And then she burst into tears. I felt for her, even as relief swept through me. It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Casey herself had admitted that she couldn’t look after her brother. I held on to her tightly while she sobbed against me, feeling painfully sorry for her as well as exasperated by my own helplessness to fix this for her.
‘I was going to t-take him back anyway,’ she gulped between sobs. ‘But I was going to wait until… wait until after Ch-Christmas. I’ve never been on my own at Christmas before. I just w-wanted someone from my fam-family…’
I hated Casey’s parents in that moment. Hated them. If I had been lucky enough to keep my family, I know I would never intentionally have hurt them or lied to them or betrayed their trust or made them feel worthless and unwanted. I think husbands who cheat on their wives are disgusting. And I think parents who throw out their children over pregnancies or sexuality or any other pathetic reason are a disgrace. They don’t know how lucky they are to have each other to begin with.
‘You won’t be alone for Christmas,’ I said softly. ‘I know I’m no substitute for your family, but at least you won’t be on your own. And soon you’ll have a tiny perfect baby that belongs only to you that no one will be able to take away.’
30th November
Last night I dreamed I was back home with Nicky and Luke. I was in the bathroom of this beautiful old Victorian house, giving my son a bath before bed. He was splashing around with toy submarines, getting soapy water everywhere, and I knew Nicky would tell us off for making such a mess when she got upstairs.
Luke’s pyjamas were on the side by the sink but I couldn’t find his towel anywhere. I stuck my head out of the door and shouted down the darkened corridor, ‘Nick, where’s Luke’s towel?’
But there was no answer — the large old house was silent. I turned back into the bathroom, frowning, and glanced at the white, fluffy ‘His and Hers’ towels warming on the towel rail. I grabbed my own and dried my son off with it, made rather a mess with talcum powder, and then managed to get him into his pyjamas.
I picked him up and walked down the corridor with him to his bedroom. There were soft toys on the shelves lining the room and trains on the wallpaper. I tucked Luke up in bed, brushed back strands of his dark blond hair, said goodnight to him, then turned the nightlight on and crept out of his room… But no sooner had I shut the door than I froze at the sound of glass breaking downstairs somewhere. It was probably just Nicky dropping a wine glass while cleaning up our dinner, but… something made the hairs on my arms stand up with this awful apprehension that prevented me from calling out to my wife and made me fetch the baseball bat from our bedroom before creeping down the stairs.
The house was dimly lit with only a couple of lamps still on, but I knew the house — it seemed very familiar even in my dream — and I had no trouble navigating the stairs in the half light. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I froze, cold dread making my heart beat painfully fast as I clearly saw the dark silhouette of a man standing in the next room. It was the living room and there was no light save for the moonlight shining through the French doors.
‘Who are you?’ I demanded, straining my eyes towards him, gripping my baseball bat harder. ‘How did you get in here?’
Still he didn’t speak, didn’t even move. I approached slowly, aware that he was probably dangerous, that he might even be armed. I got to the doorway of the living room and then reached in and flicked on one of the spot lamps. The light shone directly onto Nicky’s priceless baby grand piano in the corner, only softly illuminating the rest of the room — the bookcases, the beige suite, the box of Luke’s toys neatly packed away. And the man stood in the centre of the room, staring at me.
He was tall, with dark hair combed back, black boots, navy trousers and jacket, white cravat and pale, waxy skin. But what alarmed me the most was that he held a long, thin sword awkwardly in his hand. And there was blood on its blade.
‘Where is my wife?’ I asked, my voice shaking slightly already.
The intruder looked at me and I saw that there were dark bags of fatigue beneath his eyes. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he asked hoarsely.
‘No,’ I said, staring at him. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Valentine.’
‘Valentine?’
‘Gretchen’s brother.’
‘Gretchen? You mean the woman who was Faust’s lover?’
‘Mephistopheles is killing us,’ he groaned, dropping the sword so it clattered loudly on the parquet wooden flooring. ‘Once we’re dead, he’ll turn on you.’
‘Where is my wife?’ I demanded once again.
‘She’s upstairs. In the bathroom.’
‘Look, why the hell are you in my house?’ I said. There was something about his motionless posture, about his sunken eyes, that was making me feel increasingly alarmed. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’m bleeding to death,’ Valentine replied softly. ‘That’s what’s the matter with me.’
And as I stared in horror, Valentine moved his jacket aside with one hand so that I could see the dagger buried in his chest and the blood soaking into his white shirt, running down the side of his leg to stain the parquet floor beneath his feet. With a yell, I dropped the baseball bat and raced upstairs to find Nicky, quite sure, even before I found her, that something really awful had already happened. When I burst into the bathroom, Nicky was already dead and our ‘His and Hers’ towels were dripping with blood. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t even move — I just stood there, staring at the bloody towels, and when someone started to play the piano downstairs I somehow knew that it was Mephistopheles on my wife’s piano, waiting for me to go down and face him.
It’s lucky I know that my family died in a car crash or else this dream would really have upset me. As it was, it did, of course, scare me. But nightmares are only nightmares and I’m not going to make my usual mistake of attaching far too much importance to things that have no meaning.
15th December
Christmas is here now. Shops, restaurants and streets are decorated in all their festive finery and the snow has come to the city, making it sparkle and glisten in the fresh, clear light from the winter sun. Large Christmas trees and strings of lights have been put up around the squares and in the streets, and the artists’ Christmas crafts markets have been set up outside.
For the first few days after Toby was taken away, Casey had been very down and, in an effort to cheer her up, I had taken her out to the three-storey Luxus Department Store in Mihaly Vorosmarty Square. The traditional huge bedecked Christmas tree had already been erected in the square, and the department store itself was lavishly laced and ribboned with festive decorations and displays.
In an effort to draw Casey’s thoughts from her parents and brother celebrating Christmas without her, I had tried to focus her mind on the fact that soon she would be starting a family of her own. A few years from now, she would be celebrating Christmas with her own little son or daughter, making the season magical for them and enjoying everything anew through their eyes. To my relief, this seemed to cheer her up.
When we got to the large department store, I said I wanted to buy baby things for her as an early Christmas present. At first she protested, saying that I was already doing more than enough for her. But I insisted. I said frankly that there was nothing I needed or wanted for myself, that I had no one else to buy presents for and that, for the moment, we were both as alone as each other. I wanted to love the baby as much as she did. If she agreed to let me be part of her life, she would be giving me far more than I could ever give her.
So for a while she had walked around tentatively picking up the cheapest baby things she could see. But I continued to take these off her and put them back, picking up better quality items, until she finally gave in and started choosing nice things. We had everything a child could possibly want by the end of it. We had a cot, little feeding bottles, plastic bowls with matching spoons, a musical mobile to hang above the cot, soft toys to put in the cot, baby bubble bath with the unmistakable powdery soft scent of tiny, perfect newborn babies, and a set of yellow rubber ducks and other bath toys. We also bought a baby monitor and a highchair, an array of toys and books, and, last of all, we must have spent a small fortune in the clothes department.