Julia (2 page)

“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking up into his gray, rather compressed-looking face. “I wanted to check on something around the back before you left.”

He looked at her oddly: to examine the back, of course, she would have gone through the house rather than around the corner.

“Not a lot of children on this street, Mrs. Lofting,” the man said. “They play in the park of course but you’ll find that Ilchester Place is a quiet sort of neighborhood, as I’ve told you.” Was this, too, more tired sarcasm? But the man had noticed the girl, and was making an effort to be courteous. He had looked straight through her weak excuse.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the key and putting it in one of the short pockets of her dress. “You’ve been very patient with me.”

“Not at all.” The man looked at his wristwatch, then for a moment at his car, and then at the Rover, where suitcases were piled up on the backseat, crowded in with some potted plants, two short stacks of books tied with string, and a box of floppy dolls she had had since childhood. These were the only things she had taken besides her clothing, and they were all from the room she had been using since leaving the hospital. The books were an indulgence, but they were hers, not Magnus’s.

“No, you needn’t, please,” Julia quickly said. “I couldn’t dream of asking you, after … everything.”

“In that case,” he said, palpably relieved, and began to go down the steps, “I have some things to attend to at the office, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be leaving you to your new house.”
He glanced up at the long, warm brick exterior. “It
is
a beautiful house. You should be quite happy here. And of course you have our number, should anything arise. Am I correct in thinking that you do not know Kensington thoroughly?”

She nodded.

“Then you have before you all the pleasures of investigation. Where was it you were living before? Before today? Hampstead, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You should find this part of Kensington very sympathetic.”

He turned away to walk toward his car. When he had opened the door he faced her again and called across the pavement and lawn. “Do ring us if you have any problems, Mrs. Lofting. By the by, I think you might have some spare keys made for you at one of the shops in the High Street. Well, good day then, Mrs. Lofting.”

“Bye.” She waved from the steps of the house as the man drove away. When his car was out of sight, Julia went down to the Rover and looked back up at her house—now truly her house. Like all the other houses on the short, elegant length of Ilchester Place, it was neo-Georgian, brick, secure. There she would be safe from Magnus. The house had spoken to her need for quiet and for restful seclusion the moment she had seen it: almost as if it had in fact spoken to her. Buying it had been as much a compulsion as following the little Kate-like girl had been. She
could
live in it, apart from Magnus: in time she could telephone him or write a note, after he had got used to the idea of her bolting. She had spent the previous night in a Knightsbridge hotel, afraid that every step meant the approach of Magnus, his face red with false sympathy, with the effort of trying to contain his violence. Magnus could
be terrifying: it was the other side of his impressiveness, that huge male authority. No, she would let Magnus be for a while. Her note had explained all that could be explained.

Now the suitcases and the rest of her things had to be got into the house somehow. She pushed the button beside the door handle and, when it resisted her, pushed it again harder. The car was locked. Julia pulled a key from her pocket, but it was the house key on its taunting yellow ribbon. She bent over to look through the window and saw the rest of her keys dangling from the car’s ignition.
Helpless
. She felt the oncoming of tears. For a moment she experienced an intense gratitude that Magnus was not beside her. “Julia, you are completely incapable.” “I wonder if you ever do anything right.” Or a short, brutal condemnation: “typical.” A barrister, Magnus had an arsenal of techniques for suggesting that other people, especially his wife, were weak in the head.

“Oh, thank God,” she said aloud; she had noticed that the window on the passenger side of the Rover was rolled down, although that door, too, was locked. “Typical” as that might be, Julia took it as a good omen for the first day she was to live in her new house. Perhaps Magnus really might be kept from finding her—for a week or two, at least.

As if the two were related, the thought of Magnus recalled the girl again, and Julia, opening the other door by reaching in through the window and pressing down on the inner handle, thought of trying to find her inside Holland Park. She fought down the image of herself and the girl, sitting together on a bench, talking. Beneath this lay another image, an image of horror and despair, and Julia, sensing it coming to her consciousness as it had during the weeks in hospital, deliberately made her mind empty. She would think about the luggage and the plants; one of the pots had broken, shearing away a
section of clay nearly seven inches long and exposing granular black soil webbed with thin white roots. Julia had, she realized, bought the house on Ilchester Place the same way she had taken Magnus for her husband, in a rush.

But she had spent
her
money on
her
house: it was the first utterly free thing she had done since she had married Magnus eleven years before. Then, in 1963, she had been twenty-five, a rather more than pretty young woman with striking reddish hair and a soft, unlined, contented face: “the face of a girl at an Impressionist’s picnic,” her father had said. She had gone through her private school and Smith College, it seemed to her now, in a sort of trance, at a great distance from herself. Little but her courses and a few professors had moved or touched her. She had lost her virginity to a boy from Columbia, a tall, intense Jewish student of English. Most of his courtship had consisted of anecdotes about Lionel Trilling and the sex lives of famous poets; they had seen a great many French movies together.

Afterward there were other boys, but none of them came any closer to the inner Julia than the Columbia student; she slept with none of them. When she graduated from Smith, she took a job with Time-Life, in the clipping library at
Sports Illustrated
, but quit a year later when she overheard another young woman, one she had thought of as a friend, describe her as a “fucking heiress.” Quitting was a relief: she knew that she was incompetent at the job, and had lasted a year because the head of her department, a married man named Robert Tillinghast, was fond of her. She liked him, but not enough to remove her clothes in his company, which was clearly what he had in mind. For six months, then, she lived in her parents’ home, reading novels and watching television,
feeling more and more afraid of any world beyond the front door or the Smith campus; then she ran into a Smith friend in a restaurant and heard that the publishing company she worked for was looking for a young woman to do editorial work; in a week she had another job. Here, she enjoyed an almost mechanical, rootless pleasure in the work, editing academic books in the firm’s college department; she was fond of saying that she learned things from each new book. She took an apartment in the West Seventies. She seemed to be settling into a dazed, busy, thoughtless life: taking the bus to work (on principle, she rarely rode in taxis), doing her correspondence, working with manuscripts, eating with one man or another, she often thought that she was merely watching herself perform, as though life had not yet truly begun. Then one morning she woke up in her bed beside Robert Tillinghast, and decided, panicked, to leave New York and go to England. “I’m moving horizontally since I’m not able to move vertically,” she told her friends. Robert Tillinghast drove her to the airport and said, Good God, he wondered what would become of her. “I guess I do too.”

In London, she first took a room on Drury Lane, and six months later, after she had found a job with a publisher of art books, moved to a two-room flat in Camden Town. “You’re living in a kennel,” her father had blustered when he flew across to inspect her new life. “Where the hell are the want ads?” He found her a self-contained, large-windowed flat with two bedrooms (“You need a room to work in!”) in Hampstead, three times the cost of her place in Camden Town. One night several months after she had moved in, she met Magnus Lofting at a party given by a married couple who both worked for the art-book publishers.

They were Hugh and Sonia Mitchell-Mitchie, both Julia’s
age; Hugh, who wore denims and T-shirts and the golden curl of an earring in one ear, was the head of the art department. Sonia, like Julia, did editorial work. In manner, both were bright and inconsequential; Julia, who liked them while she was a little unsettled by them—both seemed to spend an abnormal amount of time discussing their love affairs—had not known that their idea of a party was to spend two hours drinking as rapidly as possible and the rest of the night playing parlor games.

When the others began to play, Julia faded backward in the room, hoping to go unnoticed: she was made insecure by all games. Sonia began to taunt her; in a moment, twenty people were staring at her. Julia felt cruelly exposed.

“Don’t be a bully, Sonia,” a man said. “I’ll talk to your friend.”

Julia turned to the source of this authoritative voice, and saw a big rocky-faced man in a pinstriped suit; he was years older than anyone else at the party. The hair above his ears was already going gray. “Sit down next to me,” the man ordered.

“You saved my life,” she said.

“Just sit down,” Magnus ordered.

She gladly sat.

Ten years later, she could not remember the conversation they had had, but she knew that, immediately, there had been something impressive about him: he was purely male, with a suggestion in every gesture that he could take her as easily as he could light a cigarette. With the instincts of someone who had grown up surrounded by prosperous people, she recognized that he was successful at whatever it was he did; he seemed to understand her utterly, or to be utterly indifferent to anything he did not understand. In a chilling way, he
was fascinating. They spent the rest of the evening talking to one another, and while Hugh and Sonia and the rest of the party were beginning another game, one in which a “murderer” assassinated his “victims” by winking at them, Magnus said quietly to her, “I think I’ll be going. Shall I give you a lift? How did you get here?”

“I took a bus,” she confessed.

“Too late for a bus now.” He stood up. He was a head taller than she and too big to be merely burly. When he raised a hand, she flinched; but he carried it to the back of his head and smoothed down his hair. “I’ll take you home unless you live somewhere unreasonable. Blackheath or Guildford are out of my range.”

“I live in Hampstead,” she said.

“Grace abounds. So do I.”

They walked to his car, a black Mercedes, parked on the Fulham Road; she learned that he was a barrister, and that he had once lived next door to Sonia Mitchell-Mitchie, who had become a kind of adopted niece. He asked few questions of her, but Julia found herself talking compulsively. For some reason—a reason she was not to understand for years—she even mentioned Robert Tillinghast when describing why she had left New York.

It was only when she knew that she was going to leave Magnus that she recognized that she had married him—had fallen in love with him—in large measure because he reminded her of her father. And they were both prodigal, casual adulterers. Julia saw very early that Magnus had other women: he was brutally offhand about them. On the ride back to Hampstead, he had said that he wanted a drink, and drove to a club behind Shepherd’s Market, where he signed her name in a guestbook and led her into a dark, half-filled
room in which elegance was still a few paces in advance of shabbiness. The waitresses wore long pastel gowns revealing out-size, separated breasts. A third of the men were drunk; only two women, besides Julia and the hostesses, were in the club. One of the drunks put his arm about Julia as soon as she entered the room. Magnus pushed the man away without looking at him. He ordered drinks and began to look aggressively about the room as if he were looking for another man to knock down. Both of the other women, Julia saw, were looking at him. She felt pleasantly excited, stimulated, sipping at her drink.

“Do you gamble?” Magnus asked her.

She shook her head.

“You won’t mind if I do?”

“No,” she said. “I suddenly feel very awake.”

Julia followed him through a door at the end of the lounge and continued, following his broad back, to a grilled-in counter where Magnus took money from his wallet and bought chips. She watched as he placed five fifty-pound notes on the counter, and, after hesitating a second, a sixth. He seemed to get a surprisingly small amount of chips for all this money.

Together, they skirted various gaming tables and went up to a roulette wheel. Magnus placed four of his chips on the red. Breathless, Julia watched the ball spinning across the ratchets. It landed, clattering, on red. Magnus left his chips where they were, and the ball landed again on red. Then he moved everything he had won to black; again he won. How much money did those chips represent? Five hundred pounds? More? As she watched Magnus glowering down at the stack of chips, she felt exhilarated, slightly disoriented: he must have loathed the party, she realized. The next time the wheel spun, he lost some of his chips, but his face remained immobile.

“Your turn, Charmaine,” he ordered. He shoved a stack of chips toward her. With desperation, Julia realized that they were worth at least two hundred pounds.

“I can’t,” she said. “I’d lose your money.”

“Don’t be cowardly,” he said. “Bet any way you please.”

She pushed the chips onto the red, since that was what Magnus had first won with. This time the ball clattered down onto the black. She looked up at him, stricken.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Put more on it.” He slid chips toward her.

She did as he said, and lost again. She stepped away from the table.