The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (55 page)

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Helen,” said Brian reassuringly. “The
baron is dead. I saw him go to his death myself. He stepped past me out of the cave mouth and it is four hundred feet down to those rocks. What remained of his body must have been washed out to sea. It took a long time before we discovered the remains of the poor baroness and Hugo.”

Helen nodded meditatively.

“In a way, since you told me their story, I feel very sorry for the baroness and Hugo. Think of the torture they must have gone through. How could the baron have been so inhuman?”

Brian shook his head.

“He was clearly insane. If a man sets himself up as a god, then he does become inhuman. But the story is ended now. We will hear no more of Frankenstein.”

Helen squeezed his hand.

“No, there is so much else to look forward to now.”

On the top of the coach, the five second class passengers sat in less comfort than their travelling companions below. They were tossed about to the swaying rhythm of the coach and had to cling on to whatever hold they could, to prevent themselves from being precipitated on to the road.

Most of them were grumbling, in the fashion of country people, as the chill autumn wind whipped their ruddy cheeks and made their eyes smart.

Now and again the sun would shine thinly down from a blue sky in which long, straggly white clouds blurred its warmth.

One second class passenger rode a little apart from the others, sitting silently by the side of the coachman who had long since given up trying to make conversation with the man. Privately, the coachman had estimated him to be an undertaker or a mortician. He was clad from head to toe in black, with a muffler and hat almost obscuring his deathly white, cadaverous face.

He sat with his eyes staring straight ahead along the roadway, his thin mouth set firmly.

Only now and then would the mouth twitch in a parody of a smile as his mind plotted some vengeance against the people who had destroyed his life’s work, his great creations. And already his mind was forming a new creation, a creation which would be the perfect man.

Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh, the son of a Sutherland army officer and grandson of an eccentric scientist (who was apparently the first man to keep bees in central London and was also the inventor of “dayglo”)
.

After working as a journalist, he became the editor of
Mayfair
and
Penthouse
magazines which led to the publication of his first book
, Your Erotic Fantasies.
This was followed by other how-to sex books, including the bestseller
How to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed.

He made his debut as a horror novelist in 1975 with
The Manitou
(filmed in 1978), since when he has written almost thirty more books in the genre, the most recent titles being
Burial, The Sleepless, Flesh & Blood
and
Spirit.
His first collection of short stories
, Fortnight of Fear,
appeared in 1994. He has enjoyed huge success in Eastern Europe and all of his horror novels have recently been published in Russia
.

“ ‘Mother of Invention’ is set around that part of Middlesex where my grandparents lived when I was young,” explains the author. “It was inspired by all the perfumed evening-gowned ladies who used to come in to kiss me goodnight. They were glassy-eyed and over made-up and walked disjointedly, and I always thought they were rather ghoulish. It was only when I grew older that I realized that their disjointedness was the result of too many gin-and-tonics
.”

H
E LEFT HER
sitting on the sun-blurred verandah under the cherry blossoms, which showered down softly all around her like the confetti on her wedding-day all those years ago.

She was seventy-five now: her hair shone white, her neck was withered, her eyes were the colour of rainwashed irises. But she still dressed elegantly, the way that David always remembered her, with pearl necklaces and silk dresses, and although she was old she was still very beautiful.

David could remember his father dancing around the dining-room with her, and saying that she was the Queen of Warsaw, the most stunning woman that Poland had ever produced, from a nation which was renowned for its stunning women.

“There is no woman to equal your mother: there never will be,” his father had said, on his eighty-first birthday, as they walked slowly together beside the Thames, at the foot of the steep hill which led up to Cliveden. Dragonflies had darted over the dazzling water; oarsmen had shouted and a girl had screamed with glee. Three days later, his father was dead, quite peacefully, in his sleep.

David’s tan suede shoes crunched across the gravel. Bonny was already waiting for him in his decrepit blue open-topped MG, applying a violently-pink shade of lipstick in the rearview mirror. Bonny was his second wife, and eleven years younger than he was – blonde, still child-faced, funny – and totally different from Anne, his first wife, who had been brunette and very serious and
lank
, somehow. His mother still didn’t approve of Bonny. She rarely said anything, but he could tell that she thought her thoroughly ill-behaved for taking a loving husband away from his family. As far as his mother was concerned, marriages were made in heaven, even if they often descended into hell.

“Your father would have had some very strong words to say to you, David,” she had told him, staring at him resentfully, unblinking, her head tilted to one side, her fingers fiddling with her diamond engagement ring and her wedding-band. “Your father said that a man should always stay faithful to one woman, and one woman only.”

“Father loved you, mother. That was easy for him to say. I didn’t love Anne at all.”

“Then why did you marry her and give her children and make the poor girl’s life an absolute misery?”

David still didn’t really know the answer to that. He and Anne had met at college and somehow they had just got married. The same thing had happened to dozens of his friends. Twenty years later they were sitting in mortgaged houses in the suburbs staring out of the window and wondering what happened to all those laughing, golden-legged girls they
should
have married.

What he did know, however, was that he loved Bonny in a way that he had never loved Anne. With Bonny, he could understand for the very first time what it was that his father had seen in his mother. A captivating look about her that was almost angelic; an overwhelming femininity; a softness of skin; a shining of hair. He could sit and watch her for hours sometimes, as she sat at her drawing-board, painting wallpaper designs. He could have watched her for a living, if only it had paid a salary.

“How was she?” asked Bonny, as David eased himself into the car. He was a tall man, very English-looking in his rusty-coloured sweater and his fawn twill trousers. He had inherited his mother’s deep-set Polish eyes and her dead-straight hair, but his Englishness was established beyond doubt by the same long, handsome face as his father, and his insistence on driving the tiniest of sports cars, even though he was six feet, two inches tall.

“She was fine,” he said, as he started up the engine. “She wanted to know where you were.”

“Hoping I’d left you for ever, I suppose?”

He swung the car in a wide semi-circle, and headed off down the long avenue of pollarded lime-trees which gave The Limes Retirement Home its name.

“She doesn’t want to break us up, not any more,” said David. “She can see how happy I am.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps she thinks that the longer you and I stay together, the less chance there’s going to be of you going back to Anne.”

“I wouldn’t go back to Anne for all the Linda McCartney meat-free foods in her freezer.” He checked his watch, the Jaeger-le-Coultre that had once belonged to his father. “Talking of food, we’d better get moving. Remember we promised to drop in to see Aunt Rosemary for tea on the way back.”

“How could I ever forget?”

“Oh, come on, Bonny, I know she’s odd, but she’s been part of the family for years.”

“So long as she doesn’t start dribbling, I don’t mind.”

“Don’t be unkind.”

They reached the gates of the nursing-home, and turned east, toward the motorway, and London. The late-afternoon sun flickered through the trees, so that they looked as if they were driving through a Charlie Chaplin movie.

“Does your Aunt Rosemary ever visit your mother?” asked Bonny.

David shook his head. “Aunt Rosemary isn’t my real aunt. She was more like my father’s personal assistant – receptionist, general
factotum, secretary – although I never saw her doing any secretarial work. I don’t know who she is, exactly. She came to stay with us when I was about twelve or thirteen and after that she never left . . . not until father died, anyway. Then she and mother had some kind of falling-out.”

“Your mother isn’t exactly the forgiving kind, is she?”

They drove for a while in silence, then David said, “Do you know what she showed me today?”

“You mean apart from her continuing disapproval?”

David ignored that remark. He said, “She showed me an old photograph of her whole family – her grandfather, her grandmother, her mother and her father and her three brothers and her, all standing outside the Wilanow Palace in Warsaw. They were all very good-looking, as far as I can see.”

“When was this photograph taken?”

“I think it was about 1924 . . . mother would have been five or six, that’s all. But it gave me an idea for her birthday present. I thought I might see if I could trace her life back to when she was born . . . I know father had hundreds of photographs and letters and stuff. I could make her a kind of
This Is Your Life
book.”

“Won’t it take an awful lot of work? You’ve still got that thesis to finish for the Wellcome Foundation.”

He shook his head. “The whole attic is crammed to the rafters with photograph albums and diaries. Father kept them all in immaculate order. He was that kind of man. Very neat, very precise. A perfectionist. Well . . . he’d have to be.”

“Where did he meet your mother?”

“In Warsaw, in 1937. Didn’t I tell you? He went to Poland to assist the great Magnus Stothard when Sir Magnus was called to operate on Count Szponder, to remove a tumour on his spine. Unsuccessfully, I’m afraid. My mother came with her family to one of the dinners the Szponder family gave in Sir Magnus’s honour . . . this was
before
the operation, I might add. My mother wasn’t an aristocrat, but her father was very respectable . . . something in shipping, I think. In those days, my mother’s name was Katya Ardonna Galowska. She always used to tell me that she wore a grey silk dress with lace on the collar, and sang a song called
The Little Song-Thrush
. Apparently my father sat staring at her with his mouth open. He invited her to spend a holiday in Cheltenham, which she did, in the following spring. Of course things started looking rather threatening in Poland, so she stayed in England, and she and my father were married, and that was that.”

“Did your mother never see her family again?”

“No,” replied David. “Her brothers joined the Polish Resistance
and nobody ever found out what happened to them. Her father and mother were denounced as Jews by one of her father’s business partners, and were sent to Birkenau.”

They were joining the M4 now, and he had to adjust his rearview mirror because Bonny had altered it when she was putting on her lipstick. A huge truck blared its horn at them, and David had to swerve back into the feeder lane as it came bellowing past.

“You’re taking your life into your hands,” said Bonny. Then, as they rejoined the motorway, and picked up speed, “Do you remember that programme,
Your Life In Their Hands
? That surgery thing, where they showed people having operations?”

“Of course I do. Father was on one of them, doing a liver transplant.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

David nodded proudly. “They called him the Tailor of Gloucester, because his suturing was always so incredibly neat. He said the trouble with today’s surgeons is that their mummies never taught them to sew. He always used to sew on his own buttons and take up his own trouser-cuffs. I think he would have embroidered his patients if he ever had half a chance.”

David’s hand was resting on the gear-shift, and Bonny laid her hand on top of it. “It’s strange to think that if some old Polish count hadn’t had a tumour on his spine, and if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland, we wouldn’t be together now.”

Aunt Rosemary lived in a small bungalow in New Malden, in an uninspiring street that was straddled by giant pylons. Her front garden was covered in concrete, which had been scored with a crazy-paving pattern, and a concrete birdbath stood in the centre of it, with a headless concrete robin perched on the rim. The hedge was tangled with last autumn’s leaves and crisp-bags.

David rang and Aunt Rosemary slowly heaved her way to the door. When she opened it up, they could smell lavender furniture-polish and liniment, and the sourness of unchanged flower-vase water.