Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  One of the pencil drawings will show cars piled up on top of each other with, in the foreground, a single blood-stained boot. Another will show a child lying back, its mouth wide open in a rictus of agony, while its abdomen gapes. Another will show a woman, a mask obscuring her face, who dangles, trussed up like some chicken, her pudgy face blue, from a meathook embedded in a cracked, white ceiling. Another will show a muscular oriental, his head shaved …

  Each drawing will be a miniature, amateurishly slapdash reproduction of those terrible photographs and newspaper cuttings that she had first resolved to burn, so long ago now, in the grate of the sitting room of her Brighton house, and then, having burned a single photograph, had instead hoarded, mysteriously checked, far back in the drawer of her desk.

  She will decide to tell the other two women every detail of Stephen’s past? She will hold out the sheets in trembling hands? She will exclaim with joy and terror, ‘But this is incredible!’ as all three of them stare down at the drawings in her hand?

  She will decide that she cannot speak anything so unspeakable about her own, her only child? She will look away from the sheets, as though they were no concern of hers? She will mumble, artfully concealing her joy and terror, ‘I think I must have brought an umbrella too?’

  The other two women will stare at Lavinia, Sybil with a boldness which might be mistaken for hostility and Bridget from under lowered lids, one of which will twitch as though a tiny worm were wriggling beneath it. They will be bewildered and surprised that Lavinia, usually so graceful and self-possessed, should be standing before them like some gauche, embarrassed teenager, her legs wide apart, her head on one side, one shoulder hunched, and her lower lip drawn in between her teeth. Then that bewilderment and surprise will quicken into a breathlessly uncomfortable expectation. They will each know that Lavinia, for some unaccountable reason, is hesitating whether to divulge something of extreme importance to them. Their attention will tighten and tighten as though an invisible hand were remorselessly turning a screw; but at the moment when it will seem that the screw must either snap off or split the material into which it is being driven, Lavinia will turn away from them.

  ‘Well …’ Her voice will be all but inaudible. ‘ Goodbye, Sybil. Thank you for the tea.’ Her body will swivel slowly, away from her hostess, to face her fellow guest. ‘ Goodbye,’ she will muttter, staring downwards at Bridget’s tiny feet in their impractical court shoes. Clearly, it will not be her intention that the two of them should travel together, or even leave together. She will then jerk away, one elbow high, as though she were pulling herself free of a hand attempting to restrain her. She will walk towards the lift, Sybil and Bridget both watching her in silence, and she will tug at its door, her face screwed up as though at an effort almost too much for her. Without looking round at them, she will enter, clash the door closed, and vanish from their sight. Though not even she now knows this, they will never see her again.

  Sybil and Bridget, facing each other by the open front door, will have nothing to say. But, in the silence which will prolong itself on and on between them, each will no longer surmise but will know, know with total certainty, that Lavinia possesses the key for which they have been searching. It is there. If she wished, she could hand it to them, as easily as she could hand to them the front-door key to her Brighton house, which she keeps in her bag. Each will feel a sudden joy buffeting her, similar to the wind which will suddenly whirl up the stairway as Lavinia opens the door to let herself out into the darkening evening. It will be a joy so violent that each will, for a moment, wonder if it will cause her to lose consciousness. Each will even know the reason for the joy. There has been a cross correspondence which, unlike all the other cross correspondences, defies all rational explanations. Lavinia knows the nature of that cross correspondence, even if she may never reveal it or even confirm the fact of its existence.

  Bridget will gulp, her mouth open, as though in an atmosphere so thin that she is in danger of asphyxiation. Her lips will show a blueish tinge under their lipstick. That tiny worm will wriggle even more frantically as she lowers her lids. Sybil will press a palm to her breastbone, the fingers splayed. It will seem to her as if some huge bird, imprisoned within her, were beating its wings in an effort to get out. ‘Well, Sybil …’ Bridget’s speech will be slurred. ‘ Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘Strange woman.’

  ‘Strange,’ Sybil will repeat, with the dazedness of someone coming round from a deep sleep or an anaesthetic. Then she will give herself a little shake. ‘ Be in touch,’ she will say.

  Bridget will nod.

  Lavinia will walk down the Bayswater Road, towards Marble Arch, and though it will have been her intention to take a taxi to the Barbican and though many taxis will pass her, she will not raise a hand. She will walk on and on, faster and faster, and all the time she will feel joy cascading into her, like rainwater into a cistern previously choked with dry mud. It is true, it is true! But she couldn’t, no, she couldn’t, have revealed to the two tremulously expectant women, much less to the world at large, her own and Stephen’s shame. Never, never for one moment. No.

  Sybil will go into her bedroom, the used tea things, which she usually carries into the kitchen and washes as soon as her guests have left, ignored at this moment of choking, dizzying rapture. She will pick up Hugo’s silver-backed hairbrush, which she has kept, she does not know why, beside her own on her dressing-table ever since his death (‘You won’t mind if I have it, will you, Audrey? It used to be our father’s’). She will draw from the hairbrush a single pale hair – she will not remember ever having seen it there before – and then, dropping it to the floor, she will stand by the open window, feeling the chill of the autumn evening like a caress on her forehead, cheeks and bare arms. She will chuck the hairbrush across on to her bed and, suddenly, like a bride, she will turn to the door she has shut behind her, will raise both her arms and will cry out, in a voice of grief appeased and happiness regained, ‘Oh, Hugo, Hugo, Hugo!’

  Bridget, on an impulse, will turn towards Holland Park instead of making for Kensington High Street underground station. She will enter the park and, though the sky is darkening and the air is growing chill, she will wander, by narrow, erratic paths, deeper and deeper into its tangled heart. She will see a child, with another, smaller child on his handlebars, bicycling in the distance. A jogger will loom up at her, his mouth agape on to the grey, icy air, and then he will vanish. A dog or the ghost of a dog will patter past, in obedience to a far off whistle.

  She will approach a small, secret pond, on which some ducks float so motionlessly that they might all be dead; but they will not be dead, at any moment they could be aroused to clamorous life. They, the water and Bridget will now be equally still. She will grip the iron railing tighter, she will stare into the bushes massed on the other side of the pond and then, suddenly, it will seem to her as if the bushes are alight, the flames whirling around them and up from them and towering higher and higher, even though not a single leaf or twig is consumed and the ducks do not stir. Bridget will whisper out of her contrition and longing, both now appeased, ‘Oh, Roy, Roy, Roy!’

  Eventually Lavinia will walk out of Brighton Station, while the people surge towards her or surge past her, importunate, restless, distracted wave on wave. She will be oppressed by the alternating frenzy and desolation of their unavowed need. She will know that need, since for so many months it has been her own. She will know it so well.

  She will go into her cold, empty house – day after day she will have been waiting for a man to come to repair her central-heating boiler – and she will trudge up the stairs to her bedroom, go to her desk and take out an envelope. She will pluck the fan of pleated paper out of the grate of the sitting-room fireplace and then she will take down a box of matches from the chimneypiece. She will place the stiff photographs and the limp newspaper cuttings in a crisscross pattern on the bars, she will strike a match, she will put the mat
ch to one of the photographs.

  Acrid and grey, the smoke will prick her nostrils.

  Then, when the last scrap of newspaper has been reduced to a palpitating cobweb before it disintegrates, she will suddenly realize the enormity of what she has done. She will press the fingertips of both hands to her mouth, she will rock back and forth, and in agony she will sob out, ‘Oh, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen!’

  Copyright

  First published in 1984 by Hutchinson

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-5846-9 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-5845-2 POD

  Copyright © Francis King, 1984

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