The Radleys (24 page)

To replace al these blood-fueled works of art, they went shopping and fil ed the gaps in their back catalogues with Phil Col ins, Sting, and Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
, of which they played

“Spring” every time anyone came to dinner. And they got hold of books such as
A Year in
Provence
and lots of upmarket historical fiction they had no intention of reading. Nothing too obviously lowbrow, high art, or close to the edge ever darkened their bookshelves again. As with everything else in their lives, their tastes remained as close to that of the archetypal, middle-class, vil age-dwel ing unblood as they could manage.

But despite every preemptive measure, certain things would inevitably let them down. There was Peter’s continued refusal to join the cricket club despite being pestered by fel ow residents of Orchard Lane.

Then there was the time the lady who used to run the post office came round and felt dizzy after seeing Helen’s painting of an open-legged nude reclining on a chaise longue. (After which incident, Helen put her old canvases up in the loft and began painting the apple tree watercolors.) It was their unknowing children, though, who let the most cracks show. Poor Clara’s love of the animals who feared her, and Rowan’s worrying his junior school teachers with his attempts at creative writing (Hansel and Gretel as incestuous child-murderers on the run; “The Adventures of Colin the Curious Cannibal”; and a fictional autobiography imagining his whole life lived trapped inside a coffin).

It had been painful watching their children struggle to make proper friends, and when Rowan began to be picked on, they had seriously considered homeschooling. This would have given him a life of constant shade and one free from bul ies. But in the end Helen had reluctantly put her foot down and decided against it, reminding Peter of the handbook’s plea for abstainers to “integrate, integrate, integrate” wherever possible.

And this approach might have worked, to a degree, but it couldn’t guarantee complete insulation from gossip, any more than it could make sure none of the pupils their children mixed with were going to tempt or torment them into an OBT attack.

And right now, on this Monday morning, the gossip is out of the trenches, coming closer and becoming more immediately dangerous. Peter is in the reception area, flicking through his mail and appointment sheets. As he does so, he listens to Elaine, a woman whose biological processes wouldn’t function without a bit of Monday morning misery fishing. She is in conversation with one of Jeremy Hunt’s patients in a hushed, eve-of-the-apocalypse kind of voice.

“Oh, isn’t it terrible about that boy from Farley?”

“God, I know. Terrible. I saw it on the local news this morning.”

“He just disappeared.”

“I know.”

“They think it’s, you know, a
murder
.”

“Do they? It said on the news that they were treating it as a missing—”

Elaine is quick to interrupt. “No. From what I hear, the boy’s got no reason to be disappearing.

He’s real y popular, you know. Sporty. On the rugby team and everything. My friend knows his mum, and she says he’s the nicest boy you could meet.”

“Oh, it’s terrible. Horrible.”

An ominous silence. Peter hears the squeak of Elaine’s chair as she swivels toward him. “Bet your kids knew him, Dr. Radley.”

Dr. Radley.

He has known and worked with Elaine for over a decade but he has remained Dr. Radley despite the many times he has told her it’s okay, preferable actual y, to cal him Peter.

“I don’t know,” he says, maybe a little too quickly. “I don’t think so.”

“Isn’t it terrible, Doctor? When you think it’s just the next vil age.”

“Yes, but I’m sure he’l turn up.”

Elaine doesn’t seem to have heard this. “There’s al sorts of evil out there, isn’t there? Al sorts.”

“Yes, I suppose there is.”

Elaine is staring at him oddly. The patient—a woman with long, dry hair who looks like an older, morbidly obese Mona Lisa in a faded rainbow-knit cardigan—is also looking over. He recognizes her as Jenny Crowther, the woman who used to run the Saturday morning arts and crafts workshop in the vil age hal . Seven years ago, she had phoned their house and spoken in concerned terms to Helen about Rowan’s Roman god puppet. Ever since, she has never said hel o in the street, only offering him the same vacant smile she is offering now.

“Al
sorts
of evil,” says Elaine, underlining her point.

Peter succumbs to a sudden claustrophobia, and for some reason thinks of al the fences Helen has been painting over the years. They are trapped. That is why she paints them. They are trapped by the smiling, empty faces and al this misinformed gossip.

He turns his back on them and notices a padded envelope in a pile of mail to be sent out to the hospital. A blood sample.

“Wel , it makes you want to keep your kids under lock and key doesn’t it, Dr. Radley?”

“Oh,” says Peter, barely listening to what Elaine is saying, “I think you can get a bit paranoid about these things . . .”

The phone rings and Elaine answers as Jenny Crowther lowers herself onto one of the orange plastic chairs in the waiting area, facing away from him.

“No,” Elaine is saying, with smiling authority to a patient on the line, “I’m sorry, but if you need to make an emergency appointment, you real y need to cal us between half past eight and nine o’clock . . . I’m afraid you’l have to wait until tomorrow.”

As Elaine continues talking, Peter finds himself leaning down to sniff the brown padded envelope and notices his heart quicken, not in heavy beats, but with smooth, bul et-train adrenaline.

He glances over at Elaine, sees she’s not paying attention to him. Then he scoops up the envelope, as surreptitiously as he can manage, with the rest of his mail and carries it into his room.

Once inside he checks the time.

Five minutes before his next patient.

He quickly opens the envelope and takes out the plastic vials along with the pale blue NHS

form. The form confirms what his nose has already told him, that this blood does indeed belong to Lorna Felt.

There’s a magnetic, almost gravitational pul toward her blood.

No. I am not my brother.

I am strong.

I can resist.

He tries to do what he has tried to do for almost twenty years now. Tries to see blood as a doctor should see it, as nothing more than a mixture of plasma and proteins and red and white cel s.

He thinks of his son and his daughter and somehow manages to place the three vials back inside. He tries to reseal the envelope, but it peels open as soon as he sits in his chair. The dark thin opening is the entrance to a cave that contains either untold fear or infinite pleasure.

Or maybe even both.

On the first Monday of the month, Helen meets some of her nonworking friends in one of their houses for a book group meeting and a midmorning nibble designed to get the week off to a good start.

This arrangement, or at least Helen’s involvement with it, has been going on now for the best part of a year and during that time Helen has only missed one meeting, owing to her being on holiday in a rented
gîte
in the Dordogne with the rest of her family. To miss a session today, at short notice, might ring a note of discord or suspicion, which would—on top of the ominous B-flat minor, which is the camper van parked on Orchard Lane—probably be best avoided.

So she gets herself ready and strol s over to Nicola Baxter’s house, on the south edge of the vil age. The Baxters live in a large converted barn with a sweeping drive and an azalea-fil ed garden that seems to belong to a different era from the epic space inside, with its rural-futurist kitchen and armless, oblong sofas.

By the time Helen gets there, everyone is already sitting down eating flapjacks and drinking coffee, with their books on their laps. They are talking more animatedly than usual and, to Helen’s bafflement, it soon becomes clear that the topic of conversation is not
When the Last Sparrow
Sings
.

“Oh, Helen, isn’t it terrible?” Nicola asks her, holding out a solitary flapjack on a gigantic crumb-scattered plate. “This Stuart Harper business.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. Terrible.”

Nicola is someone Helen has always quite liked, and they usual y share much the same opinion on the books they read. She was the only one who agreed with Helen that Anna Karenina had no control over her feelings for Count Vronsky or that Madame Bovary was essential y a sympathetic character.

There is something about her that Helen has always related to, as though Nicola too had cut off some part of herself to live her current life.

Indeed, sometimes Helen has watched Nicola, with her pale skin and quivering smile and her sad eyes, and seen so much of herself in her that she has wondered if they shared the same secret. Were the Baxters abstaining vampires like themselves?

Of course, Helen has never been able to ask the question outright. (
So, Nicola, ever bitten into
someone’s throat and sucked their blood until their hearts stopped beating? Nice flapjacks, by
the way.
) And she has yet to meet Nicola’s children, two girls who go to a boarding school in York, or her husband, an architect who always seems to have some big civic commission going on and was continual y away working in Liverpool or London or somewhere. But for a long time there had been a grain of hope that Nicola might actual y sit down one day and tel her she’s been battling a blood addiction for twenty years and every day is a living hel .

Helen knew it was probably just a comforting fantasy. After al , even in the cities vampires were a tiny fraction of the population, and the chance of one being in her book group was highly unlikely.

But it had been nice to believe it was possible, and she’d held on to this possibility like a lottery ticket in her mind.

Now, though, as Nicola is acting as shocked as everyone else about the missing boy, Helen knows she is on her own.

“Yes,” Alice Gummer is saying, from one of the futuristic sofas. “It was on the news. Have you seen it?”

“No,” says Helen.

“It was on this morning. On
Look North
. I caught a bit of it at breakfast.”

“Oh?” says Helen. At breakfast the Radleys had been half listening to the
Today
program as usual and nothing had been mentioned.

Then Lucy Bryant says something, but her mouth is so ful of flapjack that at first Helen doesn’t hear. Something about a hobby? A bobby?

“Sorry?”

Nicola helps out, translating on Lucy’s behalf, and this time the words couldn’t be clearer.

“They’ve found his body.”

The panic, in that moment, is too much for Helen to conceal, it comes at her suddenly, and from every angle, cornering al hope. “What?”

Someone answers. She has no idea who the voice belongs to. It is just there, swirling in her head like a plastic bag in the wind.

“Yes, apparently it’s been washed up out of the sea or something. Near Whitby.”

“No,” says Helen.

“Are you al right?” The question is asked by at least two of them.

“Yes, I’m fine. It’s just, I missed breakfast.”

And the voices keep swirling, echoing and overlapping in the vast barn where sheep might once have bleated.

“Come on. Sit down. Have your flapjack.”

“Do you want some water?”

“You do look pale.”

Amidst it al , she is trying to think clearly about what she has just found out. A corpse with her daughter’s bite marks and DNA al over it is now in police hands. How could Peter have been so stupid? Years ago, when he dumped a body in the sea, it didn’t come back. It was far enough away from land for them not to have to worry.

She pictures an autopsy taking place right now, with a whole audience of forensic experts and high-ranking police officers. Even Wil wouldn’t be able to blood-mind them out of this.

“I’m fine. It’s just, I get a bit funny from time to time. I’m fine now, real y.”

She is sitting on the sofa now, staring at the transparent coffee table and the large empty plate hovering on it as if suspended in space.

As she stares, she realizes she would succumb, right now, to a taste of Wil ’s blood. It would give her the strength she needs to get through the next few minutes. But just thinking this makes her feel more trapped.

The prison is herself.

And the body that mixes her blood with his.

Somehow though, and with nothing redder than sweet, sticky oats to eat, she manages to pul herself together.

She wonders if she should leave and pretend it’s because she’s il . But before she has worked out what is the best thing to do, she finds herself sitting and watching and eventual y taking part in the discussion of the book she didn’t quite find the time to finish reading.

When the Last Sparrow Sings
was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize, a novel set in mid-twentieth-century China depicting a love story between a farmer’s bird-loving daughter and an il iterate farmhand carrying out Mao’s policy of kil ing the sparrow population. Jessica Gutheridge, whose handmade cards Helen always buys for Christmas and birthdays, saw the author at last year’s Hay-on-Wye Festival and is busy tel ing everyone how incredible the event was—“Oh, it was just marvelous, and you’l never guess who was sitting in our row”—while al the time Helen struggles to seem normal.

“So, Helen, what did you think of it?” someone asks her at one point. “What did you think of Li-Hom?”

She struggles to act like she cares. “I felt sorry for him.”

Someone else, Nicola, leans forward in her seat and seems slightly put off that Helen doesn’t share her opinion on this. “What, after al he did?”