Sabine (14 page)

Never mind, said Roland in a carefully unruffled tone, stooping to retrieve those pieces that had slid under the bed, We can amuse ourselves, like Penelope, putting it together again.
On peut s'amuser.

You can, she fired back at him. Well, not fired, but at least there was a trace of the old bark coming back into her voice. You can, Penelope.
We
would rather do something else.

We. Yes, we – beautiful, sumptuous royal plural. In fact Sabine was so tired when she returned to bed that we ended up doing nothing, but even with her dozing we were three against one that afternoon, and the one was increasingly subdued and out of countenance. He left earlier than usual, putting up no show of resistance: a kiss on the hand for Sabine, who wiped it off afterwards on the sheet, another for Ghislaine, and he was gone. A cur slinking off into the dusk. As Christopher and I bicycled back to the château along the darkening road, emptier of traffic at this time of evening, I can remember
feeling almost peaceful inside for once. Sabine was better, and when she was better she was more herself, and when she was more herself she was more mine, and therefore I was better too. Not so jealous, not so mad. The anaemia, the injection marks, the game, the cards, the missing cat – all these things seemed to fit back tidily inside my head in the compartments they had always occupied, prior to my letting them loose. Crumpled puppets, stashed back into their box after the show.

He counted those frigging pieces of puzzle he picked up, Viola. Did you notice? Under his breath he was counting. That makes two of them – we've nailed two of them already.
Les deux vampires, de pire en pire.

This Christopher sang to the strains of
Carmen: ‘L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
…', that bit. I joined him and we shouted the words into the rim of the forest as we sped past, and the forest sucked them up like blotting paper.

In theory the coffins were our next task. Where did our vampire suspects keep their coffins with all that special home-dug earth inside? Count Dracula was run to ground – quite literally – by his pursuers when they noticed the unusually large shipments of Transylvanian soil that preceded his transfer to London. Where did Aimée keep the coffin in which she potted herself out during vegetative phases? Where did Roland and the Marquise keep theirs?

Well, just you try scuffling around the vaults of Château de Vibrey, uninvited, in the wee small hours, looking for empty coffins. Or in the daytime for that matter, looking for full ones. No, Christopher was already losing interest and had refused to accompany us, and on our own Serena and I just didn't have the guts. The long bike ride down the arterial road was daunting enough, with the
camions
lumbering past practically grazing your legs, to say nothing of gaining access to the castle without being seen or carrying out the search itself.

But what else could we do that would give us
definite proof? Because proof was what I craved now. Proof, certainty, anything to put an end to this dreadful pendulum swing between the twin instruments of torture – fear to jealousy, rack to wheel, take your pick and start all over. Sabine was better, ever since eating the chocolate sandwich she had continued to improve steadily, but how long would the improvement last? And would it last? Dr la Forge was hopeful, Ghislaine said; he was sure now it was chlorosis, and the course of chlorosis was nearly always benign.

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?