Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  Throwing the letters onto a side table, she noticed a thread of packing straw on the ground. She picked it up. Klaus must have received a package from Belgium, she deduced, pleased with her detective work.

  ‘Klaus?’

  Her voice fell flat against the walls, sounding pathetic and doubtful. It was only when she walked into the lounge room that Klaus’s absence became achingly apparent.

  ‘Presence doesn’t just live in the material,’ Julia had once reasoned to Carla, pleasantly tipsy on the veranda one late summer afternoon. ‘We leave a whole stream of existence behind us, a constellation of evidence—invisible particles of skin, heat, breath, lingering sound, hair in plugholes. Then there are the stains, the dents, the scratches—the markers of passion, of arguments, of lovemaking, of the clumsy, stumbling move into a first embrace and the clumsy stumbling step backwards out of the last. If there is an afterlife, it must exist in how we are remembered. Our spirit can only live on in the others we have touched—those who have loved us and those who have hated us.’

  This was the hypothesis Julia had arrived at at the age of forty. An age when she assumed she would be safe, when she had known loss and thought that she would never have to know it again; would never dream of a parent or lover only to wake to the awful realisation that they were absent.

  His chair’s missing, she thought now, looking around wildly, terrified that they’d been burgled. Her mind spiralled as she tried to calculate what else had been stolen. The 1930s dentist’s chair was one of the defining possessions Klaus had brought to their marriage, an icon from his student days in Brussels.

  The portrait of Lavinia Huntington was still there, but around it were several blank spaces where prints had once been—a Van Gogh, an Aubrey Beardsley, a Chagall—all belonging to Klaus.

  She stared at the wall; she knew it had changed but her brain wouldn’t allow her to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. Suddenly other differences became clear. All her husband’s books were gone from the shelves, leaving gaps like broken teeth in the dark oak, her own volumes left tilted and abandoned.

  She ran outside, out into the evening sunshine that illuminated the fine smudge of smoke from someone’s bonfire that filled the air. Someone whose world had not been inverted like a cheap paperweight so the snow was now falling upwards, against gravity, against all rationality.

  Julia stumbled into the writing studio and a dusty emptiness. The stripped walls clasped the shadows of her husband’s secrets like a faint tracing of fig leaves. The worktable was naked except for the abandoned wood vice, which now seemed to be yawning in sudden fear.

  Julia’s heartbeat hammered against her eardrums. Outside a cicada began to scream. Now desperate for clues, she raced back to the house and up to their bedroom, the last bastion of intimate terrain.

  The door swung open; there was a new chip in the frame. The cupboard was ajar. All of Klaus’s clothes had been taken except for a pair of trousers she’d given him which he’d never liked.

  She flung herself on the bed, her hands clasping the mound of her womb. Rolling towards his side, she noticed the letter. Neatly folded into an envelope, her name printed on the front in her husband’s distinctive left-handed scrawl: Julia.

  Lifting herself onto her elbows, Julia stared at it, his handwriting an obscene point of normalcy in the emotional turmoil that pounded through her. Like a plot point in a fable she wondered what would happen if she didn’t open the letter, if she acted as if she hadn’t found it—would her life continue unchanged?

  Taking a shuddering breath, she reached for the phone, the unopened letter sitting on her lap. She dialled his mobile phone and waited until the dial tone finally cut any possible thread between them.

  Dear Julia,

  I don’t know how many times I have started this letter. Too many times. It’s like the thousand times I’ve tried to get the courage to begin this conversation, but have failed in the face of your happiness. Your blind belief. When I think back over our marriage I don’t know how I got in so deep. You are so much more evolved than me. You’re so lucky you know what you want. I never have really. I think for years I have allowed myself to be defined by your needs. How you see me. It’s only now that I’ve finally woken up to my own potential—both the lack of it and the true extent of it. I have always been a secret coward. Forgive me.

  I’m leaving you. Wish I’d had the bravery to wait for you and tell you to your face, but that moment has passed. You’re a survivor, you are so much stronger than me, you’re going to be okay, you and the baby. I will always love you and maybe one day we can be friends.

  Klaus.

  Julia screamed, a wail that filled the house like blood, her husband’s presence tearing away from her in the very anguish of the sound.

  Doubling over, she vomited on the bed cover. Still retching, she gathered it up and ran to the bathroom where she dumped it into the bath. As she sat on the edge of the bathtub, a strange practicality possessed her. She walked back into the bedroom.

  He’ll come back. Just talk to him, talk to him.

  She rang again. His mobile phone was still switched off. Furious, she threw her phone. It bounced off the wall like a cartoon sequence.

  Julia retrieved the phone and called Klaus’s agent, keeping her voice as neutral as she could. The agent had no idea where Klaus was, nor that anything was wrong. She started dialling his parents, then realised it was 4 a.m. in Antwerp. It was then that she thought to call Carla.

  ‘Carla?’

  Grief choked her instantly, as if verbalising what had happened would make his absence final. I have been left; he has gone.

  ‘Julia? I can hardly hear you.’

  ‘Klaus…’

  ‘He’s left you.’

  Carla sounded composed, detached. Julia stared into the receiver. Her reaction didn’t make sense; it was as illogical as Klaus’s empty cupboards.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know because he’s here, with me.’

  ‘With you? Why?’ Her voice sounded tinny and melodramatic even to herself. One hand pinched the skin of the other until it was white.

  ‘Oh Julia…I wanted to tell you, I tried to tell you…’

  ‘Have you and Klaus been having an affair?’

  Beat. Outside the window, the sound of a lawnmower whipped up the air, an absurdly ordinary noise in the midst of a dissolving world.

  ‘An affair implies that it’s finite. But yes, Klaus and I are lovers.’

  Pain stabbed a path across Julia’s midriff in short razor-sharp jabs. Part of her refused to believe in the current reality; it was as if her closest friend and husband had decided, for whatever perverse reason, to test her affection.

  She listened to Carla’s breathing, this woman on the other end of the line to whom she had revealed all her emotional ambiguities, all of the information women trade and entrust in the binding intimacy men rarely experience. An intimacy Julia had imagined would be a constant factor in her future, no matter what, now profoundly betrayed.

  ‘When did it happen? When I was away?’

  ‘Julia, do we have to go over this now?’

  ‘I have to know! I want to know exactly when and how it happened!’

  ‘You’re being irrational. The main thing is that it happened. We’re lovers, we love each other.’

  ‘Is he there?’

  ‘Stop screaming.’

  ‘Is he there? I want to speak to him. I want to speak to my husband!’

  She could hear them conferring; his distinctive voice with its flattened phonetics made her heart rate quicken. A sharp cramp shot through her womb. When he came to the phone he was silent.

  ‘Klaus, tell me that it’s all a lie, a stupid mistake.’

  She could hear him struggling to find the words.

  ‘You have the letter,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t want to see you. I can’t see you. This isn’t only about you, Julia, you are not the only victim here. Try and understand.’<
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  Listening intently, she found it hard to reconcile the detached tone of his voice with the man she thought she knew.

  ‘You’re leaving me, that’s all I understand at this moment. You’re leaving me…’ she gasped around the great hollow sobs that kept betraying her.

  There was silence then the click of the receiver.

  A sharp contraction toppled her—she fell back on the bed, clutching at herself. By the time she crawled on her hands and knees to the bathroom, her thighs were streaming with blood.

  19

  JULIA LAY IN THE HOSPITAL BED, floating on an analgesic balloon. It hovered, shiny, fleshy-pink and obscene, like a profane zeppelin, its great billowing circumference pushing everything of the outside world into irrelevance.

  ‘Hey Julia, I know you’re awake.’

  Naomi’s voice echoed faintly in Julia’s mind, each consonant falling upon the skin of the zeppelin and causing it to ripple like the surface of a pond. Regardless, Julia drifted along, her limbs deliciously leaden by a drug-induced torpor. A fruity scent reminiscent of oranges and violets floated across the bed.

  ‘Julia?’

  She opened her eyes reluctantly. Naomi was holding a vase crowded with lilies and freesias, waiting for Julia to catch the perfume. Satisfied her friend was now fully awake, Naomi placed the flowers onto the bedside table.

  ‘So, you’re back in the land of the living.’ Naomi studied the geneticist. She looked truly dreadful: her eyes were puffy from crying; stress had etched a rigidity into the lower half of her face, giving the impression that she was perpetually clenching her jaw; her hair was unwashed and straggly; and she looked as if she’d lost at least seven pounds. But what was most devastating was the intense vulnerability that radiated from her. The layers Julia had carefully constructed over the years—irony, wariness, humour, curiosity—appeared to have been erased overnight, and the energetic professional had been replaced by an emaciated parody. It was as if Julia had relinquished her body entirely and now a wax effigy lay in her place, with huge rabbit eyes staring up out of a shrunken face.

  ‘I lost the baby.’ Julia’s voice was a monotone stripped of emotion.

  ‘I’m so sorry, sweetie.’

  ‘I can’t imagine life without Klaus. There is such a level of unreality about this.’

  ‘I’ll take you away. We’ll rent a house in Mexico and make voodoo dolls out of his clothes. I have the perfect hatpin. You’ll recover. It doesn’t feel like it now, but you will. It’s not the end of the world.’

  ‘It is the end of the world. It’s the end of my world. I love him, do you understand? I want him back. I want my child back, my life…’ Her voice broke into harsh dry sobbing.

  Undone by such grief, Naomi felt helpless. She stroked Julia’s arm. ‘He’s probably not coming back, Julia.’

  Julia swung back to her, suddenly frenetic. ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to him.’

  ‘Does he know about the baby?’

  Naomi nodded, then, finding it too painful to look into Julia’s eyes, averted her gaze to the temperature chart pinned above the bed. ‘My ex-husband knows a great hit man,’ she joked. Again, the inappropriate comment rattled down to the floor.

  ‘You know, I felt the baby move inside of me before…’ her voice faltered again, ‘he was so real, so alive…They’ve taken all these tests; it could have been my uterus, my cervix, they just don’t know. But I do. It was shock, Naomi. How could he? How could they?’ Julia whispered.

  A nurse passed by, wheeling an old woman whose drip preceded her like a victorious trident. As she caught sight of Julia and Naomi, she broke into a Yiddish lullaby in the clear childish voice of an eight year old. The two silently watched the old woman’s progress, Julia with her eyes, Naomi with her smile stuttering brilliantly like a faulty fluorescent, both secretly interpreting her appearance as a bad omen.

  ‘The ironic thing is that they’ve put me on antidepressants but they take ten days to kick in. I could die of grief in that time.’

  She struggled to sit up. Naomi squeezed her hand, but Julia’s unhappiness continued to ooze out of her like a slow poison.

  ‘But think of the benefits,’ Naomi replied. ‘A guilt-free medically justified selfishness during which you can indulge yourself outrageously and your friends will be expected to support you…’

  Encouraged by what she thought was a faint gleam in Julia’s eyes, she continued. ‘Seriously, though, they will help you prioritise what’s really important.’

  Julia stared blankly at the wall, then suddenly her voice emerged, urgent, frantic. ‘He won’t stay with her, you’ll see, it’s just a temporary thing. Fear maybe—or maybe the pressure was simply too much. He’ll come to his senses.’ ‘Julia, it was Klaus who rang to tell me what had happened. Sweetheart, I don’t think he’s coming back.’ Julia’s skin seemed to grey visibly. She leant across and grasped Naomi’s arm, her nails digging into her skin.

  ‘It was a boy, tiny but perfectly formed. I’m going to fight. Do you understand? I’m going to fight to get my husband back.’

  20

  Mayfair, 1861

  ‘I REGARD MATRIMONY IN MUCH the same manner as I regard the purchase of stock—there are risks involved and patience may be required, but, assuming I have researched the proposed investment thoroughly, I am usually confident that sooner or later my returns will justify the initial outlay.’ Colonel Huntington leaned back in the leather armchair, easing open a button of his paisley-printed waistcoat to aid the digestion of an excellent supper of jugged hare and claret.

  ‘You’re not as phlegmatic as you would like to appear, Huntington. I have to confess, up until this marriage of yours, you have been extraordinarily secretive about your trysts. Why, Charles and I had quite given up speculating what your pleasures might be.’ Henry Smith, a jovial man in his early fifties, retorted after belching loudly, spreading his weight a little more territorially then the younger man. He felt like pulling rank after the sanctimonious lecture the Colonel had bored them with throughout the meal—a treatise on the responsibility of the colonial powers, primarily the English. It was an issue Henry felt personally responsible for, given his involvement with Clive and the Colonial Office. ‘After all, I don’t believe you married for money yourself. Nor beauty, I’m told. Youth, perhaps?’

  An aggrieved expression clouded the Colonel’s brow. The third member of the party, Charles Sutton, sensing the dismay that had temporarily floored the normally loquacious anthropologist, leaned forward and refilled his glass with more of the excellent port he had purchased for his friends.

  ‘My dear fellow, that’s a blow below the belt. Mrs Huntington has her charms.’

  ‘Indeed she has,’ the valiant husband added, then fell awkwardly silent.

  ‘She reminds me of an unbroken colt,’ Charles said. ‘A great deal of potential which simply necessitates some reining in.’ He turned to the still pained anthropologist. ‘Quite seriously, Huntington, she appears to possess an inherent sophistication that merely requires some tutoring.’

  ‘So you married for love?’ Henry Smith snorted derisively. The idea was absurd.

  ‘A manner of love, or perhaps affection might be the more apt term,’ the Colonel responded. ‘I will concede, however, that my initial impulse was emotional, believe it or not, Harry. I now realise that I was most certainly in the grip of that sentiment which affects gentlemen of a certain vintage. But I cannot tell you what it means to me to have a son. To see oneself in another, to know that one creates wealth and reputation for a reason other than sheer egotism.’

  Charles, English to the marrow, coughed politely and tried to diffuse the intensity of the moment by distracting himself with the colour of the wine. Conversely, Henry concluded that this was a providential opportunity to gather some potential slander that could possibly prove useful in the future. He nodded encouragingly.

  ‘But there was another influence,’ the Colonel continued, aware that
his uncharacteristic revelations were leading him into a confession he would doubtless regret. ‘I had tired of the travel, of the battles, of having little but the maintenance of properties to hold me to Mayfair and Inverness. In short, I needed anchoring.’

  ‘Indeed, a wife and child will provide an anchor—and a short chain,’ Henry interjected, thinking of his own estranged wife and seven children.

  ‘And there is the enthusiasm of youth. Lavinia has that at the very least. And she also has a sharp intellect, and in relation to my work she is quite the inspiration.’

  ‘Ah, but do you love her?’ Henry insisted, amused by the debating of such a nebulous subject.

  Several men sitting nearby turned at his raised voice. One, immaculate in tails and a silk top hat, who looked as if he had come directly from the theatre, glanced critically at the group through his monocle then turned to his companion and laughed.

  The Colonel, ignoring the slight, drew heavily on his cigar before answering. ‘Love? Don’t be ridiculous; you know as well as I that love is the domain of Lotharios under thirty.’

  ‘Come now, Huntington, however private you might be, I believe I’m correct in surmising that you have dedicated a good portion of your life thus far to the sensual pursuits?’ Henry continued.

  ‘I have been fortunate to have had the means to do so, indeed.’

  At which each of the three gentlemen fell into his own private reverie: Huntington reflecting on his past debaucheries and whether they had, as had been suggested, rendered him incapable of deeper emotion; Henry on his financial difficulties, the result of his inability to control his own baser passions; and Charles, suddenly overwhelmed by the epiphany that he had never loved and was, quite possibly, incapable of such an emotion. Was this fortunate or not? After glancing surreptitiously at his distracted companions, Charles consoled himself with the observation that at least he enjoyed a stable, if uneventful, existence and was probably the richest man at the table. The glum lull was broken by a reveller who drunkenly began a clumsy rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on the club’s pianoforte.