods into the room. Beautiful! She feels such joy at this unexpected illumination that, for a moment, she does not question the manner in which it has happened. The sun is on her face, on her bare arms, on one of her legs. Then the flap crumbles, disintegrates, subsides into the dirt-engrained fabric of net. She stares at it.

  Mrs O’Connor comes crablike into the room, the plastic tray with the tea things on it held in her hands. First Sean and then Sybil follow her. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, dear. That kettle’s all furred up, it takes an age to boil.’

  Bridget is staring straight ahead, her eyes glazed and a smile on the corners of her lips, her cheeks puckered slightly.

  ‘Are you all right, Bridget?’ Sybil asks. There is something about the withdrawn expression and the rigid posture of her friend which alarms her.

  Bridget gives a little shudder. ‘ Yes, oh, yes.’ She can still feel, though the room is now dim, that sunlight on face, arms, leg. ‘I – I had an odd experience while you were gone.’

  ‘Odd? How?’

  Bridget describes it. Sybil listens to her attentively, but Mrs O’Connor, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, goes on with her pouring out of the dark, stewed tea from the brown teapot which dribbles because of a chip in its spout.

  When Bridget has finished, Sybil says, ‘ How extraordinary,’ and simultaneously Sean, who has been sitting on the sofa, absolutely still, his eyes fixed on B
ridget’s, cries out, ‘I see’d that too. I see’d it!’

  Sybil turns to him, ‘Do you mean that you’ve also seen the curtain rise up like that – stiff, of its own accord?’

  There is something stern and inquisitorial in her voice and it may be this that prevents him from answering her. He jumps off the sofa, with a little squeak, runs to his mother and hugs her about a knee. She runs a hand, affectionate and protective, through his tousled hair.

  ‘I felt so happy,’ Bridget says. ‘For a moment, I felt so happy. And some of that happiness remains.’

  Suddenly, Maureen is there in the room. They have none of them heard her approaching or opening the door. Her far from clean feet, with their talonlike nails, are bare. She is wearing a dressing-gown over pyjamas. She stares at Sybil with a hungry intensity.

  Mrs O’Connor puts a hand to her forehead and then lowers it over her eyes, as though to shut out a glare. ‘Bless me if I’m not starting one of my heads again. Get me a Paracetamol from the kitchen, Maureen, there’s a pet.’

  Maureen goes out as silently as she entered.

  Sybil, adept at organizing other people’s lives for them, says, ‘I do wish you’d let me take you to the Migraine Clinic. I’m sure they could do something there to help you.’

  ‘I’ve tried everything,’ Mrs O’Connor says. ‘Every blessed thing. Nothing seems any good.’

  ‘Diet is very important,’ Sybil tells her. ‘You probably don’t eat the right things. Or eat the wrong ones. At the Migraine Clinic they’d tell you.’