by Peter Straub
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’ 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 ffizzy 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 dou
ble 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’ 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?
“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 §he 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’. 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, rust-colored dog bounding but 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’ 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 pror duced 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.
