Chapter Thirty-Eight
Is it any wonder then that the novel Bram composed after Dracula, the one he dedicated to me as a panacea for all the sorrow, was a romance?
He titled it Miss Betty. When it appeared the following year, it did so with little fanfare and sorry sales.
Quietly, I wondered if, after the lurid horror of vampires, the sweetness of Miss Betty (even if she could foretell the future) was not what readers wanted.
Once again, it stunned me how my husband could write with such feeling about passion, about pounding hearts and giddy minds triggered by the presence of another person. Miss Betty was filled with such moments. He’d even set it in the street where we used to live, Cheyne Walk.
Did he ever feel that way about me? About anyone?
Or did all of it come from his bountiful imagination? Did it matter?
Sometimes, when I looked in the mirror and studied my face and body objectively, a body that had birthed a son who was now about to turn nineteen, I’d wonder if I would ever know what it was like to be held with desire, to rhapsodise about the touch of a man, to listen with racing heart for his footsteps, to burn for his kisses.
Oscar would float across my mind and memories of his hands, his lips, would cause my flesh to goose and my heart to quicken.
I’d been so young, a different person then.
He had been, too. I recalled the dangerously angelic face of Bosie, the freshness of Robert Ross, then Oscar as I’d last seen him, flaccid, grey and shattered.
I would brush my once chestnut hair, seeing the way the silver threads among the dark caught the light, note the way the lines around my eyes and on my forehead were deepening.
My teeth weren’t quite the bright white they used to be.
My once taut jawline and neck were loosening.
I’d never been the dizzy, delightful Miss Betty, or Lord Godalming’s Lucy, or any of Bram’s other fictional heroines, fending off suitors and reeling over their charms. I was and would always be Mrs Bram Stoker, wife of a man who could pen the most wondrous and bizarre tracts that gave life to feelings I doubted he’d ever known.
Or had ever felt towards me.
It was a tough pill for this real woman to swallow.
Still, after twenty years of marriage, I could console myself that while I didn’t share physical intimacy with Bram, there was much we did.
Bram trusted me to hold tight his secret and respect his work.
I hadn’t always appreciated the latter, true, and I’d resented the time it kept him away from home, resented the person I saw as responsible for that (and still did).
But I’d become the principal sounding board for his ideas; was always the first person to read (or hear him read) his novels.
Bram also respected me, valued my opinions.
He appreciated the various people I’d brought into his sphere, many of whom had guided him to publication.
For all that he’d said and done things that had hurt me profoundly, he’d never broken my heart.
As far as I (or anyone else) knew, he never kept a mistress or visited bawdy houses (so many of our male acquaintances did and were not subtle about it), and he certainly didn’t shunt me away to a country house or seek to assert his authority by withholding an allowance.
On the contrary, he was a generous provider.
He endorsed my housekeeping, my salons, indulged my delight in shopping and new dresses.
As if he had a choice! Not after the last time a ‘ladies column’ rather maliciously pointed out I’d worn the same ‘sensational’ outfit twice.
It was the shame that report caused that put me on the fateful voyage to Paris with Noel and Mrs Simpson.
To think, the desire to win approval, and from the gutter press, nearly cost us our lives …
If only that reporter knew the truth of my arrangement with Bram. Wearing the same outfit wouldn’t rate a mention.
Marriage caused unhappiness for far too many – especially women.
So many wore it on their dour faces, squinched lips and downcast eyes.
One had only to hear how Sarah Bernhardt’s brittle laugh improved after her husband died of a drug overdose, or recall Lillie Langtry’s false smile regardless of whose arm she was on.
Why, look at the twisted features of Florence Irving, Henry’s estranged wife, formed by the bitterness her union had brought her.
Then there was the Marquess of Queensberry and his string of broken wives.
Not to mention poor Constance Wilde … Marriage had always been my goal.
But I’d wanted an interesting life as well.
Through Bram, I’d gained that. I should be content.
I was – mostly. Yet, a part of me still fretted that my marriage was not what God intended, that I was a fraud, a fraud terrified of being exposed and shunned.
Was the life Bram and I chose to live together that unnatural? It was the question I’d repeatedly asked myself for years. Would I one day be punished for living a lie? Would Bram? I kept pressing God to provide an answer. Alas, the God of love was deaf to my pleas.