Sabine

by A. P.

  And yet in the end it went a bit like that. The cinema was bearable – just: I remember nothing of the film save for the name Schumacher (pronounced the French way, Shoomashair), which still bothers me today, to the point that I never watch car racing if I can help it. I can’t watch the film either, which is a pity, since they say it is one of the finest ever made.

  The whole way through, you see, I was conscious only of this being beside me. This strange, alluring/repellent being who had the effrontery, while I was a jangling mass of nerves, to sprawl there at my elbow in a pose of the utmost relaxation and munch on – whatever it was he was munching. Some kind of peppermint affair: for the carnivore, breath does pose a problem. He offered me one, but like Persephone I’d have died sooner than accept so much as a grain of nourishment from his hands. Now and again he would give a little heave in his chair and from his mouth would come a smothered chuckle. More than relaxed, he was amused. And not only, or even chiefly, by the film. I could tell that. No, he was amused by me and by the situation. I had striven to seduce, gone all out to seduce, entice, arouse, and seemingly all I aroused in him was this infuriating amusement and perhaps, perhaps – although this thought was so bewildering I could hardly fit it in my head – a feeling of tenderness. I had the distinct impression that although he knew I hated him, and probably had no illusions as to why I had telephoned him, hatred and all, he didn’t hate me back in the slightest – quite the reverse.

  In one of the saddest parts of the film – the close-up of a dying rabbit, I think it was – he took my hand, turned it over and brushed the inside of my wrist against his lips. I bucked like a rabbit myself, expecting to feel the pressure of his teeth and then the bite – there were veins there, too, were there not? But all that followed was the gentle relinquishment of my hand, its replacement in my lap, and then that tiny heave again as he leant towards me and tapped, as his father had done before him, a teasing finger on the tip of my nose.

  Ça va, Viola? You’re not bored? You can follow all right?

  I couldn’t follow, not a word except for Shoomas-hair, but I was not bored. I doubt Andromeda was bored either as she waited for the sea serpent. (What would Sabine say to that comparison, I wonder? Unprintable.) I was terrified, keyed up to breaking point, hungrier than I’d ever been in my life before but with no desire to eat, my stomach having turned itself at some point of the day into a bowl of sulphuric acid with the lid on, but bored, no, that I was not.

  Nor was I bored on the drive back to the château, awaiting as I did, at any moment, a sudden swerve off the road and into one of the lanes that led into the forest and then, in silence, in the darkness, the aggression, the assault. (Only maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe it was more a Svengali business, a hypnotic stare, a look-into-my-eyes-and-do-not-flinch-as-I-come-closer sort of approach.) But with ruthless honesty, as kilometre after kilometre passed without mishap and the road became more and more familiar as we neared the final stretch, I had to admit to a certain feeling of letdown along with the panic.

  Could it be that it was worse to be spurned by a vampire than it was to be attacked by one?

  Well, yes, if the rejection spelled tactical failure too. Because how could I ensnare my predator/prey and keep him successfully away from Sabine until daybreak if he declined point blank to enter the snare? So little time if you looked at it backwards and saw it dwindling; so much if you looked at it forwards, stretching out like a via dolorosa to be trod.

  Roland? (Husky, come-hither voice, well, the husky part wasn’t difficult.) Do we have to go back so soon? Couldn’t we just pull in somewhere and stop for a moment? And talk, maybe?

  No answer. And the luscious profile remained fixed: he was obeying Aimée’s instructions and driving like an undertaker. (At whose funeral? Whose?)

  Just talk? Just a moment?

  Still no answer, but in the light of the dashboard I thought I saw his mouth flex upwards at the corner. Another smile, sod him. Another fond avuncular smile.

  And then, unexpectedly, his hand straying from the steering wheel for a brief moment and covering mine, giving it a quick little non-avuncular squeeze.

  Viola. Oh, Viola, it’s not as easy as you think. C’est pas si simple que ça.

  We hadn’t spoken of Sabine all evening. If he were to do so now, I realised, then that would be the end of it – her name would come down between us like a blade, severing this weird connecting thread, which I could still feel, despite everything. He was behaving impeccably – as uncle, friend, elder brother, call it what you like – but the thread was there and he was drawn by it. He was tempted.

  Proof was that he made no mention of Sabine. But by now the car was drawing close to the château gates. I could pick out the spearlike rods of the railings already and through them, in flashes, the glimmer of the lantern that hung over the doorway. It was dreadful, it was humiliating, I didn’t even feel relieved on my own account, merely anguish-ridden on Sabine’s: it was not going to work, my seduction plan was not going to work. As a last desperate measure I resolved to wait until the car braked for the swing over the road and into the drive, and then throw myself across Roland and pull the steering wheel hard in the opposite direction, hopefully landing us up on the verge. There was no traffic and the verge was wide and flat, almost a lay-by, it shouldn’t be dangerous; the dangerous bit would come after, when I would have to face the consequences of my gesture. Whatever they might be.

  I don’t know whether I would ever actually have had the nerve to carry out this manoeuvre. I think I would but I’m not sure: I had already shut my eyes and braced myself for action, but as things turned out I merely stayed braced and opened them again. Because, quite of his own accord, Roland suddenly slowed down the car and turned it off the road, parking it only about ten yards short of the spot I had chosen as my deadline. Then he switched off the ignition and turned to me, taking my head between his hands and holding it tight but with care, as if it were a bowlful of liquid that was threatening to spill.

  I could see very little of him, it was so dark, only the glimmer of his eyeballs; they moved sideways fast, to and fro, to and fro, so that I could tell he was shaking his head. Then he clicked his tongue, also rapidly.

  Rien à faire, little Viola. Nothing doing, nothing doing.

  I wanted to say something – deny, protest, voice surprise, indignation, something – but his hands forestalled me, swivelling, one to behind my neck and the other to the front, covering my mouth.

  Ssssh, ssssh. Ttt, ttt, ttt. Listen to me, Viola. Don’t get me wrong, don’t take this badly, but it’s no good. Understand? It’s no good. Whatever’s going on in this pretty head of yours – and it is a pretty head, it is, oh, such a pretty head – you must convince yourself, it’s just not going to work.

  I made a mooing noise through his hand which he must have interpreted as a ‘why not?’ and perhaps it was.

  Because … Because … Because of many things. But it will never work, not the way you want it to. Not the way I want it to either maybe. Things are written differently. It’s not ours to change them. C’est clair?

  He kissed me then. Not on my lips, seeing that his hand was still sealing them, but on that cursed nose of mine again and on the eyelids. Peck, peck, peck, about as sexy and threatening as a nanny. Then he withdrew his hand and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He lit two and gave me one, then repeated his question, C’est clair?

  Clear as mud, Mr Vampire. Clear as blood. What was going on here? What was he referring to when he said it wouldn’t work? To the escapade between the two of us? Or to my plan, my defence of Sabine? How much did he know? How much did he reckon I knew? Was his a double-decker answer? If so, did he expect me to read it on both levels, or just on one, or …?

  Oh, this fiddly rapier nonsense, it was driving me mad – all this feinting and parrying and finesse and double- and triple-entendres. Speaking would get me nowhere, only into a deeper and deeper muddle. Better just to shelve the language
of words and rely on the older, wiser one of the body.

  A body conversation with a vampire, though? Would our vocabulary be the same? Necking, for example, how would necking translate into Vampirese? Or love-bites? How, even, a French kiss?

  Don’t think about that, you craven idiot, think of nothing but Sabine. Think of her lying there under the open window like a limp little dummy – drained of strength, defenceless, at his mercy. Think that this is all you can do now to save her, to win time, win time. Think: every second lost to him, a second gained to her. Think … No, better still, don’t think at all; act.

  So, shutting my eyes again – clamping them tight, battening down all of my sense-equipment so that I neither saw nor smelt nor felt nor heard anything save this bare imperative cracking in my head like a whip – I hurled myself, as far as this was possible within the confines of the car, on to Roland’s chest and clung there, murmuring some kind of sentimental gibberish, the wording of which I prefer not to recall. It has little importance, anyway, because it soon turned out that I had battened my senses down so tight and emptied my mind so thoroughly I had clean forgotten about the cigarettes.

  Roland’s, which he had dropped under the impact of my chest against his, landed in the space between the seat and the door, and was retrieved by him with alacrity at the first whiff of burning carpet. Which came very shortly afterwards, leaving me uncertain as to whether he thrust me aside on that account or simply in order to shake himself free. Mine was untraceable save for the continued smell of burning, which grew and grew and thickened and thickened until we were obliged to interrupt all traffic between us, in whatever direction it might have flowed and wherever it might have led us, and run to the house for water.

  End of evening, end of rescue attempt; for me, virtually end of hope as well. Once the fire brigade lark was over, there was no alternative but to sit in Aimée’s dining room making awkward three-way conversation under her faraway but oh so beady gaze that didn’t miss a trick, not a trick.

  Curieux, the way that cigarette landed up where it did. And the car – a little curieux too. Why was it parked outside the gate? Why did you not drive it up to the front door, Roland? Ah, the smoke, c’est ça, of course, the burning – there was not time. Of course, of course.

  It was not her way to show disapproval – it didn’t fit with her loose-reined style – but she seemed to be at the very least disappointed in some important respect with her young vampire colleague. As he ate she eyed him balefully, pushing crossly at her tendrils of escaping hair as if to convey her displeasure through their medium. There was clearly no question now of her leaving me alone with him, or even pretending to do so. She wanted him gone, fast, and made no secret of the fact, carrying on nimbly from one hint to the next.

  And speaking of time, mes enfants, it is twenty past eleven; the others have gone to bed already, and Viola needs a good rest – her father is due to arrive tomorrow (a little warning note rang on these two words, son père, as if his arrival was something to be feared. Good sign.) So, Roland, if you don’t mind hurrying a little with that consommé …

  Roland didn’t mind a bit. He downed the soup in a gulp – not a pretty spectacle to watch, this rapid disposal of the russet-brown liquid – kissed Aimée’s hand, said goodnight to both of us, and was gone. And that was that. Much as I yearned to, I could do nothing more. He had the car, I only a bicycle; if his bloodlust took him to Sabine he would be quenched and through before I was even halfway there. Quite apart from the fact that if he wanted to travel even quicker he could probably turn into a bat, spread his wings and fly. All I could do now was to rely on a twist of garlic and a little metal cross, and hope for … no question of the best but at any rate the least worst: her overnight survival.

  XVII

  Help

  Next morning there was a feel of lawlessness in the château. Not that any rules had been strict, ever, but they had been there, been in place: a few thin strands, holding things together like twine round a bunch of asparagus. Now, school, staff, students, structure, everything seemed to flop apart.

  When I woke up, Christopher already had his music on loud, Aimée was nowhere to be seen, and Serena was thumping around the place waving bits of clothing, packing in a flurry. She was due to leave for Paris by train that morning. Bon voyage, my half-hearted dilettante vampire-chaser; make way for the pros. Breakfast had been laid, lightly mauled by the others, and then left there to congeal in the slatted sunlight. No sign of Mme Goujon either, nor of the little beaded muslin cloths that she used for covering the butter and the jam pots.

  I shooed away the wasps and downed a croissant for the sake of my body – which didn’t seem to appreciate it much, as it left it lying at the entrance of my stomach like an uncollected parcel – and then mounted my bike and set off without a word to anyone.

  What colour would the litmus paper of Ghislaine’s eyes show this morning? This was the only question my head seemed to have room for. I dreaded learning the answer. Dreaded encountering her look, dreaded seeing what I knew I would see there: that dull clouding of despair. No coincidence that in the hasty snapshot world of cliché hope is green.

  And yet I must have undervalued the powers of those two traditional, homespun remedies: holy cross and garlic. Or else I had kept Roland up late enough after all, and after leaving me he had gone straight home to bed, as disoriented as I was by the night’s unfolding events. Or else the consommé had blunted his appetite. Because when I finally found myself standing face to face with Ghislaine, who was sitting quietly writing letters at her desk in the room adjoining Sabine’s, I saw, with a surge of joy so strong it nearly made me dizzy, that things were better. I didn’t even have to check her irises, her smile was so wide.

  She’s sleeping, Viola, isn’t it wonderful? She’s had a good night, she’s eaten breakfast. It was as Dr la Forge said: just a temporary setback. Oh, the relief! I thought we were in for another attack, but now – I feel it in my bones, a mother knows these things – she’s on the mend at last, really and truly. She’s going to pull through.

  Of course she was because if need be I was going to pull her through myself. My father and I in partnership, we were going to pull her. Sabine had weathered this last crucial night with only the flimsiest of safeguards; from now on everything would be easier. From now on we would have an adult on our side – a clever, wily, resourceful adult who would never let himself be bested by a group of resuscitated French freaks.

  I said earlier that the day of the fancy-dress ball was my last unclouded day, but I was overlooking this one. This, in its precarious rim-of-the-volcano way, was a luminous day too. Sitting there chatting to Ghislaine, weaving in my head as I did so an absurd but oh so comforting fantasy of bringing her and my father together, and their falling in love and marrying, and our living, all four of us, in my father’s house, which would then spring alive under Ghislaine’s magic ministrations. (I had to eliminate the boys from my fantasy: not even in a dream dimension would they fit into my father’s fastidious lifestyle. And I had to exclude the house-helpers too because I couldn’t see them adapting very comfortably to a foreign regime. Never mind, Ghislaine and I would manage the housework, we made a good team.) Every so often I poked my head into the bedroom and watched Sabine as she lay there, bathed in the sunlight she so craved, the little cross still glinting in the hollow of her neck – my sacred place. Watched a strand of hair that fell across her face billow backwards and forwards like a golden metronome in time to her regular breathing. It was turning glossy again already, her hair, and so was she. Ghislaine’s maternal radar system had sounded correctly: the menacing presence of illness could no longer be felt. Gone was yesterday’s doll. The room smelt fresh if a bit garlicky; wholesome and vital. Coffee aroma in place of the tang of medicine. A whiff of toothpaste. Soon there might be cigarette smoke as well. Roll on the Gauloises in their blue packets with their victory wings.

  I tiptoed in and sat on the floor for a bit beside the bed,
my face, like Sabine’s, turned towards the sun. I remember that, and I remember how nice it felt – those bright rays dancing on my skin. At some point I think I may have joined her briefly in sleep. Minutes wasted, minutes stupidly squandered, because sleep is not a place you join anyone, but how was I to know they were so precious?

  Around midday I rang Aimée to let her know where I was, and to find out if my father had called, and if so, from where. By the slightly cramped feeling in my stomach as I waited for her answer I realised how closely my present mood of optimism was tied to his arrival. Had she said, No call yet, my hopes would have crashed again. Had she said, From the coast, they would have stayed about level. Had she said, Paris, they would have risen quite a bit. As it was, they rocketed because she said, Yes, mais oui, mais oui, mais oui, petit lapin, and to come back as soon as I could: he had rung from Chartres, where he was resting for a while, having crossed the Channel late yesterday evening and then driven through the night. He would be leaving the moment it was cool enough for him to set out again and should arrive sometime in the afternoon. Les Anglais and their horror of driving in the heat! If you asked her, in weather like this, behind the wheel was the best place to be.

  Even when driving veils were the fashion, Aimée? Even when you were muffled up like a mummy and the dust flew everywhere? Even when you crashed with poor Lady Whatever-her-name-was and sent her to an early grave? I was tempted to say something like this, just to startle her, but I didn’t, of course. My father had taught me virtually nothing, and permitted others to teach me very little, but one thing I did remember him telling me, probably in connection with chess, was: if your opponent underestimates your intelligence the battle is half won.

  When your intelligence is zero, though, how can an enemy underestimate it? My father’s rule of thumb made no provision for that. I ate pot au feu with Ghislaine in the kitchen, then took a bowl up for Sabine but she was still asleep. Deeply, soundly, or so it seemed, snoring a bit but in a light, snuffly way, like a pug-dog. There was no need to worry about an afternoon visit from Roland: Ghislaine had mentioned that his mother had commandeered him for the day. The de Vibreys were holding some kind of réception that evening, she said with a smile (whose significance escaped me, along with so much else), and he wouldn’t be round till late. Late was bearable, late was OK; my father would have arrived by that time and he would ensure that no evil befell. I planted a goodbye kiss on the top of Sabine’s head and she stopped snuffling and turned over quickly – so quickly I had the impression she was aware of my presence. A fact that, stupidly, pleased me at the time. Then I went downstairs, took leave of Ghislaine, got on my bike again and trundled down the road I had trundled down so many times before, leaving a snatch of Mozart in the forest this time to add to the bayings and sighings and roarings and horn-calls and all the other noises encrypted there. ‘Voi che sapete’. My father’s favourite aria. You who are in the know. Honestly, life can sometimes be so trite you’d think it had been scripted by a hack.