by A. P.
Ghislaine looked mystified and shook her head. She mouthed, Moustique? at me and looked up at the ceiling, searching for a possible culprit.
I tutted a denial and mouthed back, La Forge.
We were entering another patch of disagreement territory here. Sabine didn’t trust Dr la Forge, and I didn’t trust him either, not since the day – about a couple of weeks earlier – that Aimée had lined us all up and got him to examine us.
On the face of it, it had been a routine check-up requested, or at any rate agreed to, by our parents. Or so Aimée said, and, in my father’s case at least, she was probably telling the truth. This maladie of poor Sabine’s is so worrying for all of us, I know my little bunnies will understand. (Yeah, what if we are little myxie bunnies, is what you mean.) Dr la Forge assures us it is not catching but, tout de même … A good, thorough examination, maybe a blood test if there is any doubt, would set all our minds at rest.
Would it? Did it? Like hell it did. I have never much taken to doctors, which is odd in a way, coming from me, and Dr la Forge was no exception. He examined us in the main sitting room, which Aimée had transformed for the occasion into a consulting room by means of one of her ash-grey sheets draped across the versatile sofa that had been the scene of Matty’s tussle with the soldier. Aimée also stood in as nurse. I’ve never liked nurses much either.
Christopher went in first. I went second, Serena third and Matty fourth. Which in fact meant she was the last because Tessa didn’t go in at all: her parents had got wind of something serious and were driving over from England especially to collect her and cart her off to Harley Street; they were due to arrive sometime over the next few days. Her looming departure saddened me more than I would have thought possible: it was the beginning of our diaspora. I would even miss the morning fag-fog.
Dr la Forge had one of those homely male faces. A family solicitor’s face – epicene, rosy and well-shaven – that you instinctively felt you could rely on. Coming from a man like that, prurience is all the more jarring. Aimée’s presence didn’t help either: our nudity, our embarrassment, the doctor’s sticky little hands running caressingly into all the crannies – you could see she was lapping it all up.
Là, derrière, Viola, she beamed at me when my turn came, pointing to her cherished Venetian screen with the gold-leaf flaking off it like dandruff. Take off your clothes and then come back here and lie down. Yes, yes, all of them, naturally, this is a medical examination. C’est bien sérieux.
Why is youth so docile? Inside I was seething with the indignity – we’d been told we were to have a blood test, for goodness’ sake; a rolled-up sleeve was surely sufficient for that – but I did exactly as I was told. And, of course, once you’re naked, that’s it; no one can rebel successfully without at least a loincloth.
Now, legs bent, c’est ça, Aimée instructed me, propping my heels on the armrest of the sofa. Wide, a little wider. And she draped a grey towel across my knees, which hung there like a curtain, separating me from my nether parts. All I could see was my chest and ribs, drastically foreshortened like those of Masaccio’s laid-out Christ, and then, peering over the curtain, the two adult faces, exchanging glances that I tried hard to read but couldn’t.
Dr la Forge’s hands scuttled over me like warmblooded reptiles, probing here and there into my flesh, as if in search of a likely place to burrow. This seems all right. Bon. Nothing here. Abdomen quite in order. Good muscle tone; nice clear skin. Now, if Madame would be so good as to just stand aside for a minute – voilà, merci – he could have a little listen to the lungs …
And now it was his head that intruded on me. First the hands, tap-tap-tapping their brazen way right up to the hummocks of my breasts and over, and then the pink, cologne-smelling head, laid on one side so that the eyes stared right into mine, coming closer and closer. Listening, I suppose, to the tom-tom beat of the fingers, but also looking, looking. Contemplating my shame and relishing it with a connoisseur’s relish. I could see a tuft of hair poking out of one of the nostrils: it quivered.
I felt disgust, and tried to show it by turning my head to one side. Straight away a scented forefinger flicked out and swivelled it back again, and then hooked one of my eyelids and pulled it downwards. All in one movement. Let us just check for anaemia here. No, no signs at all. Ruby red, a lovely colour.
Did you also check …? Aimée was flapping the towel around to attract the doctor’s attention. Once she’d got it she fired off another set of cryptic messages via the pencilled eyebrows. Up and down, up and down, it was a wonder the colour didn’t run.
Pas encore. One thing at a time. Dr la Forge stood straight again and gestured to Aimée to take up her earlier nurse’s stance. Then, with the divide back in place, he retreated once more behind its cover – totally this time, not even the top of his head showing – and I heard the squeak of rubber as he snapped on what I guessed was a pair of surgical gloves and, without warning, moved his fingers to quite a different spot from those they had so far examined. His touch sent a shock of pleasure through me that I hated myself for feeling. How dare my body react like that to a stimulus from this repulsive man, how dare it? I’m not sure I didn’t hear a little chuckle coming from behind the towel. Although, when his head rose again above it, Dr la Forge’s expression was professional and blank.
Ici, Madame, all is in perfect order, just as Nature formed it, and I think it wiser to let well alone. No deeper examination, ce n’est pas le cas. I will just take a little sample of blood now from the arm – for the tests, you understand – and then our young patient can get dressed again.
It was Aimée now who smiled. Her cat smile, satisfied and serene. If she’d had a few worries on the vigilance front, now they were dispelled. The doctor handed her a thin rubber tube and she tied it tenderly round my arm, watching the vein swell and then stroking it several times with her finger before giving it a little light swab. Don’t hurt her now, Doctor, will you, she warned with mock severity (almost everything about her was mock that day, except the smile). This one is a very special pupil. You should see the work she turns in – exquis, some of it. Un vrai talent poétique.
God, I hope I didn’t smile back at the pair of them as they stood over me, draining, in cynically symbolic fashion, my blood. I hope I had that much sense.
I think maybe I did, because at least I thought to check my treatment against that of the others. None of them, it emerged, not even Matty with her sultry Latin temperament, had been subjected to the same humiliation. Christopher had even been allowed to keep his underpants on, lucky bastard; the two girls had been stripped and tapped and prodded, but neither of them had had their private parts examined.
Of course he didn’t do a fanny-check, silly, he’s not a gynaecologist; only gynaecologists do that. Matty was clued up on this score.
So much for Dr la Forge’s medical correctness, then. No, I never trusted him again on the ethical front, and when I saw those two wayward jab-marks on Sabine’s neck I didn’t trust him any longer on the clinical front either. Why, even a ruddy vampire, I said angrily to myself – and later out loud to Ghislaine, because I found the comparison apt and scathing – would have made a tidier job. Even a ruddy vampire.
XII
Jeu d’Esprit
How long, after this throwaway remark of mine regarding vampires, before the idea began to take shape in my mind? (Shape? Does a fog have shape? Does the twilight? Does the onset of darkness?) Not long, not long: once the word was out, the thought had only to trot along behind. A few days perhaps. Maybe closer on a week. Tessa had gone already, that I do know, or I would have retained comments of hers in my memory. Laconic, funny things that would have stuck fast and made me smile despite everything. Sadly there are none of those.
I don’t have any comments of Matty’s, either, now I come to look for them. So presumably she had left by then too and there were just the three of us: Christopher, Serena and me. Which would make it slightly over a week, because Tessa’s p
arents came that same weekend to retrieve their endangered ewe-lamb, and Matty’s came the weekend after, on the same mission. I remember this succession of dates clearly because we had a poor/posh lunch that first Saturday with Lord and Lady Grimthorn, as Christopher aptly twisted their name, and a rich/posh lunch the next with the Canal Grandes (again the name is Christopher’s rendering). I remember too how interested we were to see to which pair Aimée would accord greater status. We were all convinced the Grimthorns, as representatives of the ancien régime, would win hands down, but it was not so. The peer and peeress were accorded baked leeks and custard; the flashy, dashy Canal Grandes, dripping gold and suntan lotion, got roast duckling in orange sauce and a Saint Honoré with all the frills. Aimée, in her own warped way, moved with the times.
Christopher made plenty of comments, of course, but only in the jokey phase. When he saw things were taking a more serious turn the whole topic started to bore him. Or maybe to embarrass him. Or maybe to do something else to him, I don’t know. But, anyway, after a spurt of wild enthusiasm, when he would dance around behind Aimée’s chair at mealtimes, for example, miming pouncing movements with a Dracula cloak draped over his shoulders, or else stare her straight in the face and let beetroot soup drip down his chin, he fell totally out of sync, and every time Serena and I got down to discussing the matter in his hearing he would make fangy faces at us instead and drift back to his disc-jockeying. ‘Two that gather vampires; dreadful trade.’
Serena was my stay, my fellow vampire-hunter. She entered into the spirit of the thing with a zest, an energy, that endeared her to me like a sister, and that lasted as long as she could relate to me, in that or any other way. I say sister because we were too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts, could never really lock. (Now why did I go and choose that simile, when I hate jigsaw puzzles? Ah, I know why. And I know why I hate them, too.) But as a temporary task force we made a pretty united pair.
We read books, all sorts of books, from lurid to learned, we mugged up our subject, we bicycled to the public library and scanned through all the volumes we could find, and then we made notes and compared them: it was disheartening what a court little bouillon our pooled info boiled down to. And most of it we knew already from the Hammer Horrors. And much of it, too, was rot.
– Vampires are the living dead. Oxymorons personified. They find death in a violent manner, and come back to life on the rebound, as it were, on the wings of an energy not yet spent. Hence their thirst for the juice of life: i.e. blood.
– They procure this means of sustenance by sucking it from the necks of their victims (preferably young and svelte human beings, though other, scruffier animals will do at a pinch) through twin incisions made by their unusually long canine teeth.
– They are not spirits, they are a good deal more corporeal than that, but their bodies, although solid enough to the touch, cast neither shadow nor reflection. By virtue of this semi-concrete state they can pass unimpeded through closed windows and doors, although not through walls.
– They are pallid in complexion, shun the sun, live only by night, and sleep away the daylight hours in coffins containing earth from their native land, usually central Europe. Occasionally, for purposes of rapid travel, they mutate into animal form, generally that of a bat. Thanks to this ability their link to the animal kingdom is particularly close, although only to select species: they can handle wolves and bears like pets, for example, but not the larger felines; rodents but not weasels or ferrets.
– They are super-humanly strong, impervious to wounds, and can be kept at bay – if only briefly – by lashings of garlic and/or by a sacred symbol, such as crucifix, rosary or host, brandished in the face. They can be eliminated only by means of a stake, preferably of hawthorn, driven through the heart. Another useful delaying tactic consists in strewing some fine-grained substance, such as rice or lentils, in their path: their obsession with numbers obliges them to halt their pursuit while they count the grains.
– Their name derives from the Serbo-Croat Vampir, meaning an unscrupulous speculator, a usurer, a money-lender.
– The vampire of popular imagination is elegant, languid, old-fashioned in taste and habits, and of bourgeois, even aristocratic, standing, but such characteristics need not be taken as defining. In all likelihood the view is traceable to influential writers of the past, such as Voltaire and Marx, both of whom identified vampires with the richer classes, battening on to the poor for gain.
– The first officially recorded case dates back to 1725: one Andreas Berge crops up in the parish register of Barnin in Moravia as being missing from the grave, his corpse ‘vampertione infecta’.
And that was it: our handbook, our state-of-the-art compendium. All that we could garner in the way of knowledge to help us in our Spot-the-Vampire quest. Not exactly encyclopaedic in scope, but it enabled us to pick out our three main suspects immediately, merely by scanning through the above points and ticking off, against their names, those that applied.
Christopher was still with us at that stage – in spirit, I mean, as well as body. It was he who did the ticking. And most of the talking too.
I’m with Viola on this: Roland is one, you can bet your last lei. Odd, how we never rumbled him before. Posh and pale, and spooky as they come, and now guzzling himself silly on poor Sabine’s blood – that’s four points, straight off. And talk about old-fashioned tastes – ever noticed those trousers he wears? Five. He goes to the top of the list. Beats Aimée hollow: she’s only got three – poshness, shunning the light, and her nifty little quick-change cat stunt.
Serena’s attitude was already more committed: when she spoke there was no trace of Christopher’s flippancy in her voice at all. Actually, she said, very sober and precise, the list makes no mention of spooky, and Roland mostly wears jeans, so I think we can only count three. Which means he and Aimée tie.
Honestly, girl, where’s your dress sense? I wear jeans; Roland wears joined-up mailbags that just happen to be made of denim. You know how long it took me to get mine this way? Twenty-four bleeding hours. I lay in the bath for twenty-four bleeding hours …
Yes, yes, we know all about your heroic past. Belt up and go on to the next. And don’t say bleeding, either, it’s a bit tactless in the context. The Marquise, Roland’s mother, what about her?
Draccie’s mum? I don’t know. It’s up to Viola really – she’s the witness, not me. She’s the only one who saw. What did the woman do, exactly, Viola? Try to be accurate: a lot hinges on this. Did she lick the stuff off her goggles? Did she slurp? How can you be so sure, then? OK, OK, an expression like that counts as a point, I reckon – in the context. Let’s call it four, and put her down on the blacklist too. Ready for the hawthorn.
And the Marquis? Serena asked diligently.
I was all for condemnation here as well but Christopher invoked a suspended verdict. We’ve got to be fair, he said. The Marquis is a louche old lecher, granted, but that’s no proof he’s a vampire. Give him a chance first, I say, before we stake him. Give him a test.
The mere thought of testing the Marquis, let alone staking him, made me shudder. You give him a test, if you’re so keen. For me, there’s no need. He’s one of them too. I think it runs in the family.
Serena nodded quickly in assent; she too looked appalled.
Christopher just laughed. Gutless swabs, the pair of you. But you’ll have to do some of the fieldwork, you know, I shall be far too busy. My unenviable task, if you remember, is to investigate Aimée’s pussy. What does the naughty thing get up to at night? What are those specks of dust among its fur? Million-dollar question: Does Aimée henna her pussy as well as her hair?
It was a game. Yes, of course it was a game. For all of us – at that stage. A pastime, a device for hijacking the attention and holding it captive for as long as possible. Christopher and Serena were bored to tears and I was d
istraught to tears: for our different reasons we all needed the diversion. A psychoanalyst would say I needed a scapegoat too: an embodiment-of-evil figure on to which to project my rage and misery and impotence at Sabine’s plight, and thereby soothe my battered ego. After all, you can’t exactly be jealous of a vampire, can you, or not in the same way a lover is jealous? (Can’t you just!) Whatever it is that binds aggressor to victim, and vice versa, it’s hardly a love relationship. Rivalry, jilting, dumping, betrayal – these terms no longer hold the same meaning. Your nose is broken, maybe, smashed even to pulp, but no skin off it, no lover’s skin off it at all.
An analyst would also say – it’s part of the creed, no? – that now I’d got my bogeyman I could be expected to calm down a bit. But that would be shrink-talk. How could I calm down, suspecting (or imagining, or hallucinating, let the shrink choose the verb) what I suspected now? Admittedly the vampire theory took care of the jealousy problem, but it rocketed the worry on Sabine’s account sky-high. How could I go on doing everything in my power to nurse her back to health during the week, and then, punctually, every weekend, deliver her into the hands of a lethal predator while Ghislaine bustled tactfully off, humming snatches of Mendelssohn’s wedding march, and I buckled silently down to housework? Impossible, surely, especially the ‘silently’ part? But equally impossible to speak, warn, utter the ludicrous, outlandish, grotesque-under-the-circumstances truth.
So what did I do, then? Well, I could give a long, tortuous answer to that question, reflecting the many tortuous things I did and thought and tried to do and tried to think, but in four short words, which are just as eloquent, I did my nut. I made a fool of myself, an unhelpful, boorish fool. In so far as I could manage, which was never far enough, I mounted guard over Sabine: sitting there at her bedside during Roland’s visits, stolid and unreceptive; refusing to pick up any of Ghislaine’s hints that I should leave the couple alone. I was unheeding to the point of obduracy, to the point of rudeness – who cared about manners when I stood to lose so much?
