Julia

by Peter Straub

  “I can’t leave. Everything I’m interested in is here.”

  “Julia, have you been drinking?”

  “Not much. Why? It doesn’t matter. Magnus drinks.”

  “I want you to come to stay with me, Julia.”

  “That’s funny, everybody wants me to live with them. I’m very popular with the entire Lofting family. I can’t tell you how wanted that makes me feel.”

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “I don’t need sleep anymore. I’m too excited to sleep. Well, I suppose I get a couple of hours a night. I’ve been having the most amazing dreams—I keep dreaming about that girl I saw in Holland Park. She’s a sort of metaphor for Kate, I guess. She seems totally without any redeeming virtues.”

  “Julia, guilt shouldn’t…”

  “I have no guilt. I leave that to your brother.”

  Julia hung up.

  Worried; Lily took her watering can into her, efficient little kitchen and filled it at the tap. She carried the can out onto the terrace and began to sprinkle water over the flowers, which had lately showed the effects of the past month of hot dry days—particularly intense weather for a London summer. Eventually the weather would break, she supposed. Lily’s clearest memory of such a long spell of hot weather was a summer more than twenty years before; she remembered it because that had been the year Magnus bought the house on Gayton Road. He had not been so fat then, and he had told her that he liked to go on Hampstead Heath and take off his shirt. One day she had met him in Gayton Road and walked over the Heath with him; in a green sloping vale Magnus had removed his shirt and fallen asleep in the sun. He had looked enormous, hieratic to her, his big pink trunk and massive, handsome head against the brilliant green of the grass. Lily had watched him for an hour, admiring how even in sleep Magnus seemed more powerful, more authoritative than other men. Of course, he was cruel, though not to her. “Magnim,” she had said, stroking one of his bristling eyebrows—it was his name in their private language. She had been happy that he had women, but equally happy that he seemed incapable of marriage. Lily, in those days, had thought that most women would know better than to desire marriage with Magnus. Julia had been a shock: at that time, an innocent, radiant girl with beautiful hair and a modest manner absurdly at variance with her general air of healthiness, she had been eminently the type of girl Magnus seduced (physically, she was rather an American Sonia Mitchell-Mitchie, then Hoxton), but far from the kind of woman he might reasonably have married. Lily had for some reason always thought that were Magnus to marry he would take a woman older than himself. “It’s her Burner-Jones eyes,” Mark had suggested—poor envious Mark would have wanted any woman Magnus claimed as his own, even if she had looked like Mrs. Pankhurst. Later she had discovered the extent of Julia’s wealth, and Magnus’ marriage had become far more comprehensible.

  But not for years did it become less painful. Really, Kate had helped with that reconciliation, had perhaps effected it, since Magnus, while altering little in other ways, had revealed a surprising capacity for fatherhood. He had loved Kate so deeply that Lily could not herself do otherwise; and eventually she and Julia had become friends. That Julia from the beginning had wished for that friendship encouraged it; but perhaps the change had begun when Lily arrived one morning to find a nursing Julia reading not a baby manual but Middlemarch. Julia might have been absurdly young, almost too wealthy, but at least she had good taste in fiction. Eventually, Lily had given her some volumes on the occult—books recommended by Mr. Carmen and Miss Pinner—and-had been pleased that Julia had read them carefully. (Though she had thought more of Mr. Carmen’s Roheim and Mircea Eliade than Miss Pinner’s books on astral projection.) Later, she had more reason to be grateful for Julia, though Julia was unaware of it, for she had purchased the flat in Plane Tree House largely with money allotted to her by Magnus from his joint account. And she knew without asking that it was Julia’s money which paid for most of Magnus’ expensive presents to her.

  The main thing, Lily thought, was to get Julia back with Magnus—never mind how much money was lost on the house and its contents. Both of them needed healing. Lily knew perfectly well that she was at times jealous of Magnus simply because he was a man, and jealous of Julia because she had come between herself and her brother as even Mark had never done, but it was in everyone’s interest that they begin to knit themselves together again. Magnus, this past week, had been worse than Lily had ever seen him. Sometimes he did seem almost to hate Julia—though, proud as he was, he needed no supernatural assistance in that—while he desperately wanted her cured, wanted her back.

  And Julia needed Magnus far more than he needed her. She had begun to look shockingly weak and ill. Her marvelous hair had gone dull and limp, and her face soft and pouchy. Sometimes she seemed hardly to be listening to what you said to her. Julia was running on sheer nervous energy. It was no surprise that she saw evil children everywhere or that she had built up a sick fantasy about Kate.

  And now this obsession with the Rudge case, which was perfectly explicable in the light of what Julia was determinedly repressing. Lily imagined Julia in a reading room, flipping crazily through old newspapers, making mad notes—she must look like Ophelia floating downstream on a sea of newsprint.

  I have a duty to Julia and to myself, Lily thought. When she had finished watering the plants she put the can down on her terrace and went inside to telephone Magnus.

  Most importantly, she had to keep Julia from Mark. There was something missing in Mark, a moral space filled by his resentment of Magnus. Lily knew that Mark would miss no opportunity to humiliate Magnus. Julia, now weakened and perhaps hysterical, would be more open to Mark’s entreaties than she had ever been. That must be blocked.

  She first dialed Gayton Road. When there was no answer, she tried his chambers, where a secretary had not seen him all day and had been told not to expect him. She knew what that meant. Lily went down a list of his drinking clubs, and finally reached him at the Marie Lloyd, a certain sign of trouble. Once at the Marie Lloyd, the least prepossessing of all the little clubs he patronized all over the city, he began looking for a fight—he had once knocked down a truck driver outside the club who had sneered at him. She had to carefully judge the state of his intoxication, and calibrate her statements to it. Magnus’ spy, she also saw herself as Magnus’ protector. From his first words, she knew that it would be dangerous to irritate him, and so Lily omitted from her account of her conversation with Julia most of the material about the Rudges.

  “Yes, she’s much better,” she said. “I think she fainted from exhaustion, and she’s been getting some rest. She has a project she wants to begin working on, and that will help her fill her time. It seems harmless enough. Magnus, you must not go to that house anymore. That is absolutely the wrong tactic.”

  “Were you there when she fainted? Did you see her?” This meant, Lily knew, that Magnus wished to ignore her advice.

  “A neighbor saw her faint,” Lily said. Now was not the time to inform Magnus that Mark had come along moments later. “Someone got word to me, and we helped her get inside. She’d locked herself out, but the French windows at the back were unlatched and we helped her in that way.”

  “Those damned windows are always open,” Magnus grumbled. “I’m going to go down and see her. Take her home.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Lily hastily said. “In her frame of mind that would only hurt things.”

  “Bugger that.”

  “I think you should go home. I think you should let things go their own way for a few days, my love, until she has settled down a bit more. She’s a terribly confused girl.”

  “She looks like hell,” Magnus said. “I saw her. But who isn’t confused?”

  “Magnus, before long she will have to face what really happened to Kate. I know it is dreadfully unfair to you that she blames you for what happened, and my dear, I feel your pain, but I do think now that the best thing for you would be to go straight home and perhaps teleph
one her later and try to speak calmly to her. I’m certain that is the best tactic, in the long run.”

  “I have the feeling you’re hiding something from me, Lily.”

  “No. I am not.”

  “What’s this project?” Magnus belched loudly. “Christ, I have to pee. What’s this project she’s working on?”

  “I gather it has something to do with that house she’s taken.”

  “Christ,” Magnus said and brutally rang off.

  Julia, hanging up the telephone, still kept her mood of excited elation. This had little to do with liquor, despite Lily’s implication, for she had only sipped at a watered whiskey during the afternoon after her return from the periodical collection in Colindale. Yet the feeling was akin to that of one stage of drunkenness—an optimistic, impulsive sense that wheels had begun to move, that a resolution was near. She had no doubt that this would have a connection with the Rudges: the Rudges were to help her exorcise Kate, help her finally lay Kate to rest. How this was to happen she did not know, but she felt a certainty that it would happen. In any case, she no longer had any choice—she was driven to discover the truth about Olivia Rudge.

  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’ victims. Mark’s phrase encapsulated the futile history of her marriage; she did not know if she were crying for her nine 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’ 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 batte
ring 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’ 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.