Julia (27 page)

“Good God,” Magnus managed to utter. “Is she mad? She can’t divorce me.”

“I should imagine, brother dear, that she has grounds sufficient to divorce you fifty times, should that be necessary. But, yes, I think she is mad. This Rudge affair has utterly unhinged her. She has snapped, Magnus. There is surely some way that you can have her put away in the hospital. Put away for good, if necessary. Or at least until she is capable of listening to reason.”

“Lily,” Magnus wheezed, his voice foggy and menacing, “what the devil did you say to her? Did you wave Kate in front of her again?”

“No,” Lily said, “at least not directly. She is much too full of this Rudge matter to consider Kate. Will you go to your chambers and look up in your musty old books whatever law you can invoke to get her safely put away? Because if you do not, you will not have a wife at this time next year. She could go to Reno, or wherever it is Americans go to be especially vulgar.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” Magnus growled. “I’ll look up what’s needed for an involuntary commitment.”

“You might have done that when she left you,” Lily offered in her sweetest tone.

“I needed you to suggest it, Lily.”

One question of Lily’s stayed with Julia.
Why is it you?
She could have answered, because it was I who bought the house, but that merely pushed the question back a step. She was not satisfied with what she already knew; it seemed to her that the force which had taken her out to Breadlands and had led her to Olivia’s group had not yet released her.

What she most wished to do was to take two more pills and sleep out the rest of the day. But there had been something, some idea she had not followed up.… Her mind traced the flicker of memory back, almost catching it. A magazine. Then she had it:
The Tatler
. She had been going to look for pictures of Heather Rudge’s parties in
The Tatler
on the day she saw the Burne-Jones painting.

Well, she thought, why not? Since making the discovery of Olivia’s role in the Braden boy’s death, she had felt occupationless. Now it seemed that she was only to wait—wait
for Olivia to decide in what way she would move. Leafing through magazines in Colindale was far more attractive. Let Olivia appear in the reading room, let her wave her knife over bound stacks of
John O’London’s
and
Punch
. The image was so bizarre that Julia, for the second time, caught at the fluttering tails of her sanity. Was it possible that she
had
ripped the dolls and written on the mirrors? Turned on the heaters? Perhaps she had imagined seeing Olivia. Her doubting mind bent back on itself.

Yet someone had killed Paul Winter. She had not invented that. Olivia was no delusion. Aware that she was on the verge of feeling grateful for Winter’s horrible death, Julia dressed in her hot silent room, went out to her car, and drove through drizzle and glittering streets to Colindale and the periodical collection.

Her reader’s card was inspected with almost insulting thoroughness by a uniformed guard; as she walked down the symmetrical rows of desks she obliquely saw two young men seated behind a large heap of Victorian magazines smirk at each other as she passed. Julia supposed that she looked more than ever like an actual beggar maid. Her shoes were mud-stained from the chase through Holland Park, her tights were ripped, and she hadn’t washed her hair in a week.

The desk she was accustomed to using was occupied by a large black man wearing gold spectacles which seemed to emit fierce light. His long flat cheeks bore triple raised scars, purplish black. He glanced aggressively at Julia, a bear defending his territory, and she wandered to the other side of the room, looking for a vacant desk. Two or three men tracked her with their eyes, looking benignly amused.

At last she found a desk near the wall and dropped her spattered raincoat over the top of the chair. After filling in a request slip for all the copies of
The Tatler
from 1930 to 1941, she took it to the desk and gave it to a new librarian, a dark-haired young woman with large tinted glasses. Julia watched the young librarian take her card to one of the runners, and realized that, two weeks ago, she had seen her outside the French restaurant on Abingdon Road. It was the girl with whom she had felt a sympathy, the girl who had smiled at her. They had been members of the same species. Now she felt nothing of the kind. She had nothing in common with this pretty young librarian.

With her hair a reddish mass of tangles, in her ripped black tights and muddy shoes, dark circles beneath her eyes, Julia sat behind her blond desk, her mood lifting. She would not feel sorry for herself. A boy set half a dozen fat black volumes on the desk before her. “They’ll send up the others when you have finished with these,” he said, nearly apologizing, as if he expected this strange woman to shout at him.

She knew that she would find something. She felt morally renewed. Julia pulled the top volume off the stack and began to leaf through it, staring hungrily at the pictures of men and women in evening dress, remembering her childhood. Almost, she could hear them speak.

The first hour she found nothing, nor the second; it was slightly before noon when she had even a faint success. She had flipped halfway through the volume for 1933–34 when a picture, a face, on an earlier page burned back to her, and she tore backward in the book to November, 1933. There on the right-hand side of the book, grinning up at her, was Heather Rudge, holding a cigarette and a champagne glass,
her shoulders gleaming; the sexuality of the woman scalded Julia’s bowels. On both sides of her dangled young men. Julia rushed to the caption. “The well-known American hostess Mrs. Heather Rudge at Lord Kilross’s party, here seen with Mr. Maxwell Davies, Mr. Jeremy Reynolds, Lord Panton, the Hon. Frederick Mason, and Viscount Gregory.” That was all. None of the young men, who glittered with an identical infatuation, were familiar to Julia, and she saw no other photographs of Heather at the party.

She went slowly through the remainder of the volume, but Heather did not reappear. Nor did she for another forty-five minutes, when Julia saw her oval, challenging, vain, sensual face again rising up from her dazzling shoulders on a fluted neck. More young men surrounded her—Mr. Maxwell Davies, Viscount Gregory and the Hon. Frederick Mason among them. They looked unchanged. The occasion, Julia read, was a party given by Lord Panton, who appeared beside a frilly little blonde, the Hon. Someone-Someone, all teeth and curls. These were her young men, undoubtedly: Julia wondered which of them had owned the honor of siring Olivia.

Thrice more, in the volumes leading up to 1936, Julia found photographs of Heather. She seemed to travel usually in the company of the same young men, with a slight mixture of mustached older gentlemen with straining bellies and popping eyes. Oliver Blankenship, Nigel Ramsay, David Addison. But every time one of these older men appeared, he was shadowed closely by several of Heather’s younger set. Heather was always “the well-known (or popular, or famous) American hostess” in these photographs, but there were no pictures taken of her parties.

Julia signaled to the runner to take the six heavy volumes
and return with the later set. Her face was warm and hectic, flushed, and she began to drum her fingers on her desk and look wildly around the quiet room, where men bent their heads over books as though drinking from them. Her watch said three-thirty. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since morning coffee.

One wing of the library contained a small cafeteria. Julia wondered if she should get a sandwich before going on. The impulse grew out of her rising mood, the optimism she had begun to feel, and she decided to follow it, even though she felt no hunger. She scrawled a note for the boy and went quickly down the aisles and out of the reading room, giving a bright, unfocused smile to the guard at the door.

Julia flew down the long lightless hall to the cafeteria, selected a tray from beneath the gaze of a bored Indian woman wearing a hairnet, and looked over the available food. “Too late for hot lunch,” the Indian woman announced from her stool. Julia nodded, examining the sandwiches. “No hot lunch now, only sameges,” the woman insisted.

“Fine,” Julia said. She took from the rack a cheese and tomato sandwich wrapped in thin cellophane; touching the whispery layer of cellophane, Julia instantly imagined it plastered across her face, adhering there, stuck to her nostrils and mouth. She dropped the sandwich on the tray.

“Coffee?” Julia said, standing before the shining coffee machine.

The woman shook her head. “No coffee. Too late, coffee again at half four.”

“Fine,” Julia said, and plucked a container of orange drink from a carton.

When she reached the cash desk, the Indian woman left her stool and moved slowly past the racks of food, audibly
sighing. At last she reached the register and rang up Julia’s purchases.

“Two pounds.”

“That can’t be right—one sandwich?”

The woman stared deeply into Julia’s face, then looked with great boredom back at the tray. She punched more buttons on the register. “Thirty-two pence.”

Julia took the tray to a clean table, and looked back at the waitress, half expecting to be ordered to one of the uncleaned side tables. The woman was shuffling back to her stool, conspicuously not taking notice of Julia.

The orange drink felt cool and sweet on her tongue, and it opened a channel all the way down into her stomach. She chewed experimentally at the dry sandwich; its bread seemed poreless, synthetic, and the cheese did not separate between her teeth. For a few moments she continued to chew distractedly at the stale sandwich, lubricating it with orange drink.

When her insides contracted, she quickly left the table and rushed across the room to the door marked
LADIES
. Inside one of the metal cubicles she vomited neatly into the bowl, and tasted the heavy sweetness of orange drink; when her stomach contracted again, only a thin yellowish drool came up.

She went to a sink and wiped water across her mouth. The mirror showed a drugged-looking, raddled harridan of indeterminate age; gray showed clearly in the frizzy hair at the sides of her head. Her lips were cracked, and beside her right eye was a small bruise she’d got when she had fallen down in Holland Park Avenue. Julia tried to comb her hair with her hands, and managed to coax it back into mere disorder before she left the washroom and returned to the reading room.

The five fat volumes sat atop her desk. Within minutes, Julia was lost in the first, examining all the photographs on a page and then flipping it over. By four o’clock she had seen two more pictures of “the famous American hostess,” once in company with Mr. Jeremy Reynolds and the other on the arm of Viscount Gregory. Heather was unchanged, but the young men, five years older, were visibly coarser and meatier, beginning to show double chins and jowls.

In the volume for 1937–38, Julia found a photograph of Heather standing beside a wheelchair. Strapped in the chair, incredibly shrunken and frail, was David Addison, one of the portly, pop-eyed older men who had customarily accompanied her; on the other side of the wheelchair stood Mr. Maxwell Davies, his earlier slender and dark handsomeness now softened and blurred by fat. Davies’s face was opened in a thoughtless, greedy maw of a smile—it made Julia shudder. It seemed to her that she could smell his breath, taste the thin flavor of the man’s mouth. Heather Rudge glinted, smiling a cool winner’s smile, between the two ruined men.

There were no further pictures of Heather in that volume, and none in the next. Some of the young men, Lord Panton and Viscount Gregory and others, appeared at balls and dances, grown fatter, gross of face, with the ruddy look of once-athletic alcoholics. She closed this volume at five o’clock. The library closed at five-thirty, and Julia debated whether or not it was worthwhile to leaf through the remaining two big volumes.

She decided to skim through them in the half hour left to her, and then to telephone David Swift again. Julia hefted the volume for 1939–40 and turned to the first number and began to flip through the issues more quickly than she had before. When she reached the issue for May 19 she glanced
down at a page of Cambridge photographs and gasped aloud. A young Magnus Lofting, standing erect in a dinner jacket, beamed out at the world from the page; beside him stood Mr. Maxwell Davies. “Two Cambridge men discuss the Blues,” read the caption and gave their names.

From that moment Julia burrowed into the last two volumes, looking for the picture she knew she would eventually find. Even isolated shots of Heather, or of Heather with her familiar retinue, did not long delay her; Julia flipped through, scanning the pages for one inevitable photograph.

The photograph appeared at the end of the 1939–40 volume, in an issue for February, 1940: the year before Olivia’s birth, Julia remembered. “Wartime Spirits Kept High in Kensington,” the article was headed. One of the pictures showed, unmistakably, a corner of the living room at 25 Ilchester Place. The wallpaper looked gaudy, and instead of the McClintocks’ heavy furniture, graceful small chairs and lounges stood against the walls. Men of various ages seemed to fill the room, many of them in uniform. Heather, looking as young and sensual as she had in 1930, appeared in over half of the photographs. She danced with Lieutenant Frederick Mason and Captain Maxwell Davies, and was seen in ardent conversation with Colonel Nigel Ramsay; but the photograph at which Julia stared until the bell clamored throughout the reading room was on the second page of the set, and showed an elderly couple, wildly out of place at the party, smiling somewhat tremulously into the camera. They were identified as Lord and Lady Selhurst. Behind them, in one of the corners of the room, twenty-one-year-old Magnus Lofting had his right arm about Heather Rudge’s bare shoulder.

She looked up as the African at her old seat was rising from his chair and gave his ferocious countenance a glance of such peculiarity that he dropped a sheaf of paper. She thrust the volumes to the back of the desk and stood up—only she and the African were in the reading room, apart from the pretty librarian and the last two or three stragglers already passing the guard. Her heart seemed to blaze. Now she knew how to answer Lily’s question,
Why is it you?