This Thing of Darkness, page 13
Hugo picked up a stick of sealing wax he had left on the counter and took a box of matches out of his pocket. “Quite right,” he said. He lit the wax stick and set about methodically sealing over all the knots of string. “But it does say ‘till death do us part’.”
“Bela was never widowed.”
“No,” said Hugo. He turned the parcel over very carefully and finished his work before snuffing out the flame between his fingers. “You know what I’m saying, Evi. He wouldn’t have wanted you to remain alone on his account.”
Evi rose to her feet. “Everyone says that, and how on earth can anyone know?”
Hugo placed the parcel on the counter as carefully as though it were a newborn baby. “No man wants to think of the woman he loves being alone. Memories make poor companions.”
Evi looked intently at him. “What did you say?”
“I think it’s an old proverb,” said Hugo, realising his mistake. “It’s the sort of thing my grandmother would have said.”
“It’s not,” she said. “Not a proverb, I mean. And it was Christy’s grandmother who used to say that. He was always quoting her.”
Hugo turned his back on her and moved in the direction of the back stairs. “Why don’t we talk about this somewhere else?” he ventured. “It’s three o’clock.”
But Evi had grabbed hold of his arm and refused to let go. “It was one of the last things he ever wrote to me. I can show you the letter if you like. His last letter. Would you like to read it?”
Hugo ushered her out of sight of those glaring shop windows where passing strangers could peer in and watch a couple having an argument as though they were watching a movie. In the private world of upstairs, any argument could be resolved. “Evi, please don’t jump to conclusions. It’s not such a striking choice of words.”
“Striking enough.” She paused, awaiting an answer. “Look at me!”
But Hugo could not raise his head. “Evi, don’t.”
“Don’t what? Ask the same question I’ve been asking you since we first met?”
Hugo took a chance and placed his hands on her arms; he felt her trembling with anger or nerves, but he had noticed before that she had a mild tremor, which he had assumed was caused by the drink. “Evi, there is a reason I never speak about Korea, even though I know you are desperate to talk about it, and that is because it is too late. I cannot change the past, so what purpose does it serve in dwelling on it?”
Evi shrugged him off and stomped up the stairs. “Well said from a man who runs a film mausoleum! Well said from a man helping me write about a man who ceased to be of any significance to anybody twenty years ago!”
Hugo followed her, half hoping she would stumble so that he could catch her, but she did not oblige. “That’s a little harsh, if I may say so,” he said. “There’s a difference between having a healthy interest in the past and being trapped in it. You, if you’ll forgive me, are trapped in the past.”
Evi turned to face him, glowering at Hugo with such rage, he actually took a step back. He had seen her angry but never so deeply enraged as to unsettle him. “I don’t see why I should forgive you for that, as a matter of fact,” she spat out. “And I will trap myself in the past if it is the only way I can find out what happened to my husband. Christy is buried in the past, and I’m not leaving him alone there.”
“Evi, you’re still young; you have a future.”
“Don’t bother.”
Hugo pulled up a chair and sat down, hoping it would encourage Evi to do the same, but she refused to budge. “He died, Evi. You know that. There are many women out there who may never know what became of their husbands, but you do know the truth. Isn’t that enough?”
“I do not know how, and I do not know why,” she said coldly. “That is enough to keep me where I am.”
“It may never be possible to know,” Hugo said. “Most widows never know precisely what happened. All sorts of details get lost in the heat of the battle.”
Evi inclined her head to one side as though she were seriously considering what he had said. “You’re a liar,” she said, so pleasantly that it took a moment for Hugo to realise he was being insulted. “But you’re such a charming liar, I didn’t want to notice.”
“Evi!” But the indignant tone carried no conviction.
“Don’t pretend to be shocked,” she said. “You know precisely what I mean. All of this is fake, every single detail of it. I’m working on an assignment about a man who was fake all the way through, who made his living pretending to be what he was not until he had no identity of his own left at all. This is all a pretence. All of it.”
Hugo stood up, desperate to regain some authority over the situation. “So I’m fake too, am I? Because I deal in film memorabilia? Come now, how is that fair?”
Evi stepped towards him, much closer than was truly proper, but she wanted to break down his reserve. “Had we ever met before my editor sent me to see you?”
Hugo shook his head nervously. “No, of course we hadn’t. You know we had never met before.”
“Quite. But the strange thing is that you have behaved from the start as though you knew me very well. Without even noticing it, you have anticipated my needs and wants every step of the way.” She took another step in Hugo’s direction, forcing him to back away or let her collide with him. “Those quaint English afternoon teas of yours. They weren’t an expatriate’s kindly gesture to a fellow countryman at all; you knew it was what I would want.”
“It was intended as a kindly gesture,” Hugo put in. “I somehow knew you’d like it.”
“You knew perfectly well I would,” Evi retorted. “I used to tell Christy about afternoon tea at my grandmother’s house, the names of all the different cakes and treats. The wartime diet made one rather obsessed with food, and I could list them all for him: Victoria sponges, Eccles cakes, scones oozing with jam and cream. You even poured my tea exactly the way I liked it without having to ask. You’ve been so kind, but it’s the kindness of a man under an obligation.”
Hugo raised a hand like a traffic cop, but Evi misread the gesture and jumped back like a scalded cat. Hugo’s face flushed with mortification. “You didn’t really think I was going to hit you, did you? You ought to know me a little better than that!”
It would have been better to stop at calling him a liar, thought Evi as she made her way to the foot of the stairs, but now she really had insulted him. “I’m not sure I know you at all,” she said, picking up her bag. “I know you knew my husband. It’s the only way any of this makes sense, but you haven’t the decency to tell me the truth. I’m not sure we have anything left to say to one another.”
Hollywood, the epitome of everything Evi most despised—the false, the pretentious, the shallow, the mercenary; men and women in makeup and silly costumes posing before cameras; a privileged few made fabulously wealthy on the gullibility of the populace. The perfect place for the newly divorced Bela Lugosi, she thought, a playground for him to craft the dreams and nightmares that would guide America through the misery of the Depression.
Evi had been unable to settle herself to work when she had arrived home, and in the gathering twilight, even reading and rereading her other manuscripts in progress did nothing to steady the surge of emotions crashing through her. It was only when she was nearly halfway through her second bottle that she felt numb enough to set about the task of bringing Bela Lugosi’s new film career to life. She was not above a little escapism herself, for all her posturing, and Hollywood was perhaps less dangerous to her survival than a series of empty bottles like the ranks of a death squad lined up across her desk.
An actor drawn once again into the realms of darkness: The Silent Command, Daughters Who Pay, The Midnight Girl, The Rejected Woman. . . The Darkness seemed to have found him all the way across the ocean in America and was feasting on his innermost thoughts, nudging him firmly, carefully into the production of horror and fear.
His bitter, rejected wife whispered her tales of woe to a judge who believed her. Her marriage to Bela had been a nightmare, a horror that had sapped the life from her as though he had sucked her own lifeblood. He had become a phantom to her, holding her in a trancelike vice until a court broke the spell between them and she fled into the night.
Bela would never see or hear from his second wife again, and she would become a memory to be recalled with a mixture of regret and shame and fear—the one wholesome response to that nagging sense he could not shake off that he was being moulded by a force beyond his control. Somehow or other, he had found himself trapped once again, but this time between the films full of adultery and violence from the West Coast and the plays of the East Coast, macabre, satiated in madness and despair and the inexorable draw of the occult.
Then came the visitor—just as Bela felt at his most alive, goaded onwards by his dreams of becoming a truly great movie star. His bags were packed to leave New York once and for all, the tickets bought. Bela sat in his dressing room removing the last traces of his makeup when he heard the door opening softly, causing him to stand up sharply to greet the intruder.
The visitor stood before him, dressed in black. “Good evening, Mr Lugosi,” said the stranger, with a nod. Bela was startled to realise that the man was speaking Hungarian, albeit with an accent he could not place. “I have a play to produce. I require a star.”
More Hungarian theatre, thought Bela. “Forgive me, sir, but I am a little beyond. . .”
“The play will be in English, performed on Broadway,” said the stranger immediately, sensing Bela’s concern. “The play has a wealthy backer from our country who wishes the lead role to be performed by a Hungarian. You, to be precise.”
“I see.” What actor alive did not thrill at the sound of a man requesting his presence in a play—and a lead role, no less, on Broadway? Nevertheless, it all sounded so odd, fantastic even. “Would you care to sit down?” asked Bela, buying himself some time.
The stranger shook his head, lifting his bag onto Bela’s dressing table instead as if to demonstrate the veracity of his offer. He opened the bag and brought out several large pieces of gold, which he placed carefully on the table in front of Bela. “You may take this as a deposit,” said the stranger.
Bela swallowed hard. He was so intrigued that the gold was scarcely necessary. “May I know the name of the play?”
The stranger nodded. “Dracula.”
Minutes later, with terms quickly agreed upon, the stranger left, leaving Bela alone in his room with an unnerving sense that a presence had been left behind to watch him. He changed and left the theatre, feeling that a deal of sorts had been struck and that it was about more than a stage play called Dracula.
The night air was warm as Bela strolled down the neon-lit streets of the metropolis. Far in the future, he would look back and feel as though he walked through those streets directly onto the stage—he remembered little of the weeks of learning lines and rehearsing. He passed effortlessly from the thrill of an offer to the applauding audiences and glowing reviews, hailing him once again as the star of the moment, an overnight sensation, the latest discovery upon the Broadway stage. Fame, glory, wealth—it was all his, and yet Bela was not overwhelmed or overjoyed. It was his right, his entitlement, a day that had always been meant for him.
The other actors quickly learnt to accept Bela’s aloofness, putting his detachment from them down to an odd character quirk or a skill learnt in adversity, little knowing that Bela believed himself to inhabit a different realm from theirs altogether. Each night, on stage, he escaped from the noise and heat of the city to the cool calm of Transylvania; he returned home. In the fantasy world of the theatre, he could walk again through those ruined castles, deep within those sprawling dark forests where the children of the night serenaded his every step.
He was a man in a trance, never quite sure where fantasy ended and reality began. Both cast and audience were suitably awestruck by the power of his performances, but Bela was aware of nothing other than himself and his role as he strode onto the stage every night as a newborn master of the unreal, the embodiment of the Lord of the Undead. The newspaper reports talked of a strange magnetism that emanated from the stage. Bela would have expected no different as he was conscious of a strange power that went forth from him in that role, enfolding him so that he could have gone on forever in that one role, the undead Count Dracula, haunting the world.
But the inner darkness called him on to new opportunities and new excitement. It was time to heed the call of Hollywood.
11
Evi was falling. If she could have found words to describe despair or even thought to describe it to anyone, she would have said that it was simply like falling—falling somewhere without an exit, without any means of escape, like down one of those deep, narrow canyons Christy said could be found in the remote places of this country, deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building, full of the creatures of the night living undisturbed by human trespassers or the harsh rays of the sun. The pattern was always the same. She would hover at the edge of that precipice for hours or even days, staving off the inevitable in the only way she knew; then something would happen to throw her off, and she would fall. She would fall, she would keep falling, and all the moonshine in the world would not drag her back.
She was still falling as she wrote. Surrounded by empty bottles and crumpled, discarded pages, her subject became muddled with her own nightmares, and even her dream journeys no longer made any sense. She imagined she was back in her family home in Coventry, standing before the maternal judge because of something a gossiping neighbour had said she had done. Then she was standing with Christy in the prison camp, holding his hand as though he were a little boy, telling him it was all going to be okay. Through the portal of dreams, her identity slipped from helpless victim to guardian angel, and neither felt real; she was sure the most awful beating ever had never prompted her to plead like that—it would have been beneath her dignity to cry out if someone had been removing her fingernails—and even in her drunken slumbers, Evi knew she was not in Korea either. She knew she had never saved him.
There it all was before her eyes—the cold kitchen floor with its black-and-white tiles; the aromas of dinner cooking on the stove, meals she would not be invited to join; the round, squat table leg with its spiral engraving, the white paint scratched away from the many times she had dug her fingernails into the wood and squeezed and squeezed. . . and stifling heat, a world she ought not to have known at all, but it was there all the same. The prison camp as her imagination had created it: coils of barbed wire everywhere; the maddening murmur of insects; the rows and rows of weary men trying to stand to attention, all looking the same, the generic faces of a newspaper photograph. But Christy was real. He stood away from the others. Evi knew he was in terrible trouble—that was why he was standing in isolation—but she stood beside him and squeezed his hand in hers. Yes, he was real. She could feel the warmth of his skin against hers, his grip a little too tight because he was afraid and trying not to show it.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly, but he did not let go of her.
“This is exactly where I should be,” she said. “I won’t let anything happen.” It was absurd. Even in the confusion of her dream, Evi was the same size she had always been, and Christy towered over her. “I’m here.”
“Evi, you should go.” His voice had a tone of urgency now; his fingers uncurled from around hers, leaving a space between them. “Some things can’t be shared.”
Evi was having none of it. “I shan’t go anywhere!” She stepped towards him to close that tiny gap between them, but something or someone was holding her back, and she could not move. She could not reach him. Evi began to struggle. . . in an instant she was back in her family kitchen, being thrown bodily onto the floor. . . then she was fighting this invisible assailant, who was keeping her from her husband at the moment he needed her the most. . . she flailed and shouted only because there was nothing else she could do. She did not know where she was any longer. One moment she was battling to stop a person from hurting her; the next moment she was employing her every scrap of energy to stop herself from being rescued. She knew she was being taken away from Christy because he was going to suffer; she was being taken out of the firing line. But she would not let them do it; she did not want to escape. . .
She was adrift and, hardly for the first time, trapped in the cavern of her own mind. Evi was falling into that state of despair in which she lost any sense of night or day. The hours and days slipped away in a blur of grief-induced nightmares and empty bottles and pages and pages of notes she had taken during her interviews with Bela.
Writing was the only constant. It had been the same way for her father during the last year before she left the house. Battling the misery of falling sales and financial hardship, combined with the misery of an ever more foul-tempered wife and distant daughter, Evi’s father had retreated into his work until his characters and plots seemed more real than the world around him. That is what madness is—the seeking of refuge in a place that exists only in the mind. It was his place of refuge, and it was Evi’s now, that endless sojourn into the life of a man whose star had set many years before.
In the stifling heat of her room, Evi journeyed to Hollywood; she watched an actor in his prime on film sets playing bit parts, then minor characters, then lead roles. Films and films, and another wife collected and discarded between pictures. Bela’s world, so ludicrously superficial, so fake, so wholly irrelevant to her own solitary life, compelled her to sit at her desk and work. It forced her to wash and dress and leave her place of refuge for the noise and clamour of the outside world, where Mr Goldberg briskly took her work from her and handed her the means to survive for another week.
Writing forced her back to Bela’s abode, which looked much more familiar now that her own habitation was beginning to resemble it so closely. Evi no longer felt the need to sit near the window, craving the little shaft of light that broke through. The darkness suited her well enough after all.
