Voices in an Empty Room (24 page)

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, falling 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.

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.

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?'