He ‘saw’ a man and a woman lying on the grass, himself and Roxane, although when he opened his eyes they were gone. The message he was giving himself was clear and unambiguous. He might have had no destination in his head but he now knew exactly where his feet were taking him and that he did not want to go there, not just yet anyway.
He was weary when he turned back into the mews, anticipating a cold drink and an afternoon nap. The anticipation evaporated instantly when he saw Meghan sitting on his doorstep, texting. She looked up when he stood before her.
“What? Did you think I didn’t know where you lived? You’re not the only one who can creep around after people, you know. You’re just the one who thinks nobody ever sees you. Mum wants to call the police on you, the restraining order and all that, but Gary won’t have it. They argue about you. A lot.”
The bitterness in her voice almost made him take a step backwards, but she scrambled to her feet and enveloped him in an embrace that shocked him even more. For a moment he did not moved, then his arms went around her as though by their own accord and he tried not to remember how long it was since he had held his daughter in his arms, and why.
“What happened to your arm,” she asked, once they released each other.
“Something tried to kill me,” he replied, shrugging off the injury. “Fortunately it didn’t succeed.”
“But it was too close for comfort,” she whispered, taking hold of him again. “I saw you on the television, outside The Russia House, with her…”
“You recognised her?” That was a shock. Meghan nodded.
“You had better come in,” he said.
“Spartan, very Spartan,” was her judgement when she looked around his sparsely furnished home.
“I have everything I need,” he defended himself.
“Everything you want, you mean,” she laughed. “It’s not the same as everything you need.”
He felt as though he had just been kicked in the solar plexus. It was all he could do not to sit down on the floor in shock. Where had his sixteen-year-old daughter acquired knowledge like that, and the bravery to speak it out loud to her father? “What do you want?” he said, eventually.
She sat down and looked at her feet, then looked up at him and licked her lips. “I wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?” he managed to ask eventually.
“I’m not my mother,” she said, reaching out and taking hold of his uninjured hand. “I don’t think you’re a monster. After what I saw at that club…”
“Saw? What did you see?” Panic rose up in his throat, in case she had seen any of the massacre. It would be time enough for her to have to deal with that horror when she took his place, if Roxane was correct and she was his successor. He would never forgive himself if she was dragged into adulthood a second before it was inescapable because of his negligence.
“I didn’t see anything. I did what your lady friend said, your employer, what’s her name, Roxane? I got out of that club, gave Onslow the brush off…”
“Onslow? Was that his name?”
She nodded. “Onslow Pierce, yeah. What sort of name is that for anyone cool? I told him to fuck off back wherever it was he came from and then I stood in a shop doorway on the other side of the street, waiting for you to come out.”
“I didn’t see you there.”
“I don’t have to be seen unless I want to be seen, you know. When you’ve got a mother like me, you get used to sliding between the shadows. You and Roxane were the only ones who came out of the club. I waited ‘til you were gone, and the doorman came out like his arse was on fire, yelling into his mobile like it was the end of the world. I put two and two together and went home before the police arrived.” She smiled up at him as though expecting to be patted on the head and called a clever girl. When that didn’t happen she shook her head and looked away. “Did you kill them all?”
“Not personally,” he said. “It was a team effort.”
“But I thought she was a vampire too!”
“Maybe she’s particular about the company she keeps.” He did not have to close his eyes to see her moving through the vampires, an angel of death haloed by scintillating blood and flying gold.
“She likes you.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “She employed me to do one job for her. That’s done. I won’t see her again.”
Meghan squeezed his hand strongly enough for it to hurt. “You don’t believe that. You must have seen the way she looks at you.”
“How can I tell the way she looks at me? She’s always wearing those mirrored glasses of hers.” He was surprised to find his annoyance at that was genuine.
“She’s interested in you, dad. Take it from me. You should take her up on it. You shouldn’t be alone if you don’t need to be.”
He laughed, getting to his feet and walking to the kitchen window. “The day I need to take romantic advice from my sixteen year-old daughter who has had how many boyfriends?”
“More than you’ve had girlfriends and wives, daddy dear.”
How he kept his temper from exploding in a torrent of abusive words he did not know. However insolent she might be, putting her in her place would not be worth risking the effort she had made to contact him. He didn’t imagine Marion would be quite so forbearing if she ever heard, which she wouldn’t. Not from him anyway.
“As long as you haven’t slept with any of them.”
She blew him a long, wet raspberry. “Boyfriends, daddy dear, I said boyfriends. When I get interested in a man I’ll let you know.”
He didn’t know whether it disturbed him more that she might not be joking than it would do if she was. She got up quickly and hugged him again, squeezing him tight enough to hurt his injured arm. He tried not to let her know.
“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be a hero and happy, you know.”
He opened his mouth to remind her of the long list of heroes through history whose heroism had kept them from happiness, but instead contended himself by asking “How is your brother?”
She laughed. “He’s a little prick, like every boy of his age. Mum spoils him and Gary doesn’t know what to do with him, but he’ll turn out okay, don’t you worry.”
Being cut off from his children, having nothing to do with their raising, was at one and the same time the greatest curse of his life as the hunter, and a blessing. He had never wanted to be a father, never had the slightest confidence in his ability to be a father rather than just the source of the genetic material that led to their creation. However they turned out, it wouldn’t be his fault, his responsibility and there was nothing he could do about that.
“Does your mother know you’re here?”
“Fuck no, she’d have a fit…”
He slapped her without thinking, just a light tap on her left cheek - but she stepped backwards, crashing into the chair - with eyes wide open and chin on her chest, hand rising up to brush her unmarked cheek.
“Mind your language. It isn’t big. It isn’t clever. All language is there for a reason. There are times when only an obscenity will express what you feel. If you treat it casually, f this and c that all the time, when the time comes you’ll have nothing left to express your feelings. All you’ll have then is violence.” He shook his head. Why was he lecturing her? Because he was her father, that was why. Perhaps he wasn’t much of a one, but all the same…
She darted to him, embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks. “Don’t run away from happiness, daddy dear. It might not be for ever, but if it’s there grab hold of it.”
She was out of the door and gone before he could say that was his line to speak to her. The front door slammed shut leaving him wondering what had just happened.
Chapter Twenty Four
“You took your time,” Roxane said when she opened the door.
“I was busy,” he lied. He could not recall a time in his life when had been more carefree, less driven to get his nose back on that grindstone, even those few
times he and Marion had actually gone away on holiday together before the children came along. “Busy doing nothing, working the whole day through,” Call found himself singing, “trying to find lots of things not to do…”
His voice trailed away to silence as he realised that really had been the way of it, and now he stood there, uncertain what to say or do, yearning to take the vampire in his arms and nuzzle into her neck, whispering sweet nothings and not even thinking of baring his teeth.
If he had not been frightened before, he was now.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what made me do that.”
She shook her head. “You should sing more often. You have such a pleasant singing voice.”
Call knew she was lying. He remembered his mother telling him he should never sing in public, or even in the bath.
“You did get my message?”
He didn’t bother to respond to that, the answer was so obvious. He was there, wasn’t he? They stood looking at each other for a while, uncertain, until she stepped aside for him to enter. Immediately he was struck by a profound difference in the atmosphere inside the house. It was far less gloomy. The foyer was filled with light coming in from windows high above in the roof he had not even noticed were there on his previous visit.
“You’ve had the decorators in…” He looked around himself.
She shrugged. “I was bored. A change is as good as a rest.”
The walls were all a dazzling white. There were sconces filled with illuminated opaque white glass globes, the heavily varnished to the point of being almost indistinguishable one from another ‘family portraits’ that had lined the staircase were gone.
She walked to the bronze statue of the cat at the foot of the staircase, trailing her right forefinger over the upraised foot for luck and walked towards the rear of the house. He followed her through into what proved to be a garden room, the open French windows leading through into what was, in effect, a foetid tropical jungle beneath the glass, the atmosphere so humid he felt he should grow gills. The instant he entered sweat began to trickle down his spine. Roxane looked perfectly at ease.
“You will have noticed the number of carnivorous plants I have growing in here,” she said, idly. He had noticed no such thing. He could tell a rose from a dandelion but not much more, which had been one of the many features about him Marion could not comprehend. According to her, most people were fascinated by horticulture, understood plants, and were interested in gardens to the exclusion of almost everything else. She entertained many notions about ‘most people’ Call regarded as unrealistic, improbable at best, but by the time he realised that it was much too late. He had buried their relationship too deep for any exhumation.
“There are times when I believe they are the nearest things I have to family,” she said. There was a dreamy quality to her voice as she trailed the nail of her little finger along the spines on the open scarlet maw of a Venus Fly Trap, which snapped slowly shut once she whisked her finger away.
Given what had happened to her real family the last time they had been together he said nothing to this. Carnivorous plants were creepy enough as it was.
“Where did you go?” he asked. “One minute you’re climbing into an ambulance with me, the next thing I know it is the following day and I am alone in hospital.”
For a while she did not answer, prowling her hot house, checking her pet plants, straightening here, snipping there, and using her finger nails as secateurs. “Hospitals disturb me,” she said, eventually. “In a hospital I never know what I’m expected to say. If I say anything at all it is inevitably wrong, and draws attention to me. I do not like drawing attention to myself. Someone might see through my glamour. So, I left as soon as the ambulance arrived at the hospital. They took you inside in one direction, I turned and walked away in the other. I doubt anyone noticed my absence.”
“I did.” He said quietly, not expecting she would hear him. Nevertheless, she jerked upright, as though she had just been touched with a cattle prod. “I missed you all the time,” he found himself confessing to the back of her head, the words pouring out of his mouth without having first been approved by his conscious mind, his brain. “I missed you right up to the moment you opened the door,” his automatic pilot continued. He was astonished, almost stupefied by the truth of this, and very afraid.
“I’ve been dreaming about you,” he said, apropos of nothing at all. She turned on him.
“Pleasant dreams, I hope.”
“You don’t know?”
She snorted. “I have certain powers of glamour and persuasion, Robert, but I cannot affect the dreams of someone sleeping miles away from me.”
“Oh.” He did not enjoy being made to feel like a fool.
“Tell me about these dreams.”
“I would if I could… but I can’t. I can never remember my dreams.” Was that a flicker of emotion he saw on her face, annoyance, disappointment? “Then I’ve been thinking about what your brother said.” This was an outright lie. He had tried very hard not to recall Cyrano’s last words. He saw no reaction from her, and made a spontaneous decision. “Look, let’s pretend the last few days have not happened. Let’s pretend I am not a vampire killer and you are not the oldest, most powerful vampire I have ever met. Let’s pretend I’m a halfway passable man and you are a beautiful woman with no… how should I put this? Encumbrances.”
Her expression did not change. “Suppose we do pretend. What then?”
He took a deep breath and held it for so long that when the words came they poured out of him in an almost incoherent stream. “I ask you if you would like to go out with me, have a drink together, a meal, go to the theatre, see a band…”
“Enough already,” she laughed. It sounded like a peal of bells. The foliage in the glasshouse swayed sideways and the windows shook in their frames. “Mr Call, are you asking me out on a date?”
He shrugged. Why had he started to shrug all the time? “Sounds like I am, doesn’t it.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Chapter Twenty Five
That evening they went to the Royal Opera House and saw ‘Sleeping Beauty’ with tickets Call bought from a tout standing ten yards from the steps up to the entrance.
“I thought this was illegal,” he said to the burly, shaven headed man in the doorman’s uniform of dark trousers, satin finish black blouson jacket, tight white shirt with a black dickie bow all topped off with sunglasses even more darkly impenetrable than Roxane’s.
“It is,” the man growled, “but I won’t call the coppers if you don’t.”
Call laughed and handed over an additional fifty-pound note. “For services rendered,” he said. The man just looked at him and said nothing.
He had never seen classical ballet in the flesh before and had no criteria by which he could judge what he saw, only that the dancers were all lithe, athletic and graceful, the lead dancers being more of all of those qualities as well as being beautiful and Russian. Roxane, on the other hand, sat there entranced by what she saw, wearing a beatific smile and applauding enthusiastically when the opportunity arose. He followed her lead.
“They’re not as good as Fonteyn and Nureyev,” she said, “but then who could be… unless their name was Nijinsky?” He was familiar with the names, but that was all. Unqualified to comment, he said nothing.
After that they went for a meal in an expensive restaurant on Bow Street where the food was overpriced, the wine even more so and the passing parade of people endlessly fascinating.
“You know, this is the first time in as long as I can remember I’ve people watched and not been on the lookout for vampires.”
She took a sip of wine and inclined her head, looking at him sideways. “Why not?”
He laughed and realised that he felt completely relaxed, at ease with himself and the world. “They’ll keep. Besides, I am in no danger from any of them, am I? I’m with you. Is there any vampire anywhere who would dare to go against you?”
It was only when they were undressing each other in her bedroom they discovered he had gone out without his blades. By then, though, neither cared. The universe was reduced down to the two of them. Nothing else existed. He had always considered himself a functional rather than an inspired lover but she responded to his every touch in ways more enthusiastic, more passionate, more wanton, more demanding than any of his other lovers, exalting him to go further, to do more, to give what he had not realised he had to give. When they fell apart from each other and he lay there, spent and exhausted. Feeling as though his heart must burst out through his ribs in the next moment, he decided that he could, quite happily, die there and then.
When he was woken by her touch and creamy sunlight reaching into the room through a gap between the curtains he was very glad he was not, in fact, dead. If he had known the aftermath of love making was to feel as he did he would have gone out of his way to make love more often.
“He was right,” she whispered into his ear as they eventually fell towards sleep again. “Cyrano was right.”
The next days passed in a haze of their doing the things lovers did who had no calls on their time and one of the world’s great repositories of culture at their disposal.
Galleries large and small, theatres, concert halls, cinemas, libraries, walking through the warm summer oblivious to everything but each other. One evening, sheltering beneath a huge, ancient plane tree, Call remarked that he felt like a teenager, and Roxane laughed. “Yes, isn’t it great? I was much too old to be a teenager when I actually was that age.”
The Seeker Page 16
