Sabine

by A. P.

  Thus spoke la Forge M.D., for Medical Delinquent, and D.O.P., for Dirty Old Prober, into the bargain. What if he was one of them too? Wrong complexion, all that pink, but, to borrow an expression that Sabine often used when describing him as a diagnostician, I didn’t trust him any further than my Flugge drops.

  Time was entering into the arena as well. Had already entered, sneaky, on tiptoe, the way time does. In a mere seventeen days the summer term would be ending, and with it my attendance at this particular … What can I call it? School? Place of learning? Yes, place of learning will do. I wasn’t sure exactly what, if anything, my father had lined up for me over the summer, but whatever it was, I was confident that with a bit of cunning and a bit of wheedling I could get him to consent to my remaining in France. To perfect my French, bien sûr, Papa. Maybe I could stay with Ghislaine again – that would be the ideal solution all round. Maybe she would take me as a paying guest or an au pair or something. Myself, I would go as a slave – hers and Sabine’s. As slave and bodyguard, slave and bloodguard, camped in a willow cabin at their gate. What I would not, and could not, do was to abandon Sabine to the …

  Full circle again. What was he, this Roland? What were they? Having shelved the idea of the coffin search, at least for the time being, Serena and I turned our attention to a much blander but, as it turned out, more elusive type of quarry: shadows and reflections.

  The furniture of Plato’s cave. Ever tried hunting for shadows and mirror images? Ever tried hunting for missing shadows and missing mirror images? In a fusty, dusty environment, what is more, where the blinds are always half-drawn and the mirrors are of a date with Versailles. The shadow world is all around us, its contents spread out flat for our inspection like bolts of material on a draper’s counter – you would think it would be a cinch to spot an anomaly, but …

  Just turn on that reading-lamp, Serena, the bright one. Train it this way and get Aimée to come here a minute on some pretext or other. Call her, tell her you’ve found a cockroach in the carpet. A flea, anything. Work it so that she stands right there in the pool of light, and I’ll check what happens on the shadow front.

  What happens is impossible to tell. Aimée runs in screaming, Puce? Puce? and hugs Serena to her as if for protection against a man-eating tiger. Quelle horreur! Where, Serena? Where? Puces in my house! Jamais des puces in my house! Oh, I detest the puces, horrible, sales little bêtes! Madame Goujon, come here quickly, do you see any puces? And Mme Goujon scurries in too, carpet beater in hand, and begins flailing the spot on the carpet indicated by Serena, and Aimée stands over her, still hugging Serena close, and the dust flies and the shadows whirl, and I am none the wiser. Except that I know now, if Aimée is a vampire, that vampires have a particular abhorrence for fleas, at least judging by the reaction of this one. Perhaps they see them as competition.

  So it will have to be the coffins after all. We’ve tried virtually all the other tests, none of them conclusive. I have even taken to wearing a cross round my neck, bought cheaply in the costume-jewellery department of the Prisunic, and twiddling it in the faces of all those I encounter. To no apparent effect, except perhaps a little pained blink from Aimée’s watery, early morning eyes – again, it is hard to tell. But without Christopher’s zaniness the game is palling on Serena and on me too. Besides, Sabine is perkier; she needs me, she wants me by her. I have more important things to do than go grubbing around in other people’s basements. Roland has exams in Paris and is absent for their duration. May he fail the lot.

  * * *

  You are going to get well, you know.

  You think so, Viola? Cent pour cent?

  I know so. Cent pour cent. The green’s gone already – look. What shall we do when you are well enough to go out?

  Nothing. Everything. Rien de spécial because everything is special, I never realised. Food, Viola, food is special, you have no idea. Sitting up and reading is special, with clean sheets, and the sunlight shining on your bed. Special is walking to the bathroom on your own without your head spinning or having to lean on someone else. Special is thinking about one day soon actually wanting a cigarette. I might come to England and stay with you, what about that? Would your father like me? Would he approve of me?

  I approve of you, that’s all that matters.

  So he wouldn’t, eh?

  We shall see, it’ll be fun to see. What do you want for supper? There’s chicken, I think, if you feel like it. I’ll tell Ghislaine on my way out.

  Chicken. Paradise. See you tomorrow. Come as early as you can.

  A week goes by, therefore, a relatively routine and tranquil week in comparison to the ones on either side, before Serena and I take advantage of an empty Thursday evening and, armed with torch and bluff courage, prise open the heavy wooden door that leads to the nether regions of the château and pad our way down the stone staircase on the last stage of our quest.

  Last because, yes, the game has really lost most of its charm for us now. Only the unforeseen opportunity, and a certain unwillingness to let Christopher know how important he was to the game’s functioning, keep us going in this particular case. Aimée has gone to Tours to have the car serviced and has rung to say she will be back late. M. Bosse is off duty and has forgotten to give us homework. (We are cunning about inducing him to forget: all you have to do is mention Napoleon round about the close of lesson-time and he is away, gabbling on about industry and genius and the inevitable concurrence of small feet and large brains – his own feet being tiny. Dick too, according to Matty, our departed connoisseur.) Mme Goujon has a free afternoon also. From turrets to cellar, the house is ours entirely.

  Down we go, then, into what our imagination has forecast will be a network of dungeons, but is in fact just one large whitewashed storeroom, brightly lit by an overhead light bulb – so the torch is superfluous – and lined on all four sides by surprisingly clean and well-arranged shelves. Most of these contain food supplies – boxes of apples, crates of potatoes, jars of bottled beetroot, bottled carrots, bottled onions, jams and other preserves – and on all of the stores, whether bottled or not, the figurative fingerprints of Mme Goujon are legible: this is clearly an outpost of her realm. It doesn’t look as if Aimée has ever set foot there, let alone laid herself prostrate. In a bed of earth, what is more. Why, the place is spotless: Mme Goujon would have a fit if she came across so much as a teaspoonful of soil; even the potatoes look like they’ve been scraped. One wall, just a fraction more dusty than the others, is given over to wines, each bottle snugly fitted into a little round wooden hole with just its neck protruding, and in the furthest corner from where we stand, opposite the stairs, there is a pile of suitcases, half-covered by a piece of velvet curtain material. These cases, together with a pair of rusty ice skates hanging on the wall by their laces, are the only objects in the room that harbour a certain air of age and neglect: everything else could have been placed there yesterday for a glossy magazine article on good housekeeping. Chapeau, Madame Goujon! No wonder Aimée is such a fawning employer.

  Serena and I look around, then at each another, and shrug. Relief or disappointment? Neither, simply boredom settling upon us again.

  I suppose we couldn’t grab a pot of those chestnuts, could we, before we go? Serena suggests. They look yummy.

  I shake my head. It’s all so tidy, anything added or missing would be bound to be noticed.

  What about those cases?

  The cases look old but ordinary, not even any interesting labels stuck on them.

  What about them?

  What about opening them, I mean? What about having a quick look at what’s inside?

  We exchange glances again, and again shrug in unison.

  Probably nothing.

  Yeah, you’re right, probably nothing. Still …

  Still …

  Seeing as we’re here …

  Seeing as we’re here …

  You can bet Bluebeard’s wife said just the same. I can even hear her saying it. Nothing
in that little room, surely, nothing interesting at all; that’s why my dear kind husband told me not to enter – in order to save me the bother. Still … Seeing as I’m here and have this little key …

  The cases weren’t even locked. Careless Aimée, fluffy-headed Aimée, flouting all the strictures.

  Not that there was anything particularly eyecatching in any of them, or not on first inspection. A few more fancy-dress clothes, slightly more carefully kept, maybe, than the ones she had provided for the party. An oyster satin ball gown, reeking of mothballs, all baggy at the waist – perfectly hideous. An ostrich feather fan with the struts broken. A little ivory carnet de bal, complete with pencil. Unused, or at any rate unmarked, no names in it at all. A foxfur cape with a crossover clasp of two little foxy faces. A sad object, but then all of these objects were sad, even the tissue paper that enveloped them had a mournful look about it, even the sheets of newspaper lining the bottom of the case.

  No, not lining the bottom of the case, seeing as they were held together with a clip and had obviously been put there on purpose, lying at the bottom of the case. Lying at the bottom of the case and telling the truth at the bottom of the case – the stark, impossible, inescapable and horrendous truth.

  I wish I hadn’t learnt all that blasted French, I wish I hadn’t been able to read those headings so quickly. I wish my eyes had flicked over them uncomprehending: old newspaper cuttings from God knows when. Stuff them back into the case with the rest of the clutter and forget about them. And I wish my eye and memory for clothes weren’t so keen.

  Because it was the dress that caught my attention. Not so much Aimée herself, who, with a freshness of face and wealth of hair I was unaccustomed to, might well have slipped my notice, particularly since most of the photographs showed her buttoned up to the nines and shrouded in a heavy motoring veil at the wheel of a far earlier model of Peugeot. Not so much the headings either, although the words Mort, Tragique, Accident and Fatalité did, it is true, have a certain arresting power of their own. Certainly not the photograph of the other victim of the crash, the younger one, Lady Beatrice Whoever-she-was, whose face and name meant nothing to me. No, it was the dress, and more exactly the neckline of the dress, that did it. A scalloped neckline, but in reverse, so that it was the skin of the wearer, not the dress, that took on the shell-shape. I remembered that dress all too clearly, it was one of the limp dressing-up togs Aimée had furnished us with on the night of the fancy-dress party. Keeping the cuttings, and keeping the clothes that feature in the cuttings, and keeping your name (almost intact, just a feeble consonant shift in the first letter of the surname), and keeping your habits and profession and place of residence – how slack can you get?

  It can’t be her. Serena was adamant. The dates don’t fit. If it was her, she’d be … Wait, these articles don’t give the woman’s age, typical French, but here it says she was a Directrice d’Académie. Now, if she was already a Directrice d’Académie when she died, then that would make her, say, thirty at the least. Thirty then, so now she ought to be…

  Mysteriously, the calculating part of my brain was still working. Just over ninety, said my voice. So that was still working too – two small bits of me running on oblivious, like the legs of a decapitated chicken.

  Exactly. And she’s not. Nowhere near. It must be an aunt or someone, that’s all. Some relative who looked like her, and who ran the school before she did. Stop shivering like that, Viola, you’re making me nervous. Let’s put all this silly stuff away, back where we found it, and get out of this dump before someone comes and finds us meddling. Viola? Viola? Viola, stop it, stop doing that, you’re scaring me. You don’t honest to God think, do you, that…? Shit! You do. Shit and double shit! Viola, please, say you’re joking, say it’s a joke. Viola! Viola! Leave off the fake hysterics, will you, it’s not funny any more.

  XV

  Garlic and Onions

  No, Serena was right, it was not funny any more. If it ever had been. In the last two deranged days we spent together before she too, like Matty and Tessa, was spirited away by anxious parents (it was lucky the telephone didn’t melt under the barrage of her incandescent SOS’s home), there was virtually no common ground between us at all, but on this one point we saw eye to eye: it was not funny any more.

  I knew now. I knew the truth. Philosophers down the centuries have always made such a fuss about knowledge and how we come by it, but they got their priorities wrong. Acquisition of knowledge is not the problem, it’s how not to acquire it when it’s staring you in the face. Jeering at you. Thumbing its nose at you. Making a nonsense of every other bit of knowledge you have ever come by.

  I was surrounded by a group of vampires. It was the modern era, the second half of the twentieth century, post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Einstein (just), and I was stuck, helpless, hopeless, almost totally alone, in a blooming nest of vampires.

  It was not my own predicament, however, that most concerned me, or I would have packed up my stuff and run there and then. Or just run – forget the packing. No, it was Sabine’s. If you can count as polite the Marquise’s words to me during the hunt, few and chilly though they were, all I had received from the vampire contingent so far was civility (from her), fondness (from Aimée), and a murmured invitation to the cinema. Hardly indicative of life-threatening designs on my person. With Sabine, though, it was a different matter. For some reason – maybe her greater appeal, maybe her odd-girl-outness, or maybe simply because, being older and unsupervised, she made a more available target – Sabine was on their list of victims. High on their list of victims. Heading, or so it would seem, their list of victims.

  My fears had been grounded. In absurdity, OK, but grounded. Sabine had said jokingly that she wanted to be immersed in a bowl of water, like a bicycle tyre, to see where the blood was leaking from. Well, I could tell her now exactly where it was – no bowl or water required: the blood loss came from those two holes on her neck. Pints and pints of it were going out that way, leaving no trace except in the sated smile of Roland. Roland, the biped leech. The tick, the parasite, the vermin. If you were to look closely you could probably see some of it still coating his tongue when he took leave of her. If you were to kiss him soon enough afterwards – oh, banish that terrible, terrible thought – you could probably taste it.

  Serena and Christopher were convinced I’d gone mad – properly, this time. They weren’t far wrong. From the next morning onwards they avoided me like a leper, and in this too they were right. In my frenzy and despair I stank to heaven, the way Job did in his grief.

  I had no plan, no compass, no support. I was lost in a hostile, crumbling world. I spent that night – the night of the discovery – mostly arguing with Serena in a last-ditch attempt to win her over to my side. Pleading with her, beseeching her in a kind of desperate diminuendo, first for help on all fronts, then just in the matter of guarding Sabine, and finally, when that too was denied me, holding out for a minimal, negative quota in the name of our past companionship: no hindrance, no betrayal – either to Aimée or to her parents or anyone else. This concession I finally wrung from her at about three in the morning.

  I’ll have no time, anyway, she flung at me as, exhausted and exasperated, we eyed one another like strangers over the crater of an overflowing ashtray before going our separate ways to bed. I’m getting out of this madhouse double quick. I’m ringing home tomorrow and then I’m off. If you’ve got any sense you’ll do the same. Just get the hell out and try and forget this place exists; then you might be OK.

  What do you think I should do about Christopher? I asked. (Apart from ‘Goodbye’ I think these were practically the last words I ever spoke to her. It’s hard to speak to someone who won’t remain in the same room with you: already at this stage she had gained the doorway.)

  What do you mean, do about him?

  Do you think I should get him to promise secrecy too?

  Oh, leave Christopher, she said in a throwaway voice that came to me through th
e gap of the rapidly closing door. He’s not going to grass, he doesn’t give a shit.

  Lucky Christopher. But then, not so lucky either, just that much more cocooned in his detachment. During dinner – which for me had been an ordeal: speaking levelly to Aimée when I knew she had been dead for the past sixty years, smiling at her, spooning down my food without retching, and letting none of my horror show – he had just sat with his head thrown back and rolled bread pellets. Hysterical girl stuff; nothing to do with him. (Oh, but it was, my old school friend. Tell me, how do you behave at mealtimes now?)

  I slept like a log that night – what remained of it. I was young, and the young sleep, no matter what. In the morning I awoke with total awareness of the way things stood, which was unusual for me and probably meant that I had slept like a log travelling through whirlpools. My head, primed with information though it was, was still totally empty of plans: the knowledge was there, the fears were there, but they just rattled around inside my skull – dried peas in a jar, taking on no pattern whatsoever.

  Almost without realising how I had got there – had I been sly about missing lessons? Had I spoken to anyone about where I was going? – I found myself at some point of the morning on a bicycle, fully dressed but hungry, pedalling hectically along the road in the direction of Sabine’s. Some kind of pea-formation must have clustered and propelled me. Curled in the basket in front of me was a long plait of garlic bulbs: I wasn’t sure how that had got there either; presumably I had bought it on the way.

  Not long after this, judging by the sun and the hunger, which were both on a gradual rise, I was standing in the doorway of Ghislaine’s kitchen, watching her as, with a skin-diver’s mask over her face to protect her eyes, she sat at a deal table, chopping onions and other ingredients for a stew.

  How long I stood there before entering, I don’t know – I was still in this funny trance-like state that made time so difficult to measure – but it was long enough for the scene to exert a slightly calming effect on the contents of the pea-jar, and to imprint itself on my memory under the title, ‘Last Glimpse of Home’. Ghislaine had a Midas touch where grace was concerned, and like Midas’s it operated automatically, independent of her will. Aesthetics can’t have been much on her mind that morning, and yet the table top could have served as a model for a Cézanne still life, so beautifully did the coloured pot and vegetables bask there in the sunlight, and she herself, with her long arched neck and looped-back, greying hair framing her sideways-tilted face, could have sat for a Modigliani portrait. Only the mask spoke of the artistic revolution to come.