Stokers Shadow (6 page)

“How long did it take?” Mary asks further.

“Six or seven years I think.”

“Six or seven years!”

William feels stung. He wonders what the girl's amazement might mean considering her judgment of a moment ago. Does she think it's the sort of novel that could have been whipped off in a week?

“That wasn't his main career, you know,” he replies. “He was Henry Irving's business manager as well.”

“Sir Henry Irving! Yes, I know. He must have been a great man to know. Maybe that's where your father got his inspiration!”

Mary looks down as though meditating on greatness.

William sighs, watching her face for a second, feeling a weight of inevitability on his shoulders. He feels like one of the conspirators in Julius Caesar, boiling with acid cynicism,
fuming at the praise unjustly heaped upon one who is celebrated, yet impotent to move even with his white-hot malice against a man who is already dead.

“And you must have known him too?” she adds looking up with an open and trusting expression.

Caught in mid-frown, William tries to relax his face. “Oh yes. I knew him.”

Mary has slowed down as they are reaching the post box. William tips his hat and smiles. “Well, we must talk about this again, Mary.”

Mary's face breaks into a broad smile, dispelling the pride in William's chest. It isn't her fault, he says to himself, feeling affection for the girl, for her optimism and innocence. The same warmth oozes through William's memories.

He walks on alone with the afternoon fog descending around his shoulders. He is back in last night's dream – the rocking carriage in vast, crystal night. He replays the vision of his father through the bedroom window. It's curious how little this disturbs him, he reflects, considering how very much awake and sensible he felt at the time.

And as he progresses slowly towards the damp-blurred lights of the main road, a memory comes to the forefront of his mind. He is in the Lyceum auditorium again. A fuzzy darkness sweeps across the rows of empty seats in front of him. The theatre smell pervades the cool air: the scent of wax polish; the ghost of perfume from evenings past. William is seventeen and the magic of childhood and the theatre has long passed. But he realizes with a prickly nervousness this is a big night for his father, the eve of Dracula's publication. Bram and the
publisher have been frantically sending notes back and forth for the past few days. His father has been even busier than usual. William – usually shy, morose and distant from his father – has become preoccupied with this, his father's latest venture. He knows there is something special about this book, that it marks a more concentrated, prolonged period of writing than is customary in his father's life. And the result of all the excitement, the event to mark the end of several years of solitary work, is this evening.

Fewer people are present than everyone had hoped. William's mother has not turned up at all, but the young man knows this is just her quirk, her dislike of the macabre subject and her unease with the fact her husband writes it. And there is something slipshod about the presentation. The actors Irving has allowed his father to use from the company are mainly too young and inexperienced for the parts they are reading.

But the main problem is the length of time it is all taking. William's seat is becoming uncomfortable. Dissatisfied noises penetrate the darkness from several areas of the auditorium at once – not the muffled, polite throat clearings of an audience absorbed, but loud, careless coughs and fragments of conversation. This is a “pre-publication reading,” not a performance, and with actors merely standing on podiums running through pages of description and dialogue, it is becoming cumbersome.

There is too ample a stretch of time in which to dwell on all the shortcomings: the hurried nature of the makeup; the white dust of fake grey hair on the actor playing Abraham Van Helsing; the anemic vampire with the weak voice declaring
with a comic lisp that his revenge will spread over centuries. But worst of all is the contrivance of having so much of the reading go to the vampire-hunting hero, Professor Van Helsing, with the thick, fake Dutch accent and the dialogue his father has written which painstakingly recreates the grammatical mistakes such a character might make.

William squirms in his seat towards the back of the main auditorium. Sweat drips down his spine. “Though we men have much valour and determination with which to protect our so dear charges,” Van Helsing drones on, “we must also needs be armed with much knowledge, as knowledge too is a sturdy armour in which we must wrap ourselves. Is it not so, my dear Madam Mina?”

The chatting of the audience has become constant now. There should be a dramatic pause here, but instead there is a steady murmur. “So, I must implore you,” continues Van Helsing, a cloud of dust flying off his wig, “what is it that you are trying to tell us, my brave young patient?”

“Only this, professor,” Mina replies, looking sincerely into the empty seats and indifferent loungers. “He who has wrought all this great misery upon us all … “

Someone guffaws. William feels a wire tensing inside him.

“… the very one who has caused this great ordeal …”

More laughter William's fists tighten.

“… is the saddest soul of all …”

Suddenly, voices from behind him rise even more than usual; their tone is excited and conspiratorial. He hears the word “Irving.” A hush follows; a hush that has been absent for every moment of the long performance; a hush that is for the
benefit of the great actor alone. William knows that Irving is watching somewhere from the back. Hooves begin galloping in William's chest. He wants to rush out of the place altogether. But he is trapped because people will see him and comment on it. So he stays, his heart hammering. He can taste disaster like the air before a storm – tingling, moist and expectant. He knows Irving is going to come up with some “clever” put-down.

Only he doesn't hear it at first. Instead, a sudden eruption of laughter almost drowns the dialogue completely. The seats behind William remain alive with conspiratorial delight, things are being called out from one section of the auditorium to another. “What did he say?” someone calls, and William knows Irving must have left.

“He said …” the speaker replies through laughter, “‘Dreadful!'” The word comes in a rasping, didactic tone, an imitation of Irving.

W
ILLIAM ENTERS QUIETLY
. Ruby, the maid, hovers around him more expertly and less charmingly than Mary, taking his hat and coat. Then he moves into the sitting room where Maud is already reading, one book open in her hand; another, black-bound and anonymous, closed and upon the chair arm. Maud looks at him and smiles.

“What are you reading?” William asks.

“Freud.” Maud closes the book. “Freud and Dracula. I'm psychoanalyzing your family.”

William sits down unhappily. He picks up the newspaper laid on the side table and snaps it open. “And what have you found out?”

“Do you really want to know?”

He peers over the top of the newspaper.

“You want to tell me.”

“Listen to this.”

She puts the Freud book down and picks up the black book, the back of which has Dracula in faded gilt lettering.

Maud clears her throat and unconsciously checks the fastening of her hair. She looks at William with a hint of trepidation and begins the passage of the novel in which Jonathan Harker is asleep on the castle floor and three lascivious women appear out of nowhere to prey on him. William feels his face sting with heat at the strangeness of it. Why would anyone go to sleep on the floor of an old castle anyway? he finds himself thinking. He feels exposed and naked as he prepares to defend his father's skill.

But another sensation quickly takes over. As Maud rhythmically makes her way through the description, peering up at him as she pauses, William feels as though a new nightmare is being unravelled within him. A nightmare of troubling, contradictory passions which are at once familiar and forgotten, long-buried in the deep earth of his memory.

Jonathan Harker feels wicked, burning desire, that one of the women will kiss him and at the same time a sickening dread. He waits with a languorous ecstasy when he smells blood on their lips. But at the very height of this teasing expectation, Count Dracula bursts into the room ordering the women away and claiming the hero for himself.

At this point, Maud stops and looks at William.

“So,” William asks, afraid but defiant. “And what does that tell you?”

“I don't know,” Maud says, her brow furrowing.

William feels his body stiffen. He puts his hand over his mouth pretending to check for stubble.

“But, if my husband wrote that,” continues Maud uncertainly, “and if I was twenty-five years older, your mother's age, with rather more old-fashioned views, I think I might feel threatened by it.”

“She never seemed threatened by it to me.”

“Maybe not in the past, she didn't. But she's threatened by it now, isn't she? She's threatened by what we'll make of it today in 1922 with our greater liberty to discuss matters once hidden.”

“I hardly think so,” says William, deflecting the darkness which looms from Maud's suggestion. “People of my mother's generation were hardly innocent. What about Dorian Gray? Dracula comes practically on its heels.”

“But Dorian Gray talked of perversion while Dracula kept it all hidden and encoded.”

“I don't think there's anything hidden or encoded about it,” William insists, wondering at this lie and feeling his face burn again as he repeats it. “It's a simple, straightforward story about vampirism.”

“I don't think it is about vampirism. I think it's about something else.”

“Naturally,” William responds. “You've been reading Freud.”

“Do you ever think about Henry Irving?”

William shakes his head impatiently.

“I mean,” continues Maud, “about what his influence on the novel might have been?”

“The only influence he might have had is lead actor if Dracula was ever turned into a stage production.” William begins to scan the paper again but immediately his imagination is overtaken by a matching of pictures so vivid and intense it cannot be denied: the pigeons whirling around Irving's statue meld into the pamphlet illustration of the German film, the thin, crooked vampire and the banner garland of flying rats obeying their master.

“Why are you so sure about that?”

“Sure about what?”

“You made up your mind that the answer was ‘no' before I even asked the full question.”

“I don't understand you,” William says frowning, lowering the newspaper again.

“You don't want to talk about Irving and his influence on your father. It's a painful subject for you.”

“Nonsense,” William insists. “I was talking in great detail about Irving to Mary, my mother's new girl.”

“You talked to the maid about Irving?” Maud says.

“She did most of the talking.” William pretends to be absorbed in a headline. “And she's not a maid, I told you. More of a companion.”

“Well, whoever she is, she's lucky to get you to talk about something personal without prising it out of you the way I have to.”

William drops the paper onto his lap. “Firstly, it wasn't a personal conversation, it was small-talk. Secondly, I felt sorry
for the girl at the beck and call of my mother. And lastly and most importantly, I was walking down the same street at the same time so my options were either to talk to the girl or ignore her, pretending not to know who she was. I'm sure that's the course of which my mother would have approved. I'm rather surprised to find you agreeing with her on such matters.”

William is breathless and overheated after this diatribe. He snaps the paper up again, but has to put it down as his wife responds.

“Those were your only two options, were they, William?”

“Yes.”

Feigning confidence, William begins to look at the paper again.

“Sometimes I wonder. You talk about your mother's judgment failing. I'm not so sure she's the only one.”

“What is the matter with you, Maud?”

“I'm sorry,” Maud sighs. “I just find it hurtful when you can be so carefree, so natural with some people, yet so brittle when you're with me.”

“Maud, I can assure you I have not been ‘carefree', as you put it, with anyone in the last little while.” He suddenly feels tender towards her and speaks gently. “You are not missing out on anything. I am quite miserable all the time.”

Quite suddenly, Maud relaxes and laughs affectionately.

Ruby enters with a tea tray.

William and Maud become silent.

Mary drowses, watching the curtains ripple and flutter, caressed by unseen hands, drawn silently through to the other side and returned just as gently into the room. She lies in the room's darkest corner beneath a sheet and a single blanket. The moon radiates like a bright half-halo through the little open square. Blue light skims off the window ledge and touches the tip of the bedpost at her toe
.

Mary follows the dovelike movement of the curtains, carried along by the gorgeous fantasies in Dracula, and the heady, succulent images of blood and death. One passage is replaying in her mind: Jonathan Harker peering out of a castle window at night only to see the Count slowly crawl like a lizard down the sheer vertical wall, his cloak spreading around him like great black wings. She thinks of the disbelief that must accompany such a sight, and the abandon it must take to weave such ideas into a story. She looks into the soft, magical darkness and thinks of Mr. William Stoker
.

William is floating on the undulating breeze. He does not quite recognize the garden around him which abounds with midsummer life: squirrels, rabbits, swifts and swallows darting from tree to tree. But the bright starlight and the intoxicating scent of wild roses seem to echo a world from his childhood, a mythic forest of paradise and plenty which seems to have been always beyond the rim of his imagination. He wafts effortlessly past the grand cedar tree with its levels of luscious green from which heads and tails of squirrels appear and disappear as though lost in the ecstasy of endless discovery. Although the moon is out, there is sunlight too. Day and night interchange constantly like brightness and shadow beneath a half-clouded sky. Patches of the garden dance joyfully in pools of gold, just as others glisten in the silver-blue of night. Each is the equal in beauty to the other; in both moonlight and sunlight every blade and leaf dances with the impossible, glorious happiness of perpetual life and motion
.