Julia (28 page)

“Because,” she thought, “Magnus is Olivia’s father. Because both of his children were stabbed to death. Because Olivia wants revenge. Because the patterns are clear.”

Light-headed, she left the library and entered a steady gray falling of rain. Chains of black clouds printed the dark sky. Julia absently searched her bag for her keys, unlocked the car door, and bent in behind the wheel. Her face felt chilly and slick with rain, and her hands were cold, wet. These sensations, like the bitterness at the base of her tongue, skidded off the reflective surface of her mind; at that moment, if asked, she would have hesitated before answering in what country she was. All of the puzzle had finally been connected, it had clicked into place, and the answer to Lily’s question had been found, as it must have been, in the past. Julia did not need Magnus to confirm or deny her knowledge: she knew that she was right. Magnus was Olivia’s father; he’d had a youthful affair with Heather Rudge and then deserted her. It explained everything. And it clarified Heather Rudge’s conduct when Julia had met her at the clinic. Now she knew why the old woman had thrice asked her,
Is that your real name?
Julia leaned back in the car seat and looked up at the black chain mail of the sky, seeing each of the pieces fall into place.
What could make more sense than that Olivia Rudge would seek to kill her deserting father’s second wife, Olivia being what she was? That she would make a deadly rhyme of her own murder?

There was a place she had to go. One area of her mind knew this with utter clarity, even while all the rest still floated, stunned by Olivia’s symmetries. Ordinarily she would not have trusted herself to drive—she felt as though she’d had half a bottle of whiskey—but there was no other way of getting where she had to go. She pulled the key over in its slot and heard the Rover’s engine kick into life. She slammed the car into gear and shot forward across the parking lot. Rain blurred across the windshield, and Julia flicked on the wipers at the same moment as she turned out into the street. The map in her head would lead her where she had to go, though she did not know how to get there.

Olivia, Magnus.

Olivia, Magnus. She had known from the night of her meeting with Mrs. Fludd, but only now did she see how the connection worked, how she was a part of Olivia’s web as she was of Magnus’s. Olivia could have been Kate, she thought, and the Rover rocketed forward, just scraping past a yellow Volkswagen. She meant, Olivia could have been her daughter. She and Heather Rudge were interchangeable.

“No,”
she said aloud, and swerved her car out into the passing lane, stepping on the accelerator.

Sisterhood. They were sisters. Women of the same man. Mothers of murdered daughters.

Julia brought the car to a squealing stop when she finally saw the red light, and ignored the curious glances from beneath umbrellas on the sidewalk. She sat, her mouth
slightly open and moistureless, behind the wheel, looking upward, waiting for the light to change. Magnus seemed more incalculable than ever, a sea of possibilities and surprises: she could never encompass him nor dismiss him. The poison which was Olivia came from a level deep within him, from some power stunted and sent awry in his childhood. (Like Mark, said a disloyal cell in her mind.)

Horns erupted behind her, and she threw the car into gear and shot across the intersection. She knew where she was going. The sky’s darkness leaked down, staining her hands on the wheel.

Had
she hit a dog? She could not remember: indeed, she could not remember most of the drive. There had been a dog, in the vicinity of Golders Green and the Finchley Road, a rust-colored dog bounding out into the road; Julia had cramped the wheel immediately, instinctively to the side, and had sent the Rover into the side of a parked car, crumpling one of its doors; but she thought that when the Rover had ground its way out of the parked car, a second thudding sensation had come from the left front tire. Speeding away, she had been afraid to look in the mirror.

Now she stood beside her car in Upper Street, a steady rain dripping into her hair, thinking about how terrible it was to kill a dog. She could not look at the Rover. Magnus’s present to her (bought with her money), it had been importantly clean and sleek, feline: an exemplar. It was like Magnus to buy something for her with her own money and then use it against her. From the side of her eye she caught an impression of a wrinkled rear end and a back bumper curled in like a ram’s horn. She hunched her shoulders against the rain.
Where was her coat? Not in the car. She had left it slung over her chair in the periodical library. She hoped that she had not hit the dog. It would leave no marks, but still be dead.

Across the street the lights of the pub burned softly red through the windows; glasses hung upside down, bat-fashion, gleamed like Christmas, points and blurs of red. Rain jumped in the street and ran in rivulets toward the drain. The streetlamps produced a shining streak along the pavement, a harsh acid yellow, a color which eats the skin. Water caught in Julia’s eyebrows and lashes. She looked above the pub and saw no lights in the windows.

She had to go up to the flat; she had to see.

There were no police, what did that mean, no police?

Julia moved across the street, forgetting to turn off the lights of her car or to remove the key, pausing to let half-seen cars splash by before her. She came up on the pavement before David Swift’s door, and knocked twice. Then, her head and neck streaming with water, she found the bell and pushed it down.

When no one came, her insides seemed to freeze. What had happened to the police? Hadn’t they understood her message? Julia pushed at the door. It held against her. Numbly, in baffled frustration, she turned her head and saw the Rover’s headlights shining at her from across the street; she was pinned within them. They were all of the car she could see.

Frantic, she turned again to the door. Something Magnus had once described to her came back to her in miraculous detail: he’d been defending a housebreaker, and he had told her how the man had used a plastic card to slip the catches on locks. He had used her check card to demonstrate. She dug in her bag for her wallet and pulled the card out, spilling
loose papers and bills into the bottom of her bag, and inserted the top edge of the card between the door and the jamb. She pushed it up and in. A hard sloping edge floated back: she heard a loud click. When she pushed at the doorknob, the peeling door swung in. She slipped inside, escaping the beams of her lights.

It was the dingy staircase where he had called to her, shouting. From the top she heard a muffled noise. Julia’s heart clenched, and then released her, though fear poured through her like cold water, and she went up the filthy stairs. She had dreamed of doing this, though she could not remember when. Her fingers shook on the wood of the door at the top; muttering came from the other side, a meaningless series of syllables. She pressed her trembling fingers to the wood, and pushed the door gently in. Her fingers left small dark stains on the wood.

She was conscious of Olivia: that tense, webbed atmosphere of waiting tension. Olivia’s air seemed to fill the room. Her lion’s smell. She was here, or had just left. Julia saw the knife first. Wonderingly, she picked it up from the floor, feeling her palm adhere to the handle. She remembered—as though it, too, were dreamed—the penknife she had uncovered in the sand on her first day in the house. Holding the knife, she could feel sand in her palms, grinding at her skin. Olivia.

She whirled about, certain she had heard Olivia calling. But it had been a noise from the couch, the repetition of that whiffling noise she had heard on the staircase. As if truly in a dream, Julia walked smoothly across the bare carpet to the couch and saw David Swift lying on his back, his eyes open and his mouth working. Broken syllables came from him. He was sleeping, Julia thought, talking in his sleep.

As she looked, his head snapped to one side and his chest seemed to bloom. A red slot opened up from his breastbone to his belt, and redness spurted out, foaming over his shirt. It was as though a flower had opened, revealing a sudden configuration of great complexity and intricacy. More blood flowed from beneath his chin and sheeted across his neck. He stared up into Julia’s eyes and tried to speak. Blood filled his throat, and it welled from his mouth, garbling his words.

“She …”

“She’s just left,” Julia finished for him. He had already lost an appalling amount of blood; Julia took up a cloth from the little table and pressed it over the long wound on the man’s midriff. She must have seen it wrong, she thought, her mind surprisingly calm; he had been dying when she had come in. As Julia held the useless cloth over the long wound, David Swift thrashed on the couch and sent a wave of blood over her hand and then fell back. Julia dropped the knife into the sticky fluid beside the couch. She stood up, blinking. Olivia had got here first and had killed him while he slept. Her stink was in the room.

She washed her hands at the sink, her back to the dead Swift. When she was free of blood, she fled down the stairs and left the street door ajar, so that a policeman would look within. Through increasing rain she ran in the beam of the Rover’s headlights toward her car. Laughter and music from the pub followed her.

The horror of what she had seen broke over her when she sat again in the car, rain sliding down her collar from her hair, and she shook back and forth, slamming from the seat to the steering column, yanking and pushing back with her arms, her hands locked on the circle of wood. She had been
too late; even the police had been powerless against Olivia. Julia slammed the Rover’s door and cowered within, shaking and freezing. Her mind cleared long before she was able to control her body. Images of America, of valleys and green distances, invaded her.

She drove through dark, rain-slicked streets, her window wipers thumping, on what she knew was the wrong side of the road. She should have been on the right, because she was driving through the back reaches of a city like Boston, which was familiar to her in a surrealist, dreamlike fashion; yet all the other traffic was on the left, and that, too, was dreamily familiar. Julia went with it, driftingly, faintly pleased by her knowledge of this strange city, and faintly annoyed that she could not get her bearings properly. She saw a spot of blood on her thumbnail, and in reflex wiped it on the seam of her trousers.

Her turnoff, the access road to the expressway, lay somewhere nearby; from there it was only a couple of hours’ drive to New Hampshire. She knew that because she had never in her life been more than a couple of hours’ drive from her family’s valley: Julia could visualize all the roads, the highways and expressways and turnpikes and seal-coated county roads and gravelly tracks used by farmers, which formed a lacy web of connections between where she was and the valley. And she could visualize with a perfect wholeness the last turning before the valley, the sweep of the exit ramp from the freeway down through dark hills, a few mysterious lights shining in deep vales, far off the glow of a town. She could see every inch of that dark access to the valley, and she knew where
the river was, though you couldn’t see it. She wanted to see it now, before her.

She was driving through an American city, a city like Boston, bearing generally south. Nineteenth-century houses, built of red brick, now a grimy brown, stood on either side of narrow streets. Cold rain rattled on the top of the car.

Driving through an American city, driving through America. London was a furry patch in her memory; London did not exist. She was in Boston, and there was no London. Soon she would find the Berkshires, and that lovely long highway through banks of trees. Tanglewood. Julia pressed hard on the accelerator and her car slewed on wet Pentonville Road, fishtailing in its lane. Except for all these cars, it looked like the outer edges of Boston. She knew that people drove on the wrong side of the road here. It was habit with her by now. Why should that be? She pushed the question down.

She was of no age, she was going home, nothing had happened to her. Her father waited, dressed in an elegant dark gray suit; her grandfather had just died, and that was why she was going home from Smith. Boston was a mistake, she should not be in Boston; but she knew the way to go.

Now she was near the Fens, she thought. It would look much different, for everything had changed, and she had not been at Smith for years. She wheeled the car around a corner, blindly, her mind fluttering. A vision of a man’s chest gouting fluid.… It meant nothing, though her feet had slipped on red blood. Nothing. Julia forced herself to smile at a young man striding across the road, walking on broad white stripes, and he returned the smile. He had an American face, round beneath floppy hair. Wet with rain. A slippery face, a face which left no traces.

The Rover jolted forward past the boy. Soon she would find the way, and then she would be sailing, with no mental effort at all, down the turnpike, leaving the city behind, moving toward the sloping bank of the exit, turning down between hills, passing small ghostly lights deep in a vale where the winding of the road shone under the trees.

At the same time, she knew where she was going, though her mind seemed to detach itself at times and go floating through Boston. As she drove down Marylebone Road, she noticed on the back of her left wrist another smear of blood, and hurriedly, disgustedly, wiped her wrist on the car seat.

But she could not rid herself of the feeling of being in Massachusetts until she had left her car parked outside a house in Notting Hill, rushed up the path in the rain, gone down six steps at the side of the house. Her mind seemed to be flying apart, a wispy cloth tugged by birds. She pounded at the bell. A basement, a valley. Breath caught and tore, chugging, in her throat. Her mouth open and cottony. Finally the door opened, and she rushed against the man who stood within, touching his wet face with her hands. He held her tightly while he struggled to remove his coat. Raindrops coursed down her face, and she butted against his chest, shaken by what she recognized as crying only after what seemed a long time of it.