Julia (11 page)

At first she found nothing more exciting than had been the lists of prominent Kensington aldermen and merchants; the author had tracked down a number of conventional haunted-house anecdotes and set them down in colorless straightforward style. The ghost of a headless nun in a “manorial” building on Lexham Gardens; two sisters who had killed themselves in adjoining houses on Pembroke Place and had been seen crossing the gardens, hand in hand, by moonlight; the Edwardes Square “paterfamilias” of 1912 who had been possessed by the spirit of his mad great-grandfather and taken to dressing in the extravagant style of a century before and had finally murdered his children; Julia read all of these stories with a dulled interest.

Then a sentence and a street name burst from the text.

One of the most vexed and troubling of all Kensington murders [Julia read] was that of the case of Heather and Olivia Rudge, of 25 Ilchester Place. One of the last women to be sentenced to death in England, Heather Rudge, an American, had purchased the house on Ilchester Place from the
architect, who had built it for himself in 1927 but in two years wished to move, due to family troubles; at the time, Mrs. Rudge, who was separated from her husband, had a reputation as a brilliant, rather reckless hostess, and was considered by many inhabitants of her social world as “fast.” [Eda Rolph implied a fondness for handsome younger men and wealthy businessmen from the City.] One contemporary, the author of several mild books of verse and a once-popular series of theological novels, described her as possessing “a small, vivid, distinctly alarming face in which beauty and avidity fatally conjoined.
Vanitas
indeed: yet we found in her a helter-skelter charm.” The birth of a daughter, Olivia, twelve years after the purchase of the Ilchester Place house, occurred in wartime, and so did little to affect her already damaged career as a hostess—the morals of a rich, aging playgirl whose greatest notoriety had passed six or seven years before interested only a few.

The parties continued, at intervals and with considerably less splendor than previously, and then ceased altogether; little was heard of the Rudges until 1950. In that year, the nine-year-old Olivia Rudge was mentioned in connection with the death by suffocation in Holland Park of a four-year-old child, Geoffrey Braden of Abbotsbury Close. Olivia Rudge and what the popular press briefly referred to as the “Holland Park Child Terror Mob”—a group of ten or twelve children apparently led by Olivia—had been seen tormenting young Braden on the day before his death. The following morning, Olivia and several others, according to a park attendant, had again pursued young Braden and abused him. The attendant had chased away the gang of older children and advised young Braden to go home; when he had returned to that area of the park, he had found the boy’s body lying in a shadowed place
beside a wall. Public and police interest shifted from the gang of children when it was learned that young Braden had been sexually injured before his death; and subsequently a vagrant was hanged for his murder.

Two months following the execution of the vagrant, Heather Rudge telephoned the Kensington police station to confess to the murder of her daughter. Police arriving at the house found Olivia stabbed to death in her bed; the coroner later reported more than fifty stab wounds to the body. Mrs. Rudge was immediately taken into custody and hence was protected from the crowd of journalists who wished to harry her—the murder of Olivia Rudge had quickly become a front-page speciality of the scandal press which had soon unearthed the past of Olivia’s mother. (“Society Sex Queen Murders Daughter.”) In time, Heather was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Later her sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Certain questions remain. Why did Heather Rudge kill her daughter? Why was her sentence commuted? Was there a connection with the murder, a year previous, of Geoffrey Braden? Certainly the press had implied such a connection. Newspapers had seized on the case, claiming that Heather Rudge had been driven mad by her daughter; the more sensational papers asserted

Julia’s first thought, after reading this, was an irrelevance: so that’s where those mirrors came from—Heather Rudge, with her wild parties staffed with young men, not the proper McClintocks. Then in the next half second, she knew that she would find out, that she was compelled to find out, everything there was to know about Heather and Olivia Rudge. She read the two pages over again quickly, then flipped back and read them once more, slowly and carefully. Eda Rolph nowhere stated directly that Olivia Rudge had murdered or had helped to murder the Braden boy: what grounds were there for the implication? Julia immediately began to think of how she could discover information about the Rudge case. Newspapers: surely the British Museum, if not a branch library, had newspaper files on microfilm. Could Heather Rudge be living still? She turned to the first pages of the book to look at the publishing information.
The Royal Borough of Kensington
had been published by the Lompoc Press in 1969, five years ago. She might easily be still alive. “… a private mental hospital in Surrey.” How could she find the name of the hospital? Heather Rudge had lived in this house, she had slept in this bedroom; in sleep, her body had occupied the very space Julia’s body now did. Julia seemed to be spinning through time; time seemed plastic, distorted, unsafe: the past seemed to rise up all about her, like a foul gas.

Then she sat upright, her heart speeding. Perhaps Heather Rudge had stabbed Olivia in this very bedroom. Olivia dying as Kate had died, bleeding as though blood
willed to depart the living body, her blood foaming out over this spot around a hidden corner in time.… Julia nearly bolted from her bed.

But it could not be true. This must have been Heather’s bedroom, she thought; her daughter would have had one of the smaller bedrooms down the hall. And that was where the murder would have been done.

Why am I so interested in this, in these people? Julia thought. Because it will be an explanation.

Julia felt wide-awake, as stimulated as if she’d just had three cups of strong coffee. She wanted to telephone Mark, to see Lily—she wanted to telephone Eda Rolph, to ask her the name of the hospital where Heather Rudge had been kept for the past twenty-four years. But she is here, too, Julia thought, she is part of the character of this house, and she lives here still, moving up and down the stairs, her skirt rustling, turning down a bed, running to the door to greet a lover or a friend, locked in the bubble of her time. Every moment lives parallel with every other moment. What
had
Miss Pinner seen, to make her faint?

As if in answer, a clicking noise came to her from downstairs. It was the same noise she had heard before when, crouching beside the drapes, she had seen Magnus standing motionless in her garden. It was the noise of something outside wishing to come in. Julia realized that, paradoxically, she was now less afraid of Magnus than she had been before reading about Heather and Olivia Rudge—Magnus was flesh, Magnus was blood. All about her moved intimations of the past of the house, those echoes of her own past. She lay in bed listening to the soft rapping at the downstairs windows. Some minutes later she picked up
The White House
Transcripts;
she read doggedly for two hours, getting through very nearly half of the book, before she finally fell asleep, her light still burning. The rapping, patient and insistent, continued to sound through the house.

Sweating, she dreamed of Kate.

Julia came drowsily awake two hours later feeling that she had just been touched: no, caressed. Her light still burned. She reached up to switch it off. The bedroom was even hotter than it had been when she had first come in; her entire body seemed filmed with sweat. The bedroom curtains hung straight and unmoving; in this room, air refused to circulate, but piled atop itself, densely. The sky shone through the window, lighter than the dark of the bedroom. Julia could still feel, along her bruised left side, the afterimage of a hand, stroking lightly. The caress was gentle, seductively soothing. Of course there was no one else in the room; she had conjured up the caress herself, summoned it up out of her needs.

Julia settled down into the sheets again, deliberately relaxing. The rapping from below had ceased: Magnus had gone home, unable to bring her wandering and calling through the house, having failed at least this once. She closed her eyes and crossed her hands on her midriff. Perhaps Heather Rudge had nursed Olivia in this room, talking to her daughter in baby talk … perhaps Mrs. Fludd had seen Heather doing violence to her daughter. Surely such an event still lingers in its physical setting, still reverberating there.… Julia’s mind began to drift. She heard a snatch of music playing: it was big band music, tinny, as if on a radio, and then it dissolved, along with everything else. She fell immediately into dreams which were indistinguishable from semiwakefulness. Once
again she was being caressed. She was being touched by lingering, stroking hands beside her own hands. Small hands moved lightly down her body. They paused, and began again, stroking. Julia saw Kate beside her: they clasped one another. Kate was with her. The caresses were like music—soft, moving, layered. Julia felt infinitely quietened, infinitely soothed; the small, moving hands were like tongues, lapping at her. She gave herself to this comfort. Broken dreams, fed by these long caresses, filtered through her mind. She and Mark sat side by side on the gray couch, speaking words she could not hear. Mark’s hand surrounded hers. She was swimming in warm water, a pool of water as warm as a bath. She wore no bathing suit, and the water slipped about her like oil. Her skin was opening. She was beneath strong sun. The flickering touches ran insinuatingly over her opening body. Mark and Kate: then, shockingly, only Kate.
“No,”
she said, groaning, and her voice brought her up through sleep. “No.” She could still feel the last touch of the hand, stroking between her thighs: she felt sickened and frightened, roused. Now she was absolutely awake.

She had been dreaming of Kate. What horrible thing had she dreamed? She listened for the sound of Heather Rudge slipping down the stairs. Now, the thought of Kate was fearful: Kate, she realized, must hate her. She was caught in a terrific dislocation, her body moving toward its resolution, her consciousness stunned by what was logically inexplicable. Slowly, feeling as though soiled for life, Julia slipped her hand to the part of her body which needed its touch, and with hard circular movements of two fingers brought herself over the edge. She felt like the unappeased ghost of the living Heather Rudge. Her body smelled of loss and failure, of airless exertions.

The next morning, with trembling hands, she dialed the number Rosa Fludd had left with her. For the first time in her life, she had taken a drink in the morning—a smoky, unwatered slug of malt whiskey, choked down while she was still in her robe. She had immediately wanted another. The quick explosion of warmth, intimating relaxation and pointing to an eventual extinguishing of consciousness, was uncannily like being back in the hospital, seconds after her morning injection. Now, she thought, I know why people drink in the morning. It’s better than breakfast. She had quickly screwed the top back on the bottle and gone to the telephone. Beside it was the white card Mrs. Fludd had given her.

She heard the telephone going
brrr brrr
in Mrs. Fludd’s white antiseptic flat. It trilled six, then seven times without answer. Was she still there, watched over by her budgerigar and the huge sentimental eyes of the girl in the Keane print? It was imperative that Julia speak to her: what would the old woman have said to her—admitted to her—if Julia had known about Heather and Olivia Rudge last night? On the tenth ring the telephone was answered.

“Yes,” said a young woman.

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Fludd, Rosa Fludd. My name is Julia Lofting.”

“Wait a minute.” Julia heard muffled voices; the young woman had covered the receiver while turning to speak to someone else in the room.

“My aunt says she can’t talk to you.”

“Is anything wrong?” Julia asked.

“Anything wrong? You should know. You were one of them brought her home.” The girl’s accent was so strong that Julia
had difficulty distinguishing the words. “You’re one of them put her in a state.”

“A stite? Oh.”

“A
state
. You and them others. You bunch of airyfairies near drove her out of her mind, didn’t you? That’s not proper, is it? Poor woman don’t even take money to jolly you lot along, and.…”

Another voice was raised in the background and the hand again clamped over the receiver.

“Tell her I have more information,” Julia said. “This is terribly important.”

“… she says she has more information. You sure? You want to?”

In a moment Mrs. Fludd had taken the telephone. “I’m here,” she said. Her voice sounded tightly contained.

“Mrs. Fludd, this is Julia Lofting. Are you all right? I’ve been worried about you.”

“You can’t waste your worry,” said Mrs. Fludd. “What did you want to tell me?”

“Well, I read, just by accident, a story about my house in a book on Kensington, and I had to tell you what it said. Mrs. Fludd? This house used to be owned by a woman named Heather Rudge, an American, who had a daughter named Olivia. Mrs. Fludd, she stabbed her daughter to death. My own daughter was stabbed to death—my husband wanted to save her life, she was choking to death, and he killed her. The other little girl was killed right in this house more than twenty years ago. Is that what you saw? Is that what Miss Pinner saw in the bathroom?”