Lauren wanted to go to parties, spend evenings dancing, dressing up, drinking and squealing with her friends. A couple of times he’d gone with her, but he’d felt awkward, didn’t want to drink with those people just because they were the same age as him. They seemed barely out of childhood. He watched Lauren laughing, bright and brittle in the middle of a crowd, and felt like he didn’t know her.
The last time he’d crept away, gone up to the cave where he’d found his dad half way down a bottle of whisky. They shared the rest of it and watched the sun come up. His dad said, ‘You can’t be everything in her life.’ Peter, knocking back another whisky, felt his eyes prick with tears.
That was back in the spring. Now his dad was in Greece with the woman he loved. Peter rolled over to face the back wall of the cave so he could see nothing but blackness. Then he closed his eyes.
25. Ali
When I was little, Gran sometimes used to tell me stories about a friend of hers called Meg. She said she was different from other people. She’d been alive for two hundred years and she would never die. She had been all over the world and seen all sorts of things. She was alive at the same time as Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole and all those other people you learn about at school. She was alive before the lightbulb was invented and when the first man landed on the moon. Though Gran was alive for that as well.
I asked my mum if she knew Meg, and Mum said Gran was making it up. Nobody lived that long, could you imagine how old and decrepit she would be?
But Gran said Meg never got any older. She stayed the same and she always would.
After a while I kind of came round to Mum’s way of thinking. I didn’t mind. I liked Gran’s stories, and I thought she’d made Meg up for me, to make me interested in history and as something to share. So I always went along with her and pretended she really existed.
Then one day I walked into Gran’s house and there was this woman standing in the kitchen leaning against the worktop. She was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. She had blonde hair and she was smiling. She wasn’t like anyone else and I knew straight away that she must be Meg. I couldn’t stop staring at her.
Gran walked in from the other room and said, ‘Oh, Ali, there you are.’ But I didn’t look at her and I didn’t speak. It was like sipping at a drink of nectar, something perfect and sweet.
Meg laughed. ‘I think she takes after you, Frances,’ she said.
I could see Gran, from the corner of my eye, looking from one of us to the other.
‘Ali,’ she said quite sharply. Meg was wearing a cream coloured dress which had no sleeves and ended just above her knees. Her arms and legs were golden brown. Her eyes were clear and looking at them was like looking at a lake on a hot day. ‘Ali!’
Reluctantly I pulled my gaze away and turned to my Gran.
‘Ali, this is my friend, Meg. Meg, my granddaughter, Ali. Now Ali, how about you put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea?’
Meg was there for a week that time and I spent as much time as I could at Gran’s house. I tried not to stare at her all the time. I did things for her instead. I made her drinks, which she mostly left, and brought her cushions and a stool for her feet, and sat near her waiting in case there was anything else she needed. She was very gracious and never acted as though she was irritated by me. When she was chatting with my Gran I watched her, looking at the curve of her cheek and the lines of her collar bone, but mostly at her eyes which sometimes looked grey or blue, and once even black.
They talked about the past and about people they both knew in Paris. I didn’t know Gran had been to Paris, but apparently she had lived there for two years when she was younger and that’s where she’d met Meg.
When she’d gone, I said to Gran, ‘Meg is the loveliest person in the world.’
And Gran said ‘She’s the loveliest person in the world for me. She always will be. But there are others like her. Maybe you’ll meet them one day.’
Now Meg was standing in front of me holding out her arms. I ran to her and threw myself into them.
Behind me I heard Richard saying ‘You two know each other?’
Meg disentangled my limbs from her body. ‘Do you remember Frances?’ she said to him.
‘Of course.’
‘Well, Ali is her granddaughter.’
How could Richard have known my gran? He would have been a child like me when she died.
I realised I’d only ever seen him in the dark before and he stood out more than everyone else then. Now he had taken off his sunglasses and he was looking at me. The room was full of his light.
‘You too!’ I said.
‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ said Lauren, and we all turned to her. For the first time I noticed the mark on her neck which had nearly healed, and I realised how pretty she was and then I could hear the blood pumping in her veins, faster than mine, faster than the beat of the jazz coming from the front room. I knew the others could hear it too.
‘Mum, this is Lauren who I met at the library. I thought we’d grab some beers.’
‘Lovely to meet you, Lauren. Make yourselves at home.’
I didn’t want this. Watching these two like spiders and the girl, Lauren, a fly in their trap. Such beautiful spiders too – if I wasn’t careful I might find myself ensnared. I’m not sure I’m as strong as Gran was.
‘I might get off, actually,’ I said.
‘Oh, Ali, but you’ve only just arrived.’
‘Please stay.’
I looked at Richard. Everything had changed now I knew what he was. I thought of that day in Gran’s kitchen when I first saw Meg and I knew this moment was going to be etched into my memory with the same intensity.
‘We need to talk to you,’ Lauren said.
I wondered if I should warn her. She was looking at Richard excitedly and she nudged him with her elbow.
‘Don’t let her go, Richard.’
That was another reason. They might not have told Smith and Jeannie anything, but the less they knew about me the better.
‘Another time,’ I said. I walked out before anyone else could say anything.
As I walked across the yard the door was flung open.
‘Ali!’ It was Richard’s voice, but I didn’t turn. I pictured my gran in Paris, sitting on the train at the Gare du Nord waiting for the whistle to blow, for the train to move and carry her back to England. She’s looking straight ahead, refusing to look out onto the platform where Meg is pleading with her to stay. If she looks she will crumple and give in, become what Meg wants her to.
‘It wasn’t that though, Ali, becoming the same as her. That’s in my blood anyway. If we could have been together, the two of us, for eternity, I would have leapt at the chance. But Meg wasn’t offering monogamy, she wanted me to be a part of her crowd. She has a lot of love to give and a great hunger with it. I wasn’t enough to satisfy it on my own.’
‘Ali, where can I find you?’
I knew he could see me. The light from the door continued to shine out, but I carried on walking and didn’t turn. For a moment I thought he was going to run after me. But he had a fly waiting in his trap that needed attending to, and when I reached the bend in the lane I disappeared from his view.
Back at the cottage I waited impatiently for daylight. I looked on the shelf and found a pack of out-of-date cherry Bakewells. I opened them and ate one after another. They were too sweet and too dry and left a bitter taste in my mouth, but it was something to do. I tried to doze but when I closed my eyes I found myself replaying the scene at Hough Dean. I wanted to make it different, make it Lauren that had left, back safe to her boyfriend. But she was still there, smiling and lovely and unaware and I opened my eyes again to the cold stone walls.
Eventually enough grey light seeped in that if I sat by the doorway I could just read Hannah’s writing. It was cold and I wrapp
ed the blanket around me, glad I’d returned via the town last night to collect my jumper and jacket.
23/4/92
E dropped in today for coffee. (This was a recurrent theme. E was her friend and she mentioned her a lot). She says the owner of Hough Dean has returned, a woman apparently. E seemed pleased, excited. She said they knew each other when she was younger.
I turned the pages. Hannah had retired from the library and was having a particularly steamy time with Don. Their relationship had gone on for so long at such high levels of intensity I was beginning to wonder if he really existed.
3/5/ 92
I’ve been hearing rumours about E’s friend. People say she’s come to make more of her kind, to cause trouble. I’ll ask E – she’ll know about that sort of thing.
8/5/92
E was round today. She didn’t seem quite herself, a bit distracted. I asked her about that woman and she’d heard the rumours too. I said, you have the power to banish her, why don’t you do it before she causes any trouble. E just shrugged, said she didn’t want to interfere.
Then nothing more until nearly the end of the notebook.
30/9/92
Scene in the street today. E should have stepped in before this. Sally from Old Barn screeching at E, calling her a witch and all sorts. E said she’d go and talk to her friend, but it’s too late, she’s gone, leaving all this havoc in her wake. E’s going to have trouble living this down.
I peered at the letters. Could that E actually be an F? It was early in 1993 that Gran moved to Suffolk to live near to us. Mum always said she wanted to be with her family, but maybe life had been a bit too uncomfortable here. I grabbed the next notebook from the pile. It was lighter outside now, although it was still really cold. My fingers were stiff so I rubbed them together and breathed on them. I took another cherry Bakewell from the box and opened the first page of the notebook.
5/1/93
E is going away. It’s been awful the last few weeks. People have been leaving things on her doorstep, making crank calls, spreading rumours about her. I think Sally Lumb is behind it all – but there are others. I heard a couple of women in the library yesterday, one of them telling the other about how E kills chickens in her back yard and collects hairs from the backs of bus seats so she can put them in wax dolls for curses. The other woman said E only helped out in the charity shop so she could collect things which belonged to people and use them against them. I told them it was rubbish, that E is no more a witch than I am. They looked at me as if to say, well you’re her friend, you probably are a witch. Amanda dropped in for tea yesterday and she asked me if I thought I should carry on being friends with E. I said for god’s sake you don’t believe that nonsense do you? And she said well, true or not, you’ll be tarred with her brush.
Then E came round and said she’d had enough. She said I was the only person who still spoke to her and before long people would stop talking to me too. She said she had a granddaughter who she’d only met a few times, but she thought she might have inherited the bloodline and she wanted to get to know her, prepare her. She said there was no place for her here any more.
I’m going to miss her more than I can say.
That’s me, the granddaughter. I have to think back. What did Gran do to prepare me?
26. Meg
I like to keep all the people I’ve loved. The first was Daniel who I lost to Napoleon. I try to keep him in my mind, but it’s been so long. One sweet year we were together, and so many years since. He was the first, the most intense of all my loves, but sometimes I struggle to remember the colour of his eyes or the feel of his kiss.
Charles is gone too, my son and Daniel’s. My memories of him are clearer. He lived a full life and we became the best of friends. When he was fifteen years old I caught a chill which turned to pneumonia. I lay feverish and my boy sat beside my bed.
‘Please don’t die,’ I heard him whisper, as though from another world.
‘I can’t die,’ I told him. ‘Death already owns my soul.’
He held my hand, and mumbled words of prayer.
When, a few hours later, my human life slipped away I could hear Charles sobbing. My new form was still evolving and I couldn’t move to comfort him. It was a blessing that he didn’t go straight for the doctor, but sat with me through the hours of night. No one else was witness to that transformation. In the first light of dawn, still immobile, I spoke to him and he stared at me with horror and delight.
Gradually he accepted the truth, but he was embarrassed by what I’d become and asked me to be discreet, especially around his friends from the Scientific Society. We bought the house at Hough Dean and moved down from the moor. Charles’ friends came round sometimes for meetings. I would wear a cap and welcome them, provide them with tea and scones as a mother should, then make myself scarce. Once, dressed in a suit belonging to Charles, I joined some of them on a botanical ramble: Charles and his friend John Nowell and a young lad from the town called James. Charles was anxious the whole time, but the two of them were so caught up in the small green growths on rock, wall and boulder, that they didn’t pass a second glance when Charles introduced me as a visiting cousin.
Eventually death took Charles, whose life I had bought at such a price, and I was bereft. In those dark days as I hid away at Hough Dean, leaving the house only to feed like the animal I was, I made a vow that Death would take no one else from me in this way. I had the power to keep my loved ones with me, to defeat Death and make more of my kind.
Which was why Frances was such a source of pain and grief to me.
And why Andy is breaking my heart.
There have been others, of course. Before Charles’ death I had already turned a couple of young men, one in Paris and one in London, both of whom I still visit when I take the fancy. After Charles there was Richard, my second son, who has been with me much longer now than Charles was, and is thinking of leaving the nest. And there have been others. Each has been a great love affair while it lasted, eventually fading in intensity. Sometimes on a lonely night when Richard is away I list them in my head, like Charles going through his botanical specimens. Sometimes I visit them and we relive old memories. Even so, up until then, if I’d had to choose one to be my only companion, it would have been Daniel Crossley, my husband, whose name I carry and who was denied to me, as Andy now denies himself.
Frances came to Paris in 1960, looking for her father. She was nineteen years old, lithe and firm, with long, brown hair that carried the light of the moon. The moment I saw her I was entranced.
She carried the bloodline and her instincts took her straight to the dark heart of the city, where she could smell our kind. Her father wasn’t in Paris and no one really knew where he was, or even if he still existed. There are ways that we can be killed, and some thought that he had fallen foul of hunters in Eastern Europe. Whatever, he hadn’t been seen in Paris for many a year. Frances heard these tales, but she didn’t move on in her search. I invited her to be a guest in my house and she stayed. I like to think it was because of me.
I hadn’t met anyone like her before. She smelled so sweet and the blood pounded through her the way it does in all young girls but, unlike them, she knew it. She could hear it and knew the effect she had on us. Sometimes she would keep out of the way, go off on her own to explore the city, only returning when we’d had time to feed. But other times she seemed to enjoy the power she had over us. She and I would talk for hours. She talked to me of Hawden, which I hadn’t visited for many years at that time. She told me the town was empty and run down, likely to die away completely soon with the end of the industry that had built it. She talked of blackened houses with no sanitation, empty mills and an ageing population eking out the last of its days. Of young people leaving for the cities or pastures greener, herself included, here in Paris looking for what life might bring.
The sofa was draped with a Persian
throw, and she sat on it wearing white cotton shorts and a red striped t-shirt, her long brown legs drawn up in front of her, fiddling with her toes as she spoke. I listened to her words and to the beat of her young heart and I wanted to keep her.
She liked to read and one day I invited her into my library. I’ve collected a lot of books over the years and most of them I keep at my house in Paris, in a room lined with mahogany bookshelves and carpeted deep red. The window is hung with velvet three shades darker. That day she was wearing a yellow mini dress which only just covered her bottom and, as she read the spines, I stood behind her and drew a finger up the inside of her thigh.
She shuddered but didn’t turn. I lowered my face so she could feel my breath on her neck. Still she continued reading, but she inclined her head, just a fraction to the left, baring her neck to me and I took my first bite. She tasted salty and young. She stood still whilst I took my fill, then when I drew out my teeth she turned and we kissed for the first time.
The period after that while her wound healed was one of torment to me. She played with me mercilessly. Some evenings she gave me her body like a gift, lying on the sofa in her tiny skirts which hid nothing, allowing my hands, lips and tongue to travel where they would. My teeth throbbed at the nearness of her blood, a skin’s depth, a membrane, between them and her infinite sweetness. But we had agreed that she was to join me and there was to be no biting until the skin on her neck had mended.
Other nights she would go out into the city, visiting the clubs and bars, not caring if I was with her or not, revelling in her youth and freedom. She would tumble home in the early mornings, sometimes alone, but often accompanied by crowds of loud drunk teenagers who would inhabit my kitchen making tea and toast and exclaiming at its Englishness.
TAINTED LOVE Page 17
