Stokers Shadow (9 page)

William wonders what his expression was revealing. He gives a business-like cough and takes himself off to another section, the quaintly ancient floor creaking beneath him. He drifts over to the tobacco stall, where his gaze is claimed by long, thin Turkish cigarettes which lie in little pyramid arrangements under glass. There is something pleasingly forbidden about them; their appearance carries an echo of the Eastern-style opium dens of the city now extinct but once the secret playground of his father's class and generation.

A female form draws quite close to his left side. Without looking, he can see she is dressed in a light-grey coat, fastened rather loosely at the waist. If a lady, he thinks, she must be of dowdy disposition. He notices that she is craning her neck to see his face. The sultry bazaar woman wafts back into his mind. And a second later, he finds himself addressed.

“Mr. Stoker!” the young voice says, gasping in surprise. “I knew it was you!”

He spins quickly to see Mary's face, with more colour than usual, animated with surprise and delight.

William finds himself skipping a breath and taking a halfstep backward. Her twinkling blue eyes and optimistic smile whirl in a cocktail with the Bacchanalia already surrounding
his senses. The lurid shimmering cloak of his desire is suddenly edged with the most exquisite innocence.

“What a coincidence!” she cries, smiling more brightly as though reacting to the surprise in his face.

William feels his cheeks burn but is determined to keep a sense of composure. Mary's straightforwardness is as unsettling as it is charming; he has to struggle against the impropriety of such openness even while he enjoys the warmth from her vivid expression. A frowning ginger-haired counter clerk has appeared behind the tobacco display. William turns from him to address Mary and, in doing so, figuratively takes her arm; they do not touch but a physical understanding causes her movements to coincide with his as though she is a mirror image. They sway away from the clerk attached, like Siamese twins.

“So my mother has set you free for an afternoon,” he says, feeling the mention of his parent will absolve him of anything improper. A quick glance behind, however, proves that the clerk's interest has, if anything, grown to full disapproval.

Craving the open, where glances and stares might seem less stifling, William guides Mary down the creaking aisle toward the exit. Mary explains, somewhat awkwardly, that she did not seem to be needed so has come out to see the sights. Not really listening to her, William replaces the mango jar on a shelf as he passes.

They cross the threshold into the sunlit open and William asks her what she has seen. Excited again, Mary names the places she has passed. She becomes especially animated as she talks of the bustling life of Covent Garden and how it made her
feel she was in Italy, and how no place in London really felt like England but usually like some other country. As they walk along, William realizes he does not know their destination, or where and when it might be proper for them to part. With an oozing pleasure, he becomes aware that Mary's abandonment is so great the question is not even occurring to her. An idea – a folly of flirtation but harmless enough – passes through his mind; they are coming close to the Ritz Hotel and William has an idea he would like to see this girl lost amidst the extravagant leaves of Palm Court, an excellent place for afternoon tea. He feels light and youthful as he steers her through the wide entrance with the wrought iron gate lodged permanently open. Mary halts in mid-sentence – she was talking about how she feels watched by the griffins and gargoyles that perch upon so many buildings. William registers her soft confusion with a raising of his eyebrow and a smile.

“Where are we going?” she asks, as their footsteps clatter over the shining marble entrance floor.

“Follow me,” he replies smiling. “Let's sit down and have some tea.”

Mary stares in something between fear and wonder at the many layers of splaying palms, at the crystal ceiling and at the insanely ornate fireplace with golden nymph and cherub statues reaching out in three-dimensional relief, holding cups and swords and bunches of grapes. William coaxes her to sit before one of the Ritz employees, who is dressed like an overdone courtier, has time to pull out her seat. He orders quietly while Mary lets her cloth bag flop by her feet and takes it all in. Then he turns back to watch her clear blue eyes scan the
surroundings, not so much like the innocent fawn of poetry as the sentient, critical being he knows her to be. It occurs to him that, rather than being impressed by the luxury, she might actually be horrified by the gaudiness. He waits while she settles, and when she first meets his eye, she smiles with a warm but unspecific enjoyment.

“What do you think?” he asks.

She returns his smile, knowing she is being teased. The expression and the pause that follows are perfectly judged to make William realize that she is not an underling, maid, or young woman in need of help or patronage. She is William's equal, someone who, except for the natural advantages of age, can match him in every respect.

“It's so lavish,” she replies at last, “more like a cathedral than a tea room.”

“I used to come here when it was first built,” William replies with a hint of apology. He realizes he must have been thinking about Maud and their courtship days when he decided to bring Mary here. He must have thought the excitement he once shared in this place could be transferred somehow to the present and to a different coupling. “It was quite the thing once,” he says simply, shifting in his chair. “How are you enjoying Dracula?”

“Oh, I wanted to talk to you about that!” Mary replies, returning to her fully animated, positive self. “I've had the strongest reactions all the way through this book.” She bends over and reaches into her bag, pulling out the battered novel with the faded cover.

“You've brought it with you!”

“I was in the library before I started to explore,” she says, blushing again and William wonders why.

She puts it down on her knee and looks at him intently. “I have this feeling …” she says, rooting him with her ocean-blue eyes. Then she looks down for a second, trying to work out how to say it. “It's like vampirism isn't entirely bad.” Mary looks up again and then shakes her head, frustrated that she cannot explain.

William smiles and finds himself glancing around at the other mainly empty tables. The only other customers are a lady with a long feather in her hat that dangles every time she takes a sip of tea, and a demonstrably bored younger companion. They seem to be beyond earshot. He wonders why he should be worried. Perhaps it is Mary's earnestness. There are devils of cynicism carved into the very foundations of this city. Mary cannot begin to imagine how they wait to devour her.

“What I'm trying to say,” she continues, “is that something happens to people, to Lucy and Mina, when they fall under the influence of the vampire. It's as though they get mixed up with Dracula, become part of him and he becomes part of them, and then – and this is the strangest thing – it's as if the good characters … the ones we are on the side of … become bad.”

William looks at her frowning, struggling to understand.

“What I mean is,” she continues, “When they – Dr. Van Helsing and the others – go to kill Lucy in her coffin, they become worse than Dracula. At least he doesn't pretend to be good.” She sighs, dissatisfied with her explanation.

“I understand what you're saying,” says William sincerely. “The villain becomes more sympathetic as the story goes on.”

“Yes,” she agrees helpfully, still not quite happy.

“Perhaps it's because my father was an Irishman. He had a complicated view of heroes and villains. It's something that happens to those of us from the colonies,” he says, looking directly at Mary, indicating that he means her too. “I think we find it difficult to stick to one opinion about good and evil.”

“Why?” she asks thoughtfully. “Why would that be?”

“Because our masters are at once our friends and our enemies, depending on how we feel treated.” He catches her serious, intelligent gaze and continues. “And in any case, they can never be completely our friends, simply because they are our masters.”

Mary continues to look at him searchingly. William finds his cheek burning. “Like my father and Henry Irving,” he continues. “To my father, Irving was master, enemy and friend.” William notices a strange silence falling around them. His voice is soft but it carries. A clinking cup from the table of the feather-hatted lady alerts him to the fact that people are listening; something in his tone must have told them of a possible impropriety. But William continues to meet Mary's gaze. She is leaning slightly towards him across the table, drawing words from his innermost depths. He is a bottle uncorked, spilling ideas which he was hardly aware of possessing.

“There's a kind of a devotion that runs through the Stoker line,” he says. “My grandfather, Abraham, toiled devotedly for the English in Dublin Castle, sacrificing and resenting all the way, passed over for promotion, locked out of the highest social circles because he was too Irish.”
How long is it since I have even talked about all this with Maud?

He seems to float away from himself for a moment and watch himself from another table – a flushed, middle-aged man unburdening himself before a beautiful and intrigued young woman. The intensity of the couple shows they are sharing secrets. The nature of the secrets hardly matters; shared confidence always weaves intimacy.

William knows why the feather-hatted lady and her companion have gone silent. His soft, resonant tones waft the flavour of yearning through the air. The twin subjects of family and devotion have been chosen because, from here, he can unravel his love song, or at least its mournful prelude. William has been here before – to this very place many years ago with Maud, speaking in the same soft, intense tones about similar things, drawing the same warm focus from his companion. Why am I trying to relive it all now? he wonders.

But Mary seems fascinated; soft fires show in her irises. William finds he cannot stop. “Anyway, Abraham passed on his disease to my father, although in a different form.”

“You mean Irving?” asks Mary.

“Yes. Not the British Empire exactly. But another kind of icon. The prince of the stage.”

William is surprised by how romantic his voice sounds and by how much the girl seems under his spell. Yet he feels a hypocrite; however poor his forebears' attempts to escape this family curse, no one's struggle seems as bleak and half-hearted as his own.

“But you don't see yourself as Irish, do you?” she asks, still excited.

“By blood, I'm completely Irish,” William replies.

“But Mrs. Stoker – surely she's English.”

“No, she's Irish too.”

“But her accent, and she seems so …” Mary doesn't finish but William thinks he understands.

“People of my mother's class and aspirations do not necessarily keep their original tongues,” he says with a slight smile. “Has she not told you of her years in Dublin?”

“No. She doesn't speak much, except to ask for things.”

The serving girl comes with tea, dainty sandwiches and an assortment of cakes. She places the tray before them without a sound and begins to pour the tea. William and Mary are silent. The serving girl catches William's eye – a hostile look – as she switches the tea spout from one cup to another. William's face burns. But Mary is oblivious, looking around contentedly. The serving girl leaves.

“I hope my mother is paying you fairly,” William says hoarsely.

Mary gives a slight cough and withdraws the cup from her lips, putting it down on the saucer.

“We have never talked about that,” she says, dabbing her mouth with a serviette and colouring.

“What do you mean you haven't talked about it?” William asks rather too forcefully.

Mary looks up with a hint of pleading in her eyes, as though she'd rather leave the subject alone.

“Nothing really. We've just made no arrangement about that side of things.”

The black clouds of impotence suddenly clear from William's mind. The fire of action burns in his heart. Armour
tightens around his chest. He hears his father's voice whispering about just crusades and battles found by providence in the most unlikely corners of one's life. Here, at last, is a fair, pale maiden who needs rescuing. Only the perversity is distracting, that he must save her from his own mother.

He shifts in his seat and covers his mouth with his palm. “Explain this to me again, Mary,” he begins. “You're telling me my mother has made no provision or specific undertaking to pay you?”

Mary stares back with wide open eyes, the cup handle suspended in one hand.

“Well,” she begins, pained, “there has been no mention of it … and I haven't asked!” She blurts the last part as though defending Mrs. Stoker.

William leans forward and rubs his hands together. “Mary,” he says quietly, “if you are acting as a companion to an older lady, in other words as a friend, someone who would attend the same events, meet the same people and be introduced into the same society, it might be acceptable for you not to draw a salary. But this, as I understand it, is not the case. Correct me if I am wrong.”

Mary looks defeated and embarrassed. “Well, Mrs. Stoker mentioned something about that. She said we would do things and go to different places.”

“But you haven't?”

“Not yet.” The words drop like soft clay and her moist gaze rests upon the table.

William suddenly regrets spoiling her tea. He realizes that in his fervour he has been pushing her into one of two imperfect
worlds, that of official servant or unpaid friend. He would like her to be a companion so that the growing intimacy between them might continue. But he cannot live with himself if he lets his mother exploit her; it would confirm his own nonrebellion.