A Christmas Homecoming (11 page)

This time, Vincent agreed, but reluctantly.

“Good,” Joshua said firmly. “Now there is the problem of lighting the scene where we peer into Lucy’s tomb in the crypt. I haven’t worked out yet how we can do that so the audience can see. The sense of shock and dawning horror is crucial there.”

“Any ideas for that?” Vincent asked Ballin.

“Do not show the audience,” Ballin answered.

“Oh, superb!” Vincent jeered again. “What shall we do? Recite it to them in the rash of words you are so much against? I’m sure that will frighten them out of their wits! Very dramatic.”

Ballin kept his patience. He smiled, as if amused at Vincent’s contempt. “Most emotions are the more powerful for being shown through the characters we identify with,” he said calmly. “Open the tomb with a creak,
a sigh of hinges, and let us see the horror dawn on the faces of Van Helsing and Mr. Harker, even Mina, whom we admire so much. Let us see her grief for her friend Lucy. Perhaps you need an additional scene earlier on so we may observe how fond they are of each other? We will know that something is terribly, hideously wrong, but for a space of seconds time will stand still and we will not know what it is. Our imaginations will fill it in with a score of different abominations. Then one of you may say that the tomb is empty.” Ballin spread his hands in an elegant gesture, his pale fingers catching the light.

They went on discussing, adding to and taking out, and by the end of the afternoon they were exhausted. Caroline and Joshua went up to their room, Caroline grateful for an hour’s respite from the subject before they all met again for dinner.

But when they were in the bedroom and the door closed, she could see that Joshua was still worried. He certainly would not rest as she had hoped.

“It’s not working,” he said bleakly, standing at the window and staring out at the light catching on the
pale blur of snowflakes in the darkness beyond. “Not yet.”

She bit back her impatience. The disappointment in his voice was enough to pull at her emotions, crushing the irritation she had felt mounting inside her.

“I thought Mr. Ballin’s suggestions were very good,” she said, knowing she risked making him feel as if he should have thought of them himself. Just now she believed the rescue was more important than its source.

He turned to face the room, the lines around his mouth deeply etched, his eyes pink-rimmed. “They are,” he agreed. “But they are only cosmetic. There is still a lack of cutting edge to it. Dracula isn’t … isn’t terrifying. We can feel the horror, but not the evil.”

She wanted to be helpful but nothing came to her mind that was honest, and he did not deserve to be patronized with false comfort. “I’m not certain if I know what evil is, onstage,” she said unhappily.

He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Ballin is right: It will only become real to us, and to the audience, when we see the effects of such evil in others. I wish I could think how to show that.”

“Who is Mr. Ballin, I wonder?” she asked curiously. “He seems to know a lot about vampires, and about acting. How can he?
Dracula
was only published this year.”

“I’ve no idea who he is,” he replied, walking toward the bed and lying down, hands behind his head. “I could sleep until tomorrow,” he said. “Except that I can’t afford to.”

“Mina,” Caroline said suddenly, with certainty.

“What about her?” Joshua was confused.

She turned toward him. “Jonathan Harker is a usual sort of hero, but he’s … I don’t know … a bit cardboard, terribly predictable. He isn’t like any real person I know, because he has no faults, no vulnerabilities—unless being a crashing bore is a vulnerability? It isn’t, is it?”

He smiled. “Not onstage. Bores don’t feel hurt, they just drive everyone else to drink. What are you getting at?”

“We don’t really care about Harker,” she explained. “We know he’s good, but we don’t care. And Van Helsing is a ‘know-it-all.’ We need him to defeat Dracula, and we believe he’s going to. In fact, I suppose we take it for granted. But Mina is good, really good—but vulnerable,
too. She cares about other people. She’s brave but she has enough sense to be frightened as well, and later on when the holy wafer burns her, we know that Dracula has finally gotten to her. She is the one we need to care about, to see slowly pulled further and further down into the darkness, despite everything. I would mind terribly if anything happened to her, anything that Van Helsing couldn’t save her from.”

He sat up. “Would you?”

“Yes. Yes I would.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, gently and for a long time.

“Then we shall let them think Mina will not survive,” he said at last. “Thank you!”

allin attended the morning rehearsal the following day. Now he was quite open about his suggestions, and Alice was eager to adapt them. Douglas seemed less displeased, and Caroline noticed that when Lydia was not onstage playing the character of Lucy, they quite often stood together. They did so awkwardly at
first, but then with increasing ease. They might have simply been commenting on the play and its progress—Caroline was not close enough to hear—but the unspoken communication between them told quite a different story. She had learned from Joshua the difference between text—the words on the page that actors spoke—and subtext—the emotional meaning that they conveyed and (if the acting was any good) that the audience understood. For Douglas and Lydia, the subtext was that they were increasingly drawn to each other. Alice either had not noticed, or else she had, and was not as disturbed by it.

Did Alice believe she could undo any damage as soon as Lydia left? Was she so confident of herself, or of Douglas’s love for her? Or had it perhaps to do with her father’s wealth and the opportunities that it would offer Douglas in the future? Was she really so shallow? So vain?

Caroline found herself hoping very much that the latter was not so. She liked Alice. She was highly individual, and perhaps she reminded Caroline rather a lot of her own daughter Charlotte, another young woman full of impractical dreams.

Or was it really that Alice reminded her of herself? After all, what kind of a woman with any sense would abandon a respectable and financially safe widowhood in order to marry a Jewish actor seventeen years her junior? Caroline shook her head and turned her attention back to the stage, where the drama was beginning to form a coherent whole. At last Joshua himself was acting, not merely reading his part and watching the situation and the details of others. The entry of Dracula made a world of difference.

Very carefully Caroline dimmed the lights, then brightened them slowly as the coffin lid opened, the creak of the wood pausing for just a moment before Joshua emerged.

She almost stopped breathing as he uncurled his body and stood up, his face wreathed in a terrible smile.

There was a gasp from Alice, sitting close in the front row, and Mercy gave a little shriek.

“Ah!” Ballin said with satisfaction. “But one small suggestion. May I show you? It might be simpler than trying to explain.”

Joshua’s jaw tightened, but he stepped aside. “Of course.”

Caroline dimmed the lights and began again.

Ballin climbed into the coffin and lowered the lid. There was a moment’s silence. Everyone was watching. Very slowly the lid rose again, perhaps two or three inches, then long, white fingers emerged, curling like talons, feeling around as if in search of something.

“Oh, God!” Mercy breathed, her own hands flying to her face.

The coffin lid continued to open very slowly. A full arm was visible. Then, still carefully, noiselessly, Ballin climbed out and stood up, his head peering from side to side.

There was no need for anyone to comment; the difference was too clear to require it.

Caroline found herself tense when they resumed, picking up as Dracula crept up on Lucy, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea. They went through the attack, but it lacked that vital knife edge of terror. After the power of Dracula’s emergence, it was anticlimactic.

“The book says a bench, a ‘park seat,’ ” Joshua said unhappily. “But it’s awkward. It’s just physically clumsy.”

“You are right,” Ballin agreed. He turned to Alice. “Have you any better ideas, Miss Netheridge? Something less … pedestrian? Certainly something less impossible to relax back against.”

“Relax?” she said in astonishment. “She is attacked by a vampire just risen from the grave!”

“No, no, no!” Ballin shook his head. “She is seduced, Miss Netheridge. We have seen him walk from his coffin but she has not. We watch the horror, helpless to prevent it. That is your tension. Never forget it. We know he is something hideous, risen from the dead, but to her he is a lover, bewitching her, filling her dreams.”

“Ugh!” Alice shuddered, but there was no denial in her face. On the contrary, her eyes were bright with a kind of luminous excitement.

From the back of the room, Douglas looked at her with a distress quickly mounting into anger.

“Perhaps it isn’t the path above the cliff at all,” she suggested, watching Ballin. “What if she has gone to the graveyard to pay her respects to her dead father, or mother?”

“A gravestone?” James said in disbelief. “You want
her seduced on a gravestone? Miss Netheridge, that is … vulgar, even blasphemous.” His face showed his distaste very plainly.

Alice blushed, but she did not retreat. “It is her neck he bites, Mr. Hobbs. I was not imagining an overtly”—she swallowed—“sexual scene. I am surprised you were.”

Now James blushed scarlet.

Ballin smiled. “An excellent idea, Miss Netheridge. I assume you had in mind one of the taller stones. If she were to lean back against it, all the symbolism would be perfect, the suggestion without the gross detail.” He swung around to Joshua. “Do you not think so, too, Mr. Fielding?”

There was only an instant’s conflict in Joshua’s face, then the resolution. “Of course,” he agreed. “It might be difficult to make something suitable. For now we can use one of the upended trunks.”

It took ten minutes to find such a thing and prop it up, with weights at the bottom so it would stand. They replayed the scene, and suddenly it was transformed. The gravestone worked perfectly, allowing Joshua to raise his arms and spread his shielding black cloak.
The audience could imagine anything they wished. When he moved back, slowly, as if sated, Lydia leaned half-collapsed against its support.

From the audience Mercy gave almost involuntary applause. It was as if she was so wrapped up in their performance that, for a moment, her professional enthusiasm overrode her personal need to be in the limelight.

Dracula’s first entry to the house, with Mina’s invitation to him to come in, had to be done several times. It was mostly in order to place the lighting in exactly the right position so he stood first in dramatic shadow, and then emerged out of it, transforming from a figure of menace to one of increasing charm, even grace. The final time they ran the scene, even Mr. Netheridge could not help but be fascinated. He had come in quietly and was watching from the back.

“Aye,” he said grudgingly. “It’s gripping, I’ll grant you that.” He turned to Alice. “You’ve done well, girl. I begin to see what you’re on about.”

She smiled and said nothing, but the pleasure was bright in her face. She looked across at Ballin, and he gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment. It was so small
that had she not been looking at him directly, Caroline would barely have seen it.

The scene with Van Helsing acting as Renfield worked superbly. Vincent was excellent. He would not have admitted it, but he copied almost exactly what Ballin had done, although his own sense of timing also asserted itself. The result was both chilling and pathetic, and very real.

By the time they came to Lucy’s death scene, they were all caught up in the story. Even James, as Jonathan Harker, displayed a sensitivity Caroline had never seen in him before. Mercy’s grief as Mina reduced the audience to a throat-aching silence, and Eliza, who had also returned to watch, quickly dabbed at her eyes to hide her tears.

They took a break only for luncheon: cold meat sandwiches, pickles, and hot apple pie with cream, all served in the theater.

“I think we should see more of Harker and less of Van Helsing in the tomb scene,” Mercy said suddenly. She had just finished the last of her pie and was reaching for the excellent white wine that had been served with it. “It would improve the pace. Van Helsing is the
intellect; Harker is the heart and the courage of the pursuit. Apart from Mina, of course.”

“Of course,” Lydia answered. “But actually the core of the scene is Lucy. She is the one who has become a vampire. And we still don’t know what we are going to do about the children.” She looked at Joshua, then turned to Ballin. “Perhaps Mr. Ballin, who seems to have been sent here by the storm to solve all our problems, will be able to answer that for us?”

“We are reduced to illusion,” he said thoughtfully. “We have no way of physically representing a child. Alice could—” It was the first time he had used her given name.

“That’s stupid!” Douglas cut across him at once. “She is nothing like a child; she couldn’t play one. She’s a full-grown woman, at least in appearance.”

Ballin’s face tightened with anger, whether for himself or for Alice it was impossible to tell. “She is also quite a passable actress, Mr. Paterson,” he said very softly, very precisely. His voice was oddly cold, as if there was some threat in it. “We can make a dummy, something of pillows, with the appearance of arms and a head. I’m sure Mrs. Netheridge’s maid can give us a
dress that will do. The minds of the audience will create for them what they expect to see.”

Joshua gave a sigh of relief.

Douglas snorted with what seemed to be contempt, although Caroline was certain that it was actually frustration.

“The master of delusion and deceit, aren’t you!” Douglas spat the words.

It was Alice who sprang to Ballin’s defense. “Stagecraft, Douglas. I’m sorry you don’t know the difference. It is causing you to be unnecessarily rude to our guest.”

“He is not our guest,” Douglas insisted. “He is a stranger who landed on the doorstep out of the storm, melodramatically, asking for help, and he has been aping Dracula ever since.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice said angrily. “He told us what happened. His carriage overturned and broke a wheel in the snow. He won’t be the only person stranded in this weather. What on earth would anyone do except invite him in, especially at Christmas? What would you have done? Tell him there is no room?”

“Invite the vampire into your house,” Douglas answered,
his own voice louder and more strident. “He told you himself: Evil can come in only if you invite it.”

Alice paled a little. “No one can come in unless they are invited,” she said, glaring at him. “Don’t tell me we’ve done this so well you actually believe in this vampire stuff?” She tried to laugh, and failed. It came out as a gasp of breath, with no humor and no conviction.

“I believe in evil. And in stupidity,” he said bitterly.

Her eyes raked him up and down. Her lip curled a little. “Don’t we all?”

“Of course we do.” Lydia moved closer to Douglas’s side. “If we didn’t before, we should now.” She faced Alice. “You are fortunate to have the love of so fine a man, Miss Netheridge. I think he is something like Jonathan Harker, brave and modest, not knowing how to fight evil because he has none within himself, to be able to understand it.”

Alice went even paler. She started to say something, then changed her mind and walked away.

“Perhaps you’d like to attack the children again after we’ve finished lunch?” Joshua suggested to Lydia with an edge of sarcasm that was breathtaking. “Just
pretend you have the dummy in your arms. Leave it in the shadows. Drop it, if it seems right to you, and then come forward to Harker and Van Helsing.”

Caroline put her hands over her face and pretended she was somewhere else, just to give herself time to re-gather her strength.