Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  Behind Lavinia, one of the girls, no older than fifteen, half-naked, her blonde hair a frizzy dishevelled cloud, her eyes two black smudges above rouged cheeks, broke into a hacking cough. The low murmuring of a man’s voice responded. Shrugging with resignation, the prostitute turned back into the room.

  The boy swung around. ‘Tuesday ain’t a good day for Mrs Murphy. Ghost day, she calls it—takes a lot of gin to exorcise them spirits, she reckons. Speakin’ of which, madam, would you care for a dram? We always offer our gentlemen customers one.’

  Lavinia shook her head and again the boy shouted up the stairs. Finally, there came the slam of a distant door and the creaking of floorboards. A melodious voice sounded out from the dark. ‘A visitor, you say?’

  Lavinia’s heart leapt; the accent was unmistakable.

  ‘Well, if he ain’t paying and he doesn’t want one of my girls, I don’t care how posh he might be, he can feck off back to Gleann Cholm Cille for all I care!’

  ‘I am not here for any business, Mrs Murphy, but I think you will want to meet with me,’ Lavinia called up, cautioning the boy with one gloved hand.

  A walking cane emerged from the shadows, followed by the nebulous outline of a woman. A pile of hennaed hair swept up in a bouffant crowned a face whose past attractions appeared ravaged by drink and misery. The nose, once aquiline, now showed the bulbous tip of the alcoholic; the large dark blue eyes were besieged by wrinkles and the mouth hung slack. The woman appeared to be in her late forties, although Lavinia suspected she might be younger. Leaning heavily on the walking stick, the proprietress descended the stairs. Catching sight of Lavinia, she paused, staring hard.

  ‘Sweet Jesus.’

  She dropped her walking cane, which clattered noisily down the stairs before her like an omen portending bad news. The boy rushed to hand it back, bowing obsequiously.

  ‘Mother?’ Lavinia murmured, looking into the eyes she recognised as her own. Feeling faint, she steadied herself against the wall.

  ‘Bartholomew!’ Meredith Murphy barked at the boy. ‘Unlock the front parlour and bring me a bottle of gin!’ Swinging back to Lavinia, she turned the corners of her mouth up into the semblance of a smile, revealing several missing teeth. ‘I believe we have an occasion.’

  The parlour was a dingy, stuffy room holding a small velvet chaise longue that had seen better days and two armchairs. Bartholomew had stoked the fire until it was roaring. Lavinia, mindful of fleas, sat on the edge of her chair, an untouched grimy glass of gin sitting before her on an upturned travelling trunk (still marked Rosshare, Ireland) that served as a table.

  ‘’Tis a miracle—I look at you and I see myself. I wasn’t much younger than you when I gave birth.’ Sighing, Meredith Murphy lifted her second glass of gin and drained it.

  ‘If you’re imagining an apology or some such sentimental whimsy, you can forget it,’ a sudden cough broke the gravelly alto of her voice. ‘I left Anascaul and that sanctimonious misanthrope who begot you because I wanted to, and I have never felt the slightest regret. Oh, do not misunderstand me, I loved him—the cockeyed affection of a muddle-headed girl, but it were love. Then after you were born, the fighting began. The bloodiest fisticuffs that ever happened behind drawn curtains. Your father grew too ashamed even to give the Sunday sermon. Oh, it was a terrible time.’

  ‘I cannot believe my father struck you.’

  Meredith Murphy burst into a fit of growling laughter that threw her back against the ancient cushions. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she straightened herself. ‘It weren’t him, darlin’, it were me! Temper of a banshee. I had to leave. There were times I believed I might have even harmed you, poor wee bairn that you were. You know that scar your father has, on his left cheek?’

  Horrified, Lavinia nodded.

  ‘That were a pair of curling tongs I threw at him. The poor man was right to kill me off and bury me. He did you a favour.’

  Meredith Murphy leaned forward, breathing a stench of gin, stale perfume and rotting teeth over Lavinia. ‘My own flesh and blood, so beautiful. You’ve done well to get where you are. I shan’t compromise you, daughter, not over my dead body, that much I can promise you. Meredith Murphy looks after her own. But tell me, is there a child? Do I have a grandchild?’

  ‘A boy called Aidan.’

  Overwhelmed, Meredith clasped Lavinia’s hand to her bosom. Lavinia, revolted, pulled herself free and, murmuring her excuses, fled.

  While the hansom cab jolted over the huge potholes that pitted the lanes, Lavinia considered how transformed her future was now. Would she ever be able to forgive her mother for abandoning her? And could she ever abandon her own child, even if it meant surrendering him to a better life?

  Once secure in the sanctuary of her own bedroom, Lavinia lifted the whispering box from the mantelpiece. She placed it on the stone of the hearth and stood for a moment with the heel of her shoe poised, ready to shatter it into pieces. Then, changing her mind, she hid it in a drawer.

  57

  Los Angeles, 2002

  ‘FREE WILL IS A NINETEENTH-CENTURY liberal mythology—we learnt that in first year philosophy. It’s the legacy of Rousseau and all those other deluded utopians, so are you going to seduce me now?’ Gabriel raised one eyebrow provocatively, his face a streaked montage of light and shade.

  Julia rolled over onto her front, pulling the duvet with her, and looked at him. The sun fell across his torso and face, highlighting the fine hairs that swept down his chest to his pubic hair. He had one hand behind the back of his head, his face tilted towards her. Running her fingers along the sweep of his nose, she noticed how his mixed ancestry showed in his face: the Semitic nose, the sharp Latino cheekbones, the hooded green eyes, the olive skin. He will probably never be quite as beautiful as he is now, she marvelled, pushing her own age and the implications of their relationship to the back of her mind.

  ‘You’re outrageously precocious,’ she said, ‘however, you know as well as I, that while we might be genetically predisposed towards an action, that doesn’t mean—given social conditions, intellectual discipline, cultural contexts—we actually carry out that action.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you, or you wouldn’t be doing the research you do.’

  In the ensuing silence, Julia wondered about her true motives. An image of Tom Donohue, and then a masked Amazonian Indian fighting for his life suddenly seemed to loom up from the patterned bedcover; was she being disingenuous? Was she placing ambition over ethics?

  Gabriel rolled onto his back and watched a daddy-long-legs pick its way delicately across the ceiling.

  ‘We have another hour before I’m due home,’ he said, and nudged his hard penis against her thigh.

  She smiled; she’d forgotten that other wondrous thing about younger men: the fourth erection. He pulled her across and she fell onto his chest, his thick soft lips searching for her tongue, sucking at it, tugging a path of ecstasy that shot right through her centre. Her vagina, swollen from so much lovemaking, felt as if it had been transformed into a new organ, a deliciously burning extension that made her hum with pleasure. He buried his face between her breasts.

  ‘I can’t believe how gorgeous you are.’ His voice was muffled as he pressed her flesh against his cheeks.

  ‘Not too old?’

  He gazed up at her. ‘You must be joking, you’re perfect. Besides I told you before, I prefer older women.’

  ‘I thought I was your first.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He began pushing her high above him until she was forced to steady herself against the wall, her hips held over him, his face buried in her, her buttocks cradled in each of his hands. Naively, she’d imagined she would have to teach him the intricacies of the female body. Instead she’d found him reminding her of the enthusiasm of first lust, the sexual imagination that always coloured the beginning of a liaison.

  She closed her eyes. She’d always been better at giving sensually than receiving. Klaus had this in common with her;
they’d even joked about it. Klaus. Her memory stuttered like a faulty fluorescent. She opened her eyes; for a second, the curve of Gabriel’s chest turned into Klaus’s; his mouth, her husband’s.

  Determined to exorcise the vision in sensation, she lowered herself onto Gabriel, the smell of her a sweet smudge across his face. Pinning his arms above his head, she caught the tip of him between her labia. Closing her legs, she rode him like a man.

  His huge eyes stared up at her as he tried not to orgasm, summing up a thousand irrelevancies as distractions—the names of protein molecules, the number of Bob Dylan hits between 1968 and 1978, the Dodgers’ highest score for that season; until he knew from a sudden tightening that she had started her orgasm, and a huge jolt buckled his own body.

  Julia lay in the crook of his arm, her limbs lolling in total relaxation, echos of her climax still ricocheting.

  ‘I would love to give you a baby,’ Gabriel’s voice broke into her reverie, a rare moment of no thought, a respite now lost as recent history rushed in.

  ‘Thank you, but that’s an absurd idea.’

  Belittling me again, he thought, staring up at her beamed ceiling, wondering how long the age difference was going to hang between them. She can’t help herself, he decided. It would be immature of him to be offended, but he was anyway.

  Julia turned away; her back was an arch of freckles and tanned skin Gabriel longed to touch. Curling around her, he was amazed by how imposing she looked but how small she was to hold.

  ‘Is it?’ he ventured.

  Her whole body tightened against him and for a moment he was terrified he’d lost her. They lay there in silence, the smell of sex sharpening the air.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Julia said eventually, ‘I keep thinking I’m going to drop back into that one minute and then my marriage will continue uninterrupted, as it did before. It seems so completely against nature, the idea that Klaus is happy with someone else and his life has moved on, whereas mine’s still in suspension.’

  ‘But this is life. I am life.’

  He made her turn towards him. She looked through him in a way that made him shudder.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ she replied softly.

  Julia sat at one of the lab computers, studying a set of graphs. The incubator hummed behind her. Gabriel had run the tests for Jacob syndrome but none of the subjects had proved to have the extra Y chromosome. She’d been forced to discount it as a factor.

  Julia pulled up ten files: half were identical twins, the other half non-identical. A file lay open on the desk: a report on one set of identical twins, the Taylors. Horace Taylor, a corporal, had been court-martialled in 1991 for breaking the Geneva Convention on Treatment of Prisoners of War during the first Gulf War. Acquitted due to lack of evidence, he had again faced charges during the Kosovo crisis while stationed there with UN forces, accused of using unnecessary force during a raid on a Serbian gunpost.

  Julia scanned down the page: there was a small mention of his twin, Jack, but as he had spent less than one year in the military before resigning, there was very little data about him. Julia googled his name. Up came three links: one was about a retired baseball player from the 1950s—same name, different guy. The other two were articles from the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Times: Actuary slays family in rage ran one of the headlines. Julia read on:

  Actuary Jack Taylor, thirty-eight, was arrested yesterday for the murders of his wife, Joan, and their two young sons. Taylor, described as a quiet, fastidiously neat man and a chess fanatic, came home from work early on Wednesday to discover that his sons had accidentally knocked over a chess game he was halfway through. Furious, he went to his garage, collected a rifle and shot all three members of his family dead. He then changed his bloodstained clothes, walked to the nearest police station and made a full confession.

  Julia checked the date: two years after his brother had stood trial for the Gulf War incident. Jack Taylor must have experienced an impulse towards the same uncontrollable violent outbursts.

  Would it have been possible for Jack Taylor to have controlled himself if he had known about his genetic susceptibility, she wondered. Could he have sought help to circumnavigate situations that could trigger violent reaction? Could he have stopped himself from murdering?

  58

  Mayfair, 1861

  THE PAINTED TIN SOLDIERS WERE DIVIDED into two lines. On one side of the toy brick barrier crouched the Russians, their rifles aimed at the platoon of mounted British cavalry on the other side. The horsemen held tiny steel swords raised above their heads. Miniature green plaster hedges and trees—stolen from another game—formed an incongruous no-man’s-land between the trenches.

  The Colonel moved the leading horseman forward, pushing the tiny tin man and his horse through a hedge, knocking it sideways. Aidan, sitting on a blanket beside his father, watched appreciatively while the nanny, knitting in a corner, looked on.

  ‘You see, it was like this,’ the Colonel told his son, ‘blind hubris, the collision of old warfare with new weaponry. We did not stand a chance, my lad.’

  He knocked the cavalry piece down. Suddenly, Stanley’s face flashed before him and he was there, back in the trench, clutching at the torso of his dead friend.

  ‘Papa.’

  The sound of Aidan’s voice brought him back to the moment. He knelt against the ottoman, his hands trembling. He’d noticed these lapses had started to intensify recently, the nightmares becoming more frequent. I cannot continue like this, the Colonel thought. I cannot escape my nature.

  He glanced down at the fallen cavalryman. The roaring sound of a thousand galloping hooves swept through him like a wave as he sat pinned, trying to control his dread. Aidan leaned forward and with one flailing arm knocked over the whole platoon. Immediately, the Colonel was back there on the battlefield, clutching the neck of his panicked horse.

  ‘No!’

  Terrified, he struck the child, who broke into loud wailing.

  The nanny sprang to her feet and snatched the crying child away. The Colonel, coming to his senses, went to comfort his son but the child pulled away from him, flinching.

  ‘It’s all right, my lad. Papa was just having a nightmare, that’s all.’

  The Colonel kissed his son’s wrinkled, screaming face then, ashamed, left the nursery. Outside, he paused, resting against the banisters, trying to stop the shaking that racked his entire body. He knew that only one man’s touch could drive out the terror that possessed him. I must see him, he decided.

  I don’t know who I’m whispering to any more, but you are my creation, and the solace I take from these confessions compels me to continue.

  It is late July. My hair has grown back to my shoulders and I have fashioned it into ringlets. Unknown to James, I have stopped my dosage of laudanum and that dreadful time seems almost behind me. I am close to completion of James’s pamphlet and am most proud of my handiwork.

  I had assumed us happy again, but three weeks ago his nightmares of war worsened again. He has become a haunted man. On one occasion he terrified the housemaids by barking orders at invisible soldiers. He neglects his scientific duties and returns from his club later and later. My queries are met with a sullen aggression, as if he is intent on enclosing himself in a citadel of private grief. Even his companion, Hamish Campbell, has stopped visiting the house.

  I am at my wits’ end. James has been gone for three days and nights now, with no message. I have sent a man to the Carlton but even they have not seen him. I cannot just sit and wait for his return. I find I do not wish for him to disappear from my life.

  Lavinia closed the whispering box and caressed the carved wooden top. Then, throwing on a shawl, she stepped swiftly out of the bedroom.

  Drawing the door bolt, Lavinia entered the kitchen. The glow from her candle skipped across the silent utensils hanging like gleaming stalactites from the ceiling rack. She slipped past the vast pantry and the wooden icebox, beyond the coal shute that led into the cellar,
and stepped out of the back door into the yard beyond.

  The warm pungent atmosphere of the stables enclosed her. The sleeping horses filled the low building with a strange tranquillity, the serenity of a world that transcended the indulgences of men.

  Several luminous black eyes opened and blinked slowly. One mare snorted nervously. Lavinia whispered, hoping to calm her. The foot of the attic ladder was visible in the far corner of the stables. Stepping carefully to avoid the soiled straw, she made her way to it and began to climb.

  ‘Who goes there?’ The cry sounded out from above her head.

  ‘Your mistress!’

  There was a rustling, then the grumbling voice of a boy—one of the stable lads, Lavinia assumed, remembering that all of the stable staff shared the loft. The thump of footsteps travelled overhead, then the trapdoor was thrown open.

  ‘Has there been a death, madam?’The coachman rubbed his eyes blearily. He had hastily pulled his breeches over his nightshirt and flung on his riding jacket. There had been an illegal cock fight in Chauncery Lane that night and all the stable, bar two boys, had attended. It was a pastime Aloysius did not discourage, believing it innocuous entertainment that assuaged his lads’ high spirits.

  ‘No death.’ Lavinia fought a sudden sense of foolishness. ‘I need you to take me to the master.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be wise, madam.’ Somewhere in the darkness behind him, a boy whimpered in his sleep—the youngest stable boy struggling with a dream, Aloysius thought, and, not wanting to wake him, he stepped down and closed the trapdoor. ‘The master has ordered me not to disturb him under any circumstances.’

  ‘But you know where he is?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Is he alone?’

  ‘I cannot answer that, madam.’

  ‘Is he with Mr Hamish Campbell?’

  ‘I will not endanger my employment, Mrs Huntington, you know that.’