Sabine by A.P

Author:A.P.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2005-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

XII

Jeu d’Esprit

How long, after this throwaway remark of mine regarding vampires, before the idea began to take shape in my mind? (Shape? Does a fog have shape? Does the twilight? Does the onset of darkness?) Not long, not long: once the word was out, the thought had only to trot along behind. A few days perhaps. Maybe closer on a week. Tessa had gone already, that I do know, or I would have retained comments of hers in my memory. Laconic, funny things that would have stuck fast and made me smile despite everything. Sadly there are none of those.

I don’t have any comments of Matty’s, either, now I come to look for them. So presumably she had left by then too and there were just the three of us: Christopher, Serena and me. Which would make it slightly over a week, because Tessa’s parents came that same weekend to retrieve their endangered ewe-lamb, and Matty’s came the weekend after, on the same mission. I remember this succession of dates clearly because we had a poor/posh lunch that first Saturday with Lord and Lady Grimthorn, as Christopher aptly twisted their name, and a rich/posh lunch the next with the Canal Grandes (again the name is Christopher’s rendering). I remember too how interested we were to see to which pair Aimée would accord greater status. We were all convinced the Grimthorns, as representatives of the ancien régime, would win hands down, but it was not so. The peer and peeress were accorded baked leeks and custard; the flashy, dashy Canal Grandes, dripping gold and suntan lotion, got roast duckling in orange sauce and a Saint Honoré with all the frills. Aimée, in her own warped way, moved with the times.

Christopher made plenty of comments, of course, but only in the jokey phase. When he saw things were taking a more serious turn the whole topic started to bore him. Or maybe to embarrass him. Or maybe to do something else to him, I don’t know. But, anyway, after a spurt of wild enthusiasm, when he would dance around behind Aimée’s chair at mealtimes, for example, miming pouncing movements with a Dracula cloak draped over his shoulders, or else stare her straight in the face and let beetroot soup drip down his chin, he fell totally out of sync, and every time Serena and I got down to discussing the matter in his hearing he would make fangy faces at us instead and drift back to his disc-jockeying. ‘Two that gather vampires; dreadful trade.’

Serena was my stay, my fellow vampire-hunter. She entered into the spirit of the thing with a zest, an energy, that endeared her to me like a sister, and that lasted as long as she could relate to me, in that or any other way. I say sister because we were too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts, could never really lock.

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