A Christmas Homecoming Read online

  Eliza looked at her with anxiety. “Should we be dealing with such ideas about real evil at Christmas? Isn’t it … inappropriate?”

  “But isn’t the good real as well?” Caroline countered simply.

  Eliza swallowed hard, her throat tightening.

  “I used to believe the battle between good and evil was something of a fairy story,” Caroline went on seriously. She remembered Sarah’s death. She felt the horror again, as sharp as if it had been yesterday.

  “Now as I get older and have seen more, I believe it is real. We need redeeming so desperately. We need hope because without it we have nothing. If there is a God, then mercy and renewal must be possible, even if we understand only a little of them, and nothing at all of how such redemption works. We get so much wrong, make so many rules, because it deludes us into thinking we have control of what goes on around us. We don’t, and we shouldn’t want to.

  “For heaven’s sake, we are so limited!” she added with sudden ferocity. “We need a force infinitely bigger and wiser than we are in our lives. But we cannot have good without also the possibility of evil, so if there are angels, then there must be devils as well. If we are even remotely honest with ourselves, we know that. So …” She looked at Eliza’s face and wondered if she had already said too much. “So in a way devils and demons are good,” she finished. “Because if we are reminded that there is evil, even supernatural manifestations of it, then we will believe in and love the good even more.”

  Eliza was smiling. She put out a hand very tentatively, resting it on Caroline’s arm. “My dear, you are a remarkable woman. I could never have imagined that watching a group of actors working would have taught me something I so badly needed to know. Thank you so much.” Then, as if embarrassed by her frankness, she stood up and excused herself to go and speak to the cook about dinner. “I fear we shall have to be a little more sparing with our rations than usual,” she added, by way of explanation.

  Caroline thought that the cook would have noticed for herself that the snow was impassable, but she only nodded agreement.

  On the stage they were proceeding with some of the later scenes; Vincent Singer was elaborating on Van Helsing’s intellectual brilliance.

  Caroline watched Joshua, and knew he did not like it. She agreed with him. Glancing at the faces of those who were watching, she could see that they were bored as well.

  Mr. Ballin came in silently, bowing briefly to Caroline, and to Alice and Lydia, who were both sitting in the audience. Douglas ignored him, but Ballin did not seem to see anything untoward about Douglas’s manner.

  Caroline watched Joshua standing on the stage holding the script in his hand. He had asked Vincent to make more of Van Helsing’s character, his humanity. But now that Vincent was trying to add depth, the character was not coming alive. But Joshua needed a solution before he risked interrupting Vincent’s monologue. They could not afford the time or the emotional energy for tantrums, and Singer was crucial to the drama.

  Vincent continued on, making Van Helsing seem a smug genius, and Alice sat wincing, looking more and more perplexed.

  Finally Joshua interrupted. “Vincent, this doesn’t work. It’s taking up too much time, and half of it is irrelevant.”

  Vincent stared at him. “I thought you wanted Van Helsing to be more of a character? As Miss Netheridge has written him, he’s flat, and even tedious. And more important, he’s no match for Dracula. How many times have you told us that a hero has no validity if the villain has no menace and no power? Surely the reverse must also be true?”

  “Yes, it is,” Joshua conceded. “But telling us he is clever doesn’t convince—”

  “What do you want?” Vincent demanded. “I’m an actor, not a conjurer or a contortionist. You want the music halls for tricksters!”

  “It’s too many words,” Joshua said flatly. “We stop listening.”

  Ballin walked over toward the stage. “No one cares for a man who boasts of his achievements,” he said quietly but very clearly. “And we have to like Van Helsing, even if we do not always understand or approve of what he does until after he has done it. Then we see the necessity.”

  Vincent started to speak, and Joshua held up a hand to silence him.

  “What do you suggest?” he asked Ballin.

  “Let him solve a problem, a difficulty of some sort,” Ballin replied. “Then his quick thinking, his knowledge and improvisation will be evident, and useful. He will not need to boast; in fact, he will not need to speak at all.”

  “Oh, bravo!” Vincent applauded. “Such as what? I’m sure you must be overburdened with examples.”

  Ballin thought for a moment. “Well, the use of light and mirrors is always interesting,” he replied. “Especially with vampires, who traditionally have no reflection.”

  “We already know who the vampire is.” Vincent dismissed the suggestion with a degree of contempt.

  Ballin ignored him. “Van Helsing could arrange mirrors that reflect from each other, magnifying light and sending it around corners. Vampires are creatures of the shadows. At least to begin with, Dracula does not wish to be exposed.”

  “Brilliant,” Vincent said sarcastically. “Then we lose all the tension because we defeat the poor devil right at the beginning. So how is it then that we let anyone fall victim to him? Are we all just blazingly incompetent?”

  Ballin was unperturbed. “We do not succeed because Lucy is bitten outside, in the night, before Dracula ever enters the house. Van Helsing doesn’t know that. Nor, at the beginning, does he know the depth of the vampire’s seduction. Lucy moves the mirrors, just as later Mina will lie, and even become violent, when Dracula calls her.”

  Joshua was smiling slowly.

  Ballin continued. “Later Van Helsing could suggest an alarm to warn them all if anyone enters Mina’s room through the window. A chemical device, of magnesium dislodged by the movement of the window so that it lands in water. It would give off a brilliant white light, which could be seen by anyone watching the window from another part of the house.”

  “And they don’t come running to the rescue because …?” Vincent asked, but his voice was now interested rather than dismissive.

  Ballin smiled very slightly. “Because Mina has drugged their wine. That is already in the story. Again, clever as we are, we have underestimated the strength of the vampire’s hold over our minds.”

  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.
r />   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.