Stokers Shadow

by Paul Butler

  “CAN 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.”

  Maud crosses her hands on her lap. “What were you thinking about it?”

  William feels impatience rising in his chest. He wants to scream, “I’m trying to tell you that I love you, you silly woman, why can’t you take a hint?”

  He exhales deeply again, collecting his thoughts. “Just that I’m glad I don’t do that.”

  Maud is watching him closely. William feels a great tide of vulnerability edged with guilt rise and fall within him. I’ve never been this shy before, he thinks to himself, but realizes the reason straightaway. He has never been so desperate or so worried about communicating with Maud before. His heart is beating hard and he wonders what he can see in his wife’s subtle, intelligent eyes. A husband who has almost strayed? A man who has pulled himself back from the verge of disaster just in time?

  A moment of suspicion passes over Maud’s face, a sardonic half-smile well known to William. But it lasts just an instant. In a few moments another expression sweeps it aside, a warm, full-hearted smile, a smile that seems both from an earlier era, and yet is quite untried – trust and hope with understanding of past failure perhaps.

  William understands the smile, and finds his heart committing in a way that would not have been possible a week before. There is all the joy of the unexpected in this moment. The boulder has disintegrated, crumbled into dust and is being swept away on the night breeze like a bad dream.

  THEY ARE MAKING love in the darkness. The bedclothes sigh and rustle around them as they move. Linen tingles William’s fingertips like static. He wonders how much of his thoughts are known by his wife. There is something momentous in the very quiet, in the rhythm of their breathing; it seems as though communication must be infinite. And she must at least notice it is different this time, he thinks – there is something younger about them both tonight, something freshly discovered in every synchronized movement. They sound different too – more concentrated, more serious, more serene. Even while William’s thoughts spin like shuffling playing cards, there is a peacefulness in himself and an honesty toward Maud. He wonders if Maud can tell he is thinking about the Palm Court at the Ritz, about the times they went there before they were married, and how it seemed theirs, the way a certain time and place is owned by young lovers – connected to their joined inner lives by a thousand oblique and humourous references. He wonders if Maud would ever guess he had tried to create the exact flavour of that time with a young woman he hardly knew. He wonders if she could guess at the shallowness of his folly, searching for the rich seam of his most ancient love in the dust around his feet. The magic time of his love is returning now, a glimmer of gold through layers of ashes. A whole cumbersome, hideously constructed prison-like fortress is creaking and groaning and giving way to something sparkling and genuine to himself.

  CHAPTER XI

  The milky remnants of the fog have lifted. Stars appear slowly like distant spears aiming toward the earth. A leaf falls in William’s garden, its vessels choked by recent smog and the oncoming cold. It spins on an eddy and touches down upon the lawn. The breeze sighs restlessly, a flavour of regret diverging around the trunk of the old oak and coming together again, re-assessing itself.

  The Regret has been floating on the breeze between Belgravia and Chelsea, skimming over the rich dark-green surface of the Thames, gaining focus and momentum. It holds the ice needles of frost yet to descend, and the warmth of the season fully matured. The Regret communicates freely with all around it – the damp stone, the wrought iron spikes and hooks, the scents which carry all information about human contact, feeling and information. The Regret was stung into existence by a woman’s anger and pain and by a younger man’s burning uncertainty. It tumbled together from distant places where it had long since been happily dispersed. It was called together into wholeness by the pain of its dissociated parts. The Regret began to recognize itself slowly – the life it had once represented, and the woman and man whose silent cries now brought it together.

  And now the Regret is getting ready to disperse again into the lives of which it was more recently a part. Boulders have shifted into place, misunderstandings realigned. Becoming a man again has been a painful rebirth. The intensity of love and devotion and hope and pain has been like many hoops of burning flame for the Regret who has been learning to call himself Bram once more. Love, he has found, is of all emotions, the least forgiven. Bram had in life one great love, a soulmate whose thoughts and feelings were part of hi
s own. Bram and his love had in life been on a mission – to create the conditions for inspiration, a divine lamp that would burn in the hearts of men and women who partook of it. It had been the noblest quest of all and they had devoted themselves to it entirely. The Regret – Bram – did not know he would submerge his wife and son in the flames of bitterness and anger.

  The understanding and joy Bram had once seen in his wife on their balcony overlooking the Thames did not last the intervening years of so many triumphs and frustrations. It became strangled in the creeping limbs of jealousy and suspicion.

  And for his son, the flame of inspiration had been buffeted in the whirlwind of changing times. Inspiration had changed into something scorching – unjust and humiliating to the boy. It had become unfaithfulness to his mother, ingratitude of a “great one” towards his father. It had become the vicious inequality the world creates between men. William had made an enemy out of inspiration itself and this had poisoned the spirit in him. He had become lost in a quagmire of loathing and self-doubt.

  Bram’s wife and son were both dying, their souls withering slowly by increments, until the invasion of chance – a foreign motion picture – made them both cry out to the universe in pain. And Bram responded. He floated in the breeze around their homes. He entered into their dreams, conjuring memories and shadows. He stood in William’s garden, beckoning, and walked like a living man through the fog, emerging through the clouds in front of his eyes. He stepped out of his portrait in Florence’s bedroom and pulled her into the past.

  He felt the fear and anger rise and fall like lava in a volcano, altering its nature until the great change like purest alchemy when fury and grief turns to joy, and darkness of the soul turns to gold.

  BRAM LINGERS IN his son’s garden only for a moment. He remembers the passage in Dracula his publisher deleted, the one in which Dracula’s castle crumbles into dust when the vampire is slain. He knows that something similar has just happened to his son – a disintegration of unhealthy personal terrors and suffocating thoughts.

  Bram returns to his old home, dissolving into the breeze, allowing the filthy London air to blow by and through him, recognizing the squalid atmosphere from so many years before and feeling it rooting him even further to his old life when the profound comfort in the word “home” was interwoven with the scent of dry soot, factory smoke and river effluence. As he descends into Florence’s garden he feels the peace of the house vibrating gently through the brick walls. He knows Florence’s torment is over. He knows her to be sleeping, her body recovered already from the fever she invoked upon herself. When she wakes, he knows, she will cease to fear catastrophe, and she will no longer punish herself by pulling the rubble of disaster over her thoughts.

  Bram stands in the garden looking up. The young woman, Mary, is awake and looking out. She lets her head drop suddenly. Bram realizes that she is writing at her makeshift desk. Part of Irving – with whom Bram’s spirit has long since merged – reacts to the young woman. The strand of Irving is excited by her adventurous, defiant spirit. The feeling tingles through the whole spirit – Irving and Bram. This is the face of the new world, Bram feels. Every old story – from Shakespeare to his own – has to crumble into the earth like fertilizer. Each new generation needs to start afresh. Stories diminish with time. It is inevitable. They need to be retold.

  Irving agrees, reminding Bram of a conversation, long forgotten, even between themselves.

  A scent draws their spirit into the past, evoking the exact hue of candlelight which flickers slightly in the brandy glasses resting on the polished surface. Cigar smoke rises before Irving’s face. The actor is drawn and oddly exhausted tonight, Bram notices. And yet, earlier, he recalls with some amazement,his friend had drawn tears of joy and gratitude from the audience. Shylock had been a triumph, a groundbreaking portrayal in a world polluted with anti-Semitism. Irving had given the merchant such dignity and righteousness with his dark eyes and direct honest stare that expectations had been turned on their heads. “I thought Shylock was a villain,” someone had even mumbled on his way into the foyer.

  And now, as usual, Bram and Irving are alone late at night discussing all manner of human affairs, their conversation like a comet hurtling through the universe of their joint imagination. They talk of the golden spring of inspiration and of tonight’s performance. And quite unexpectedly, Irving takes a deep breath and begins talking of a fear he has never mentioned before. His voice is uncertain and his eyes cast down and tired. He describes standing in the wings before his entrance, feeling the audience on the other side, their pensiveness, the hush and shallow breathing. He tells Bram of an invisible, many-headed monster which lurks on the other side of the curtain, stealing the life slowly out of him with the electric buzz of their constant expectation. He tells Bram that no matter how drained he feels night after night, he knows he can never stop. Performance, he says, is his drug and it sustains his spirit, even while it kills him.

  Bram relives the conversation. He remembers how it helped to inform the creation of his vampire – a being that survives as we all do upon the blood of others, a creature that moves effortlessly over the borderlines of empathy and antipathy, virtue and vice, love and hate. He knows that this story, like all others, will be degraded and lost. To seek to preserve any part of oneself is the greatest of all follies and a sure route to unhappiness. The best that can be hoped for is communion – to be part of something greater than oneself.

  Bram takes one more look at the lit open window and the golden-haired woman who writes at her desk. He and Irving exchange a secret wish for her and then disperse once more into the night.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Allan Magee who gave important feedback on a conceptual level, to Noel Baker who helped me to hone the themes of the story, to my editor, Ed Kavanagh, and to Elizabeth Miller for her encouragement. Thanks also to Levi Curtis, Jennifer Deyell, Tony Elliot, Mike Goldback, Andre Kocsis, Ed McNamara, Lara MacKinnon, Jody Richardson, Jana Sinyor, Stanley Sparks and Ed Tanasychuk for excellent feedback. I would like to acknowledge everyone at the Canadian Film Centre. Thanks to my publisher Garry Cranford and to Jerry and Margo Cranford. I would especially like to thank my wife, Maura.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Paul Butler is the author of the novel The Surrogate Spirit, published in 2000, and a graduate of the 2001 Professional Screenwriters’ Programme at Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre. He is presently developing a number of projects in film and TV ranging from features to documentary series. Originally from the U.K., he came to Canada in 1994. In Canada, he has developed curriculum, written literacy textbooks and worked in journalism, teaching and editing. Before emigrating, he taught English as a Second Language in Greece.