Justine

by Alice Thompson

  ‘You have to admit it’s a coincidence,’ I said, ‘To have bumped into you so quickly after meeting Justine for the first time.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’ She smiled again. I didn’t know what to make of this. Did she, like me, not believe in coincidences?

  She seemed direct, so I thought I would try a more direct approach.

  ‘You have an unforgettable face.’

  The expression on her face changed frighteningly quickly, a cloud of resentment covered it, black and turgid.

  ‘You mean Justine has an unforgettable face.’

  The differences between the two sisters were becoming more and more noticeable the longer I spent with Juliette. Juliette’s expressions were flung onto her face more thoughtlessly and erratically than Justine’s. Juliette’s smile had the charm of complication and her hair, when she moved her head, gave off the smell of burning wood. She had a disarming smile – a sure sign of neurosis. The charming always depend on the resources of desperation. The image of Justine I had imprinted onto Juliette’s face was being gradually effaced by Juliette’s child-like movements and disturbed sexuality. Juliette, I ascertained quickly, would believe in the best in people, look for the best in the worst of men. Juliette believed in fairy tales.

  However, I wondered secretly if her role as child-woman was a part that she played rather than had thrust upon her. Her nervous fragility seemed almost too blatant to be realistic. But perhaps, I reasoned, it was simply because the contrast between her manner and Justine’s was so great that the identity of Juliette somehow ended up spurious.

  I pointed back to the painting. ‘I like so much the way the painting which is about such primitive themes as desire and death and myth is constructed with such elaborate control.’

  At least, I think that is what I said. As far as I can remember, the beginning of my seduction of Justine’s sister began with those words. However, I may have said something completely different – memory is so unreliable. Who can tell? It is too late to tell – except for me. Juliette has long since gone. I will always have the last word. There is no ghost in this machine.

  fifteen

  That same afternoon Juliette and I went for tea in the gallery. As we walked together through the rooms of paintings down the wide stone steps to the tea-room, I had to stop my hands trembling from the excitement of it all. At one point I almost stumbled and Juliette reached out her hand to stop me from falling. Her fingers, as long and as slender as Justine’s, held on to my hand for longer than was strictly necessary. I saw the image of Justine cross her face briefly and then dissipate into the cool dusty atmosphere of the gallery.

  As we drank tea, I continued to observe Juliette closely. Her leaf-green eyes seemed translucent, as if perpetually wet from tears. Her eyes had an open expression as if sending out a general invitation to be hurt. Simultaneously her gaze went in on itself, exhibiting that she had an interior world without betraying its contents. On the occasions that I glimpsed Justine in Juliette’ s face, Justine would at once turn her back to me and walk away.

  Juliette sat like a child, her legs together and her hands tightly clasped. Her body language was like that of an infant. But also, like a child, she would have the odd moment of utter unselfconsciousness where she would suddenly splay her legs wide open and I could see straight up to her centre between her white shadowy thighs. Her mouth was tremulous and soft as a ripe pear that had just been sliced open.

  We walked slowly out into the hot light of Trafalgar Square. We said goodbye with the pigeons fluttering at our feet. The sun was dying behind Nelson’s head. She wrote her phone number on my hand in large unformed handwriting. I watched her walk away slightly stooped, as if scared that the tall handsome buildings of London were about to collapse on top of her.

  Exhausted but excited I took a taxi back to Kensington Gardens. Some of my mother’s possessions now stood around me, an African mask hung on the wall and a silver Chinese Mandarin stood on the rosewood side table. Everything else, broken or otherwise, remained under the dust sheets in Blenheim House.

  sixteen

  It was already almost dark when Juliette and I came out of the cinema. Juliette was wearing, on our first date together, a thick cotton dress covered in purple stars and white moons; she reminded me slightly of a pantomime witch. Her hair was loose and tangled. The faces of the other people in the audience who were crowding around us at the exit, looked half dead as the light of the real world first hit them. We had just been to see the rescreening of Alfred Hitchcock’ s Vertigo.

  ‘I know a place where we can eat,’ she said as we stood stationary amongst the walking dead.

  She led me back into the centre of London from the South Bank, over Hungerford Bridge. St. Paul’s was lit up by a blue light like an architect’s painted model and the buildings overlooking the river had the appearance of a theatrical façade. Stopping in the middle of the bridge, we looked down over the dark waters of the Thames, dense and fluid with its own deep currents. The lights of the city of London shone across it, emphasizing the force of the water’s movement.

  Juliette stood with her back to the barrier, her elbows propped up on the edge behind her. A train hurtled by, its noise shattering the unreality of our view. With a sudden lithe movement she pushed down on her arms to hoist herself up on to the narrow ledge.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘It’s dangerous. You might fall backwards.’

  ‘You’re not scared of heights are you?’ she taunted.

  She proceeded to bring her feet up on to the top of the barrier and stand up on it, still facing inwards on to the footpath. Her hair was blowing all around her. I could see her teeth smiling between the strands.

  ‘It’s so easy to play with death. Tickle it under its armpits until it squeals with laughter. I could just jump. Or, if you like, you could push me. Death depends on the smallest of gestures.’

  She outstretched her hands to me and I gratefully took hold of them so that I could bring her down.

  ‘Hold tight,’ she said.

  She stepped backwards off the barrier into the space that hung hundreds of feet above the wrestling river. She hung for a moment dangling from my arms. She had now let go of my hands altogether: I was holding hers.

  She smiled up at me between the bars of the barrier that separated us.

  ‘If you wanted, you could let go.’ Her face looked calm.

  It was mine, I imagined, that looked tortured.

  Summoning my strength I hoisted her hack over the barrier. We stood facing each other on the bridge.

  ‘That was an incredibly stupid thing to do,’ I said.

  But without replying she turned on her heels. I followed her across the bridge on to the Embankment. She was now walking with alacrity, as if being chased by an invisible demon snapping at her ankles.

  We walked up Charing Cross Road into Soho. Unlike me, she was obviously used to London on foot, used to its narrow crannies and ungiving crowds. Up until now, I had only experienced London (only experienced this century), at a safe and privileged distance. Juliette then turned off Old Compton Street into a dark street full of scaffolding. I could see no sign of a restaurant at all, just tall terraced houses fronted by narrow entrances with entry systems to them marked by names such as aphrodite or diana. The rooms on the above floors were suffused by red light where these ­goddess-whores turned men into trees or deer.

  The garish lettering of the café’s name only became visible when we were standing directly beneath it. The flashing sign written in green neon light, the lorelei, had been concealed by the metal scaffolding. I followed Juliette up some shallow stone steps into a small room.

  The light was dim except for the flickering of candles on the checked tablecloths. Home-made wooden tables dotted the room. Covering one side of the wall was a painted mural. The painting was of the Lorelei on a rock, naked, her marigold hair falling ov
er her breasts. A ship in the distance, far out to sea, was sailing in her direction. She was luring the ship to her doom with her voice. But I am safe, I thought, because I can’t hear her singing.

  seventeen

  As we sat down Juliette pointed to the mural and asked me if I liked it.

  ‘It of course depicts a truth – the extraordinary power of women over men. Women are without question the more dangerous sex,’ I replied.

  Juliette was now looking at me in a particularly unthreatening way. She looked about as dangerous as a dormouse.

  ‘Oh, but you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Men make women dangerous.’

  Did she mean ‘make’ as in make up or ‘make’ as in incite? I really couldn’t be bothered with her riddles. I was just about to change the subject when my elbow grazed against my glass of red wine and knocked it over. The table cloth was soaked and we had to move to another table.

  We talked for an hour or so while eating a bland, unappetizing pasta, but I managed to learn little about her or Justine.

  ‘Whose funeral was Justine at?’ she asked.

  ‘My mother’s.’ I expected the standard response of sympathy but she said nothing.

  ‘What was she like?’ she asked.

  ‘Beautiful’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t mean Justine.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And? What else do you need to know? Isn’t a woman being beautiful enough for you, enough for anyone?’

  Juliette looked down at the table and I tried to read her face. Seven different emotions seem to cross her face at the same time, not one of them I could distinctly interpret. This was why Juliette could never be beautiful: too many emotions ran cross-current in her. She lacked the severe implacability whose raison d’etre was to be ruffled by desire. Juliette had too much character in her face to allow a lover room to leave his mark. Her countenance left nothing for him to do. Far better the tabula rasa, the divine blankness of a Justine, that begged me to write all over her.

  eighteen

  I walked Juliette home. She lived in Waterloo, above a pet shop, down a gloomy street called The Cut. The street was deserted and the moon shone high and round in the starless sky.

  ‘The moon always makes me want to take risks,’ Juliette said.

  She was standing on the doorstep of the pet shop. Litter fluttered beneath her feet and the smell of rotten vegetables emanated up from the street. Out of the blue, a newspaper article I had recently read came to mind. An animal behaviourist had wanted to find out the most effective way of winning an animal’s love. He constructed an experiment involving three puppies. The first puppy he showered with affection, the second he consistently verbally and physically abused and the third was treated on alternative days with both methods. At the end of the experiment it was the third puppy who ended up most devoted to him. The insecurity of being treated so inconsistently triggered off the third puppy’s need to please. Juliette was to be my third puppy. I was serious about winning her love. She looked up at me and, in the doorway’s shadow, her face could have belonged to Justine. I bent down and kissed her mouth. However, it was the face of Juliette who turned away from me a few moments later.

  In the background the tannoy of Waterloo Station was announcing the times and destinations of the trains running out of London. The rhythm and intonation sounded like the chanting of a litany. In the grey empty street it had started to rain, drops falling down over Juliette’s face. In the blue light from the fish tank in the pet shop window she looked like a sorceress.

  ‘I’ll get you an umbrella,’ she suddenly said.

  Before I could stop her, she had disappeared inside the pet shop and shut the door. The light in the floor above the shop went on and I saw her silhouette move about the rooms that faced on to The Cut. The door opened again and she reappeared on to the street. Handing over the umbrella without a word, she went back in and shut the door behind her.

  The design of the umbrella was hideous and having opened it up, I had to shut it again at once. I was unable to find a taxi and finally had to walk home. I arrived home aching and drenched to the skin.

  nineteen

  I waited a fortnight before phoning Juliette again. Mainly because of a bad cold that I had caught, but also because it gave me a certain pleasure to think that she would be waiting in for my call. As far as I could tell, there was nothing to fill up her thoughts but a kind of waiting for her Prince to come. Just existing is never enough for anyone. So I was surprised that when I did phone there was no reply. I phoned consistently over the following few days but still there was no answer. On late Sunday evening I finally got through to her. She recognized my voice immediately, which I took to be a good sign, and she eagerly accepted my invitation to supper the next day.

  By eight o’clock I had drawn the curtains and lit the candles and watched the fingers of the flickering flames point their way up to heaven. In the candlelight the portrait of Justine grew increasingly enigmatic. She was watching everything I did, including the premeditated seduction of her sister. It was the fact that it was about to happen in her presence that made it morally right: Justine sanctified it.

  The doorbell rang. I heard Juliette say her name in her soft and placatory voice over the intercom. In a moment I was letting her into my flat and the symptoms of nervousness and anticipation that she noticed in me were not altogether feigned.

  Juliette sat down on the sofa. She had not seen the portrait of Justine hanging above – the mantelpiece directly opposite her. She was too busy looking anxiously about the rest of the room, as if I were about to kidnap her and imprison her in it for the rest of her life.

  The patterns on her dress this evening were of apple trees. What made her so frightened, I wondered, of a simple, coherent design? The trees were planted all over the material, their branches intertwining with each other to create an intricate lace-like pattern. The apples were almost hidden by the leaves.

  ‘May I open the window?’ she asked.

  As she pushed up the window, the cool breeze of the night air gushed into the room between the fluttering curtains.

  It was the noise I heard first, a loud angry sound like the beating of flames and then I saw what looked like an open book being violently hurled from one side of the room to the other. The whole room suddenly burst into life with movement. A starling had flown in through the window. The bird dashed about the drawing-room, flying headlong into the mantelpiece, the walls, the portrait, perching momentarily on the sofa before thrusting itself up into the air again.

  Unexpectedly, Juliette didn’t utter a word or a cry. She stood up, and keeping as still as a statue, held out her arm. Moments later the starling had landed on her outstretched hand, as if she were just another European ornament. Quickly, she brought her other hand down over the bird, trapping it within the cage of her fingers. The bird fluttered hopelessly against its human bars. Transferring the bird to the tight grasp of a single hand, with the other hand, Juliette began gently to stroke the bird’s neck. The bird’s soft feathers gleamed in a rainbow of colours but its eyes were black with panic. She then with her second finger and thumb ringed its throat for a second, as if she were going to snap its neck, kill it with the fine slim fingers that belonged to Justine. But instead she walked over to the open window and opening up her hand let the starling fly out into the night air of London.

  ‘I hate seeing things imprisoned,’ she said.

  As if her words were an unconscious directive, I looked at her intent interior face and suddenly spontaneously identified her with the bird. I simultaneously realized that it was not her fear of imprisonment speaking, but her desire for it. She wanted to be clasped in someone else’s hand. Her only way of living in the world was to be locked up inside it. Imprisonment was a form of rescue for her.

  ‘Would you mind being imprisoned?’ she asked me.
/>   I was taken aback – I had not considered the idea in relation to myself.

  ‘Appalling idea. I wouldn’t be able to go to art exhibitions,’ I quickly said.

  ‘But you have your own exhibition here. Your own private collection of art. I think you would be quite happy to remain in one or two rooms for the rest of your life, as long as you had your artefacts around you.’

  I tried to hide my unease in a slightly disjointed smile. I also attempted to get back a sense of control. In order to do so, I pretended that I had a ventriloquist’s doll, not a woman, sitting in my drawing-room. I was unconsciously throwing my voice into her. Without understanding how I was doing it, I was somehow pulling her strings, making her talk, crossing her legs at my will.

  Over supper I decided to ask Juliette what she did for a living and later, subtly, when the time was right, probe her for more intimate details about Justine.

  ‘I write. I hardly make a living.’ ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s a kind of autobiography.’

  ‘But you’re so young. Nothing much can have happened to you.’

  ‘Things are happening to me all the time. Besides, I’m older than I look.’ She smiled.

  I tried to get her on to the subject of Justine but she kept on returning to the subject of my mother which seemed to preoccupy her.

  ‘How did your mother die?’ she asked.

  ‘She committed suicide.’

  ‘Out of loneliness?’

  ‘No. Because she couldn’t bear to grow old.’

  I was beginning to resent the directness of her questions, but to get what I wanted from her, I felt I had to answer them politely. It was nearing midnight and I had to find a way of making her stay.

  twenty

  Midnight came and went and Juliette’s behaviour began to change. She is a sorceress, I thought, dictated to by the fullness of the moon. She brushed up against me as we passed in the room so that I could smell her perfumed skin. She stroked Lethe, my Burmese cat, until the cat’s fur shimmered like moonlight and her back arched voluptuously. Juliette drank glass after glass of Corvo, as if it were water. Did she have any idea at all as to what was inside my head, the double-dealing of my plot? My motivations were hard set and wrapped up in my mind like gifts hidden in a cupboard.