Stokers Shadow (16 page)

Suddenly, Mrs. Stoker says something. Half sigh, half gasp, it sounded like “He came back.”

“Don't try to speak,” Mary says, hearing the tenderness of genuine worry in her voice. But then she jolts back. Mrs. Stoker's hand suddenly grips the material of her blouse around her neck. Her eyes are vividly alive and looking into hers, her pupils small like pinpricks. And then she laughs – not a delirious prelude to death, but a warm, intelligent, controlled laugh with focus. Crow's feet wrinkle in the corners of her eyes and Mary thinks how out of place the scene looks; with this expression, Mrs. Stoker should be in her morning room with her Chinese tea set, not sick in bed gripping her maid's collar.

Mary tries to haul her hand away, but the old lady's fingers continue crumpling her blouse, twisting the material so it chafes under her arm. “I know he came back,” she whispers. Instinctively, Mary's own fingers slip around the old lady's grip, trying to find a secret pivot to draw it away without force. Eventually she succeeds, pushing her thumb into the fleshy part of Mrs. Stoker's wrist. The grip eases and Mary guides her hand at last down to her side.

Mrs. Davis bustles into the room and Mary finds her face burning. She wonders if she should have removed Mrs. Stoker's hand the way she did, and then is annoyed that she should be doubting herself. Have I been so drawn into Mrs. Stoker's world of distinctions that I would let her hand grip onto me forever?

Mrs. Davis has drawn up close to her and is looking down upon her mistress. Mary senses she is excited. “She looks better,” Mrs. Davis gasps close to tears. “Oh, thank goodness
the fever is passing.” She touches Mary on the back with her palm. Mary feels suddenly guilty that her own relief is not as unselfish.

Everything is too soiled for direct emotion. Mary's fears for her own future, the way she had to remove the old lady's hand – these things have twisted too much unrest in her heart. She watches Mrs. Davis take over the nursing with a fresh cloth and bowl, and she finds herself retreating to the foot of the bed. She feels as though a hundred invisible hands are clawing at her collar trying to push her in directions she does not want to go. She thinks of Mr. William Stoker's sad grey eyes and that sudden admission about not being able to love. In some odd way, those words have become more and more important since. They have radiated in all directions at once – they are here in this very sickroom echoing from the walls; they are weaving in and out of her feelings of guilt at not feeling more sorry for the old lady. “There is too much in the way for love,” Mary says to herself, adding to the phrase. “How can you feel for someone who holds your fate in their hands?”

She watches Mrs. Davis stoop over her mistress, dabbing her forehead, caressing her with soft, reassuring words. Mary feels humbled for a moment. Mrs. Davis feels love, she thinks, despite her position. How inferior a creature she must be to need preconditions in order to happily serve another.

Mary takes herself off silently. She creaks up the stairs to her own room treading as carefully as she can, wanting to disappear for the rest of the evening. Entering her refuge, she is surprised to see the chair waiting for her beneath the black
square of the window and the dressing table as she left it the previous night, half-dismantled to provide a window desk. Mary feels a bone-deep tiredness as she crosses automatically to repair her wayward action. She lays her hand on the wooden back of the chair and takes one last look into the night which is clearing. Wisps of steam rise vertically above distant rooftops and an azure tint shows beyond the stars which are beginning to pierce the sky.

She tips the chair backwards, preparing to scrape it away from the window. But things are changing. It is as though she has reached a summit without knowing and has begun to descend. The rhythms of her body become more fluid, less strained and she feels lighter. It suddenly occurs to her that she might be wiser than Mrs. Stoker. The idea feels, in a way, unnatural and runs in a counter-stream against all she has ever learned. But it brings with it an awesome responsibility. If Mrs. Stoker's edicts are senseless, if the old woman's vision is clouded by personal fear and griefs, if Mary can see many miles beyond her orders, then Mary would be the profoundest of cowards to follow them. She would be sinning against herself.

Mary reaches out and touches the window so that it squeaks a little more open on its hinges. She feels the dampness of a million dying leaves in the first draft of air, and is humbled by the stories they seem to witness in her mind. The flavour of this breeze is immortal, she feels. It tells of kingdoms rising and falling, centuries tumbling past like seasons. She hears the tramp of Roman legions, the snap of the Norman longbow, the crackle of burning churches. The only truth and permanence worth heeding, this heady feeling tells her, is in
her own heart. And her own heart tells her the age of uncertainty is over.

She thinks of Mr. Stoker's words again – not allowed to love in this country – and she feels suddenly sad and angry for the grey multitudes huddled in the walls beneath her, and for herself too, stuck in an attic staring down at them. She thinks of Dracula and the same mournful phrase seems to spin through its pages – through the descriptions of forbidding castles, through the passage of the young man Harker yearning for the vampire woman's bite, through the mad chase eastward to catch the villain who has infected one of their own. Suddenly, it seems like the saddest of love stories; it is a story infused with the simplest and deepest of human wants, that of wanting to merge with another. It is a love story written for the loveless, for people who can relate to that want only through horror and fear.

Mary presses her hand up to the glass, the skin of her palm tingling with the chill as it edges slightly more open. She feels that years have descended on her shoulders in the past day or so and that the remnants of her girlhood are about to leave her. All her tumbling, conflicting emotions have formed unexpectedly into a pattern, now streaming into a single channel. It is a wholesome, exciting feeling; it carries the promise of some life mission at present too dimly defined to name. Clues and details are scattered in the dark city beneath her. Some are words charged with action: liberalism, Bolshevism, pacifism. Some are in faces imbued with meaning: the features of a boy unnaturally aged under a checkered cap, pulling a cart, looking only downwards at the road; the white, twisted features of a
young man on crutches, an empty folded trouser leg beneath him. Battered street corner signs claim her allegiance also. She hears the clink of sword and armour: the phrase, “a battle only half won,” comes into her imagination under the heading, “Suffragettes!”

She does not yet know for which of these worlds her adventure has been preparing her. But the process of sifting has begun. She looks out at the night and feels the infinity. Her first choice is simple. It is whether she should live; whether she should follow the stream she is on, let it direct her for good or for ill, regardless of punishments, hardships, embarrassments and humiliations. The alternative comes briefly in a single face: Mrs. Stoker's.

Mary leans forward and pushes the window open wide.

F
LORENCE WANTS TO
say more to Dr. Harcourt as he puts his stethoscope away again. She wants to tell him about her experience, how it went beyond dreaming, how it submerged her in a golden life she had thought to have long ago withered and turned to dust. She wants to tell him that she carries that life in her once more, that it is pulsating and warm and real and that no one can take it away unless she lets them. She wants to tell him that her heart and soul are bulging with gratitude for everything, that she loves the whole of Creation just for being, and that, right now, it is all infused with the same golden light for her, regardless of place or circumstance.

“Thank you for dropping in again, Dr. Harcourt,” she merely says weakly. And the instant she hears herself she knows that the euphoria will not last forever and will soon
begin sagging like an air balloon. Yet even while this disappointment arrives, her still buoyant optimism propels her into a new promise – that she will never again forget this golden feeling entirely while she lives.

“So where were you, Mrs. Stoker, when this attack came?” Dr. Harcourt says, fastening his bag and then standing up.

“A moving picture, Dr. Harcourt,” she replies, pulling the sheets up towards her mouth, feeling a touch of mischief that she should have such a secret.

“Perhaps it was not to your taste,” the doctor replies with a hint of impatience. He seems annoyed that she is not more ill.

“Perhaps not,” Florence replies quietly.

The doctor leaves.

Florence is alone. The silence is warm and thick around her as though the air itself were a living organism. Bram's features stand out vividly from the portrait to Florence's right. He seems less sombre than usual in the muted light. The pools of silver in the irises are no longer the endemic tears of the wounded. They convey warmth and understated humour. Florence caresses the face with her gaze, adding touches of her own to the fine details – things only she might notice and love enough to want to see recreated – a stubborn permanent pimple above his left cheekbone, a faint scar on his forehead in the groove of a furrow.

Florence feels a profound reconciliation, like the shifting of a great stone into its proper crevice after many years of dislocation. Suddenly, her love seems to extend into infinity, as though it has been released after years by the realignment. She
thinks of everyone she has ever known: Bram, Irving, Ellen and the whole Lyceum set. She thinks of people around her now: dear Mrs. Davis, so loyal and understanding; the poor girl, Mary – a good sort really; William and Maud – trudging though life as best they can with some unnatural burdens perhaps.

She feels guilty at the last thought, realizing that she herself is one of William's unnatural burdens. She starts trying to make vague plans about how to disrupt this troubling pattern. But she gets stuck as a different self-reproach mushrooms on top of the first. She looks towards her husband's portrait again, remembering that awe-inspiring friendship between him and Irving. She realizes that the golden light is especially magical and strong in this area; she can visualize a shining halo of light around the two men as they sit together, making plans. She links eyes with the portrait and finds herself mouthing the word, “Sorry.”

“C
AN WE GO
to bed soon?” asks Maud unexpectedly, laying aside her own book. “I'm tired.”

William looks up from Dracula. He has been scanning the text aimlessly. The lines have long since become blurred and his thoughts have wandered far away to the unanchored waywardness of his own feelings. He has been thinking of how his habitually suffocated state of mind has been worsening even further lately, threatening to explode his life into scandal and chaos. He has been thinking about how close this seemed to come and how fortuitous and unexpected was the cure.

He bounces the volume around in his hand once more as though acknowledging to himself that this was the key; it
was Dracula that got him to ask the question, What is wrong with me?

“Whenever you like,” William replies, putting the book down on the coffee table.

Maud sighs and looks at him, not rising. “What did you do at your mother's house?”

“Nothing, I just came home.”

“You didn't have another one of your long chats with Mary?”

William meets her gaze straight-on. Neither of them flinches or colours and suddenly it all seems as innocent as it sounds. He realizes how much he appreciates Maud's practicality, her firm anchor and innate self-confidence.

“Not really,” he says. “Just five minutes.”

“You'll have to go again if you want to make your proposal about helping with finances.”

“I know.”

William stares at his wife for a moment and thinks of how she has catalogued everything that needs to be done. She is the finger on the pulse, the watcher on the city walls, stoical, hardworking and keenly intelligent. The heaving boulder in his chest shifts once more, this time decisively. He remembers the woman in the street near the Irving statue a couple of days ago, the way the fur against her cheek reminded him of Maud. He remembers the melancholic weight of that moment, the way a thousand nerve endings seemed to wail inside him with the yearning movement.

He leans forward in his seat now, a realization suddenly flooding inside him. Every fractured desire of the past few
days, he thinks, every fanciful instinct, is reconcilable to the feelings he has for his own wife. It is as though several blurred images are coming together into one definable picture at last. We're not allowed to love in this country, he told the girl, knowing despite the excitement of the moment, behind the illicitness of the thrill, he did not mean her – the girl to whom he was talking.

Maud suppresses a yawn. William watches pensively, waiting his time, wondering what he's going to say. Am I going to apologize? he asks himself. For what? For fancying myself no longer in love? For mistaking another for her?

Maud has noticed his strange mood, the furrows on his brow, the indecisiveness about his movements. She raises her eyebrows at him, dabbing away a tear of tiredness at the corner of her eye.

“Well,” she says, “what else is on your mind?”

William realizes the impossibility of it all. He sinks backwards in his chair again. She doesn't want to hear it, he thinks.

“Nothing,” he says, then splutters, “just thinking about my father.”

“What about your father?” Maud replies, slightly amused, her penetrating gaze seeming to understand something about William – his need to speak and the difficulty of speaking.

“About the way he charged about from place to place.” William sighs. He knows he's committed himself and so forces the rest of the message out. “The way he travelled around the country, to America, to Germany, all for the theatre and Irving.”