Sabine (15 page)

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.

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 the 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.

She took it off when she saw me, and I noticed that behind it the tears were flowing just as copiously as if she hadn't been wearing it at all. For a moment my reasoning stayed trustingly with the onions. Then, as I moved closer, I saw the colour of her eyes: deep olive, almost khaki, and in a flash my mind lurched forward into the terror zone. It was Sabine. I knew it was Sabine: she was worse again. Not
much
worse, or Ghislaine wouldn't have been in the kitchen at all, she'd have been in the sickroom, but worse. Significantly worse.

What's happened, Ghislaine? For God's sake, tell me quick. There's been a relapse, hasn't there?

She nodded, and wiped the tears angrily away with the corner of a chequered dishcloth.

It's so stupid of me, forgive me,
ma petite,
but I can't help it. It's nothing serious, I'm sure, just a temporary setback. A fluctuation, like Dr la Forge says, in the normal course of the disease. Nothing to worry about. And I don't worry, she went on quickly, flashing me a wild, unconvincing smile,
I'm not worrying. It's just that … Things were going so well, and now …

Roland is back, isn't he.

It wasn't a question, I didn't ask it, I just said it.

Her face lit up with a proper smile now, although only a thin, wistful one, and she took my hand and brushed it against her cheek: a soothing measure to counteract my jealousy.

Oh, yes, thank goodness, he is back. He came last night, just before it happened. I would have preferred you, of course, my little English nurse who needs no instructions, but,
tu vois,
it was such a comfort to have someone with me.

Tu vois, tu sais, tu comprends.
Yes, I saw all right, and I knew and I understood – what had happened, what was happening and what was going to happen – but still I was powerless. And still without anything I could call a plan. Knowledge, a cheap cross and a plait of garlic – these were all I had at my disposal. The temptation to throw myself into Ghislaine's arms and blurt out everything was so strong that I had to hold on to the edge of the table to stop myself. Clutch at it hard and bite the inside of my cheeks, too, until they hurt. If I faltered and unburdened myself on her kind, welcoming shoulder she would never let me near Sabine again. Motherly, yes, but she was Sabine's mother, not mine, and I must remember this. She would listen to my rantings with a sampler of expressions on her face that would go from surprise to anger, passing
through disbelief, irony, dismay and stupefaction on the way, and ending up, like as not, at sheer naked fright. Poor Viola, jealousy has affected her reason. She would call up Aimée, and Aimée would flap and telephone my father, and probably plunge me into a cold bath for good measure while she waited for the call to come through. Then she would summon Dr la Forge, and he would diagnose a
crise de nerfs
– a nervous breakdown due to stress – and prescribe rest and tonic and segregation, and I would be dragged away and sedated and put to bed in a darkened room and left there helpless while Aimée and her vampire cronies … I could see it all, clear as if it had already happened. No, I must resist, must combat that pathetic chick instinct to run to the hen-bird for protection in time of danger. My only hope now – our only hope now – lay with Sabine herself.

Can I go up and see her?

Of course you can, Viola, she would love it. Only go quietly. Don't wake her if she's sleeping. She needs sleep, this morning she looked so tired that I … Oh, I'm sorry, pay no attention – these wretched onions …

The sickbed scene that followed was what Aimée would have called
pénible
– a word she used often, particularly in regard to the regrettable state of her most valued possessions such as the carpet, the piano, the screen, and the upholstery of the Peugeot. (That's what comes of living so long, you old
mutant, and being so tight with your money. Why not splash out on the first of each century? Be a devil. Should be easy when you're half one already.) I knew it would be so –
pénible,
pathetic – but I had to play my part. I had at least to try.

Sabine was not asleep, although I would have had no qualms about waking her if she had been: I had deliberately left Ghislaine's request on this point unanswered. She was lying there motionless, propped up on the pillows in an artificial, ceremonious-looking fashion, as if arranged by some energy other than her own. Her hands stuck out stiffly like a doll's, palms to the ceiling; her hair too had a doll-like quality about it: brushed tidily at the front but not at the back. Strands of it stuck to the pillowcase at odd angles to the head: by these dull gold rays against their white backdrop I was reminded of a monstrance.

Perhaps this was one reason why I dropped down on my knees by her bedside. Another was in order to strew the garlic under the bed without her seeing. And the third was to beg her forgiveness before I started on my outlandish tale. What I had to do seemed so cruel. I already knew it would serve no purpose other than upsetting her and weakening her further. It wouldn't even make her laugh, or not for long.

Well? (
Alors?
Oh, that ductile word of hers, what was it now? So faint it was almost a sigh. How
could
he have done this to her? How
could
he, how
could anyone?) Well, what is it, Viola? Can't be that bad. Go on,
vas-y,
spit it out. My schedule for today is pretty empty, you can take all morning.

I spat all right. I spewed. After a few initial stumbles, especially over the key term ‘vampire', which I had to expel by force it rang so dotty, the words came spilling out of me like corn from a sack, abundant, unstoppable. And virtually impossible to stuff back into the sack again, although Sabine's first reaction, when the last grains hit the floor, was, predictably, to make me try.