Julia (20 page)

“Nothing. It was nothing. I can’t even remember.”

“Oh.” She seemed chastened. “Really? Please try.”

“I can’t tell you how much my head hurts. Well, I think she said something like, ‘You’re being blocked,’ and then she said that I should leave your house.”

“It’s what she told me! Oh, Mark, she wanted to save you too.” She reached toward him and stroked his wooly hair. The pain seemed to ebb. He looked at her flushed face and her brimming eyes and saw that some of her exaltation was from the whiskey. “Dear Mark,” she said. “Your poor head.”

“Maybe she was trying to keep me away from you.” That was in fact what he had felt.

“I went to the Tate this week,” he heard her say. Her fingers continued to caress his hair. “I looked at that painting. The Burne-Jones. You’re in it too. I am so grateful for you.”

When he looked up from his cupped hands he saw that Julia was crying. “Finish your drink and let’s go,” he said. The headache had resumed its normal proportions.

Then they were standing in the squalor of his flat, holding one another. Carefully adjusting his stance to support Julia’s weight while avoiding a crusty dish on the floor, Mark stroked her long, rather unkempt hair. He saw a profusion of split ends and wiry single hairs thrust up in a fuzzy corona. “Mark, I don’t know what is happening to me,” she was saying. Each word floated out into his collar and burst in a haze of whiskey. “Sometimes I’m so frightened. Sometimes it’s like I’m not in control of myself. Ever since I read about the Rudge case I’ve been kind of
dominated
by it—it’s all I think about. Because it would mean that Kate.…” Her back shook with her sobbing.

“Don’t talk about it,” he said. He slipped his right hand between them and began to stroke her breast. Julia gasped, and then tightened her hold on him.

“Stay with me,” he said. “I need you.”

“I want to,” she uttered into the side of his neck. His back was beginning to ache from supporting her. Julia was heavier than he had thought. “You’re the only man I’ve ever wanted, except for Magnus. But …”

“I need you,” he repeated. “You’re beautiful, beautiful, Julia.” He swung her body around, kicking a plate and knocking over an empty, clouded milk bottle, and, grunting a little, lowered her to the mattress. “Please, Julia. Stay with me.” He bent and began to unbutton her blouse, brushed
his lips on the mound of her belly. In the light from the single lamp beside the mattress, her face looked blotchy and flushed.

“I can’t,” she moaned.

“You can do anything you want.” He peeled her blouse away from her breasts and put his mouth to one of her nipples. Then he leaned sideways, rolled one hip onto the mattress beside her, and kissed her mouth. It was warm and fleshy, with the feeling of crushed fruit.

“Mark.…”

“Shh.”

“Mark, I can’t.” But still she did not move. “Just stay beside me,” she said.

Mark pulled the blouse over her shoulders and slipped it down her arms, then tossed it aside. He rapidly stripped off his own shirt, and gave her another long kiss. Julia lay inert, her eyes glazed and bloodshot, out of focus, in the light of the lamp. After undoing his belt and pulling off his boots, Mark shed his trousers. “I will,” he said. “I’ll just stay beside you.”

“Promise. Please.”

“Yes.”

He discarded his underwear as she distractedly, uneasily, removed the rest of her clothing. “Your house is a mess,” she said, laying her skirt atop the blouse.

“Touch me.” He guided her hand.

“You’re soft.” She smiled into his face. “Sweet. Big soft Mark.”

“I still have my headache,” he confessed. “This doesn’t usually happen to me.” Julia’s hand warmly cradled his penis, holding it hesitantly. “No. Keep your hand there.” Now he was beginning to feel a fractional urgency, and he stiffened a little. Her hand jerked him awake. He tongued her nipples,
sliding his hand between her legs. Julia’s body seemed an immense, fruitful meadow of warmth.

“My God,” he said. “What happened to your thighs?” They bore enormous purple bruises.

“I hurt myself crawling in a window one night when I lost my key.”

“Damn it,” Mark said. He had lost the small erection he had just gained. His headache throbbed. He lowered his head to the place beside hers on the pillow and reached down to pull the sheet up over them. He touched a warm knee, the curve of a calf, then looked down to see that the sheet lay tangled at their feet. He closed his eyes again and felt her hands pulsing warmth into his back. He slid one hand between her thighs and caressed a bush of long coarse hair.

“Don’t,” she said, suddenly gripping him tight. “Don’t. Just stay with me.”

But Mark was incapable of anything else. His head seemed to have grown to twice its size. There was a whirling vacuum between his legs. He punched the button on the lamp and held to Julia’s warm body because it anchored him in the room. His head found the cushion of her breast. Everything spun about him. He tried to create an erection by willpower, but his brain could not retain the necessary images. His body felt as though it were traveling—traveling great distances toward a cluster of lights. Julia’s voice brought him closer to his real size, but he could not focus upon that either.

“… keep seeing grotesques. Did you see that man in the pub? He had a red stump instead of a hand—just scar tissue—and his mouth.…” He forced himself to think: he had not seen a man with one hand in the pub “… a roomful of blank, flabby people reaching for me … that old woman
at Breadlands … swearing.…” Her voice slipped away altogether.

In the morning she was gone, and his body stretched uselessly, achingly, into air. Beside his head on the pillow he found a note which read
You’re a darling. I’m off to do my detecting. Love
. Beneath it was a check for a hundred pounds.

The spirit did not like her leaving the house for an entire night. When Julia entered her home, wanting to wash and change clothes before looking for Paul Winter and David Swift, she saw with little surprise that some of the furniture had been tumbled about, chairs overturned and cushions flung to the corners of the living room. From upstairs came an angry knocking and banging that she knew would disappear when she set foot on the staircase. In the midst of the din, she could hear a radio playing some vapid forties dance tune, and that noise, too, would vanish. The odd, fumbling night with Mark—he had lain against her unmoving all night, as unconscious as if drugged—slipped away. As much as tenderness for Mark, she had felt all during the long hours after the alcohol had worn off an acute awareness that she was not in the
real
place, the place where the important things happened. Mark’s inability to make love had been a relief; apart from her house, deflected from her quest, she wished only for comfort from the desolation. Back in her house and close again to the source of the mystery, she felt that desolation as her familiar element—it was the gray commanding sea in which she swam. What was happening to her was necessary; she was at home.

Julia went into the kitchen and experimentally turned the tap. A pipe clamored in the wall like a trapped owl. A viscous brown jelly plopped at the mouth of the faucet, and she hurriedly
twisted the knob of the tap. Into the air she softly said, “You’re angry with me.” The hullabaloo upstairs quieted for a moment. When she had poured three bottles of Malvern water into a pot for heating, she quickly went through the living room, uprighting chairs and replacing the cushions.

“You’re not Kate,” she said, tilting her head back. “You’re Olivia. I’m going to prove it. I’m going to find out, I’m going to
find out
—it’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”

The toby jug lamp crashed to the floor and shattered.

“I’m going to help you,” Julia whispered. The house seemed to get warmer with each word. “You are very powerful, but you need my help. And when I find out, I’ll find out everything. I’ll know why you are torturing Magnus. And then I’ll be free too.”

She waited for another bang from upstairs, but the house seemed to hover about her, expectant.

“I’m going to free us,” Julia repeated softly. “You want Magnus to hurt me, but I’m going to set you free. That’s why I came, isn’t it? You needed me. You had to have me live here.”

A heavy painting thudded to the floor, cracking the glass with a sharp noise like a pistol shot.

“I’m not afraid,” Julia said, and then added, “I don’t have to be afraid until I know.” She was lying—at any moment she expected something to fly at her head—but it was a lie which contained a glowing corner of the truth. Fear could not keep her from the hot center of the truth: fear was only personal.

After she had washed at the sink, scrubbing herself in armpits and private parts with a sponge, Julia ascended to the throbbing heat of the upstairs. Her bedroom door gaped open. An elbow of noise seemed to pulse from the walls. The heat from her room gusted out in a breeze which lifted her hair and dried her skin as she entered the bedroom. The paint
on the storage heater had blistered, leaving brown ulcerlike disks on its surface, curling upward in serrations. Julia heard rustling footsteps in the hall where she had just been. The closet door hung open. She went toward it, pulled it fully open and looked inside, her throat clenched. Some of her clothes had been pulled from their hangers and lay tumbled and twisted on the closet floor, mixed up with her shoes. Then she saw the box of dolls. It had been burst open, and the dolls scattered all over the back of the closet. Their floppy, uncomplicated bodies were torn and slashed. Ancient gray wool foamed from their chests. The terror poured back into her, and she fell gasping to her knees. Her certainty blurred with her vision. Kate had treasured the dolls; a malevolent Kate would destroy them. For a moment she was sick with yearning to be back in the hospital.

When she dashed into the bathroom, she first noticed that the figure in the black mirror—
her
?—looked haggard and old, her hair a mess and her eyes big with shock. Then she saw that the large untinted mirror over the marble sink had been heavily scored with soap. She stared at the lines and slashes until they coalesced into a list of obscenities. All the details of lying next to Mark flamed in her mind, dirtied by the words glaring at her from the mirror. The spirit knew, and hated her for what she had done. The last word jumped out at her: MURDERESS.
“Liar,”
she snarled, bone-jolted, and seized the nearest heavy object—a large ovoid rose-veined stone, polished to glassy smoothness—and with it shattered the mirror. Her heart froze, contracted. Magnus seemed all about her, wrapping her in a chill, despairing blanket of deception. That accusing word still burned in her sight. After a few minutes she breathed deeply and began pushing together the long silvery shards of the mirror. Her mind skittered away from
her as her hands mechanically brushed at the smaller pieces of glass. Had she written those words herself? Had she mutilated the dolls? For a moment she was certain that she had.

Winter, Capt. Paul S. 2B Stadium St. SW 10
. Both of the men had been in the directory. Stadium Street occupied the seedy lower end of Chelsea, near the four wharves and World’s End: Julia drove the Rover down the crowded carnival of King’s Road from Sloan Square, and after inching through the packs of young people parading in costume from one boutique to another, crossed Beaufort Street and found herself in a different world. The brilliant, nervous crowds had vanished, the restaurants and boutiques replaced by factory walls and the peeling facades of bedsitters. Here, the few clothing stores hung their wares from their awnings; bent old women with shopping carts trudged along the pavements, mumbling to themselves. When she turned the corner of Cremorne Road she fleetingly saw through the side window a grossly fat man in a ripped topcoat bunched at the waist by string struggling to force a terrified spaniel into a paper bag. He was gripping the dog by the throat, working the bag around the dog’s frantically kicking legs 
…murderess
in letters of crusty soap appeared in Julia’s mind.

The bright red side panel of a bread van blocked her windscreen, and she wrenched the wheel to avoid a collision. The letters
MOTHER
’
S PRIDE
wheeled off; the Rover fishtailed to the right, ticking a parked car, and then swung back in its lane. Car horns and shouts erupted about her. She sped away.

On desolate Stadium Street she left her car and immediately caught the smell of the Thames. Its sunless, oily odor seemed to settle on her fingers and hair. She felt as though she were inhaling damp cobwebs impregnated with the
smell of fish. Julia peered at the door nearest her, and made out through encrustrations of paint Number 15. She moved slowly down the block, hearing blinds rattle as she passed the row of mean, dwarfed houses. The rusted frame of a bicycle lay beside the curb like the corpse of a monstrous insect. 10, 8, 6. Number 5 had been painted in swarmy patches of red and blue and yellow across which had been written in large black letters
REVOLUTION IS THE RIGHT OF ALL
and
HENDRIX
; the front door was fixed by a big gray padlock. Julia crossed the street and pushed open the small stiff gate to Number 2. At the end of the line of cracked paving stones, the front door was festooned with a rank of bells beside nameplates. She went up the walk and read the names scrawled on the plates—Voynow, a blank, Mertz & Polo, Gandee, Moore, Gilette, Johnson. No Winter was listed, and she felt unable to ring any of the unidentified bells. Her confidence sinking, Julia stepped back and saw on the pitted concrete facing a glossy black letter
B
above an arrow. In relief, she looked upward and truly noticed for the first time that the weather had changed. The sky held a shifting mass of clouds, obscuring the sun and piling toward a top layer of hard, thin gray.

B
was a narrow door set into the rear of the house. Through it seeped a trace of some tinny music. When Julia knocked the door almost immediately opened upon a thin figure dressed in black turtleneck and black trousers. The music, swelling past him, resolved into Ravi Shankar. Julia first took in the man’s prominent, bitter cheekbones and then that he wore an obvious wig several shades lighter than his hair.