Voices in an Empty Room Read online

  ‘Oh, you don’t want me along. I might go and stay with Aunt Lettice and Uncle Frank.’ She wondered if he had said that in order to hurt her. He never said it again, he never went to them. She left him some money and sent him more from abroad. She wrote him long, newsy letters, full of the people she had met, the places she had visited, and the fortune she was making. He rarely answered and, when he did, the stilted phrases, written in a wholly impersonal calligraphy, with a broad-nibbed pen, told her nothing, absolutely nothing.

  ‘It’s lovely to be together after all those months.’ She had opened a bottle of champagne and had bought smoked salmon, his favourite food. She had also roasted a pheasant.

  ‘Is it?’ He looked shabbier, thinner, older than when she had left him. She leant forward to put a hand over his, clutching the long, thin fingers between hers. But he extricated them, gently but decisively.

  ‘For me it is, yes. Isn’t it for you?’ She had thrown down a challenge.

  ‘Oh, don’t give me all that crap, Mother! You get no pleasure out of being with me, you never have. And I no longer get any pleasure out of being with you.’

  ‘How can you say that!’

  ‘True.’

  Suddenly, for the first time in years, she gave vent to the fury within her. ‘ Don’t speak like that to me! You don’t know the things I’ve done for you. Ever since you were a baby. Worked. Plotted. Denied myself. Never had a holiday, never for years and years, except when there was no work for me. Took terrible parts, toured, lived in digs. Put up with anything, everything. Slept with men who disgusted me for the sake of a job. And all for you, for you! So that I could pay Lettice and Frank and send you to the best of prep schools and the best of public schools and now keep you, year after year, in idleness, while I go on killing myself.’

  He looked at her. He began to laugh. ‘You really do have the most amazing powers of self-deception. You did none of those things for me, I was merely the pretext for doing them. You did them for yourself, of course you did.’ She was about to interrupt him. ‘The nobility of your sacrifices is just a load of crap. Even poor old Keith would not have used it in one of his shitty plays. But it served its purpose. If you were so demanding and ruthless and selfish, well, people told each other, ‘‘ You can hardly blame her, she’s got that bastard son of hers to support’’.’

  This revelation of his view of her was shattering. It was as though he had picked up the hammer, lying out on the tool bench of the bare, orderly room in which he worked at his carpentry and with a single blow had struck at the clear glass through which she had always looked out on her world. The glass became an opaque cobweb; when she peered through it, everything appeared horribly distorted. Or was it – the doubt gripped her like an abdominal spasm – that the glass through which she had been so serenely gazing had never in fact been clear and that the blow of the hammer, demolishing it, had at last enabled her to see things as they really were?

  ‘I don’t think we’ve anything more to say to each other.’ She did not know whether she meant on that particular day or for the whole future ahead of them.

  ‘You’ve never had anything to say to me.’

  She left him in the kitchen, shutting the door quietly behind her, and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. There she sat motionless for a long time in an armchair by the window, the light off and the blinds open on to the street. She found herself panting as though that ascent to get away from him and his abominable lies – they were lies, they were, they were! – had been one not of some dozen stairs but of miles.

  Suddenly, she did not know why, she thought of Keith; and the remorse that Stephen had clearly wanted her to feel for her behaviour towards him, she now felt for the sad, frustrated, choleric man who had, so briefly and so disastrously, been her husband. There had been something pathetically clumsy and childish about Keith’s love-making. He might have been another son, another Stephen, seeking comfort and consolation in her arms before procuring his jerking, panting onanistic pleasure. Eventually, she had shown him, beyond all doubt, how little satisfaction he was able to give her; and that contemptuous dissatisfaction of hers had merely paralleled, in all its cruelty, the contemptuous dissatisfaction of the critics who had shrugged him off. He had written to her recently to tell her of his desire for a divorce. He did not mention, though she had heard it from others, that he wished to marry one of his former students.

  Poor Keith! Poor Stephen! As she stared down into the deserted street, she thought, Yes, I’ve behaved badly to them both. I’ve always been generous, yes, but I’ve always given them what I wanted to give them, not what they wanted from me. She wondered whether to go down to the basement and say to the boy, ‘Forgive me, you’re right, let me try to do better.’ She even got as far as the hall with that intention in mind. But then she heard the rasp of his saw, back and forth, back and forth. She could see him, sullenly aggressive, bending over some length of pine and driving the saw with repeated thrusts and tugs of his narrow, sinewy arms. He no more liked her to interrupt him when he was at work at his carpentry than Keith had done when he was at work at a play. Another time. Better another time.

  But she was always so busy and Stephen was always so elusive. There were snatched breakfasts, before a television, rehearsal, or late suppers, after a performance, when she might have spoken; but at the breakfasts she was too distracted, at the suppers too exhausted. They would sit facing each other and barely a word would pass between them.

  ‘Some more toast, darling?’

  A shake of the head; a crackle as he turned a page of the Guardian; a brief laugh.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, another silly misprint.’ He did not tell her what it was.

  Or, ‘How did the show go tonight?’ He had never bothered to go along to see it, though she had repeatedly offered him tickets.

  ‘We’re all getting rather tired, I think. And in those circumstances, one overcompensates by artificial high spirits and energy. I’ll be glad when the run ends.’

  No answer. It was like a tennis match in which one’s opponent has not grasped that it is not enough to stop the ball, one must also return it.

  Lavinia noticed that, from time to time, Stephen would now return to the flat in the company of a stocky woman, with a round, shiny face, clearly much older than himself. Sometimes the woman would visit the basement on her own, letting herself in with a key. One could imagine such a woman dealing effectively with rowdy youths on the bus on which she was conductor or acting as a cool, stern wardress in a prison. From her sitting-room window, Lavinia would look down on her head as she descended or ascended the basement stairs, always at the run. The hair was thin at the centre parting, she had a way of hunching her shoulders, almost as though she had a curvature of the spine.

  ‘Who is that friend of yours?’ Lavinia dared to ask one day.

  ‘What friend? I have no friends.’ For a moment, Lavinia thought that perhaps the woman came to clean; Stephen had always refused to have her own Mrs Lambert clean for him, preferring to do it himself.

  ‘Of course you have friends! I saw you with a group of them at the Temple Bar only the other night.’

  ‘Those were acquaintances, Mother. I expect the woman you mean is Lydia. She’s also an acquaintance.’

  ‘What does Lydia do?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ He hit his breakfast egg sideways with his spoon, neatly decapitating it, ‘ I’ve never asked her.’

  Perhaps this was the truth, perhaps he hadn’t. All his life, he had been strangely incurious.

  When the play in which she had been appearing at last ended its run, there were two weeks in which she had nothing to do, before beginning a film; and it was then that she became both depressed and obsessed by the distance between them. She would ring down – ‘Are you ready for breakfast, darling?’ – or she would descend into the area, having returned from a party, ring the bell and say, when he opened to her, ‘I’m just back. I’ll have some supper prepared in about h
alf an hour.’ He would eat the meals. Sometimes, he would have helped her with the laying of the table; always he would join her in stacking the dishes in the dishwasher. But there was no communication between them; they might have been two strangers obliged to share a table in a boarding house or on a ship and trying to make the best of it, with ‘Shall I cut you another piece of bread?’ or ‘This Blue Cheshire is really rather good.’

  One day, as he was about to leave the kitchen, she said, suddenly angry, ‘How deadly you’ve become.’

  He looked back at her, his hand, the nails discoloured from the varnish that he had been applying to a table recently made, curled around the doorknob. He smiled. ‘I thought I was always deadly. ‘‘A rather boring little boy’’.’ So he, too, like herself, had overheard that friend of hers, so many years ago.

  ‘You must talk to me sometimes.’

  ‘Don’t I talk? Then what are the noises that the two of us make twice or three times a day at each other?’

  ‘Just noises. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly. He went.

  A few days later, it was his birthday. She wrote him out a cheque for fifty pounds and then tore that up and wrote him out another for a hundred. She placed the cheque in the birthday card that she had spent a long time choosing at a shop on the corner of the street. Would he like a jokey one? But each joke – whether about sex, work, looks, money, age – seemed to contain some innuendo to which he might take exception. In the end she opted for Manet’s Au Bar des Folies Bergères. Safe, if hackneyed, she thought, until, on the walk home, she began to wonder morbidly whether he might not decide that she was making some subtle, malicious allusion to his visitor. She might, indeed, be a barmaid if she were not a bus conductor or a prison wardress.

  As Lavinia went out of her front door, the envelope containing cheque and card held in a hand, she suddenly thought of the cashmere scarf, presented to her as a farewell gift by the actor, notorious for his stinginess, who had been playing opposite to her in the play just ended. Of a beautiful quality, it carried a Sulka label; but it was so clearly intended for a man, not a woman, that another member of the cast had at once suggested that ‘the mean old brute’ had no doubt himself received it as a gift from one of his boyfriends and had then decided to pass it on, brown not being a colour to go with the black overcoat with a mink collar which, in the manner of an actor-manager of the past, he always wore when in London in the winter. She went back into the house, fetched the scarf and the wrapping paper in which the actor had presented it to her, and made a neat parcel.

  Stephen looked feverish when he opened his door to her. There were red spots on each of his high, usually sallow cheekbones and his eyes glittered. His lips, she noticed, were dry and cracked.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked involuntarily.

  ‘Fine. Why?’

  Earlier that morning, when she had telephoned down to tell him that breakfast would be ready in a quarter of an hour, he had replied, ‘Oh, I’ve made myself a cup of Nescafé down here already. I don’t feel like eating anything.’

  She refrained from telling him that he looked ill, since his answer to that would always be a fretful, ‘You make people ill by telling them that they look it.’ Instead, ‘You didn’t come up to breakfast.’

  ‘I felt I couldn’t face breakfast. And, frankly, I felt I couldn’t face you.’

  She did not reply to that. ‘Anyway, many happy returns.’

  ‘Oh, God! Is it my birthday? That explains the letter from Aunt Lettice. I put it on one side, unopened. It must be a card from her and Uncle Frank.’

  ‘Am I allowed to come in? I have a card for you and a present. Or, rather, two presents.’

  ‘Two presents! How generous!’

  He stood aside, with a small, ironic bow, and she went into the front room, with the dusty work bench, its cheap transistor radio on the sill of a window which badly needed cleaning, and its sawdust thick on its linoleum-covered floor. There was a mug of half-drunk coffee, a white film, speckled with sawdust, on its surface, resting, at an angle, against a pile of motoring magazines on an unvarnished table made by himself. Since he had no car and did not even drive, she was always puzzled as to why such magazines should interest him.

  She held out the envelope and the package.

  He took them from her and placed both beside the mug, on top of the unopened envelope addressed to him in Lettice’s large, childishly unformed handwriting.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open them?’

  ‘Would it give you pleasure, if I did?’

  ‘I think it would be courteous.’

  He laughed. ‘All right.’ He inserted a forefinger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open untidily, drew out the card and the cheque within it, and dropped the envelope to the floor. He looked for a long time at the Manet, as though he had never before seen it either in reproduction or at the National Gallery. ‘Nice.’

  ‘There’s a cheque there.’

  He examined it. ‘Even nicer.’

  She felt a choking fury rising up within her as she waited for a word of thanks.

  ‘You’d better open the package too. I hope you’ll like what’s in it.’

  He put down card and cheque on the table and then took the package from under his arm. He unwrapped it, shook out the scarf; dangled it back and forth, his thin arm extended, so that its end swept the floor, gathering sawdust on its silky fabric. Both of them stared down at the scarf, as though it were a snake, at once beautiful and terrible, wavering between them, before it lashed out and struck. He looked up at her and there was now a cruel mockery in those black eyes glittering with what seemed to be a fever. ‘Must have cost you a bomb.’

  Had he guessed that the scarf had been a present to her? She could not remember ever having shown it or even mentioning it to him. She shrugged.

  He leant forward and threw the scarf round her neck, drawing its ends tight, so that she felt a soft but insistent constriction round the throat. ‘I think it really suits you better than it’ll ever suit me.’

  She put both hands to the scarf to ease its pressure. ‘Nonsense. It’ll go with your overcoat.’ She felt suddenly wary, even frightened. Though he spoke so gently and smiled so constantly, beneath all that a concealed menace hissed.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Don’t!’ With a violent gesture of both hands, she pulled the ends of the scarf from her throat.

  He laughed, walked a pace away from her, the glittering eyes on her whitening face, and then chucked the scarf across the work bench. ‘ Thank you kindly, mother dear.’ He went back to the table and picked up the cheque and examined it with the same long, intense scrutiny with which he had examined the hackneyed birthday card. Suddenly, he ripped the cheque across, ripped and ripped again, to scatter the fragments over her head as though they were confetti. She cringed as she felt them in her hair. They might have been steeped in some corrosive.

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ She was even more frightened than when the scarf had been round her throat; but her tone was calm, amused.

  ‘I don’t want your money, mother dear. I want nothing from you. Nothing at all. Today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I’m going to move out.’

  ‘What!’

  He nodded, taking in the effect of this statement on her, as a terrorist, mouth parched and heart lurching painfully, might take in the effect of the bomb that he has just lobbed into a crowd.

  ‘But why?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘And where will you go?’

  ‘No idea. Yet.’ He turned away from her, again picked up the card, again scrudnized it. ‘ Pretty. Pretty picture.’

  ‘Well … If that’s what you want …’

  ‘I think you want it too.’

  She was thinking of the departure of his father; that had been even more abrupt and even more cruel. How like Gaur he looked, with strands of the same black hair, as coarse and shiny as the mane of a horse, falli
ng across the same wide, sallow forehead, the same beautiful, slightly depraved face, with heavy shadows beneath the cheekbones, and the same delicate, tensile physique.

  ‘Of course I don’t want it.’

  He stared at her. Liar.

  ‘Well, I’ll go on paying you your allowance.’

  ‘No, I don’t want that.’

  ‘I must.’

  Still he stared.

  She walked slowly out of the room and towards the front door. ‘You may change your mind. Anyway – I’ll see you before you leave.’ She was speaking to no one. He had not followed her. ‘I’ll see you before you leave,’ she repeated, raising her voice. No answer.

  She went up the crumbling steps, gripping the rail, as though she were hauling herself, hand over hand, up a cliff face. At the top, she felt breathless and giddy. She fumbled for her key in the pocket of her jacket, had difficulty in inserting it. The telephone was ringing.

  She all but left it. Then she crossed over to the sitting room from the hall and raised the receiver. It was her agent, in a state of excitement. She had been nominated as Best Supporting Actress for the forthcoming Academy Awards.

  ‘How nice,’ was all she could find to say.

  ‘Nice! It’s terrific!’

  ‘Yes, it’s terrific.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  When she eventually put down the receiver on the excitedly gabbling voice, she could hear the rasp, back and forth, back and forth, of the saw in the room below.

  Lavinia rang down that evening to ask Stephen if he wanted any supper and again the next morning to tell him that she was about to get the breakfast. She could hear his telephone ringing on and on, both in the receiver held to her ear and beneath her in a room which, she told herself with mounting desolation and anger, could only be empty. But when could he have left? She had heard nothing. Was it possible that, like some tenant unable to pay arrears of rent long overdue, he had furtively slipped out of the house in the early hours? She sat on and on in the sitting room, her hands in her lap and her feet resting on a footstool before her, and listened, for some sound from below: footsteps, a door, a cough, that saw. Eventually she telephoned yet again. Silence. She was meant to meet a friend, another actress, for lunch at the Connaught. She did not go, she did not get in touch with her. When the telephone rang at twenty minutes past one and again at half-past one, she did not answer. The friend would be anxious: it was so unlike Lavinia to be late, even more unlike her to forget.