Julia (15 page)

The old copies of the
Times
and the
Evening Standard
she had read had convinced her of at least one thing. Olivia Rudge had been psychotic. One member of her group, the gang of children in Holland Park, had been anonymously quoted as saying that Olivia was “bent”; even a detached reporter had called her “disturbing.” If Julia could determine the truth about the murder of young Geoffrey Braden, perhaps that would appease Kate. Wasn’t proof of that the extraordinary change in her mood since she had read those pages in
The Royal Borough of Kensington
? She still had trouble focusing her mind on remembering what she was supposed to do from one moment to the next, but she felt as though she were riding a great wave, borne along on it resistlessly. She burned her dinners,
left half-filled cups of coffee all over the house, but since she had thought to ask Perry Mullineaux to help her get a reader’s card, she had one great sustaining purpose—even Magnus had receded in importance. Let him skulk about the neighborhood; he was merely in the present; he had no connection with what mattered.

Turning, still pleased with herself for her parting shot at Lily, vaguely toward the dining room and the doors to the garden, Julia reminded herself of an idea she’d had at the end of her day’s stint at the library. Before she talked to Heather Rudge—she had no doubt that she would hear from her—she would look through old copies of
The Tatler
. Surely, in the hostessy period of her life, she had been photographed for that magazine; there might even be pictures of her parties.

Then she remembered something Mark had said when he had appeared, as if by sympathetic magic, at her side when she had fainted. She had come conscious to find herself cradled by Hazel Mullineaux, Mark holding her hand. Even then, groggy and confused, she had been aware that Mrs. Mullineaux was not blind to Mark’s appearance, and she had tried to fight her way upright into parity. Mark had taken her hand more firmly and said to Hazel Mullineaux, “I don’t know who you are, but as you’re being so kind, do you think you could go across the park to fetch Julia’s sister-in-law, Lily Lofting?” He gave her Lily’s address and said he’d “stay on” to watch over Julia—a little bemused, but glad to be of use, Hazel had left them.

“That was neat, don’t you think?” asked Mark.

“Do women always do what you tell them?”

“Nearly always. They’re usually thoughtful enough not to
terrify me, too. I thought you were about to live up to your mortuary eyes. Like that Burne-Jones girl at the Tate you’ve always reminded me of.”

“Mortuary eyes? Burne-Jones? What are you going on about? I feel better already.” Julia straightened up, her grogginess nearly gone.

“The girl in
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
. Same eyes. I noticed it years ago, when I first met you. What brought on this fit?”

Then she had told him about the blond girl in the park, rushing to finish the story before Lily’s arrival. The incident was so private that, at least then, it could be shared only with Mark.

Julia threw some things in her bag and rushed out of the house just as a taxi appeared at the far corner of Ilchester Place. When it came near she hailed it and told the driver, “The Tate Gallery, please.” Better than driving: she felt too excited to trust herself to the Rover.

When the taxi pulled up before the Tate she gave the driver a pound note and went quickly up the gray stone steps, passing the usual crowds of tourists, and went through the entrance and turnstiles. She said to a guard, “Could you tell me where to find the Pre-Raphaelites? I’m looking for a specific painting. A Burne-Jones.”

The man gave her detailed directions, and she went down the stairs and eventually turned into the room the man had indicated. She saw the painting immediately. The girl sat, backed by a cushion, on a long shelf, shyly holding some flowers; the King, seated on gold beneath her, gazed up. She did look like the girl Burne-Jones had painted. Mortuary eyes. Were hers so round? But the King: the King, but for his short
sharp beard, was Mark. She gasped with pleasure. Julia stood before the painting for ten minutes, and then, still looking at it, moved to a bench where she could sit and keep looking at it. The little room endured several waves of spectators, swelling in, circling, and then draining out again. Julia shifted her place on the bench whenever her view of the painting was blocked. Eventually, alone in the room once again, she silently began to cry.

She had Mark—at least she had Mark. Both of them were Magnus’s victims. Mark’s phrase encapsulated the futile history of her marriage; she did not know if she were crying for her ten wasted years or for relief that Mark, however slightly, had shown her a way out of them.

Mark, Mark.

When the next dribbling of strangers entered the room, Julia dabbed at her eyes and went up the stairs back through galleries to the entrance. She walked outside into warmth and light and the noises of automobiles, went down the stone steps, crossed the street to the embankment and began to walk along the river. After a time she ceased to walk and leaned on the railing to stare at the gray and sluggish water. Low tide had left some scraps of weed, a bicycle tire, a battered doll and a child’s cloth cap stranded on the mud and gravel of the riverbed. Julia was certain that she would soon hear from Heather Rudge; she felt oddly disembodied, as though she were floating above the river muck. She found herself adopting the expression of the girl in the Burne-Jones painting.

That girl is going to pieces, Lily thought, and if she does, she’ll ruin everything for all of us. Drying her hands, Lily tried to think if any explanation had been given for Mark’s appearance
by Julia’s side. Had he been invited? Was he in the habit of calling on Julia? The first possibility was less dreadful than the second, but only marginally. In any case, she had to talk sense to Julia, she had to try to break her out of her wild and irrational mood. Julia had almost certainly come out of the hospital too soon. Magnus would be able to correct that. The girl had become fixated on the sordid Rudge case, of which Lily had a dim memory. It had been in the newspapers for several weeks a long time ago—now that she thought of it, all of that had happened the same summer Magnus had purchased his house. But it was merely one of those newspaper sensations, having no connection with herself. Surely it was a reflection of Julia’s loss of control that she had focused on that ancient story.

No connection. Unless … no, that could not be. Despite Julia’s frantic assertions, accidents and coincidences occurred all the time. You had only to think of Rosa Fludd to see that. Poor dear Rosa Fludd. Poor Rosa. The horrid niece had been very rude to Lily on the telephone.

Lily went through her living room to her bedroom, stopping on the way to regard the Stubbs drawing which had been Magnus’s last birthday present to her. Perhaps she could still persuade Julia to sleep in the spare bedroom. She had to make some sort of assault on Julia—all of them had been too easy, too lenient with her brother’s wife. The image in Lily’s mind was of a butterfly battering itself against a window: to keep its colors safe, the butterfly had to be pressed between glass. Once Julia was safely in the extra bedroom at Plane Tree House, Magnus could be brought in to make her see good sense. Thinking of this, Lily thought of asking Magnus about the coincidence she’d had in mind a moment before, just to see if it could possibly be true—and if it were, might Julia discover
it? Lily cursed herself mildly for her lack of knowledge of the details of Magnus’s life. Where exactly had he gone when he had visited Ilchester Place? But surely it was stretching things to suppose …? Lily shrugged the idea away and turned to her wardrobe closet. She had already decided to change her clothes.

The more soberly she were dressed, the more convincing she would be. Flipping through her clothes, Lily pulled a dark blue linen suit from the closet. She’d owned it eight years, and it still looked elegantly crisp. Then she opened her scarf drawer, sighed, and began to change.

Wearing the blue linen suit and an off-white blouse Julia had given her the year before, Lily returned to her scarf drawer. She tried on three before settling on a long rectangular Hermès scarf in a red and white pattern; then she regarded the effect in her long mirror. She looked slightly more practical than usual—like a retired lady lawyer, or the wife of a prosperous professional man. Now she had to rehearse what she would say to Julia. She glanced at her watch and saw that it had been half an hour since she had spoken to Julia on the telephone. Surely she would still be at home.

Use the Rosa Fludd story, Lily advised herself. Remind her that Mrs. Fludd told her to leave the house; now was the time to take hold of herself, very firmly, before things got utterly out of hand. She must not mention Kate unless Julia did so first. It was monstrously unfair to Magnus, but, as Lily reminded herself, Magnus had taken up the doctor’s suggestion more quickly than she had herself—Lily would have to put an end to Julia’s fantasy.

Now, Lily supposed that she’d have to use the plural. One fantasy had burgeoned into half a dozen. “Wants a little cold
water thrown over her,” Lily muttered, and checked the angle of her skirt in the mirror. She was ready.

Outside in the warm sun, she strode into the park. It was Friday afternoon, and Holland Park seemed always to be more crowded then than at any other time save the weekends. Lily’s neat figure moved, her bag swinging in time with her heels, through crowds of young people. Layabouts, most of them. Students. Though what they found time to study she couldn’t say. Of course, there’s one famous subject, she thought, seeing a couple kissing on the grass. Magnus should really have married someone his own age: a man like Magnus needed a respectable woman for a wife. And certainly not an American. Americans failed to understand so much, for all their automobiles and electric toothbrushes. Magnus should have been Queen’s Counsel by now, but any chance of that had disappeared when Julia became Mrs. Lofting. She
was
a dear girl, of course, and no one could say that all that money hadn’t been helpful. But even that had its shady side. The old rogue who’d made it was a sort of pirate, from what Lily could gather. Julia’s great-grandfather had been one of those ruthless railroad barons of the end of the last century—he had blood on his hands up to the elbows, Magnus had said. The grandfather was cut from the same cloth, apparently: whole forests had been felled for him, rivers spoiled, wars fought and companies stripped and men killed to increase his holdings. There was a taint, an historical stain, to Julia’s money. Lily lifted her head and turned, her heels making a neat staccato sound on the asphalt, deeper into the park.

Descending a short flight of steps beside the little gardens, Lily noticed a small blond girl leap up from one of the
benches where old people sunned themselves and run in the direction she was now walking. After a few yards, the girl began to walk. What a sweet old-fashioned-looking child, Lily thought: she even looked a little like Kate, at least from the back. After a moment she recognized that it was the girl’s trousers which gave her the old-fashioned aspect: they were high-waisted and elasticized around the top, like children’s trousers of twenty-five years before. The girl seemed almost to be leading Lily to Julia’s house. She began to skip ahead of her, slowing to a walk whenever she got more than fifteen or twenty yards away, and then, Lily approaching, skipped and ran once more—just as if, Lily thought, she were on a leash.

When they reached the children’s play area, within sight of Julia’s house, the girl vanished. Lily checked her stride for a moment, puzzled. She looked over the children playing in the sandboxes and sporting beside the trees, but saw no flash of that astonishing hair—that hair like Kate’s. To her left, on the long stretch of grass, she saw only three small wailing children, none of them the girl.

Lily glanced from side to side once more, then shrugged and was about to resume walking when she felt a quick chill over her entire body. She had seen, she was now looking at, a stout elderly woman seated on a green bench, her profile to Lily. It was Rosa Fludd. She was far off to Lily’s right, staring straight ahead of her, unmoving. She wore the hideous tweed coat she had worn the night of the last gathering. Lily slowly turned in the woman’s direction; her stomach felt frozen, and the ends of her fingers were tingling. She realized that she was unable to speak.

By a violent effort of will, Lily turned her head away from
Mrs. Fludd and looked back at the children. They played on, scrabbling in the sand. Their voices came clear and sweet to her. She snapped her head back to look at the park bench. It was now empty. Like the girl, Rosa Fludd had disappeared.

Lily’s breath gradually returned to her body, as if it had been suspended for some minutes in the air before her. She self-consciously straightened her back and patted the back of her head. She looked once again at the bench. No one sat there. No sad gray fat lady. Of course. No one had ever been there. What an extraordinary thing, Lily thought. And to have an hallucination just at the time when she was preparing herself to drum sense into Julia! A less stable person than herself might immediately join Julia’s fantasies and condemn himself forever to unreality. Lily permitted herself a smile at the thought of the response of Miss Pinner or Miss Tooth to the resurrection of Mrs. Fludd. Then she wondered just what Miss Pinner had seen in the bathroom on that awkward night; and then reminded herself on no account to bring up the subject with Julia. She found herself, she reflected, in the position of a priest taking a hard line on miracles with an overenthusiastic new convert.

By now Lily felt recovered; well, nearly recovered. The experience had been decidedly
dégoûtant
. She glanced once more at the bench—empty—and firmly marched on her way down the path.

On the corner of Ilchester Place Lily paused, trying to marshal her arguments. She had nothing in mind as to her exact words, but she knew she must have a lever—Julia in effect had to be pried from that house. Perhaps she could use Magnus. Some subtle threat was needed. If she could drop the word “hospital” in the proper way.… Lily stood for a
moment, enjoying the unaccustomed flavors of power and connivance.