by Lee, Tanith
Paul-Luc studied the map avariciously.
Tomorrow—
The boat was ready, a dreadful thing with unstable bathroom facilities, and the cabin floor damp from the bilge. But the journey would not be long.
Then again, this damnable wind, coming out of season. They were superstitious, the filthy Arabs. They might refuse to travel in it, or demand higher rates of pay.
A small soft thump came from Berenice’s room, audible even over the howling cacophony of the streets.
That child. What was she doing?
Paul-Luc rose and crossed the fabulous, slightly threadbare carpet, woven on steep looms to the south. The hotel was unfashionable and excellent. In summer too it did not resort to unhealthy air-conditioning. Paul-Luc always patronized it.
He knocked sharply on Berenice’s door.
After a pause, the small voice: ‘Yes, Papa?’
‘What are you up to, Berenice?’
‘Nothing, Papa.’
‘I shall come in.’
He walked into the bedroom.
The fan was off, she had said its motion frightened her at night, like a huge fly. But then it was not particularly warm at this season, only the wind had brought a closeness to the air.
Berenice sat on the side of her bed, the provisional netting pushed away.
She had been named for a queen. Unfortunately.
When Marthe, that she-wolf, had produced her, he had selected the name for their baby. She should have grown into it.
But she was a plain child, even sometimes she looked to him ugly. Marthe had been chic, pretty. But this had not served him well either, for three years ago Marthe had left him. She made only a feeble attempt to secure her daughter, which he quashed. They had not heard of Marthe since.
Berenice had a pudgy face, and her left eye was far narrower than her right, something which Colette had declared made a face more interesting, but Paul-Luc had no time for Colette, either. Berenice, also, was short-legged and her stomach was always swollen up like a little balloon. Her hair was long but very fine. He made sure she brushed it thoroughly, but it was stringy, no adornment, and muddy in colour. He was able to have no pride in her.
‘Why are you not in bed?’
‘I’m sorry, Papa.’
‘You’re a bad girl. You know you must go to sleep. Tomorrow we rise early.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Get into bed. Hurry up.’
She scrambled her way back under the sheet in her miniature white nightgown.
No toy shared the pillow. She had had a woolly cat, a disgraceful grubby hideousness, but a chambermaid at the previous hotel had apparently stolen the beast for her own deprived brat. Paul-Luc made a scene, to no avail. It was embarrassing to have to make a scene, any way, on such a matter. The maid, obviously, denied everything.
Berenice, of course, had snivelled. But when he told her to stop, she did so. She did at least always obey him instantly. He had never struck her. He had never struck her physically.
‘Now compose yourself. Recite your English lesson to yourself. I’ve told you before, it will help you to remember it, and calm you for sleep.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
She assayed a funny little unconscious gesture. Towards the side of the bed vacant of her stolen toy.
Unwillingly he recognized this.
In the first nights after Marthe had gone, he too... But he was not a fool, or a weakling. Marthe was a slut. Sometimes, in extremity, he had even informed their daughter of the fact. At least, unlovely as she was, she would not have open to her the opportunity of faithlessness.
Berenice wriggled on to her side. Her ill-plaited hair lay on the pillow like a rat’s tail. ‘Goodnight, Papa.’
Down in the dining room the fans did not turn.
The long windows looked towards the river. Veiled in dust, it shone intermittently at the lights from the corniche, like oil in mist.
Paul-Luc sat at the marble table with its fringed shawls, and picked at the menu. He would dine lightly and drink French bottled water, the sort that had not been filled up from the Nile—these despicable scum.
The mosque lamps of the restaurant burned through their frets, each with a reddish dust-halo. Above the traffic, Set’s khamsin growled in gusts.
The area was almost empty. He scanned it, bored.
And then the Frenchman’s attention was abruptly caught.
At a table across the room, where one of the huge green palms sailed from its brass tub to the pillar, a youngish woman sat. A European.
She was perhaps unnaturally but elegantly blonde, with wide dark eyes and a thin, transparently tanned face. She wore a blonde linen suit, to go with her hair, and under that a knitted silk sweater for the evening chill that had not come. Two silver drops trembled from her ear-lobes. He could not see her legs beneath the table, but doubtless they too were good and clad in sheer nylons.
Seeing him look, she raised her cloudy glass of absinthe.
A spare but flattering acknowledgement.
It did not occur to him to respond, not yet.
He thought, perhaps she would still be here when they returned from the desert. If not, naturally, he was indifferent.
The child would be awkward, but then he could simply leave Berenice in her room. It had happened elsewhere.
The blonde did not appear cheap or easy. She had an aristocratic air, of which two hundred years of republicanism had not dispelled the magic.
He had not greeted her, but he glanced sideways again, as he toyed with the menu.
She still observed him (let her, he was worth a look), and then, unflurried, away.
She had style. Not French, but French-Swiss, perhaps, or a travelled Norwegian.
The waiter came in his clown’s crimson hat, and Paul-Luc pointed out to him one of the French dishes on the menu. He said, ‘Recommend it to Madame.’
‘She has ordered couscous, monsieur.’
‘That then is her misery.’
Chapter Seventeen
Life, clichéd, changed after Althene was gone. Rachaela slept through the days. She woke in the late afternoon, or sunset. The clocks had gone back, but only the messages of the TV had finally alerted her. Then she altered some of the clocks to the correct time. Others remained on summer time, out by the salutory hour.
Elizabeth and Reg, having the code of the door now, came and went as they had always done. Sometimes Elizabeth, with the Hoover on the stairs, woke Rachaela for a moment. But there were not many carpets.
She left Elizabeth notes. She said she had the ‘flu. Later, she simply pointed out to Elizabeth that the cake had been wonderful, or that one of Jelka or Jacob or Juliet’s toys had gone down into some inaccesible part, could Reg retrieve it? Or she asked for more coffee or wine or cat food.
Althene had left a store of cash, and Rachaela’s bank account stayed always full. Rachaela realized she would eventually have to go down to the bank and draw some money for the purpose of paying Elizabeth and Reg. But not yet.
Sometimes Rachaela walked round the garden in the twilight. It was overgrown, although it had no statues. Not really properly Scarabae.
Otherwise Rachaela did not go out.
The cats, always movable beasts, slept with her through the days, using the window to the garden if necessary, climbing down through the tree, going off to Elizabeth afterwards.
Sometimes Juliet sat with Rachaela by night, on the floor of the living room. Juliet drank a saucer of cream or Carnation milk. (Rachaela drank a bottle of wine, glass by glass. Later, through the night, usually, another.) Jacob crept, voyaging through the grass outside.
Jacob and Juliet did not fight any more. Jelka was the most disturbed. She had grown rather wild, flying up the walls of the garden and on to the roof of the house. She yowled at the moon, and battled any other strange cat who approached. Sometimes her father.
Did she miss Anna?
Do I?
Althene has gone to find Anna. But she
—he—won’t find Anna. Althene will never come back.
Was this Rachaela’s paranoia?
Or had she ever been paranoid? Was it not all true—the fears of watchers—they must truly have been there.
And so doubtless she was correct in the matter of Althene.
Rachaela had lost her already, any way. Althene had become a man.
I was alone before. Thirty odd years. I liked it.
She recalled her private, makeshift, careless existence. She had had her own routines. Washing her hair every third day, shaving her pearly legs, going to the launderette when she must, cooking her neat little barren meals, her weekly bottle of wine spread over two or three days.
I am no longer she. The she I was.
Rachaela ate now the meals Elizabeth left, and on the days Elizabeth did not come, Rachaela ate mounds of hot buttered toast, wedges of Brie and Cheddar, tinned puddings running with treacle.
She did not alter physically, herself. Like the un-tampered-with clocks. No ignored imposed hour lessened her. Her skin was clear, her waist slender. No hair grew after all on her legs. Perhaps all the cruel shaving had destroyed it. The hair on her head, unshampooed for five or six days, did not become greasy.
She changed her bed once a week, washed out her lingerie and tights. That was all.
She drank pale pink wine and looked at the TV through rose-coloured spectacles.
She did not feel unhappy, desperate, angry; not bereft.
She felt... unreal.
A ghost, she padded about the house at three in the morning—hour of the wolf, of the shadow. Juliet, sometimes Jacob, might go with her.
She glanced into Anna’s room.
Elizabeth had made the bed. Ursula the fox lay on it, wrapped about the white rabbit for comfort.
Sometimes Jelka slept here too, curled into the fox and the rabbit that must hold, for her, the faint perfume of lost love.
Sometimes Rachaela would lie on the floor of the living room with the cushion under her head, and play Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov. But her concentration could never cling now to the stairs of the music. Certain gorgeous phrases, golden melodies, filled her for a moment, but then again she slipped away.
When she played the music she found she thought, for some reason, of her mother, of the life before the Scarabae. Dull, often unpleasing, memories.
Then again one night when she had watched a late-night horror movie, at four in the morning, going into the library-bedroom, she had wondered if she would find a black-haired man hanging from a rope. A wave of terror had gone through her. She saw the vengeful shade of Ruth slinking through the trees with a burning torch, to destroy the house and cook Rachaela in it.
But Ruth could not be a shade. Ruth had come back in the flesh.
One night too Rachaela fell asleep over her third bottle of Sauvignon, and was unconscious until nine in the morning.
When she came out of the shower and had dressed, and towelled her hair, she heard Elizabeth come in.
Rachaela went down from a peculiar curiosity, to see what Elizabeth looked like now, and what Elizabeth would do.
Elizabeth jumped slightly.
But she looked otherwise the same, aglow with hair.
‘How are you, Mrs Day?’
Rachaela said she was fine. She wandered to the fridge, but Elizabeth was before her. Elizabeth made grilled ham and poached eggs and spread with butter the bread she had baked the night before.
They ate this together at the kitchen table, and the three cats, as if content, ate their portions of egg, then played with catnip mice under the sunlit windows.
‘You mustn’t take it too hard,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Reg left me once. But he came back.’
Rachaela said, ‘Oh, so you think that’s what has happened.’
Elizabeth blushed.
‘It’s none of my business, but then. I told myself I’d let you know.’
Rachaela thought, Does she suppose Althene and I were female lovers or does she know too that Althene’s male?
Rachaela said, ‘It’s nice of you. But I’d say the situation is rather different.’
‘Well, wait and see.’
Elizabeth changed Rachaela’s bed-linen today.
Rachaela sat before the mirror and made up her face; powder and blusher, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipstick.
‘I might go out.’
‘It would do you good.’ said Elizabeth, piling up the bed pillows around Juliet, who had decided to nest there.
Another cliché. Elizabeth’s simple homely TV-soap words had given Rachaela back a sense of proper womanly purpose and human hope.
Rachaela laughed.
On impulse she went down the hill, skirted the town and walked into the station. She bought a ticket to London.
She knew London.
What in hell had she been doing out here?
In the train she sat and thought about the last journey. Anna and Althene.
The Scarabae were in London.
But she would not visit the Scarabae.
She knew what she would do. They had made her rich. There was enough money to escape.
She would look in estate agents’ windows. A flat, big enough for herself and her three dependants, Juliet, Jacob and Jelka.
When she got off the train she went into a wine bar with cucumber glass in the windows, and late-lunch, expense-account and half-drunk lovers lingering at the tables.
Rachaela ordered pasta with cheese and mushrooms, and a bottle of Verdicchio.
After this she went into another bar and had two glasses of a dry rough red. Here a man tried to pick her up. What would she have done years ago? Shunned him? Run away, pushed him off? She said, ‘How lovely. I charge a hundred pounds. Is that all right?’
‘Christ,’ he said. He went red as the wine and slunk out, smelling of sudden sweat under Faberge.
What would she have done if he had agreed? Gone to the Ladies and climbed, still Ruth-like slim after her gorgements of treacle pudding, through the lavatory window?
She walked about the streets. She looked in the estate agents’ windows. The flats were startlingly costly, and she could afford them all.
But she was not ready to decide.
Here and there she went into a bar, even a pub, and bought a couple of drinks. No more pick-ups.
The streets were filthy, the buildings coated with dirt and time. Glimpses came of white columns, cranes, girders, high stone ornaments, cold-killed geraniums in baskets. Pigeons picked among the moving feet. She felt a stab of pity, their precarious lives. She turned away along streets of houses.
A sunset began to come, the astonishing vivid tint of tinned apricots, syrupy twilight.
By then she had found a park or heath, she was not sure, and gone up a dark green hill.
Here, against the liquid glass shell of sky, kites were flying. A sort of quiet club had gathered, persons who had ascended from below to watch the end of another day.
Far down, as if on an island, the tallest towers of the city banked, a science fiction scene or modernized set-piece from Metropolis. As the sky’s brilliance dimmed, pale orange, the lamps of the world started to burn. And soon the wooded hill was ringed in a lariat of lights.
‘Anna!’ someone cried.
Rachaela turned. Was she afraid or only amazed?
But it was an ordinary child running to its sane, adoring mother.
Rachaela sat on a seat, in the ashes of the day.
She missed the three cats, abruptly, so much that tears stood in her eyes.
She would have to go back now. All that way.
She left the hill and found a pub, and had a double brandy.
Then, in the posh area below the heath, she located a car firm prepared to drive her out to the house on the hill.
Thank God, the driver was silent.
She thought over what she had done. She had done nothing. Achieved nothing. Only two bursts of feeling, for the pigeons and for the cats.
; Two nights later, after dark, somebody knocked on the house door. Jacob bounded to open it, and of course did not.
Rachaela thought, Some dangerous assailant? A man with an axe? Or, someone from them, from the Scarabae.
When Rachaela reached the door, Jacob ran off.
She opened it. Unwise. Perhaps.
Outside, a small child, a girl, dressed all in trailing black. She wore a white mask that covered half her face, and her mouth was crayoned, inexpertly, red. She grinned, and in the mouth were yellow fangs bought from some novelty shop.
A vampire.
A little girl vampire, all alone.
‘Yes?’ Rachaela said, dumbfounded.
Trick or treat?’
It was Hallowe’en, and the customs of America had come among them all. Even up the vertical hill.
Down beyond the poplars, someone stirred. An adult accompanying the vampiress, in case.
And yet, Rachaela could yank her in. Slam the door. Do murder, worse—
‘It had better be a treat then, hadn’t it?’
Rachaela, regardless—the adult might still have an axe—left the door wide.
She went into the kitchen and took some of Elizabeth’s chocolate biscuits from the jar, poured a glass of red wine, drew two pound coins from the change bowl on the table.
These things she bore back to the patient vampire.
‘Mind you don’t break your fangs on the biscuits.’ She sounded like Elizabeth. ‘Have a sip of that, then give it to your daddy.’
The little vampire was happy. Too happy to be polite, she bolted down the drive and the wine glinted in the hall light.
A hoarse, frozen male voice called up a thank you.
I could have poisoned both of them.
I could have lured them in and drunk their blood.
She closed the door, and the following dusk, found the glass set neatly on the bird-bath, half full. Not a drinker. Not a Scarabae. A mundane, difficult, easy life.
Chapter Eighteen
In the delicately cut-out line of slate and dove-coloured houses, one house was a dark warm pink. It shone, in the last of the bleak day, down into the canal, like a warm sun.