Voices in an Empty Room

by Francis King

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course I have. That’s it, you see, Mummy. It’s coming back.’

  ‘But aren’t you happy with Aunt Lettice and Uncle Frank?’ Lavinia was amazed. They were so patient and kind with the boy, even though he was so unresponsive to Lettice’s love and so unlike the son, extrovert and athletic, whom Frank would have wanted.

  He did not answer, merely twisting his long, delicate fingers over the model train that he had been holding in his lap.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Mummy. Yes. But it’s … coming back.’

  However, when Lavinia had next said, half-expecting him to refuse, ‘Darling, I’ve a week between plays in June, would you like to come to Athens with me?’ he nodded and exclaimed ‘Oh, yes, Mummy!’ as though he had totally forgotten that plea of his. But Lavinia had not forgotten it; she was never to do so.

  From time to time she would agonize to friends of hers – Did they think that she should try to make a home for him? Should she abandon her acting? Was she behaving badly, irresponsibly? – and they would then always give her the reassurance that, however unconsciously, she was seeking from them. It was far better that he should grow up in the country, with a man to act as father to him. No, of course she must not give up her career, that would be criminal – particularly as the money that she earned provided his support. Badly, irresponsibly – why, she’d devoted her whole life, endlessly sacrificed herself, to give him everything any child could possibly want or need.

  When he was nine, Lavinia paid for him to go to a boarding school, even though Lettice and she had repeated acrimonious and even tearful arguments about that. Lettice, fearing that his departure for the boarding school would be the beginning of a departure for ever, reminded Lavinia how much they two had hated boarding school. ‘It’s so old fashioned to inflict that kind of separation on a child. Particularly one so sensitive.’ She went on to speak of the excellence of the local day school, concluding, ‘Why waste money? You work endlessly to give him everything he needs. But this is something he doesn’t need, it’s only something which you want for him. God knows why!’

  There was far more unspoken than spoken in the tussle between the two women, as there had been in that previous tussle over Stephen’s surname.

  The boy mentioned the surname to Lavinia as she drove him over to the school for his first term. ‘What will they call me?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘What do you mean? Christian name or surname? I imagine that nowadays both boys and teachers use Christian names. But when your aunt and I went to school, even we, girls, called each other by our surnames.’

  ‘I meant – am I to be Stephen Trent?’

  ‘Well, of course!’ She laughed uneasily. ‘What else?’

  ‘But it’ll seem odd. Because people will know – since you’re so famous – that I haven’t got a father.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll give the matter a moment’s thought. Would you prefer to have Aunt Lettice’s and Uncle Frank’s name and be Stephen Cobbold?’

  ‘No.’ He did not seem to be sure.

  ‘You could, if you wanted.’

  Her acquiescence caused him a terrible anguish. ‘Oh, no!’ he cried out. ‘No!’ Then he asked a question that he had never before put either to her or to anyone else, ‘Why did my father go away?’

  ‘Well, as I’ve told you, he was from India. And I suppose he wanted to go back there.’

  ‘Don’t you ever hear from him?’

  ‘No.’ The truth.

  ‘Don’t you want to hear from him?’

  ‘No.’ A lie.

  The headmaster, who might himself have still been at school, so young did he look in his neatly pressed grey flannels and blazer with the crest of a minor Oxford college on its breast pocket, looked away self-consciously, as he always did, when tearful mothers said goodbye to their embarrassed children.

  But Lavinia was not tearful as she stooped to kiss Stephen, ‘Goodbye, darling. Be good, be happy.’

  He fulfilled the first of these two prescriptions, causing no one any trouble, as he moved, self-possessed and taciturn, between classroom, playing fields, chapel, study, dormitory. But whether he was happy, no one, least of all Lavinia – who made a point of visiting him on every parents’ day, even though Lettice insisted that, if her sister was too busy, she and Frank could run over – could ever be certain. ‘Rather a boring little boy.’ Other people said it. ‘So withdrawn.’ They said that too.

  ‘Darling, you are happy here?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He spoke it listlessly, on his face an expression of vague irritation.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes, Mummy. Yes.’

  He would spend part of his holidays with her, accompanying her to adult parties at which he would solemnly hand round the canapes or stroke the family cat or dog; reading comics for long hours by himself; and in a small, unused room which she set aside for him in her flat, working at the carpentry for which she had bought him some expensive tools. He made her a rickety bookcase one holiday and a square box, unpainted and unvarnished, for which she could find no possible use, the next.

  On the farm, he never made any attempt to help Frank, however hard-pressed he and his two workers might find themselves; but he would often sit in the kitchen watching Lettice and the au pair girl – a Japanese had now replaced the Dane – going about their tasks. That silent, intense scrutiny would worry both the women. They found that, under it, they tended to drop things, to fail at the simple task of separating the yolk from the white of an egg, and to let pans overboil or burn. ‘Haven’t you anything to do?’ Lettice would ask him, in mounting irritation, and he would reply, ‘Not really.’ Once she said, ‘Isn’t there any school friend whom you’d like to ask to stay?’ and again he replied, ‘Not really.’ He had no close friends at school.

  His reports were lukewarm – he was ‘diligent’, he ‘made progress’, he was ‘ learning to express himself clearly on paper’ – but never unfavourable, except for games (‘could show more enthusiasm’). There was no doubt that he would pass into the famous public school for which Lavinia had long since put him down.

  Then, when he was twelve, Lavinia received a telephone call just as she was about to set off for an important rehearsal at the Old Vic. It was the headmaster and he told her, in a grave voice, totally unlike his usual jolly, hectoring one, that he thought it would be a good idea if she could get over to the school as soon as possible. ‘It’s your son,’ he explained. ‘Something – er – rather unfortunate has happened.’

  ‘You mean he’s ill?’

  ‘No.’ He seemed uncertain. ‘He’s injured himself, injured himself slightly, while playing a silly game. We’ve put him in the sick bay, where he can be under matron’s eye. But, no, he’s not ill. No.’

  ‘But you’d like me to …?’

  ‘Well, yes, it might be a good idea if you came down – someone came down – so that we could talk it all over.’

  When she heard that Stephen was neither ill nor, as she had assumed for a brief, terrible moment, dead, Lavinia felt the sort of relief that is the nearest that many people ever come to joy. She explained that she had a rehearsal, a very important rehearsal, that morning, which she could not possibly miss. She even made a little joke, ‘ You see, Mr Harrison, it’s not only the show, but the rehearsal, that must go on in the theatre.’ She would snatch the first train, just as soon as she could.

  At the end of the rehearsal the director wanted to take her out to luncheon to discuss with her the ‘ attitude’ – otherwise, the insolence – of the up-and-coming young actor playing opposite to her. But she kissed him on the forehead, stooping over the bentwood chair on which he was sitting back to front, and explained that her boy had been taken ill and she must go down to his school to see how he was. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ he said, thinking of his production, not of Stephen, and she answered, ‘Oh, no, darling! Back tomorrow!’

  Saying, ‘I think you’d better see
for yourself,’ the headmaster took her to the sick bay, a bare, rectangular room, painted sunshine yellow, with a washbasin in one corner and a high iron bedstead, a chamber-pot visible beneath it, against its further wall. ‘ Stephen has been rather silly,’ the headmaster said benignly, smiling down at the pale, narrow-shouldered boy who gazed up at them with moistly shiny eyes surrounded by dark rings. Only then did Lavinia realize with a shock that Stephen was wearing a bandage round his neck.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘He was playing a game – a silly game – weren’t you, Stephen?’ The headmaster continued to smile benignly, in a way – though he would have been taken aback to have been told it – which made him look quite as silly as he had accused Stephen of being.

  The head on the pillow nodded. ‘It was only a game, Mummy. But then I couldn’t get myself free.’

  ‘What was he doing?’ Lavinia turned to the headmaster.

  ‘He was playing around with a rope. As he’s just said – as I told you on the phone – it was only a game.’ Playing around with a rope? Trying to hang himself? Then she told herself sternly, It was only a game, they both say it was only a game. But that seemed to make it no better.

  ‘The trouble is they see that kind of thing on the box and then they begin to experiment. Luckily one of the other boys went into the carpentry shed at that moment and managed to cut him down. If he’d been a few seconds later, well … You’d have been a goner, old chap, wouldn’t you?’

  The narrow head on the pillow nodded again.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you both together,’ the headmaster said. ‘I expect you’d like to have a chat. There’ll be tea downstairs when you want it, Mrs – Miss Trent.’ Damn! He always made that slip. ‘I’ll be taking a class but my good wife will look after you. You know the way, don’t you?’

  ‘Thank you. Yes.’

  After the door had closed behind the lean, boyish figure, smelling of pipe smoke, Lavinia dropped to her knees beside the child’s bed, ‘Oh, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen! Why did you do such a thing?’

  She put her arms around him, lifting him up off the pillow and cradling him in her arms; but, though he suffered her, she could feel no response. He repeated, with the same mechanical languour with which he had said the words before, ‘ It was only a game, mother.’

  A game! What a terrible game to play, by oneself, in that shed, smelling of sawdust like an abattoir, that Stephen had once shown to her!

  ‘Promise me never, ever to do such a thing again. Promise, promise, promise.’

  He nodded, his cheek strangely damp and chill against the cheek that she pressed against it.

  ‘Say it. Say ‘‘ I promise’’.’

  ‘I promise.’

  It was then that Lavinia first sensed, as she used sometimes to sense at the dress rehearsal of a play, too late to do anything about it, that something had gone wrong. But what? Again her friends reassured: children got up to these things, the failure was not hers, schools should exercise a closer supervision. The director of the play in which she was about to appear, wishing that she would stop talking about that wretched son of hers and concentrate on what he was trying to tell her about the end of the second act, leant across the restaurant table and put his hand over hers. ‘Poor darling. I don’t know why you’ve never married. It’s what you need. Not someone in the profession, God forbid!’ He himself had been briefly married to a film actress whose fame, growing like some plant in a cranny between two concrete blocks, had gradually prised their egos away from each other. ‘But it would be right for you and right for the boy.’

  Lavinia had had lovers, some of whom had wanted to marry her. Now the thought of that bandage around the pale, stalklike throat made her wonder. Was the director, his eyes brimming with sympathy as he still kept his hand over hers, not perhaps right? The psychiatrist, an elderly, chain-smoking Viennese woman, to whom Stephen had been paying weekly visits at the insistence of the school doctor, certainly seemed to think so. He needed, she said, a stable familial structure. There was a confusion for him between the two women who acted as his mothers. He was strangely devoid of any affection for the man who acted as his father. Yes, yes, his attempt to hang himself might have been a game. (She lifted her shoulders and hands, as though to suggest a doubt.) But games could be dangerous. People could get themselves hurt or even killed playing games.

  There was now no conscious effort on Lavinia’s part to find a father for Stephen, any more than there had been any conscious effort on her part to woo this or that producer, director or critic; but within a few weeks she had done so. As always, like some heat-seeking missile, she was drawn, by that infallible mechanism within her of which she was hardly aware, towards a target blazing, however transiently, with energy and power. This was the dramatist, Keith Bertram, in the most successful of whose plays she had recently been appearing. The play, sexually explicit and politically extreme for its time, with its dangerously close shadowing of two real-life scandals, one in the police and one in politics, seemed as unlikely to have emerged from this lanky, timorous Old Etonian, with his overelaborate good manners and his tendency to blush when anyone addressed him, as strychnine from a milk bottle. Clearly, he was one of those writers for whom a pen in the hand acts as a magic wand, totally transforming them from their everyday selves.

  Lavinia, a perceptive judge, unlike most actresses, both of a play and a part, had at first been dubious about appearing in a work which simultaneously outraged her innate delicacy about sex and the moderation of such political views as she had acquired. But that unerring mechanism within her forced her towards it, however much she might struggle to resist its pull. The woman whom she had to play was the vulgar, avaricious, crude mistress of a senior officer in Scotland Yard. A suburban Lady Macbeth, she eggs him on to one enormity after another until, foreseeing the multiple pile-up of careers and reputations lying just ahead, she abandons him to tell everything to a canny investigative journalist. It was not the kind of character which Lavinia had before attempted but it was probably the finest of her performances in a modern drama and it won her a number of awards.

  As Keith would solicitously draw out her chair for her at a restaurant, before himself sitting down, would hesitantly tell her that this or that emphasis at a rehearsal was ‘not quite on course’, or would take her arm, not, it seemed, so much to protect her as to protect his own tremulous self when, late at night, they walked up the deserted alley which led to her flat, Lavinia would find herself speculating on what hidden pressures and compulsions had driven him to produce a work so violent in its hatred and so self-confident in its depiction of a world of which, when one talked to him, he seemed to have had no experience.

  They drove to the school in Lavinia’s MG – typically, Keith could not drive – and took Stephen out to tea at a nearby hotel. The boy’s staid good manners were almost a parody of the man’s. Now the one passed sandwiches, now the other the cakes. When, overheated by the wood fire before which they were sitting, Lavinia began to take off her jacket, each of them jumped up to assist her. Stephen called Keith sir, until Keith, blushing, told him to call him Keith. Stephen dropped the sir but he never adopted the Christian name, either then or subsequently.

  After tea was over, Lavinia carefully wiped the corners of her mouth with the small, lace-fringed napkin provided by the hotel. She then took a mirror and a lipstick out of her handbag. Stephen watched her closely as she touched up her lips with swift, expert movements. She put away mirror and lipstick and gave him a smile. ‘Darling, I have something to tell you.’

  He nodded. He had guessed.

  ‘I’ve felt for some time that I’d like to have you living with me not just now and then but throughout your holidays. That flat isn’t a real home, somehow. It’s so poky, no garden. I also think you need – well – a father.’ Garden, father: she realized that she seemed to be equating the two things. ‘ So – Keith and I thought we’d get married. Then the three of us would make up a family
like any other family.’

  The boy said nothing. He stared tranquilly at her, his eyes dark and moist in his pale, narrow face and his hands oddly nerveless as they lay, one on top of the other, in his lap.

  ‘How does that seem to you?’ Keith asked, embarrassed and disconcerted by the silence. ‘I’m very fond of your mother and I’m sure I’m going to become very fond of you.’ The heat from the fire seemed to him suddenly to be shrivelling the skin of his forehead and his cheekbones.

  The boy gazed into the flames, his face still expressionless. Then he said, ‘If you marry, what will be my name?’

  ‘Your name? Why, Stephen, of course! What else?’ Lavinia laughed, remembering how two sisters had once perched on a stile beside each other and one had asked the other, ‘What name will he have?’

  ‘I meant – what surname?’

  ‘Well, you can continue to be Stephen Trent. Or – I’m sure Keith wouldn’t mind – you can become Stephen Bertram. I’ll be Mrs Bertram, of course, so that might be the easiest.’

  The boy chewed on his lower lip. Then he stared to her, head tilted to one side, like some dark, sleek bird of prey. ‘I want to be Stephen Trent. Always.’

  Lavinia laughed uneasily and Keith joined in. ‘Well, of course, darling. If that’s the name you want, then no one’s going to take it from you.’

  In the car driving back to London, Keith said, ‘ I don’t think he likes me.’

  ‘Of course he does. Don’t be silly. Or at any rate, he doesn’t dislike you. He just doesn’t know you. When he does, then things will be different.’

  ‘Different? Better?’

  ‘Of course, better. He’s a strange child. Not very demonstrative. But you’ll see.’

  Lettice howled when Lavinia told her. There was no other word for it. She was like a small child, her stance pigeon-toed and her mouth pulled out of shape, the back of a hand pressed to it, as the tears gushed out of her screwed-up eyes. ‘I knew you would do this! I knew you’d do this to us! After all these years!’

  Lavinia tried to put an asm round Lettice’s heaving shoulders but Lettice first pulled away with an angry, inarticulate cry and then actually slapped out at the hand which Lavinia had extended. ‘But Lettice dear, I never made any promise to you that you would have him forever. Did I? You and Frank were wonderful to take him in, give him a home, be, well, parents to him. But he wasn’t a gift, Lettice, not a gift. I couldn’t have made him a gift to you or to anyone.’