That had been a stroke or some such. The old man’s health had been waning. He’d lasted only a few hours after his collapse in the church. George had gone with him in an ambulance to the hospital, had been with him when he died. The old man had come to in the final moments before he passed forever from this world.
His eyes had focussed on George’s face, widened, filled with memory, disbelief. ‘It’s all right,’ George had com-forted him, patting the hand which grasped his forearm with a feverish strength. ‘Take it easy. You’re in good hands.’
‘Good hands? Good hands! My God!’ The old man had been quite lucid. ‘I dreamed … I dreamed . . . there was a christening. You were there.’ It was almost an accusation.
George smiled. ‘There was supposed to be a christening,’ he’d answered. ‘But don’t worry, you can finish it when you’re up and about again.’
‘It was real?’ the old man tried to sit up. ‘It was real!’
George and a nurse supported him in his bed, lowered him as he collapsed again on to his pillows. Then he caved in. His face contorted and he seemed to crumple into himself. The nurse rushed from the room shouting for a doctor. Still convulsing, the vicar beckoned George closer with a twitching finger. His face was fluttering, had turned the colour of lead.
George put his ear to the old man’s whispering lips, heard: ‘Christen it? No, no – you mustn’t! First – first have it exorcised!’
And those were the last words he ever spoke. George mentioned it to no one. Obviously the old boy’s mind had been going, too.
A week after the christening Yulian developed a rash of tiny white blisters on his forehead. They eventually dried up and flaked away, leaving barely visible marks exactly like freckles . . .
Chapter Five
‘He was a funny little thing!’ Anne Lake laughed, shook her head and set her blonde hair flying in the breeze from the car’s half-open window. ‘Do you remember when we had him that year?’
It was late in the summer of ’77 and they were driving down to stay with Georgina and Yulian for a week. The last time they’d seen them was two years ago. George had thought the boy was strange then, and he’d said so on several occasions – not to Georgina and certainly not to Yulian himself, of course not, but to Anne, in private. Now he said so again:
‘Funny little thing?’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Weird would be a better way! And from what I remember of him last time we came down he hasn’t changed – what was a weird baby is now a weird young man!’
‘Oh, George, that’s ridiculous. All babies are different from each other. Yulian was, well, more different, that’s all.’
‘Listen,’ said George. That child wasn’t two months old when he came to us – and he had teeth! Teeth like little needles – sharp as hell! And I remember Georgina saying he was born with them. That’s why she couldn’t breast-feed him.’
‘George,’ said Anne warningly, a little sharply, reminding him that Helen sat in the back of the car. She was their daughter: a beautiful, occasionally precocious girl of sixteen.
Helen sighed, very deliberately and audibly, and said,
‘Oh, mother! I know what breasts are for – apart from being natural attractions for the opposite sex, that is. Why must you put them on your taboo list?’
‘Ta-boob list!’ George grinned.
‘George!’ said Anne again, more forcefully.
‘Nineteen seventy-seven,’ Helen scoffed, ‘but you’d never know it. Not in this family. I mean, feeding your baby’s natural, isn’t it? More natural than letting your breasts be groped in the back row of some grubby flea-pit cinema!’
‘Helen!’ Anne half-turned in her seat, her lips com-pressing to a thin line.
‘It’s been a long time,’ George glanced at his wife, semi-ruefully.
‘What has?’ she snapped.
‘Since I was groped in a flea-pit cinema,’ he said.
Anne snorted her exasperation. ‘She gets it from you!’ she accused. ‘You’ve always treated her like an adult.’
‘Because she is an adult, very nearly,’ he answered. ‘You can only guide them so far, Anne my love, and after that they’re on their own. Helen’s healthy, intelligent, happy, good-looking, and she doesn’t smoke pot. She’s worn a bra for nearly four years, and every month she -‘ ‘George! ‘Taboo!’ said Helen, giggling.