Julia (29 page)

Mark stood just within his door, letting her sob. His damp coat hung uncomfortably on his shoulders, and while he cradled Julia he shrugged first one arm out of its sleeve and then the other. He allowed the coat to fall squashily to the floor and hugged Julia tighter. She trembled against him like a trapped bird, her elbows and forearms whipping at his chest.

“Oh, thank God you’re home,” she finally uttered. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t find you and then I’d have to …” Her voice became too damaged and soft to continue.

“I just got home, just this minute,” he said down into the wet hair on the crown of her head, plastered down on either side of a natural part. “Good Lord,” he said, “I never thanked you for that money. I really shouldn’t have taken it, but it came just when I was short, and—”

Julia’s distorted face tilted back to look at him confusedly. She had obviously forgotten all about the check.

“Never mind,” he quickly said, and hugged her to him again. “What’s happened to you?”

She rested her cheek on his shoulder, and breathed heavily for a moment. “Everything’s happened,” she finally said. “She’s going to kill me. I saw—I saw—” Julia stared at him with blurred eyes, her face looking directly into his without recording it.

“You saw?” Mark stroked her cheek, but she made no response.

“I thought I was in America all the way here. I thought I was driving through Boston. I was looking for the turnpike, so I could get to New Hampshire. I was going to my grandfather’s place, in the valley. Isn’t that funny?”

“You’re under strain,” Mark said.

“I’m going to be killed,” she said again. “Nobody can stop her. I don’t want to die. Can I stay with you tonight? You’re all wet.” She touched his face. “Why are you wet?”

“I was out,” Mark said. “I was having a chat with Lily. About you.” He smiled at Julia. “I got in just before you came crashing in. Come in.”

He led her into his room and helped her to sit on a cushion
and removed her shoes. Then he dried her feet with a towel and wiped her hands. He finished by dabbing at her face.

“You have another bruise.”

“I fell down. In the street. She was playing with me then.”

“And what’s this on your wrist?” He stared at the thick dirty bandage under the cuff of her blouse.

“I cut myself. Not on purpose. It was after I saw her. I called you.” Julia was looking straight before her, as if now that she had come to him, he could offer no further help. “She wanted me to be hit by a car. Like Mrs. Fludd. She doesn’t care about murder. She likes it. She makes other people like it too.”

“Hold on,” he said, taking her hands and chafing them. Mark was squatting down before her, looking at her unfocused eyes. “Who’s this ‘she’? That girl you were talking about earlier? Olivia Rudge?”

Her eyes snapped into clarity. “I didn’t tell you her name,” she said, staring at him and beginning to snatch back her hands.

“Lily did,” he said. “Just now.”

“Lily doesn’t believe me. She can’t. It’s because of Magnus.”

“Don’t worry about Lily. What about this girl?”

Julia watched in fascination as an ant crawled out of Mark’s shirt and traversed one of the wings of his collar. The ant, small, red and very quick, sped down the collar and across his chest and fled again into the interior of Mark’s shirt.

“She wants to murder you.”

“Yes.”

“She knows that you found out about that child, whoever it was, twenty years ago.”

“Geoffrey Braden.” Julia thought of the ant struggling through the hair on Mark’s chest. She felt astonishingly light-headed.

“And now she wants to kill you.”

“She’s killed two other men. Paul Winter and David Swift. I just came from Swift’s flat.” Julia spoke in a level voice, looking straight at his shirt front. “May I lie down on your mattress?”

“You’d better,” he said, and lifted her up and helped her across the room to the mattress. Sheets and blankets lay rumpled at its foot, and Mark pulled them up over her legs. Then he sat on the floor beside her, shoving clothing and plates to one side.

“I’m going to find you some sleeping pills,” he said. “They’ll help you relax, Julia.”

“I don’t need sleep,” she said.

“You need to rest,” Mark said. He lifted her head and pulled the grimy pillow across the mattress to place beneath it. Then he left her staring up at the ceiling and went to his kitchen for a vial of pills and a glass of water. “It’s just Valium,” he said.

“Take too many pills,” Julia mumbled, but swallowed one anyhow. Then she focused her gaze on his eyes—he could see her pupils contract—and said, “I found out that Magnus is her father. That’s why it’s me. That’s why she wanted me from the start.”

“Just close your eyes, Julia,” he said, “and we’ll talk about it all in the morning. We have a lot to talk about. You’ll see.”

She obediently closed her eyes. “I washed my hands because I had blood on them.” She turned her head toward Mark and opened her eyes to look at him. “I want you to protect me. Just tonight. Please.”

Against his will, Mark was looking at the outline of Julia’s thighs beneath her trousers. He noticed a smear of some dark, brownish substance along the seam of the wool, and felt everything within him leap as though touched by a live electrical wire.

“I think I might be sick,” he heard Julia say. “I feel so funny. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die, Mark.”

After Mark had switched off the light, he threw off his clothes in the darkness, unsure of where to sleep. Julia lay unconscious and fully dressed across his mattress. He did not dare to move her—Julia’s condition seemed dangerous to him, fully bearing out everything Lily had said. It was as though she could spin off into outright lunacy if she were as much as touched. And her suggestion about Magnus had upset him, reminding him again that she was his adoptive brother’s wife, despite the events of the past week or two. Mark knew all too well that Magnus was stronger than he, and would not hesitate to beat him senseless if he suspected him of sleeping with Julia. Magnus had beaten him twice during his youth, and Mark shied away from the memory of these experiences. He pulled a patterned Indian rug, given him long ago by a girl whose name he could no longer remember, from the closet and arranged the stiff scratchy thing over his body as he lay back in a chair.

Magnus seemed to be everywhere, behind every rock and round every corner: Magnus’s virility, according to Julia, had spawned Olivia Rudge, Julia’s fantastic wraith. Though they were approximately the same height, Mark invariably thought of Magnus as much taller than he, twice as massive, twice as serious a presence. Was it really possible that Lily could control him? Her offer had been a neat instance of payment
for services rendered, but it would be a valid offer only if Magnus agreed that his efforts to persuade Julia were worthy of recompense. Mark knew that Magnus considered him an incapable, nearly insignificant man, but he did not think that Magnus would cheat him. Certainly none of them could permit Julia to leave England.

Mark lay back in the chair, his head lolling and the blanket scratching his skin as if it were sandpaper. Julia still lay motionless beneath the sheet. Magnus and Lily were right about her needing a long rest, under supervision. All he had been doing was humoring her along any direction that seemed to lead away from Magnus, but perhaps it was now time to be more thoughtful. His academic career, in truth, was at its nadir; Mark could not imagine enduring much longer the boredom of teaching. His book was a phantasm, a dead thing which had lived only in illusion. Teaching was his only income, apart from the beggarly amount Greville Lofting had bequeathed him. There had been no nonsense about equal division of wealth in that old bastard’s head. Not that, in comparison to Julia, he’d had much anyhow.

She groaned from the mattress, and muttered something.

He had expected his headache, which had descended on him when he was leaving Plane Tree House and had not left for four hours, to return with Julia’s arrival, but he was surprisingly free of it. It was, he thought, because of her condition: a Julia so weak, so dependent, could not pull whatever trigger it was that launched his headache. (For in these past few days, it felt like that, as though a bullet, a red-hot foreign substance, had tumbled into his brain.)

He heard Julia’s voice: “Mark?”

“Here,” he grunted. “In the chair.”

“Why aren’t you with me?”

“I was thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Julia offered, already half asleep again.

Had she used to talk in the night, half muttering, to Magnus? Wanting him to come to her bed? This thought stirred Mark, and he sat up in the chair and examined Julia’s sprawl beneath his sheet. Her face was dug deep into the pillow, her hair bursting out around it. With her hair disarranged and uncombed, she looked far more like most of the other women whose heads had rested on that pillow.

She pronounced his name, very clearly, in her sleep.

Involuntarily, Mark suddenly imagine Magnus’s heavy, serious body straddling hers, Magnus’s belly pressing on Julia, Magnus opening her legs, Magnus’s confidence taking her. She was his. Mark could see Magnus’s arms circling her, her legs bent at his hips. His penis surged forward against the roughness of the cloth, and he threw the blanket off and crossed the room to climb onto the mattress beside Julia. A little later that night, after a quick struggle with buttons and elastic, he felt his mind traveling over enormous distances as he plunged atop his brother’s wife. It was like making love on LSD, but even that had been a pedestrian experience beside this, for during all of the night remaining, hallucinations and visions lifted and inspired him: he was a gorgeously sexual bird, fertilizing the air. Innocence irradiated the air, canceling odors of sweat and old cooking.

In the morning Mark left the flat to shop for eggs, bacon, and bread, and Julia, alone in the squalor of his room, began to weep. She felt abandoned and helpless, beached on a gray shore. Even Mark could not restore her to the ordinary human world or save her from the bleakness. She cried for a few minutes, and then arranged the sheets atop the mattress. They bore ridges of dirt and crusty stains, which Julia rather
consciously overlooked. She was wondering if the police had discovered the body of David Swift; and if they had, if the papers would carry a story about the death. Swift was not a general’s son. Someone had to be told what had happened. Mark had only pretended to believe her; and she had been too weary and shocked to fully explain the events of the night. She realized that she knew only one person she could telephone.

Lily picked up the receiver on the first ring, thinking that Magnus had discovered what had to be done to have his wife safely hospitalized.

“Yes,” she said, and looked dartingly around the room at her Stubbs horse, her vases, the Persian screen. Julia’s voice came to her, tired and faint, making each of her possessions seem locked in its place.

“Lily? Lily, I have to tell you some things. Listen to me.”

“Where in the world are you?” Lily swiftly said. “Magnus and I tried to talk to you last night. You weren’t at home.”

“Well, now I am,” Julia lied. “I was out last night.”

“Do you think that’s wise, darling? All of us feel that you should get as much rest as possible. I’d be happy to help you move some of your things over here, so you wouldn’t be alone.…”

“It’s too late for that, Lily,” came Julia’s faint voice.

“Darling, speak more directly into the mouthpiece.”

“You must believe me, Lily. No one else will. I can’t talk to anyone else.” She sounded far-off and desperate, and Lily for a moment visualized her sailing off westward, a figure in an airplane getting smaller and smaller in the sky.

“You’ve been fretting again,” she said. “Why don’t you come over and tell me about it?”

“Lily, Magnus is Olivia’s father. I know it. He used to meet Heather Rudge—in my house. There’s a picture of them together here. Taken less than a year before Olivia’s birth. He’s Olivia’s father, Lily. That’s why she picked me. I saw her kill someone last night. David Swift. He knew her, and he talked too much, like Paul Winter. She made someone kill them. I came in just after, and he was dying. I’m next, Lily, there’s no one left but me. I’m next.”

Lily scarcely heard the latter half of this announcement. When Julia had said that Magnus was the girl’s father, Lily had immediately felt that she was speaking the truth. Rage at Magnus’s deception and lies flashed through her like an electrical explosion. She felt completely betrayed. “You’re certain about Magnus,” she managed to say.

“I’m sure,” came Julia’s bruised voice. “That’s why it was me she wanted. It’s the pattern.”

“My God,” said Lily, immediately seeing another pattern. “Do you see what you are saying? Julia, if what you are saying is true, there
is
a reason why you were chosen by Olivia. Magnus …”

“Magnus and Kate,” Julia whispered. “Magnus and Olivia. The difference is that Olivia was evil. And she can work in people’s minds.”

“Julia, this is important,” said Lily, her mind spinning among possibilities.

“Look for that man’s name in the newspapers,” Julia said, not listening to her. “Swift. He was one of her gang. He told me about Geoffrey Braden’s murder. She had him killed. I saw his body—I saw his blood, all over him.”

“Ju—”

But Julia had hung up. Lily dialed her number and, her
mind still whirling, listened to the phone ringing in Julia’s house. “Pick it up,” she urged, “pick it up, pick it up.” Eventually she depressed the button with a finger and after hearing the dial tone again, tried Magnus’s number at Gayton Road.

“Lily,” he said. “I can’t just flick a switch, you know. There are a couple of options. It’ll all happen. I’ll let you know tonight.”

“That’s not what I rang you about,” she said angrily. “I want to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth, Magnus.”

“What now?” The boredom in his voice made her furious.

“Were you the father of that wretched child? The Rudge girl? I’ve just spoken to Julia, and she says she has proof you were her father.”

“Syntax, Lily,” Magnus said. “Did you say proof?” His voice came through with an amused incredulity that was as good as a confession.