Julia (33 page)

You said you’d heard from Mark at last.”

“Yes.”

“Still in California?”

“Still in California, yes. Los Angeles.”

“With that girl?”

“What was her name?”

“Annis.”

“Odd sort of name for a girl. Or is it her patronym?”

“I don’t know. He said that he was working at last. He’d found a job as maintenance man at something called a free school. Annis apparently has a little money each month.”

“Do you think he will marry her?”

“I don’t know whether she would marry him.”

“I suppose that means you are becoming liberated, Lily.”

She sniffed, and returned to her novel. When she was certain that he was not looking at her, she peeked across the room to the Sisley. Magnus had bought it for her in October. It hung in the place of the Stubbs drawing of the horse, although she had actually preferred the Stubbs horse. That had been relegated to the dining room.

“Mark has found his level at last,” Magnus was saying. “Maintenance man. That means cleaner. I’m surprised that in the city of the angels the position is not referred to as maintenance engineer.”

“He said he is also taking classes at a yoga institute.”

“And belongs to the Che-Mao-Lumumba Revolutionary Tactics Chess League, no doubt. Didn’t he tell you sometime before the inquest that it was yoga—those damnable exercises—which had finally pushed him over the edge? I should think he’d stay away from that sort of thing.”

“You know very well it wasn’t that. I don’t imagine I need particularize.”

“Please don’t,” said Magnus, sounding rather wounded. “But even he said that it played a part in his crack-up.”

“Julia played a larger part,” Lily said maliciously.

“I think I just said that I did not require reminding. A very nasty shock, finding that my wife spent her last night before committing suicide in another man’s bed. Especially that lunatic’s bed. And the bloody fool didn’t even possess the wit to see what Julia was going through.” Magnus stared at his hands, which he had clasped tightly in his lap.

“We can be very grateful she left that—letter,” Lily said substituting the last word for “note.” “It really did make things much clearer. I did think the coroner was right, don’t you? To think that it proved instability of mind and was a clear indication of suicidal intent?”

“It offends me to see any man lead a jury to that extent,” Magnus growled. “Coroners have far too much power in this country. Little gods. But yes, Lily, for the thousandth time, yes. I do think the coroner was right. Of course he was bloody right. There’s no doubt about it. Any fool looking at the condition of that house and her car would know that her mind was gone. Now do you suppose we might have some tea? Actually, I’d rather have a drink. Would you get me one? No, I’ll get it myself.” He rose and moved toward the drinks trolley.

“Do have some cheese and biscuits, Magnus. There’s a bit of Stilton on the sideboard.”

“One cannot get a real Stilton anymore,” he said. “Only supermarket rubbish. And have you seen or, heaven forbid, tasted what they have the gall to refer to as Sage Derby? It should be fed to birds. A decent pig wouldn’t touch it.”

“I just thought you might like a bite of some nice cheese and bikkies,” she said, watching him splash whiskey into a tumbler. He took even more than she had expected. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I … am … not … upset.”

“Magnus, you know that I am deeply, truly grateful to you for not being affected by my silliness on that last day. Your steadfastness was simply remarkable. I lost my head, I was an utter fool, and you were so strong, you wouldn’t be shaken, not in the least, and I am enormously grateful to you for that. I am grateful for your clear head and for your strength.”

He glanced at her, and took a long swallow of his drink. “You shouldn’t be grateful that I avoided being an ass. That’s a negative sort of compliment.” But she saw that he was calmer.

“And I shall never cease to be grateful that she wrote that note,” she said. “If she hadn’t given the game away by naming two of you, well …”

“Well,” he said. “Tellingly put, Lily.” He went back across the room and sat carefully in his chair. Magnus seemed to Lily to be gaining weight with every day. “I should have been in the soup, at least until they tried to ‘pin it on’ Mark.”

“Do you know, I think that I appreciate how she felt. Not about you or even Mark, of course, but how she must have felt about
life
, when I was being so foolish on that day, I experienced the most remarkable sensation of utter hopelessness and despair. It was quite total. I felt utterly gray and washed-out, as though everything bright was long behind me. Julia must have felt something of that kind.”

“Julia was not in a rational frame of mind. None of us can know what she thought about anything, much less something so vaporous as
life
.” He looked at her sourly. “You didn’t see the condition of that house.”

“I couldn’t go in there,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it.” She switched to a safer topic. “Have you had any luck with the house?”

“Nobody is buying houses now, especially not houses as criminally expensive as that one. That officious twerp at Markham and Reeves told me the market is worse than it’s been for fifteen years.”

“Have you been to the cemetery yet, Magnus?” She had been earlier in the week, to see to the flowers.

“No, not really. Not since the funeral. I can’t abide Hampstead cemetery. It looks like a suburb of Melbourne.”

“Julia never liked it either.”

“Rot. Utter rot. How can you claim to know such a thing?”

“Because she told me on the day of Kate’s funeral. She said that she wished Kate could have been buried in an older cemetery. In Highgate.”

“I don’t believe that Julia held a firm opinion on a bone-yard she saw only once, and then so exhausted she could scarcely stand upright.”

Lily shrugged, irritated with him.

“Anyhow, nobody seems to want the damned house,” he said. This was an oblique apology to her, and she peeked again at the Sisley painting. He was still talking, of course. “People look at it and they don’t like it, for some reason. Did I tell you that that McClintock person wrote wondering if Julia would sell him his furniture back? Said he couldn’t find any furniture like it in Barbados. He’d have had a shock if he could have seen his precious furniture.”

“That frightens me,” she said. “Please don’t dwell on it.”

“I wasn’t about to dwell on anything,” he said and gulped at his drink again. “Anything good on the goggle box tonight?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I thought I might try reading one of those books Julia had. I’ll be finished with this novel by tonight, and I thought I’d try one of hers. That’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it? I didn’t have time to look at them for ages, and then I didn’t want to. But it seems a pity to let them go unread. There’s a nice long one about a rainbow. I think I’ll begin with that, it looks a lovely read. She did have a lot of books, didn’t she?”

“It was because she was friendless,” Magnus said flatly.

“How can you, Magnus?” she said, genuinely surprised. “Julia had friends. You and I were certainly her friends. And I suppose Mark was a friend of a sort.”

“Bloody Mark. I hope he falls under a bus.”

“Mark has suffered a great deal.”

Magnus turned away in impatience. “Are you sure there’s nothing on the box? I’d like to watch something tonight.”

Lily knew that this meant that he wished to spend the evening with her, and that he would fill it by insulting the television and all who watched it. She wished that he would leave—Magnus was in one of his carping moods, which lately annoyed Lily more than they once had. “Nothing you would care for, Magnus. You despise the television, as we both know. But,” she added more from habit than desire, “you might stay for dinner. This is one of my vegetarian nights. I’ll make a big salad.”

Magnus shuddered. “I could get something from a restaurant and bring it back. I don’t like these meatless Tuesdays of yours.”

As neutrally as possible, she said, “If you wish.”

“Right, then.”

In exasperation, she thrust down her book and went over to the window on the terrace. Her flowers still bloomed vigorously, and were dazzlingly, violently colored in the damp gray air. To Lily, they looked like little flags of contentment—they said
we, at least, have no problems
.

Behind her, Magnus cleared his throat. “Just out of curiosity, my darling, do you still go to those groups of yours?”

Lily looked into the deep green of the treetops.

“Not as often as before,” she said.

“Why is that? Don’t you fancy the new swami?”

She let her gaze travel down the rough, pitted bark of the trees. On this cold, cheerless November day few people lingered in the park, and the men and women on the long path rushed by, their hands deep in the pockets of their coats. They looked gray and insubstantial before the great trees, like smoke blown past.

“Oh, Mrs. Venable is acceptable,” she said, not paying much attention to what she was saying. “I don’t feel the same about the meetings.” Now she was watching a child in a blue hooded coat recklessly ride a bicycle down the path, which was forbidden. None of the people on the path seemed to care, as if their opinions were smoke too. “But I don’t like to disappoint the others,” she said. The child swung off the bicycle and propped it against one of the trees. A girl’s bicycle, Lily noticed. “Rosamund Tooth is such an old dear, and Nigel Arkwright can be quite charming when he doesn’t babble on so,” she said. The child on the path had turned around and was now apparently scrutinizing the ground, her cowl making her look like a dwarfish monk. “But I’m not as interested as I once was,” Lily said. “Mrs. Venable’s speciality is communing with the departed, through a control named Marcel, and I’ve always thought that was a shade—you know.” Irritatingly,
Magnus snorted, lumping her with the class of people who sought information from controls named Marcel. She could now see the pale glimmer of the girl’s face. The child was staring straight ahead, as if counting to herself. Then she tilted up her face and looked right at Lily. Her eyes were blue and expressionless. With both hands, still holding Lily’s eyes with her own, she swept back the hood and revealed hair the color of white gold.

Lily jumped back from the window, whirled around, and uttered the first sentence to appear in her mind. She said, “We should never have buried Julia in Hampstead cemetery.”

Magnus said, “What?”