The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life (2 page)

To my surprise, as I watched, my father entered the room followed by one of his prim and stately Victorian patients, a woman with a bird on her immense hat. Her bodice and brown velvet jacket were tight and from her high collar and neck blossomed a cavalcade of white ruffles. Her deep maroon dress fell in voluminous tiers of lace and frills and the bulk of it revealed the presence of numerous petticoats and undergarments.

I would have turned away except that I knew Father was not going to examine her. Father never examined his female patients unless his nurse was present, and he had just sent the nurse to the chemist’s.

The woman daintily stepped upon the metal footstool and when she did this I noticed she wore frilled pantalettes on her legs and tightly laced brown suede boots. She paused for a moment, gently lifting her skirts a little, and then she sat down on the table.

Neither she nor Father said anything.

To my surprise, Father seemed to be ignoring her. He busied himself from cabinet to cabinet, but when he turned back around his hands were always empty. Even when he approached her and briefly placed his hand upon her shoulder, he did not look in her face or speak. Then he clumsily dropped a small metal container on the floor and fell to his knees to search for it.

What happened next was very strange. Even though the metal container was in full sight under the table, Father continued to grope around as if he could not find it. He muttered something, and then, awkwardly, his shoulder became entangled in the woman’s capacious skirts.

I watched terrified, hypnotized, as he grumbled and lifted one of her legs to free himself. The kind lady remained sedate through all of this, and gazed blankly off into space as if nothing were happening. Then he lifted her other leg and in a slow and breathless ritual he began to peel back her slips.

I remained frozen with uneasy fascination as he lifted each one of her petticoats. I was amazed, delighted, appalled, as layer upon layer of fabric was drawn back. And then, in the ample billows of her clothing, I caught a glimpse of sweated hair, and father’s powerful hands on the inner surface of her pale, smooth legs.

He moved slowly, pressing in to the copious undergarments.

She continued to gaze off into space, oblivious.

They finished quickly and it wasn’t until the woman stood to leave that I became aware of something else. Indeed, every time I returned to peer through the fragile hole in the egg-shell window I noticed it. It was faint, languorous, a gentle but oppressive whisper of my father’s stale tobacco smell. It delineated his territory. It warned, like blackbirds impaled on a fence around a field of rye.

There is one other incident I always remember when I remember my father. It was a simple incident. Very simple. Just a fragment. It occurred one night when I was absentmindedly peering out my bedroom window and happened to notice Father rushing out into the garden. It was strange. I knew something was wrong because Father’s shirt was unbuttoned and half off him. Throughout my entire life I don’t think I ever saw Father with his collar button undone, let alone his entire shirt. Not only that, but he also seemed to be looking for something. He madly circled the astrolabe and searched the bushes. Had he imagined he’d seen something, something that had alarmed him? He turned about, clenching his fists.

When he glanced up past my window and I saw his face for the first time, I became truly frightened. It wasn’t Father’s face that I saw. There was something strange in his expression, something furtive and anxious, like an animal being stalked. The wind ripped at his shirt, and he struggled to stand against the wind as he continued to search, scanning the chimneys and the treetops.

Dare I consider it? Deep inside him had he always believed and feared? Was he looking for something, someone, he dared not admit existed? Perhaps he had imagined it. Seen a shadow. Watched a tree branch grow into a man. Whatever it was, it had triggered more than just alarm in Father. It had broken a wall, released a flood of dark and monstrous fears, and now as he stood there he was in momentary danger of being swept away.

It is Father’s eyes that I remember the most. They were wide and not quite human. And, yes, deep in those pale and omniscient eyes was an unmistakable terror.

My father’s façade of propriety taught me many other things besides the fact that children don’t see angels. Oh, yes, it taught me the decorum required when dealing with a viscount or a baronet to ensure their patronage, the proper investments to make, how much money to donate each year to the Salvation Army, and the discipline and ambition to go on to medical school. In short, it taught me everything necessary for material survival. For this I thank him. But my father was so adverse to anything outside the beaten path of tradition that his fear instilled in me a constant watchfulness and concern. I was never against going along with tradition and using it, but I never wanted it to use me. I never wanted to be afraid to do something because it wasn’t proper and I never wanted to forget the face of the angel.

My father died when I was in medical school and although I loved him in a way, I have to admit a burden was lifted from my shoulders. The huge Victorian terrace house became mine and for the first time in my life I was completely unafraid to enjoy myself. I suddenly found I was an “eligible young gentleman,” as the old matrons put it, and not only that, but an eligible young gentleman living in Mayfair. To comprehend the full meaning of this you must understand that Mayfair was one of the two or three most exclusive regions of mad and electric London. Fashion was dictated from those narrow, twisted streets with their dignified houses and vast, lugubrious blocks of flats and ornate hotels. Even the very name of Mayfair evoked visions of red carpets and hothouse flowers, of parvenus and great courtesans, of ermine and white satin and even whiter shoulders.

It was a wonderful time to be alive and made even more wonderful by the fact that this was when I met my Camille. If there ever was an exhilarating experience that even came close to my vision of the angel, it had to have been my first glimpse of Camille. To be quite honest I have considered lying and saying that the first time I saw her she was stepping down from some beetle-black four-wheeled carriage in front of the Baron Alfred de Rothschild’s or the Maison Dorée, but truthfully, Camille was what society of the time impolitely referred to as a soiled dove, or an
houri,
one of the dark-eyed nymphs of the Moslem Paradise.

I met her at a dance hall, one of the notorious night houses of King’s Road. She was a radiant creature with auburn hair and raven eyes and the smallest, most delicate hands I have ever seen. She reminded me of a character created by Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet so admired by the French: Ligeia... the lady Ligeia, whose haunting face caused one to shiver with the same luminous wonder as “the ocean... the falling of a meteor... and the glances of unusually aged people.”

But she was not Ligeia. Camille was small and pale and she drew one to her, but there was nothing deathly in all of this. No, in fact Camille exuded life. She was always in movement, dancing or rushing to see something. Even when she paused for breath, there was a fire in her, and beneath the carefully learned Victorian gestures and expressions there glimmered something unspeakably sensual. Camille was, indeed, an
houri,
but in the antique sense. She was a rare flicker of life amid the dark and shallow creatures of the London night. At once fragile and wild, like a newborn colt. And yet, disconcerting, even magical, like a haunted china doll.

In striking contrast to this was where Camille lived. My memories of the place are fragmentary and troubled. Her flat was above one of the night houses, with a narrow gaslit staircase and peeling cork linoleum floors. There was a rustling in the place and here and there a fragment of muffled conversation. There was also a terrible smell, a smell that might have been mistaken for an animal smell were it not so distinctively human. It was an unpleasant smell, but morbidly interesting in its humanness, like the smell of childbirth only without chloroform or antiseptic. Most repellent of all was Camille’s dingy little room, and here my recollection fades. I dimly remember only a brief glimpse of a cot whose canvas was polished gray from use, a shabby blanket.

I only mention these things to emphasize how unlike Camille was from the squalor of her existence. She, too, seemed to recognize this and there was something very detached and innately aristocratic about her. I’m sure Father turned in his grave when I married her.

It was not easy making Camille a lady of Mayfair. For months we struggled refining her natural grace and bringing out the inborn melody of her voice. Most difficult of all was the myriad of incidental information she had to learn to survive in society. There were rules of conversation and certain table customs, operas to become familiar with, and nuances of language. The Duchess of Sutherland was wearing magenta to help the textile workers, and so magenta was
distingué.
And everyone must know the quadrille.

In an effort to enrich Camille’s background I decided to read various books and poems aloud to her. On one of these occasions I chose a free adaptation of a work by an eleventh-century Persian,
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam.
I had purchased the work in the form of an anonymous pamphlet, but its imagery was being so touted by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Swinburne that its translator, a Suffolk poet named Edward FitzGerald, was becoming quite famous in London.

On the occasion of my reading it we were in my father’s bedroom—or; rather, my bedroom, then. It was strange, taking over the master bedroom. The burned-cork smell was gone and the fireplace burned a little warmer. I also kept the gas jets on just a little so that the place wasn’t so gloomy. But the huge green bed was still there, and the watercolors painted by aunts in the Highlands, and the foreboding seashell chair.

Camille sat stiffly in the window seat. She wore an ample white nightgown, very frilly about her neck and falling in voluminous pleats. Her auburn hair had just been brushed out by her French servant and was unusually full and wavy. There was something almost animated about it, sinuous, like vines wrapping around the base of a tree. Each rivulet of hair, each wave and curl, caught the shimmer of the gas jets, bringing out a rich copper color not always present in Camille’s hair. Her tiny white hands were folded motionless in her lap. Her face was blank.

She was beautiful, but I have to confess she looked a little silly. She was so small and frail she seemed lost in the immense nightgown, her small, round face a little overwhelmed by so much hair.

“Camille,” I said. “I’m going to read you a poem.”

“Go on,” she said.

I cringed a little at her choice of words. “Please don’t use that expression.”

She drew in her breath and sat a little more upright. “Pray, read me a poem,” she said in more rounded syllables.

“Much better?” I commended, thumbing through the pages. I stood a few feet in front of her and held the book at eye level. I read her several verses.

I glanced up from the book. “Now, there, wasn’t that lovely?”

Camille remained unmoved.

I read her another verse. I paused again to get her reaction, but she seemed more bored than appreciative. I was about to begin again when one of the gas jets in the room began to flicker and I crossed over to adjust it.

“No, leave it.”

I turned toward her with pursed brows. “Why?”

“Don’t you think
that’s
lovely, just the flicker of the gas jet?”

“I suppose it is,” I grunted and once again lifted the book to my face. But this time Camille quickly jumped up and snatched the book from me. She thumbed from page to page looking at each as if they were blank and there was nothing there to see. Suddenly, she returned her gaze to me as she assumed an expression that in time would grow all too familiar to me. Her head was tilted back. She regarded me with an air that for all the world could have been a silent, contemplative fury. Except that it wasn’t. Or didn’t seem to be. At least, Camille never followed it with anger, but usually some sort of mild agreement with what I was saying, a nodding of the head as if to say she had given in.

Her body acquired the same air. For a few seconds it was very rigid and tight Her small hands seemed to press upon the book with unusual pressure. And then she came out of the spell, became a little dreamy and murmured, “It is very lovely.”

“Come here, Camille,” I said.

She took a step and the white nightgown caught around her feet. This made her very angry and she gave the gown a sharp tug. She sat down heavily beside me and once again seemed overcome and very small within all that white fabric. She might have remained ill-tempered from tripping in her gown were it not for the fact that she had once again been captivated by the flickering gas jet.

“Is anything wrong, Camille?”

She looked puzzled, as if honestly pondering the question, and then she pulled back the bedcover and slowly stroked the white linen. She smiled. “The sheets are so starched and white... too white.” She looked at me and there was the devil in her eye.

“Come on, now. Are you teasing?”

“No, I’m quite serious.” She regarded me with a quiver of amusement. She shifted in her nightgown, twisted and leaned toward me a little and as the fabric pulled tighter it revealed the delicate contour of a nipple. Also revealed was the pinkness of the aureole around it, distinct from the hidden white of her breast.

She looked down, slowly rubbed her hand over the nipple, pulling the fabric even a little tighter, and then gazed silently at me. She inched closer and once again became brooding. “... much too white,” she said with a low and contemptuous voice.

And then, just as she was pulling the robe back over my chest, she laughed and pushed my leg off the bed. In a frenzy she tore back the bedcover and began loosening the sheets. As she darted about, her hair seemed especially dark and tangled and parts of her nightgown became translucent in the flickering amber light.