Voices in an Empty Room (21 page)

‘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
dis
like 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.'

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.