Stokers Shadow (13 page)

You've never found any difficulty in doing that, thinks Florence, but she only smiles sadly. She thinks of the man before her as a clown, albeit a successful and brilliant one. She is reflecting on how inextricably her husband's fate is bound to him.

“We are demi-spheres, Bram and I,” Irving continues, returning to his face in the mirror. “Our fates are joined.” Florence watches, almost past caring now, wondering what poem or melodrama he will plunder next for his extravagant claims of friendship. He is using her to warm up, she realizes. He is airing out his lungs for the performance. “Do you understand, Florence?” he adds, strengthening the white between the furrows on his forehead.

Florence leans back against the wall, relaxed now, surprised he has given her another chance to assert herself. “No, not at all,” she says matter-of-factly. “Not even slightly.”

“We are part of the same whole.”

Florence lets out an unhappy laugh. “Well,” she says, her eyes narrowing, “that makes me feel very left out.” Immediately, she wishes she had not spoken. Something private has been revealed. It is Irving's hypnotic mix of gentleness and insolence that has woven it out from her; his undulating interchange between style and content.

Irving looks towards her again. “But Florence, you are the very jewel of our lives,” he says, leaning towards her affectionately.

“Our lives?” Florence repeats, her face burning as she wishes he would remember who he is.

“No one could be more important to us,” he adds, replacing the brush in the can and turning towards her once more.

“Us?” she repeats, hoping he will reverse his mistake quickly. She finds it disorienting, like thunder on a clear day. She wishes she could believe he was being malicious. She would better know how to deal with it. But his sincerity is overwhelming. It is as though she has been enveloped in Irving's world of fantasy and distortion. And the terror of it is that here the distortions seem real, normal and decent; they are allied to politeness and respect.

“Us,” Irving repeats firmly.

She stares at him. The silence lengthens. Florence feels her lip droop and quiver slightly and she envies him his armour of paint. She tells herself he would not be so brave or bold without it.

“Us?” she says again, tugging at his supreme presumption, unable to leave it alone.

“Us,” he repeats again, his voice full of understanding and deliberation, with the certainty of truthfulness. Something beyond Florence's understanding has reached inside her world, something dark and unwholesome, something which merges the barriers and borderlines upon which she relies for her balance and sanity.

And then it happens; a storm breaks within Florence. Her sinews and nerves take on a life of their own, propelling her along the bare floorboards towards the door. Solid walls have for the moment become a waterfall, an irrational whirl of constant movement.

Before her world stops spinning she is in the corridor outside Irving's dressing room. Tears have spilled onto her cheeks and she is leaning up against the wall, her chest heaving.

The leaves scatter and swirl, following William down the street, or so it seems. The very atmosphere is pulsating with life, whispering with triple-echo softness through gratings and up servants' staircases. The breeze passes him, circles, turns unexpectedly and strokes his face in passing. The soft hands seem like envoys of a long-dead master, pulling him toward memory; towards the overpowering smell of greasepaint and the cloistered world of the Lyceum backstage. William's face is held rigid by Mr. Irving's dark hypnotic stare and his child's sense of momentousness as the actor continues to paint Mephistophelian highlights into his features. To be paid such attention to by the great one, the man whom even his father – who is standing off and nodding indulgently – defers, is the very crown of his life so far. As Mr. Irving's brush works over his forehead with the black paint, William feels as though he is being initiated, handed over from his father to the master to be groomed and taught at a
higher level. He feels a thrill of excitement at the thought. He feels that the great Mr. Irving might be his father now
.

W
ILLIAM TURNS NORTH
toward Belgravia, wondering at this ancient, buried desire to be Irving's disciple, and even his son. He thinks of how this plough of memory should turn over such fresh-feeling guilt after all this time. Yes, as a child he too had adored Irving, he finally realizes, just as his father had done; he had longed for the actor's attention and coveted his guardianship. Is this the warp in his manhood that has plagued him all along? Was he stuck between fathers, and did he lose himself in the battle at some crucial stage?

As the breeze shifts over on his face once more, he thinks of all those dreams of youth; the visions of glories yet untasted, valour yet untried. He feels the greasepaint on his face once more and senses a cruel and goading spirit within him. What drab and unheroic mission are you on at this moment? the voice asks him.

Maud, as it turns out, agreed wholeheartedly that he should arrange a larger monthly stipend to his mother to cover a payment for Mary. His wife was quite animated at his idea, feeling, no doubt, this was a sign of something stirring in her husband – a sense of mission, perhaps. Maud's trust weighs on him now and he feels himself a sad and parasitic creature, planning and conniving beyond the scope of any decent woman's imagination. If only he could release that part of himself that wanted to exploit the situation and let it tumble into its dim animal cave, leaving the noble part of himself alone. How righteous he would feel, then, how like the knight of his childhood imagination.

He thinks of the unspeakable creature within him and wonders for a second at all the things that might happen if he lets this animal have full sway and act out his darkest desires. He imagines his unclean hands reaching out in the darkness, waiting to fall on vulnerable flesh. And as the vague form of the victim turns into Mary, the boulder of unease turns in his chest. She has become suddenly younger in his mind; she is no longer connected with the Ritz and tea nor with their mild flirtations in his mother's home. She has become connected rather with his boyhood, with his young self in Irving's dressing room. He finds he cannot mature her into a woman in his imagination even for a moment. She, like him, appears as a trusting one amidst overbearing giants. And her trust now destroys his passion. He lets the dark fantasy loose and, with a shiver, presses on in the direction of his mother's house, afternoon fog descending around his shoulders.

T
HE WALLS DRIP
with a steady hollow ring – droplets hitting an unseen basin. Florence tries to block her ears to the sound but she feels paralyzed. A group of men – she knows Bram and Irving to be among them – are murmuring something beyond her vision, somewhere by her feet. Florence's gaze is fixed at the ceiling of the vault which throbs at intervals, its sparse deep red veins bloating, illuminating the dark capillaries around them and then fading back into the stone.

The mumbling men have decided something. Bram's face appears, smiling but a little worried beneath the beard. He looks a little old today, his shoulders hunched. He carries a thick wooden stake sharpened roughly to a point, but carefully
varnished even on the most jagged parts. Irving, all in black like a priest, stands off holding a black book, mouthing the words as if trying to memorize them before a performance.

“Don't worry, Florrie,” Bram says to her softly, “it's just a rehearsal.”

“What do you want me to do?” Florence finds herself asking.

Bram sighs and draws a little closer to her ear. “Well confidentially, this is not very good,” he says. “It's a foreign play. They've made a muddle of the thing. But we have to perform it anyway.”

He rests the stake on her chest so that the point nips the skin between her ribs. A small piece of stone from the ceiling of the vault lands on her forehead; it is soggy and warm.

“The theatre's on fire!” shouts Irving, looking around at the dropping wet clay. There is still no audience, just her grown son, William, who sits dirty-faced and urchin-clad in a dim corner eating a potato, chimney-sweep apparatus at his side. There is no sign of fire. But Irving and Florence's husband scamper rather comically off through a tunnel in the vault, her husband carrying the stake and mallet with him. William watches after them and takes another bite of his potato. More stone falls, landing in dollops all around the crater floor of the cave. Florence pulls herself up only to find she is chained tight to a concrete slab. The links scrape hard against her wrists and ankles. William gets up slowly, wipes himself down and – without picking up his rods and brushes – leaves.

Harder rocks fall and a noise like thunder begins to grow. Florence cannot seem to tell where the sound is coming from;
it seems to be everywhere, echoing and getting louder. Suddenly, there is a crashing sound and white foam gushes from the same tunnel that Irving, Bram and William left through, hitting the floor and spurting up in a thousand bubbles. The sea water first blinds and then drenches her, pulling her hard in every direction, tearing at the manacled flesh of her wrist, stinging her eyes and shooting up her nose. And a moment later everything is calm. She is no longer chained and horizontal, but propped on a cushion. The taste of salt is still on her tongue, but otherwise she is in her own morning room, warmth and silence surrounding her.

She looks at the windows to see fog has descended, the first in a long time. It curls like smoke in places and hangs thick, like milk, edging the dark leaves near the window. Florence slowly recalls her defeat that morning; she disentangles it from her nightmare with an almost callous precision. She wishes to outface the dragon of that humiliation.

Florence runs through the details of her encounter with Mary, feeling the pain yet relishing the chance to face it down. So this is what happened – she thinks – this is what you have brought me to. Her accusation is addressed to the universe – to everything and nothing at once. She finds her mountain of defiance growing, roving in search of another such battle, one that will sear her with the same hot flames of self-reproach, one that will crack the shell of her anger and spill it into total, outright war.

She remembers the moving picture. She had secured the address at which it was to be shown this evening from Mr. Thring, saying she should know in case she decided to engage
her own lawyer. She had no intention of engaging a lawyer when she said this, and did not quite know why she had suggested that she might. But like everything else today, self-knowledge of her motivations descends after the event. An impending battle now stirs in her chest. She was merely thinking ahead, she realizes. She was reserving an option to go forth and meet her enemy.

W
ILLIAM STANDS STILL
at the corner, wondering whether to follow the man who has just passed him. There is a strange, tickling sensation in his chest and stomach, nothing like the fear he thought he would feel. The moment is replaying itself over and over, though the footsteps have died.

He heard the man approach, saw the dark outline of the bowler hat and the shoulders beneath. A middle-aged form with a beard emerged from the fog, an ordinary man with no hint of ectoplasm, no deathly pallor. And the commonplace, unremarkable feeling of it all could almost cause William to ignore one clear fact: the man was his father.

He recognized the style of dress, the beard, even his father's age – in his early forties, six or seven years before Dracula. The gait was so precisely as William remembers it, at once brisk, yet with a slight stoop on his left side.

And William carried on walking, for a few moments at least. He carried on walking because he couldn't think of what else he should do. And now he has stopped, realizing the impossible really has come true and that he may as well acknowledge it. His father's ghost has just passed him. He finds himself smiling at the glibness of it all. This is not how
a ghost is supposed to appear, he thinks. He merely passed as another man on the street passes, appearing conscious of the stranger, William, acknowledging him with a slight, nervous change of expression, but not looking directly at him or speaking. Such is the custom between men who have not been introduced. William almost missed the incident completely.

And now that his father has appeared to him a second time, William feels a surge of curiosity. Can I run after and overtake him? William asks himself. Does he know he is a ghost? Would he stop and talk and admit the impossible? But with each galloping thought, he knows the chances of finding the ghost are slipping away. Both times he has seen his father it has been a fleeting moment, one that scoops into his world from nowhere, making little sense if one is to believe in ghosts as messengers. If his father had wanted to speak to him, then why has he not done so? Why appear through glass in the middle of the garden past midnight, or emerge in the fog when appearance is assured to be followed by disappearance? There is an insulating wall between them, William feels. A strong instinct tells him that it means to remain. His father appears just long enough to rearrange the strands of his thoughts. The contact is just close enough to nudge his heart and brain into frantic activity and to question everything he has taken for granted. William knows this alone is a strong argument for disbelief; he knows that it proves his father's image is sent forth not from heaven or hell but from his own unsatisfied, questioning mind. But that does not stop the tingle of pleasure, or the sense of the extraordinary.

William begins walking again slowly, reluctant to leave the site but aware of the futility of remaining. In a short while he turns into his mother's street which is becoming alive with the first signs of Saturday evening activity. A car zooms past, its headlights like twin moons in the fog. Travelling laughter echoes down the canyon of the street. Farther down towards his mother's house, he sees the dark-hood outline of a taxi cab. A figure – his mother, William thinks – emerges from the pathway and is guided in by the waiting driver who then turns and climbs into the driver's seat. William thinks of striding to try and catch the car before it leaves, but holds himself back. The car pulls out and passes him. He presses on, realizing that his mother was only half of his unfinished business.