Julia (10 page)

“Something’s wrong,” whispered Mr. Piggot.

Together they watched Mrs. Fludd struggling, not knowing what should be done. Lily tugged at Julia’s hand, indicating that she was not to rise. Gradually Mrs. Fludd’s face cleared of purple and her eyes closed; she lay back drained and apparently powerless, her face heavy and dead. As Julia watched, the old woman’s face became chalky. “It’s over,” she uttered, her voice low as it had been earlier in the evening. Yet it seemed to shake. Her hands, too, trembled as she placed them on her chest, forcing herself to breathe regularly.

“Over?” inquired Miss Pinner. “Why, we were just—”

“This must stop,” said Mrs. Fludd in her trembling voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t do more. I can’t finish.” The woman, Julia saw, was terrified. “Get my coat,” she ordered. She was trying to struggle up from the sofa. “No more tonight. My coat. Please.” She fell back exhausted, and Julia saw with horror that the old woman had begun to blink back tears.

The group members stood about in the darkness, uncertain and disturbed. Only Miss Pinner seemed indignant. While she hissed something to Miss Tooth, Lily approached Mrs. Fludd. “Get my coat,” said Mrs. Fludd. Now she was openly weeping.

“Somebody get some water, please,” Lily said, and Miss Pinner looked up from her intense talk with her companion. Julia stood by, frozen, incapable of movement.

“What happened?” she asked. “Mrs. Fludd, what happened to you?”

“Get out of this house,” Mrs. Fludd whispered. She lolled back on the cushions, her mouth dryly opening and closing. Tears continued to roll down her meaty cheeks. “Some water.” She began to whimper.

Miss Pinner exasperatedly went from the room. Julia noticed that she was going not to the kitchen, but in the direction of the hall bathroom.

“She’s frightened,” Lily whispered to Julia. “What was that she said to you?”

Julia shook her head. Mrs. Fludd was again trying to speak. She bent near. Foul breath assaulted her. “Danger. I’m in danger. You too.” The woman was trembling violently. A sharp, acetic odor floated up to Julia, and she recognized it only when Mrs. Fludd gasped and made a violent, thrashing attempt to get up from the couch. Now she was both humiliated and terrified, and Julia, the sour odor swirling about her like ammonia, could not hold her to the couch. She looked into the dark recesses of the living room, over the heads of Miss Tooth, Mr. Piggot, and Mr. Arkwright, but Mark was nowhere in the room. He had left the house unseen.

Miss Pinner’s shriek stopped her speculation and froze her as she stood, her arms on Mrs. Fludd’s shoulders. Miss Tooth rushed from the room. Mrs. Fludd, too, had heard the scream, and sank back into the couch, closing her eyes. Julia ran after Miss Tooth. When she reached the bathroom, she saw Miss Pinner supine just inside the door; Miss Tooth was cradling her friend’s head. Julia stepped over Miss Pinner’s body and entered the bathroom. The mirrors reflected her startled, wide-eyed round face, making her look unnaturally healthy and beautiful. Then, momentarily, flickeringly, she saw someone behind her move out of her field of vision: she whirled around, but no one else was in the room. And if anyone had been there, Miss Tooth would have seen him. Julia turned back to the mirror; and there the figure was again just slipping from sight. Yet Julia, like everyone, had seen this happen before: it was a common experience brought on by
nerves. It was no more unusual than hearing one’s name called in the street. Surely, this or something similar had startled Miss Pinner. Julia approached the sink for a glass of water and saw that her blue seersucker dress, forgotten, still soaked; the water in the basin had turned the color of rust, but the dress still bore its stain.

When Julia finally returned home that night, shortly after eleven, she went early to her bed. She felt as though she would be apprehensive all the rest of her life—and half of the disquiet lay in the inability to be definite about what was its source. She and Lily had taken the quaking Mrs. Fludd to her flat in a taxi; driven through the grim, hopeless streets which were so much like the streets of her dream, they had come to Mrs. Fludd’s block of flats, in a cul-de-sac off the Mile End Road. The streetlamps had all been broken, and whitish shards of glass shone up from the dirty pavements; the road, too, was littered with broken glass, the pebbled green spray of shattered windshields. A lighted plaque on Mrs. Fludd’s building announced that the gray, prisonlike structure, one of a series of similar buildings forming a compound, bore the name Baston; before Baston, roving gangs of boys in rolled-up Levi’s passed back and forth, shouting in raucous voices. Several of them stopped to gape at the taxi. When they saw Mrs. Fludd they began to hoot. “Bloody ol’ witch! Bloody ol’ witch!” Mrs. Fludd had not spoken a word during the long ride from Kensington, though Julia had twice asked her what had happened to her, what had she seen. The old woman’s mouth had tightened with such pressure her upper lip went white. The gang of boys terrorized her even further, and she initially refused to leave the cab. Lily, on the street side, got out and at first disconcerted the boys. When
they began again to hoot, it was at Lily. She ignored them and, together, she and Julia coaxed Mrs. Fludd from the taxi. “Wait for us,” Lily said to the driver, and the two women helped Mrs. Fludd into the open court. Several of the boys trailed along behind, calling out obscenities. “Here,” said Mrs. Fludd, flipping up a hand at an entrance: she lived on the building’s ground floor, as Julia had expected.

Julia supported her through the small, antiseptic flat to the tiny bedroom where a dusty budgerigar slept in its cage. The bedroom, no larger than a big closet, contained a single bed and a dwarfish chest of drawers. On the white walls hung crosses, star charts, a dozen odd paintings which Julia scarcely noticed. Lily had gone into the kitchen to see if anything could be found for Mrs. Fludd, and Julia helped the old woman down onto the cramped bed and bent to unlace her boots.

Bending and struggling with the tight knots, Julia felt a pudgy hand settle on the nape of her neck. “Get out of here,” Mrs. Fludd croaked.

“I just thought I could help,” Julia said, looking up into the old woman’s flaring face—she wondered if Mrs. Fludd’s heart was all right.

“No. I mean, get out of this country,” muttered Mrs. Fludd. Her breath was like a buzzard’s. “Go back to America. Where. You belong. There’s danger here. Don’t stay.”

“Danger here in England?”

Mrs. Fludd nodded as if to a backward child, and rolled onto her bed.

“Does it have to do with what we were talking about? What did you see?”

“A child and a man,” Mrs. Fludd said. “Be careful. Things could happen to you.” She closed her eyes and began to
breathe heavily through her mouth. Julia, looking up at the wall, found herself looking at a Keane print.

“Is the man my husband?” she asked.

“The house is yours,” Mrs. Fludd said. “You must leave.”

Then she turned her heavy face again directly to Julia and gripped both of her hands. “Listen. I do. Fake things. Frauds. For the others. Mr. Piggot and Miss Pinner. Expect it. Not all. All that about transcendence—it’s fraud. But I do see. Things. Auras. I
do
. But I hypnotize them, like. Now I’m scared. They were a man and a girl. They put you in danger. Me. In danger. They’re evil. Just evil.”

“Is the man my husband?”

“Get out,” Mrs. Fludd groaned. “Please.”

“Please, Mrs. Fludd, who is the girl? You must tell me.”

The old woman rolled on her side, groaning. A wave of corrupt air rose from her body. “Go.”

On the ride home Lily demanded to know what had happened. “She was frightened out of her wits. What did she say to you?”

“I’m not sure I understand it,” Julia defensively said. Soon after this the cabdriver confessed that he was lost, and they switched back and forth on dark, oppressive streets before finding their way again. Julia got out of the taxi at Plane Tree House and paid the fare over Lily’s protests: it took most of the money in her purse. Then she walked home, skirting the park, where voices and laughter came to her from the dark regions beyond the locked gates.

Once in her house, she went into every room, looking for she knew not what and finding nothing: most of the lights had been left burning, and the house had a blank, emptied, waiting air, as if no one lived in it. Half-filled sherry glasses adhered to the tables. One had tipped over, and poured an
irregular dark stain onto the carpet. Probably because of what Mrs. Fludd had said to her, the house seemed malevolent: “malefic”—that extraordinary word the old woman had used.

In the unused bedrooms, where the furniture had been covered with dust sheets and vacancy lived like a guest, Julia felt insubstantial, drifting without purpose, looking for what she knew she would not find. Dusty and untouched, these rooms seemed chilled by their emptiness. When she checked, she saw that the heaters here had been left in the “off” position. Yet the house was a giant structure, a huge form, which hedged her out and kept her at bay: it would resist her impositions, it would not yield to her. Her sense of the house’s obduracy was immense. She felt, more than ever, that she was living inside a comprehensive error, the mistake that her life had become: bigger forces lay without, waiting. A child and a man.

This hopelessness drove her finally to her hot, claustrophobic bedroom. She undressed quickly and threw her clothing over a chair; before she got into bed, she looked at the heater’s wall switch. The switch was down. Julia remembered having flicked it up yesterday morning when Mark was in the room; certainly she had not turned it on since. She touched the metal surface of the heater, and found that it was as hot as if it had never been turned off. That meant that it had been on last night, since these heaters did not function during the day; yet hadn’t she looked, last night? She cursed her memory. But last night Magnus had been
in the house
. Could he be so childish as to go about turning on the heaters?—but if he could stoop to smashing things up, terrorizing her as bluntly as the boys had Mrs. Fludd, it was impossible to say what he might not do. Angry, Magnus was capable of anything. She turned the heater off once again; then, on an afterthought,
took a roll of tape from her closet and taped the switch to the fixture.

Though she shrank from the very idea, Magnus had to be faced: as did her feelings about him. What
were
those feelings? Julia felt at once as though she were on the crumbling lip of a precipice; her control, her hold on things sound and normal, was fragile; she knew that much of her seeming calm and placidity was a performance. Horror lay beneath the surface—horror was what inhabited the abyss below the precipice. The image of Magnus murdering Kate, that sight of him plunging the knife into Kate’s throat while she thrashed on the floor, could rise in her at any time, as it had before she had been taken to the hospital and drugged into insensibility. Even then she had been tortured by waking dreams. Over and over, her wrists strapped to the side of the bed, she had imagined grasping Magnus’s arm and turning the knife to her own throat. That image, too, had haunted her. Dying for Kate—she would gladly die for Kate. Instead, she had passively watched the clumsiest of murders. Magnus was inextricably tied to this horror, the horror of inanition, of drift which meant loss, of lying, of emptiness without end or meaning: that was death indeed, and it seemed to crawl forth from the walls of this house.

A child and a man. Kate and Magnus. Mrs. Fludd had seen them. And what had she said, before the trance? It had been something about hate or envy—they were what made a spirit “malefic.” Kate was present; Kate lay behind Magnus’s mad forays into Ilchester Place. She was unforgiving. Logic took her relentlessly to this illogical conclusion. Julia began to rock from side to side on her bed, moaning. She was breaking down. It was an image, again, of the precipice where she had so carefully walked, of clods and pebbles shredding away,
breaking up on the long fall down. It was Kate. Mrs. Fludd had seen Kate. In some vivid, dreamlike way, Magnus was dominated by Kate; he was an unthinkable danger to her mind.

Unable to sleep, unable to control her thoughts, Julia snapped on the reading lamp at the head of the bed. She forced herself to extend her arms alongside her body. Flatten the fingers so the palms touch the sheet, extend the thumbs. Relax. She breathed deeply, twice. She would talk to Mrs. Fludd. If she had to leave the house to escape the danger Magnus posed, she was capable of leaving. For now, sleep was impossible: but she would not leave this bedroom. This room was hers. If she were to be driven from the room, she would leave the house.

Julia turned her head to see the books on the little stand beside the bed. She had finished the Bellow novel, and now had
The Millstone, The White House Transcripts, The Golden Notebook
, and
The Unicorn
on the table; she needed something less stimulating than any of these. Kate and Magnus: Mrs. Fludd’s hints and warnings outlined a dread possibility. Kate’s spirit still living, hating her and using Magnus’s anger, feeding that anger, Kate’s spirit seething through this house.… All of this was real, happening to her.

Julia had to call Miss Pinner as well as Mrs. Fludd; before the departure of the West Hampstead ladies, Miss Pinner had been too shaky and distraught to describe what she had seen in the bathroom.

Then she saw another book which she had recently placed on the bedside table, hidden behind the little stack of paperbacks. It was
The Royal Borough of Kensington
, Lily’s present to her. A sober, judicious list of facts, a few anecdotes, color plates—it was just what she needed, a book about as tangy
as a suet pudding, a sleeping pill of a book. She lifted the heavy volume into her lap and began to flip the pages, reading paragraphs at random.

Prominent inhabitants of Kensington in the eighteenth century … Kensington as a village … political history of the royal borough … the planning of Kensington Gardens … merchant princes included … a notorious Mr. Price, hanged for the theft of a whippet.… Flipping a page after reading about the fate of Mr. Price, Julia saw a heading which read “Crime, Ghosts and Hauntings.” At first she turned over several pages, not trusting herself to read such a chapter, but her curiosity was too great, and she went back to the heading and began to read.