Sabine (20 page)

My main preoccupation anyway was keeping check on Roland's movements – nothing else really mattered. Shortly, we had been informed, he would be setting out to join Sabine. How short was shortly? How much time did my father and I have in which to foil him? We must get to Sabine's home before he did; it was no good arriving later, even five minutes' delay might be fatal, even four, even one: she was so weak now she would hardly survive another bleeding. At present he was easy enough to monitor because the whole de Vibrey brood, daughters included, had now mounted the dais and were standing there on either side of their parents, champagne glasses at the ready, clinking and drinking in
unison like a row of mass-manoeuvred puppets. The toasts, that was it, this must be the moment of the toasts. But once he left the platform it would be hard to keep track of him in the confusion. He could easily slip away without my noticing, and then …

Oh, the follow-on was intolerable, unthinkable. The ring, the pledge, the promise … His strength, his swoop; her weakness, her surrender … Oh no. Oh no, it must be stopped, it must be stopped. I cast around urgently for my father only to realise, with a gush of relief, that he was standing right behind me and had in fact placed a protective hand on my shoulder which I, in my stupefied state, had failed to notice. I tugged at one of the fingers to attract his attention but he drummed it against mine reprovingly and made a hissing noise: he was listening to the Marquis's speech with what was, for him, a fairly good forgery of rapt attention. I looked round and up at him a second time, examining him closer: his face was creased in a polite society smile, eyes faintly glazed over with tedium and the desire to hide it. His other hand, with a wine glass in it, went up and down in synchrony with all the others. Why, I wondered, when by inclination he was so detached and ironic, was he at bottom such a conformist? His heroes were Byron and Disraeli: perhaps that afforded a key. They too had been romantic about things like wealth and lineage, they too had been torn between contempt of public opinion and servitude
to its laws. The genial cripple and the genial Jew: two stars so uncertain of their shine that they needed a reflecting surface, even though it was only the lid of an old tin can and they knew it. Was my father perhaps the same? Uncertain? Insecure despite all his apparent assurance?

Oh, I hate the way these smug old maxims always turn out to be true:
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.
Does this mean I must forgive him everything? No, it means I must take a step further and recognise there's nothing
to
forgive: things go as they will go.

The Marquis had finished proposing toasts now and was making a different set of gestures. Beckoning gestures, master-of-ceremony gestures, come-on-everybody-let's-get-going gestures. Rather vulgar for an aristocrat, but then he was a vulgar man, title and all. At the rear of the dais one of the footmen was trafficking with a gramophone and a pile of records. I saw the Marquis point to him and then turn to his audience and shrug, hands spread in apology, as much as to say, Once upon a time we would have had a proper orchestra, even for a cocktail party, now all I can offer is this.

He mouthed a few short words, looking straight at my father, and from above my head my father nodded approval and mouthed them back. I know now what they were, which means I must have lip-read them and filed them away in my mind for later interpretation. They were in English: ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'.

At the time, though, I don't think I heard either them or the music they were set to, nor felt my father's arms around me as he swung me to face him and swept me on to the dance floor in full view of all the onlookers. I'm not sure I even felt the puncture of his teeth as they sank deep into my neck, or heard the gentle apology-cum-warning that may or may not have preceded it, or the applause that followed – generally pretty raucous on such occasions, going by later experience. I'm not sure, I'm not sure. It sounds improbable, but my attention was still focused on Roland, on making sure I kept him in my sights.

I remember putting my hand to my neck distractedly, and bringing it away smeared with blood, and looking at it for an instant in puzzlement, and then up at my father, and noticing that he too had blood on his face, and thinking nothing, nothing at all except, Well, so what; we can wash when we get to Sabine's. I remember, too, out of the corner of my eye, seeing Christopher in much the same messy state shuffling around awkwardly with his mum in a kind of fractious foxtrot, and being grateful that at least we had company and were not the only couple to be cutting such a dismal figure in front of our
grenouille
hosts. Although, mind you, the Marquis, as he slid by with his youngest daughter in tow, didn't look exactly all that pristine around the jaws himself.

Roland was dancing, not with his mother, as
might have been expected for reasons of symmetry if nothing else, but with one of his elder sisters. My concentration still fixed on him almost exclusively, I saw him yawn and consult his watch behind his sister's back. Then he whispered something to her, and the two of them loosened hands and drew apart, and I saw him dig into one of his pockets and extract from it a bunch of keys. The keys to the car. He was going. There was no time to lose: we must act immediately.

He's leaving! I said to my father, shaking his hand in order to rouse him, and then, when this didn't work, digging at his shins with my knee. Roland's
leaving!
He's making for Sabine's. We've got to go. We've got to get there first, remember? Remember? You promised, remember?

My father's face, in addition to the bloodstain, wore a faraway, bleary look when finally he glanced down at me. He seemed to be awaking from a reverie or sobering up after a soak. Instead of interrupting the dance he clasped me tighter and bent his head so that it was practically touching my ear. To his credit, I think I heard a break in his voice when he spoke.

Let him go, my darling, he said. Let him go to this Sabine you love so much, and let him do what he wants to her. Better him than you. Believe me, better him than you.

Yes, crazy though it sounds, it was not until my father spoke – these words that I actually could
hear, as opposed to mere mouthings – that, slowly, slowly, as I shuffled around the floor to the dance music, trapped in his arms like the prisoner I now was, the truth came home to me.

I use the term ‘came home' with irony but also with resignation. Because that is what that evening was about, you see, that is what we were celebrating: a coming-out in society that was at the same time a homecoming, a welcome to the fold.

Meaning that your rival won her in the end? (It is the voice of the man in the picture again, his image surfacing in my mind again after another interval of decades.) That beautiful girl you were both so fond of – you lost her, and he won?

I hesitate a moment before replying because this time he is only partly right. I lost Sabine, but Roland didn't win her, not really, not for long. She died in May of the following year – of a haemorrhage resulting from a miscarriage, or so the official story went. I have difficulty believing it, but even if true, it makes no difference to the way I view her executioner: greedy parasite or ardent husband, he still bled her to death. I also heard talk that her end was unintentional – a foul-up by the leaders of the vampire community, who didn't bother to brief
Roland properly on his task before letting him loose on her: No bingeing, young man, just keep her out of the way till we've got things settled with the other girl – our new recruit.
Surtout pas trop de zèle.
But that doesn't make any difference to the way I view things either: they wanted to split us, Sabine and me, and split us they did.

The man of the portrait listens sympathetically, smiling his gently ironic smile. And what about you, Viola? he asks, when I've finished. What happened to you?

I went on to become a doctor, I tell him, though my reasons for this choice of career were vague. It could have been because the profession, with its handy blood supply, provides a simple way of procuring nourishment for those of my kind, or it could have been that I felt (mistakenly, as it turned out) that it would continue to connect me somehow to Sabine. Oh, that Italian song, how sad its words are. The world that is; the world that could have been. My life as I live it now; my life as we could have lived it, Sabine and I together. When I think of my loss …

Your loss? The man of the portrait interrupts me, lifting a painted eyebrow that turns his ironic gaze to one of overt cynicism. Oh, come now, Viola, your relationship was far too conflictual, it never would have worked. Two young women bickering over the young men who come between them; two middle-aged women bickering over futilities; then
two old women bickering over the shreds of their empty existence – that is the way it would have been. You have conserved your dream intact. Be content with that.

Is a dream more precious, then, than reality? I ask.

The canvas smile only intensifies, as much as to say: You are the dream expert, Viola, you know the answer.

A Note on the Type

The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical form for mechanical hot-metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.

Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a fount engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a fount by Granjon. It was first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.