Countess Dracula (5 page)

Elizabeth raged hard. She was a woman of excessive emotions, all of them stored right on the surface. No doubt that was what had made her such a successful silent-screen actress: her ability to show exactly what she was feeling in every glance or movement.

Sometimes, in rare and sometimes drunken moments of sincerity, she admitted that her temper was a failing. It burned too hot and consumed every bit of her. She claimed that it was the product of a hard childhood in Hungary, a life of abuse and penury. A childhood lived in fear of the whims and violence of a father whose name she never gave. In truth this was as false a legend as the one Fabio had woven around her when she first started working in the industry. It was an excuse. A cover story. Elizabeth had always been angry, her long-suffering mother would have said, wanting to roar at the world from her very first breath.

The anger gripped her painfully tight, suffocated her, constricted her. It made her feel as though lashing out was the only way to draw a breath. As she threw her glass at Nayland it offered the tiniest mouthful of cool air to a drowning woman. It wasn’t enough. She threw his glass next, loving the way it exploded against the brick above the doors. Then she reached for a heavy fruit-punch jug, a weighty and satisfying weapon to throw at the world.

She hurled it as hard as she could, aiming for the glass of the French windows, wanting to fill the air with noise and destruction. Wanting to punch the whole damn world in its stupid, stupid mouth.

She had no idea that the maid would appear in the doorway the minute the jug left her grip, though even if she had known there was no guarantee she would have stayed her hand.

The jug hit the window and once more the air filled with broken glass. The maid screamed. Patience would have been relieved to see such a sudden sign of life on the witless girl’s face. She dropped her broom and dustpan and they clattered to the floor as she raised her hands to her face in an attempt to protect herself from the sharp fragments. She was too slow – the first wave of glass flew at her face and wide-open mouth, cutting off her scream.

‘Stupid girl!’ Elizabeth shouted, not so much concerned with the maid’s safety as with the potential consequences for the household of her being seriously hurt.

She ran to the window as the maid fell to the ground. Fruit splattered around her – orange slices, apple quarters, juicy strawberries exploding against the wall like the after-effect of gunfire.

Elizabeth grabbed at the girl, rolling her onto her back and then crying out herself as a gush of blood hit her in the eye. This sudden attack on her person was almost enough to force the rage further and she was a moment away from punching the girl when Patience arrived, fast but calm, bringing to the situation an authority that Elizabeth resented.

‘Leave it to me, madam,’ said Patience, pressing her hand to the maid’s throat where a small shard had nicked the vein enough to cause the spray of blood that had hit Elizabeth.

Patience wasn’t medically trained but she’d seen enough in her years of service to know a vein from an artery, a mess from a fatality. The maid, perhaps thankfully, had all but fainted, giving only a low groan as Patience brushed the glass from her face, neck and chest. One deep cut to the cheek, she noted, and one to the neck. It was the neck wound that could have turned the day into a disaster but it was bleeding gently and steadily, not pumping rhythmically like a severed artery. The wounded cheek would probably leave her with a scar – what might her father think of that?

Patience looked at her mistress, standing silent and spent behind her, half her face stained with the maid’s blood. ‘I can manage this, madam,’ she insisted. ‘If you would be good enough to send one of the other maids out I’ll call the doctor and have her seen to.’

‘She shouldn’t have just stepped out,’ said Elizabeth, still determined to make this anyone else’s fault but her own. ‘How could I have known it would hit her?’

Patience might have pointed out that if her mistress had refrained from hurling glassware around the place she would scarcely have had to concern herself about collateral damage. But comments like that are not the sort of thing that keep a woman in employment.

‘It’s all right, madam,’ she replied. ‘Everything will be fine. I will have the doctor take care of her. Just an accident.’

‘Stupid girl,’ Elizabeth muttered and, in a slight daze, she wandered back inside the house.

Patience bit her lower lip. There were times when she positively hated that woman.

Nayland heard the sound of breaking glass as he ran downstairs but he didn’t let it trouble him. Let the woman shout and scream, let her tear the whole house down if she wanted to, he would neither stop her nor care. She was poison. An infection in his system that was eroding his insides as surely as the most debilitating disease. He might not be able to cure himself of it but he would, for now, remove himself from its direct influence.

At the bottom of the stairway he made his way along the short white corridor to the double doors of their projection room. When they had bought the place this had been his one and only stipulation. A private little theatre where he could screen movies, not just his own – while many actors, Elizabeth included, might be so egocentric as to do this his love was for the medium as a whole rather than his own magnified face – but anything that took his fancy. He researched his roles here, kept up with the latest hits and also revisited favourites from a private collection that rivalled any other.

Some people worked in this industry because they loved themselves, some because they loved money. For Nayland there was also a deep abiding love of the medium itself.

He had seen his first moving picture in 1914. Hiding in America, desperate to distance himself from the horrors of the burgeoning war in Europe, a war that his younger brothers had gone off to fight, he had been struggling to make a career on the American stage. He had inflated his account of his successes in Britain, relying on the fact that the producers on Broadway wouldn’t know a lie from the truth. The challenge was simple: if he wasn’t a good enough actor to convince them of his bona fides then he didn’t deserve the success. Armed with a collection of press clippings and a couple of letters of introduction (one forged) he had tried to force his way into any meeting he could. Hoping that his accent, his confidence and his looks would buy him the career he wanted.

So far it had singularly failed to do so.

One wet afternoon, seeking to hide from the rain, he had bought a ticket from the miserable manager sitting in the booth of the Roxy and had made his way into the dark auditorium, hoping for something to take his mind off things.

The movie had been Griffith’s
The Avenging Conscience
, overwrought, overlong and hampered by a fatal loss of faith in the final reel. In that, it might fairly have been said to accurately reflect life. Nayland cared not one jot about its shortcomings: he was utterly transfixed by it. This was a new world, a new grammar, a new way of telling stories. He loved cinema’s tricks: the split screen, the dream sequence and, most particularly, the way it forced the audience’s attention in a specific direction. On stage you built images, offered tableaux and set effects but you were always hampered by the fact that you were being viewed from all angles, maybe not even viewed at all if an audience member took that opportunity to be distracted by some other piece of movement. You couldn’t take them and shove their faces in the essence of it. That was the major strength of cinema, he believed. The actor wants you to see his response to the venomous proclamations of his uncle? Well then, here it is, filling the whole screen, every detail, every ounce of hatred and recrimination. It was a revelation for Nayland and his love of live theatre vanished that very afternoon, trodden underfoot among the discarded takeout containers and cigarette ends.

He had made his slow way towards Los Angeles, paying his way en route with whatever disposable labour he could offer. Once on the West Coast his fortunes were quick to change: he had the face and charm for the movie industry and, most importantly, the camera loved him. An actor who had been overshadowed on the stage, lost in the shadow of bigger, more assured performances, had found his natural home. Rendered large on the screen he had what could never be faked: a beauty and magnetism that made audiences love him. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him. Within twelve months he had gone from a washed-up stage actor to a screen icon. Through it all he never lost his love for cinema. If anything, knowing the off-screen tricks – the camera techniques, the lighting methods – thrilled him even more. Cinema wasn’t a miracle, it was magic that anyone could learn and duplicate. Nayland had found his perfect home. Just look where it had got him.

The little projection room had seats for thirty, with the projector booth a small raised room reached by a spiral staircase at the back. He climbed up to it, and worked his way through the large storage cupboard that held his collection. He already knew what he wanted to see, though he half hoped that his gaze would fall on something else, something more escapist, as he ran his fingers along the edge of the film canisters. But it didn’t. Here was
The Golden Cockerel
, a melodrama set in the Deep South, telling the tale of two families at war.
Romeo and Juliet
reworked for a cast of honest toilers in dungarees and straw hats. It had been the first film in which he had appeared with Elizabeth. He had played Jed, the eldest son of the Capstan clan, she Viola, the rose in the flower bed of the Jackson family tree.

Nayland skipped the first couple of reels, wanting to cut to the chase. Loading up the projector he set it to run and climbed back down to the auditorium, taking a seat in the front row where the screen loomed so large that it blanked out everything else.

There she was, dressed down in homespun gingham, her hair pulled into twin plaits. Her face was so beautiful, the lines of excess and abuse as yet unformed. When she smiled her lips stretched several feet to either side and he wanted nothing more than to strip off and climb inside that mouth, to lie back on her soft tongue and feel her hot breath wash over him.

Here was the perfection that he could never find in the real world. Here was the Elizabeth Sasdy that could only be known on film. She never spoke, communicating through intertitles that offered none of the harsh edge her voice had in real life. ‘Oh Jed,’ the screen translated, ‘how I wish you’d just hold me!’ and he had and would still if only this perfect vision walked the Earth.

Nayland watched his screen self kiss that simple, beautiful hybrid of Viola and Elizabeth and tried to recall how those lips had felt. He hadn’t known what crimes they were capable of back then: they had simply enchanted him, excited him, made him determined to have her.

The memory of her brought him to life in his seat and he leaned back and unbuckled his trousers. There was a moment of shame, then Elizabeth looked directly at the camera, offering that brooding, sultry look that had stiffened half the audiences back in the late 1920s and made her a bankable legend. He was as vulnerable now as he had been then – as
everyone
had been then. He filled his palm and, eyes fixed on the only true love of his life, imagined being able to enter this most perfect vision of her. A shining monochrome lover, moving jerkily astride him as the film was hand-cranked through the camera. Would she carry the scent of the film if he pressed his face into her neck? Would her skin have its smooth, cool touch? As he pushed himself into her he imagined the heat from between their legs exposing the image, a snapshot of where their bodies met, coming into perfect focus before the heat burned the film as white as the sun.

‘I love you, Jed.’ Her words appeared on the screen as he came. ‘And I always will.’

Suddenly exposed, his passion reduced to a cooling groin and spilled seed he had no idea what to do with, he found himself more depressed than ever. Above him Elizabeth Sasdy looked down and give a sparkling, coquettish laugh.

The real Elizabeth was not smiling. She was sitting in her room, staring at herself in the mirror. She had been doing so for some time, trapped in her own head, unable to break the seemingly unshakeable connection between her eyes and those of her reflection. The room was quiet but inside her head it was all about the sound of breaking glass. At that moment, it seemed to her, with blood on her face, that she looked more beautiful than she had for years. Was
this
the real Elizabeth? A dangerous and violent creature, a woman who wore the blood of others like face paint? Yes, she thought, it just might be.

But she could hardly stay that way for ever. She went to the bathroom and slowly and methodically bathed the blood away. It had begun to dry and, with the dab of a wet flannel, it became liquid once more, trickling down her cheek towards her chin. A thin rivulet caught on her lower lip and she decided to embrace her new animal state by licking at it, tasting the violence. It was surprisingly innocuous – perhaps she needed more of it to truly appreciate the flavour.

Eventually her face was clean and she stared at it for some time, trying to decide whether her eyes were deceiving her. Was this momentary madness colouring her vision or had the blood wrought an impossible effect on her skin? She had been looking at this face only hours ago, though in truth she needn’t have refreshed the memory so recently because she knew every line and crease, knew the way her cheeks had sunk just as the rest of her had swelled. She had been following the slow descent from perfection, like an endless horror novel she couldn’t stop herself from reading with the turn of each new page. This was not her face. No … that was not true, it was her face, but her face as it
had
been, not as it now was. She only had to compare it with the area around it, the parts of her visage that had not been touched by the maid’s blood. Where the blood had been the lines were gone, the skin was tighter, fresher,
younger
. An impossibility. She might have been a poor girl from Hungary but that didn’t make her a fool, something of which she often felt the need to remind people. This could not have happened. And yet denying it was the greatest foolishness of all. It was right there in front of her: one side of her face was markedly younger than the other, the face of a woman twenty years her junior. The face that she had originally brought to this godless city, the face it had fallen in love with like so many before it. But how?