The String Diaries (9 page)

‘You speak of them as if they exist.’

‘No, I speak of them as if society believed them to exist. And there’s lots of evidence for that. When you piece the folklore together, throw in a few assumptions and stir it all up with a bit of imagination, a tale emerges of a race that lived in secret in Eastern Europe until about five hundred years ago. It’s not surprising that the shape-shifting aspect of their nature comes to the fore. Think about the context. In the ninth century you have Árpád the Magyar leader, with his Covenant of Blood, taking and unifying the whole of the Carpathian Basin, of which Hungary was a part. His descendants rule quite happily – well, perhaps
happily
is not the right word at all, but let’s not allow it to delay us – until the thirteenth century, and then . . . 
bang
!’ Beckett thumped the table with his fist, spilling beer. ‘Disaster! The Mongols invade. Millions slaughtered. Women and babies. Cats and dogs. Massacre after massacre. Nobody safe. The Mongols raid and raid. They burn, plunder, rape. It’s not difficult to understand how a myth centred around shifting develops in that environment.’

‘Defensive shifting.’

‘Exactly. And that is perhaps the birth right there of the
életek
. Their root, as it were. And if it’s a defence mechanism we’re talking of, then you’d expect them to be secretive. Who knows? Maybe after the threat of the Mongols had dwindled by the end of the century, the
életek
were able to step forwards. And live quite happily side by side until, for whatever reason, they were driven underground again, or interest in the myth began to wane.’ Beckett drummed his fingers on the table, evidently pleased with his oratory. He sipped his beer.

‘It’s an interesting tale.’

The academic nodded sagely. ‘You know, Charles, I have to say I’ve enjoyed this conversation immensely. You’ve completely reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the Carpathians. There’s something I feel I ought to ask you.’

‘Go on.’

Beckett’s expression became serious for the first time that evening. ‘Would you be at all interested,’ he asked, ‘in joining our battle re-enactment society?’

Nicole and Alice stayed with him a further week. It took him longer than he had expected to arrange their passage back across the Channel. His boat-owner friend had agreed to the crossing readily enough, but the avoidance of French Customs had been a negotiation point that resulted in him parting with several cherished bottles of Château Latour.

But even with that complication resolved, Charles admitted to himself that he had played for time. The longer he spent in Nicole’s company, the more he realised it was not just curiosity that led to his procrastination but an obvious attraction. They had argued less as the days passed – although on a few occasions their differences of opinion had forced Alice to intervene and separate them. They ate together, walked together, talked, laughed. Nicole asked to listen to a tape of his radio documentary, and then mocked him ruthlessly while she listened. He saw a different side to her during those evenings. When her defences were down, they bantered affectionately. He was often left feeling intoxicated from the experience.

The night before the two women sailed, he managed to persuade Nicole to leave the cottage and accompany him to a French restaurant in the heart of Oxford. Whomever she was running from, he reasoned, the chances of meeting him in a particular restaurant in a particular city on a particular evening were remote.

Sitting in the tiny bistro, Nicole delighted him by ordering
escargots
, and Charles delighted her by tasting one. He watched her across the table, trying to memorise her face as best he could. Her hair was down tonight, auburn locks falling over her shoulders. Summer sun had browned her face, revealing a dusting of freckles.

Nicole glanced up at him, raising an eyebrow. ‘You have that look again.’

‘Which look?’

‘I don’t know.
That
look. I never know what you’re thinking when I see it.’

‘I’m thinking that this is certainly the last I’m going to see of you for a while. I’m hoping it’s not going to be the very last.’

Nicole took a sip of wine, replaced her glass. She looked down at her food and then into his eyes. ‘Oh, Charles. This has been difficult for you, hasn’t it?’

‘Don’t say it like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘It sounds like you’re brushing me off.’

‘I’m not. But it
has
been difficult. Is difficult. This, I mean. Us.’

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

She shook her head. ‘Please. Don’t start that.’

‘I want to see you again.’

‘You will.’

‘Will I?’ he asked. ‘You haven’t told me where you’re going. You haven’t given me an address. Or even a telephone number. You won’t tell me your plans.’

‘I know.’ Nicole dropped her fork and reached out to take his hand, squeezing it before retreating. ‘It’s daunting, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Trust.’

He nodded slowly. ‘You’re asking me to trust you.’

‘Haven’t I always?’

‘You’ll come back?’

‘I can’t promise that. But we’ll see each other again, I think. Just maybe not here.’

‘And without sounding desperate, can I ask when?’

She laughed. ‘You do sound desperate. It’s completely out of character. And completely touching. The answer is I don’t know. But I think I’ll be going crazy in Paris if I haven’t had another argument with you at some point in the next few months.’

He smiled, and then he thought about what he needed to say, and his face grew serious. ‘We keep coming back to trust. I think I’ve done enough to earn yours by now. But I’ve made a few mistakes along the way. I should never have read your diaries without asking.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘And equally I’d be betraying your trust if I didn’t confess to you what I read when I dipped into them. Or where that trail led me.’

Across the table, Nicole laid down her knife and laced her fingers together. ‘I’m listening.’

He paused, alert for her reaction. Glancing around the restaurant, more for her benefit than the chance of anyone overhearing them, he said, ‘
Hosszú életek
.’

She flinched in her seat. Ever so slightly. As if she had been stung.

But she didn’t throw her wine in his face, didn’t storm out of the restaurant, didn’t do any of the things he had been half expecting. Her breathing accelerated, but aside from that she simply watched him.

Charles waited until another diner had passed their table, and then asked, ‘Well?’

Raising her eyebrows, she opened her fingers, indicating that he should continue.

He cleared his throat. Then, he began to relay everything he had learned from Beckett, and everything he had managed to read since. He omitted nothing, talking about the conflicting mythologies, about Beckett’s own speculations. And when he had finished she was still sitting there, still watching him, still silent.

‘You haven’t said a word,’ he said, picking up his wine glass and draining it.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. React? Tell me I shouldn’t have done it? Tell me the significance of all this?’

‘Charles . . .’ She floundered, looking away from him, and he saw tears in her eyes. ‘How do we even have this conversation? How do we? I value your friendship. I respect you. But you could never understand this. That’s why it’s best that—’

‘I understand enough, Nicole. I understand that, for whatever reason, this isn’t a mythology to you. I understand that you and your mother are running from someone. Something happened, I don’t know what. And for whatever reason, you think someone is hunting you, and you believe them to be
hosszú élet
. Is that true?’

She choked a sob, and it took all his restraint not to leave his seat and comfort her.

‘Nicole, you’ve been asking me to make a leap of faith all this time. I don’t know anything about this, other than what I learned from Beckett. I think I’m in love with you.’ He shook his head. ‘Damn, I’ve said it. But I can’t make that leap of faith unless you confide in me.’

Nicole was silent for moment, contemplating his words. ‘What was your view on what you heard?’

‘Of
életek
?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t have a view. It’s an interesting myth. What else can I say?’

‘Could you have a relationship with someone you thought was deluded?’

‘No.’

‘You see our dilemma.’

He gambled, played one last hand. ‘His name is Jakab, isn’t it?’

This time she reacted more violently. She rocked back in her seat, spine arched away from him, eyes scanning the restaurant – the same furtive expression he had seen the day she crashed her car. A bird trapped in a cage with a predator. It chilled him.

Nicole breathed quickly, hands gripping the table, knuckles white. Slowly, incredibly, he watched her recover herself. They sat in silence for a few minutes, and he waited as she looked from his eyes, to the table, and back to him.

‘Charles, we need to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Somewhere darker. Somewhere with stronger drink.’

They found a suitable watering hole two streets away. Dimly lit, noisy, anonymous. Wooden booths lined the wall opposite the bar. Nicole slid into one while he ordered two large cognacs and brought them over. A sputtering candle sat in a dish upon the table. She blew it out as he sat down, an indication of just how much he had managed to shatter her demeanour in the last half an hour.

Charles watched her take a swallow of her drink. She hunched over in her seat, fingers laced around her glass. He sipped his brandy, wanting to hear her story but careful not to pressure her. He was still astounded that he had told her he loved her, and dismayed both by his atrocious timing and her lack of reaction.

‘Jakab.’ She shuddered. ‘God, how I hate to say that name. When I was a little girl, my mother told me the tales of our family, told me why we had to be careful, keep our heads low. My grandmother, Anna, was Hungarian by birth, but she fled with her husband to Germany before the start of the Second World War. His name was Albert. Something happened in Hungary to make them flee. It was all very quick, in the middle of the night. They said goodbye to their families and that was it – never saw them again.

‘They settled well enough in Germany. My grandmother gave birth to my mother, Hilde, shortly after they arrived. When war broke out, Albert was conscripted by the Nazis. He survived for about a week until a sniper got him at Stalingrad.’

‘Hilde? I thought—’

‘Her real name. When the war ended and the Allies occupied, Anna was itching to move again. I don’t know if she had a near miss with Jakab or she was just concerned about the borders opening up again. Either way, she decided to move further west, this time to France. She took Hilde with her.’

‘Not a good time to be in France, if your husband was a dead Nazi.’

‘Conscript. But yes, you’re right. They were outcasts. Moved around a lot. My mother changed her name to Alice and then she met my father, Eric Dubois. By this time, Anna had passed away. I never met her.

‘My mother always warned me to be on the lookout for anything strange, to watch the behaviour of the people close to us, in case it changed. She told me there had been a man in Hungary – Jakab – who grew obsessed with her grandmother. There was a chance he was still out there. With Anna dead, there was a chance he would come for us.’

Nicole glanced up at him, measuring his expression. ‘Of course, she thought he was a
hosszú élet
. And by this time, I had read the diaries. When you read that kind of thing . . .’ She took another drink. ‘This is the bit I don’t expect you to understand. Or believe. But let me put it like this. Imagine you are
hosszú élet
. Imagine the myth you heard was true, that you have that ability. And imagine that the woman you’re obsessed with is married to another. And hates you. And imagine that, even knowing how she feels, you don’t care, you want only to possess her.’

He shook his head, opening his hands.

‘Charles, you
become
the man that she loves. You
supplant
him. My mother had been guarding against that all her life. But at the time, with no real experience of what was coming, it still seemed like a superstition, an eccentric set of hand-me-down diaries and warnings from a family too carried away by its own fireside tales. That was until we started noticing the changes.

‘My father, Eric, was a quiet, lovely man. A carpenter by trade. When he wasn’t in his workshop making furniture, he was churning out toys for me and my friends in the village. We were living in a tiny place just outside Carcassonne. A newcomer came to town. Petre, we called him. He and my father became very close. Petre came to dinner with us, was at the house all the time. He began apprenticing to my father, even though they were almost the same age. Work was scarce. People took what they could get.

‘But as time went on, Petre began seeking out my mother. He would visit the house when he knew my father was out. He started buying presents for her. My father must have seen what was coming. I think he was reluctant to act because he cared so much for his friend. It came to a head one afternoon when Petre made a pass at her. Father was a passive man, but it pushed him over the edge. He went berserk. He found his apprentice and beat him. We never saw Petre again. Everyone in the village knew what had happened. The man had nowhere to stay, nowhere to drink, nowhere to work. Everyone loved Eric and no one was going to forgive someone who betrayed him like that.

‘Shortly afterwards, we began to notice changes in my father. He stopped making toys, for a start. That was the first thing I noticed, anyway. My mother – she would never tell me – but I think their relationship . . .’ Nicole swallowed, choking on her words. ‘Let’s just say their physical relationship went from healthy and loving to violent and perverse. The arguments started. My father would forget huge chunks of our previous life together. I would make up stories about things we had done and he would nod in agreement, or laugh alongside me. Even though none of it was true.