Julia (14 page)

I almost understood everything,” Julia said. “I was lying in bed, reading that book you gave me, and when I came to the bit about Heather and Olivia Rudge, I knew that I was getting close to understanding what’s been happening to me—because I
haven’t
just been making it up, Lily. It was all mixed up with Kate and a little girl I saw before I fainted—I was so close, I had this amazing rush of energy and I almost called you, I had so many ideas. There’s something about the house that Mrs. Fludd saw, and it’s important because of what Magnus did to Kate. Somehow, the energy in this house is focused on me because of that. Mrs. Fludd
knew
she was in danger, and she said I was too. Doesn’t that convince you I’m not just making it all up?”

There was a long pause on the line while Lily balanced the effects of several statements. Finally she said, “Darling, Mrs. Fludd was killed in an accident. It was a hit and run, very near her house. Apparently she just wandered out into the traffic on the Mile End Road, and the car was gone before anybody knew what had happened. It’s always best to look for a reasonable, rational explanation before … before deciding on the other.”

“I know. But some things don’t have rational explanations.”

“Darling, there is nothing supernatural about a hit and run. As tragic as it is.”

“Evil isn’t rational. Lily, I know that something hates me—something in this house. Mrs. Fludd felt it too—it’s what she kept saying to me. I was so close to understanding everything that night I read about the Rudges. I almost broke through—I had all of these thoughts and ideas—I could feel the past all around me. The past is
in this house
. Don’t you see that I’m connected to that story? Because of Kate? It’s the key to everything.”

“Well, as to the key to everything,” Lily began, and then stopped. She had promised Magnus (they had worked it out together, with some strong advice from Julia’s doctor) that she would not lead Julia into that territory; if Julia were ever to admit the truth about Kate’s death, she would have to come to it herself. So she finished her sentence by saying, “I think it is in your state of mind.” Immediately she regretted her choice of words.

“My state of mind? That’s nice of you, Lily. Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. That’s the truth, my dear.”

“I can’t believe that you of all people won’t even discuss the possibility that something out of the ordinary is happening. Lily, if Mrs. Fludd saw something or felt something, as she did, isn’t that just in your line? Isn’t that just the sort of thing you
do
accept?”

“Only under the proper circumstances, Julia. You know I have a firm belief in the supernatural, but …”

“And how about Heather and Olivia Rudge? Lily, there are no accidents.
There are no accidents
. These things have been happening to me for a reason. Maybe it takes a coincidence to set it off, maybe there’s some kind of plan, I don’t know, but I’ve been doing a lot of looking into the Rudge case for the past few days, and I’m sure that’s the direction I
have to go. I found out the name of the clinic where Heather Rudge has been kept, the Breadlands Clinic, and I wrote to her, asking if I could see her.”

“How did you find it?”

“It was in an old copy of the
Times
. My neighbor, Perry Mullineaux, got me a reader’s ticket for the British Museum’s periodical collection, and I’ve spent the past three days going through old newspapers. Remember telling me that I needed some interest? Well, I’ve sure got it. I tell you, sometimes I almost see the two of them, I can feel them all around me in this house—I hear the music they listened to, sometimes I think they’ve just left a room the moment before I entered it—did you know about the heaters? I kept turning them off without ever turning them on, someone else was doing that, I thought Magnus, but eventually the only room where it happened was my bedroom and I taped the switch to the wall and the heater still wouldn’t go off. So I cut the wires, and the thing still stays hot. That’s just a small thing I know, but then there was that bloodstain on my blue seersucker that wouldn’t go away and kept getting bigger, there are the flashes of someone I keep seeing in the mirrors and the way the water has been getting so foul, it simply reeks, it’s like shit, like diarrhea but full of
money
, sometimes it smells like greasy old American pennies, I haven’t taken a real bath in a week. Then there are the noises and the whole general feel of the house—it wants me here, but it doesn’t like me. Lily, why did I buy this house?
This
house? Don’t you think I have a right to find out? That’s why Mrs. Fludd was killed, it’s horrible, it’s awful, that intelligent old woman was killed to keep me from knowing too soon. I’m going to see Heather Rudge, and I’m going to find everyone I can who knew Olivia—I keep seeing signs of evil in children, not just malevolence but
real evil, Lily. Kate’s behind all this, she’s evil now she’s dead and I have to work at it, I have to see what I can do, it’s so unfair.…”

“Julia,” Lily said when Julia’s voice had broken down into a series of excited hiccoughs, “I want you to move over here with me. I don’t think you should be on your own.”

“I can’t leave. Everything I’m interested in is here.”

“Julia, have you been drinking?”

“Not much. Why? It doesn’t matter. Magnus drinks.”

“I want you to come to stay with me, Julia.”

“That’s funny, everybody wants me to live with them. I’m very popular with the entire Lofting family. I can’t tell you how wanted that makes me feel.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“I don’t need sleep anymore. I’m too excited to sleep. Well, I suppose I get a couple of hours a night. I’ve been having the most amazing dreams—I keep dreaming about that girl I saw in Holland Park. She’s a sort of metaphor for Kate, I guess. She seems totally without any redeeming virtues.”

“Julia, guilt shouldn’t.…”

“I have no guilt. I leave that to your brother.”

Julia hung up.

Worried, Lily took her watering can into her efficient little kitchen and filled it at the tap. She carried the can out onto the terrace and began to sprinkle water over the flowers, which had lately showed the effects of the past month of hot dry days—particularly intense weather for a London summer. Eventually the weather would break, she supposed. Lily’s clearest memory of such a long spell of hot weather was a summer more than twenty years before; she remembered it because that had been the year Magnus bought the house on Gayton Road. He had not been so fat then, and he
had told her that he liked to go on Hampstead Heath and take off his shirt. One day she had met him in Gayton Road and walked over the Heath with him; in a green sloping vale Magnus had removed his shirt and fallen asleep in the sun. He had looked enormous, hieratic to her, his big pink trunk and massive, handsome head against the brilliant green of the grass. Lily had watched him for an hour, admiring how even in sleep Magnus seemed more powerful, more authoritative than other men. Of course, he was cruel, though not to her. “Magnim,” she had said, stroking one of his bristling eyebrows—it was his name in their private language. She had been happy that he had women, but equally happy that he seemed incapable of marriage. Lily, in those days, had thought that most women would know better than to desire marriage with Magnus.

Julia had been a shock: at that time, an innocent, radiant girl with beautiful hair and a modest manner absurdly at variance with her general air of healthiness, she had been eminently the type of girl Magnus seduced (physically, she was rather an American Sonia Mitchell-Mitchie, then Hoxton), but far from the kind of woman he might reasonably have married. Lily had for some reason always thought that were Magnus to marry he would take a woman older than himself. “It’s her Burne-Jones eyes,” Mark had suggested—poor envious Mark would have wanted any woman Magnus claimed as his own, even if she had looked like Mrs. Pankhurst. Later, she had discovered the extent of Julia’s wealth, and Magnus’s marriage had become far more comprehensible.

But not for years did it become less painful. Really, Kate had helped with that reconciliation, had perhaps effected it, since Magnus, while altering little in other ways, had revealed a surprising capacity for fatherhood. He had loved Kate so
deeply that Lily could not herself do otherwise; and eventually she and Julia had become friends. That Julia from the beginning had wished for that friendship encouraged it; but perhaps the change had begun when Lily arrived one morning to find a nursing Julia reading not a baby manual but
Middlemarch
. Julia might have been absurdly young, almost too wealthy, but at least she had good taste in fiction. Eventually, Lily had given her some volumes on the occult—books recommended by Mr. Carmen and Miss Pinner—and had been pleased that Julia had read them carefully. (Though she had thought more of Mr. Carmen’s Roheim and Mircea Eliade than Miss Pinner’s books on astral projection.) Later, she had more reason to be grateful for Julia, though Julia was unaware of it, for she had purchased the flat in Plane Tree House largely with money allotted to her by Magnus from his joint account. And she knew without asking that it was Julia’s money which paid for most of Magnus’s expensive presents to her.

The main thing, Lily thought, was to get Julia back with Magnus—never mind how much money was lost on the house and its contents. Both of them needed healing. Lily knew perfectly well that she was at times jealous of Magnus simply because he was a man, and jealous of Julia because she had come between herself and her brother as even Mark had never done, but it was in everyone’s interest that they begin to knit themselves together again. Magnus, this past week, had been worse than Lily had ever seen him. Sometimes he did seem almost to hate Julia—though, proud as he was, he needed no supernatural assistance in that—while he desperately wanted her cured, wanted her back.

And Julia needed Magnus far more than he needed her. She had begun to look shockingly weak and ill. Her marvelous hair had gone dull and limp, and her face soft and pouchy.
Sometimes she seemed hardly to be listening to what you said to her. Julia was running on sheer nervous energy. It was no surprise that she saw evil children everywhere or that she had built up a sick fantasy about Kate.

And now this obsession with the Rudge case, which was perfectly explicable in the light of what Julia was determinedly repressing. Lily imagined Julia in a reading room, flipping crazily through old newspapers, making mad notes—she must look like Ophelia floating downstream on a sea of newsprint.

I have a duty to Julia and to myself, Lily thought. When she had finished watering the plants she put the can down on her terrace and went inside to telephone Magnus.

Most importantly, she had to keep Julia from Mark. There was something missing in Mark, a moral space filled by his resentment of Magnus. Lily knew that Mark would miss no opportunity to humiliate Magnus. Julia, now weakened and perhaps hysterical, would be more open to Mark’s entreaties than she had ever been. That must be blocked.

She first dialed Gayton Road. When there was no answer, she tried his chambers, where a secretary had not seen him all day and had been told not to expect him. She knew what that meant. Lily went down a list of his drinking clubs, and finally reached him at the Marie Lloyd, a certain sign of trouble. Once at the Marie Lloyd, the least prepossessing of all the little clubs he patronized all over the city, he began looking for a fight—he had once knocked down a truck driver outside the club who had sneered at him. She had to carefully judge the state of his intoxication, and calibrate her statements to it. Magnus’s spy, she also saw herself as Magnus’s protector. From his first words, she knew that it would be dangerous to irritate him, and so Lily omitted from her account of her conversation with Julia most of the material about the Rudges.

“Yes, she’s much better,” she said. “I think she fainted from exhaustion, and she’s been getting some rest. She has a project she wants to begin working on, and that will help her fill her time. It seems harmless enough. Magnus, you must not go to that house anymore. That is absolutely the wrong tactic.”

“Were you there when she fainted? Did you see her?” This meant, Lily knew, that Magnus wished to ignore her advice.

“A neighbor saw her faint,” Lily said. Now was not the time to inform Magnus that Mark had come along moments later. “Someone got word to me, and we helped her get inside. She’d locked herself out, but the French windows at the back were unlatched and we helped her in that way.”

“Those damned windows are always open,” Magnus grumbled. “I’m going to go down and see her. Take her home.”

“I wouldn’t,” Lily hastily said. “In her frame of mind that would only hurt things.”

“Bugger that.”

“I think you should go home. I think you should let things go their own way for a few days, my love, until she has settled down a bit more. She’s a terribly confused girl.”

“She looks like hell,” Magnus said. “I saw her. But who isn’t confused?”

“Magnus, before long she will have to face what really happened to Kate. I know it is dreadfully unfair to you that she blames you for what happened, and my dear, I feel your pain, but I do think now that the best thing for you would be to go straight home and perhaps telephone her later and try to speak calmly to her. I’m certain that is the best tactic, in the long run.”

“I have the feeling you’re hiding something from me, Lily.”

“No. I am not.”

“What’s this project?” Magnus belched loudly. “Christ, I have to pee. What’s this project she’s working on?”

“I gather it has something to do with that house she’s taken.”

“Christ,” Magnus said and brutally rang off.

Julia, hanging up the telephone, still kept her mood of excited elation. This had little to do with liquor, despite Lily’s implication, for she had only sipped at a watered whiskey during the afternoon after her return from the periodical collection in Colindale. Yet the feeling was akin to that of one stage of drunkenness—an optimistic, impulsive sense that wheels had begun to move, that a resolution was near. She had no doubt that this would have a connection with the Rudges: the Rudges were to help her exorcise Kate, help her finally lay Kate to rest. How this was to happen she did not know, but she felt a certainty that it would happen. In any case, she no longer had any choice—she was driven to discover the truth about Olivia Rudge.