Suddenly the atmosphere of the church changed. The dusty light and archaic space grew distant and two-dimensional, as if they were existing only to form the background to my vision of Justine. Justine’s smooth curved body gradually, as I watched it, grew huge until her shoulders fitted into the arches of the church, her face still retaining its look of acute centredness. Until someone tapped me on my shoulder and said my name. I turned around. It was my mother’s maid, Alice, looking up at me with puppy-brown eyes. Tears were pouring down her wrinkled face.
‘I’m so sorry, Sir,’ she said, ‘So very sorry’.
I think now of my mother buried beneath the ground. She lives on but only in the unreliable memory of those who still mourn her. Her image has been lost to the vagaries of life.
Immediately after the funeral I looked around in vain for Justine but she had disappeared. I returned to the church but it was empty, except for the lilies, and as I looked around its perpendicular space, the building turned banal, became a carapace of stone, like the empty shell of a snail. There was too much room here for God.
ELEVEN
One day my solitude had been enough to content me. The next, a door had opened off to its side and I had walked straight through into a void. The vision of Justine had made the difference. In other ways my life, on the surface, remained the same. The artefacts of my choice still stood around me. Creamy marble boys and ebony heads continued in their silent observation of me. However, the knowledge of Justine was with me now and it stuck to my life like a shadow.
The height of summer had arrived with a vengeance. The central private gardens of my square dried up over night, the grass turning to the colour of her hair. Half-naked children stumbled over the spiky grass like those bottom-heavy leaded toys that always return to the upward position, whatever happens.
Justine was not there, everywhere I looked. Her absence paralysed my flat, paralysed the air, paralysed the point to living. Trees turned black, as if charred by the night. I could not comprehend the power that one sighting of her had had over me except to explain it in terms of my Destiny. The portrait of Justine had come to life: the vulgarity of a simple coincidence could not explain it away.
Once I had seen her, there was no longer any alternative. Other women became impostors. Walking down the street I recognized the back of her head often, her hair glinting like the gold of a Byzantine mosaic. But the face was never hers – it was scared and hooked, dumb and malleable, or petulant and conceited. These faces had stolen her hair to frame their own expressions. When I saw what these strangers had done, appropriated part of her beauty for themselves, I wanted to reclaim her locks, slash them off with a sharp blade, carry the sashes of her hair home. The thieves of Justine’s hair should have been punished. These women should not have been allowed to walk down the streets bearing their booty, exhibiting their lush tresses, letting it fall down their slender backs, Justine’s hair.
However, even worse was the impudent theft of her face. These strange women wore her face like a mask, but I saw that they had even prised out her eyes, the exact shade of jade, and placed them like precious stones into the rings of their own sockets. And in horror, I imagined her, the blank where her face used to be, the serrated edges of flesh, encircling her high forehead, chin and jaw where the skin, the soft white skin that had once been Justine’s skin, had been pulled away to reveal the structure of the bone beneath.
Sometimes it was only her gestures that were appropriated. A woman put her hand to the back of her neck in thought. These gestures had been snatched from Justine and used by strangers promiscuously in the street. My resentment turned to pity for it was in ignorance that these women performed these impersonations of Justine. They were puppets going through the motions, vehicles for the true justification of their existence, of the beating of their hearts, which was that they lived as clues, traces, bodily mementos of Justine.
TWELVE
In Justine’s eyes I had drawn breath only for a moment. She had seen me once and turned away. Her life was now continuing effortlessly, gratifyingly, without me. She did not need me to watch her in order to turn the pages of a new book, she did not need me to watch her in order to undress garment by silken pastel garment. I was not necessary for the graceful movements that she made. She would be able to touch herself without knowledge of my name, without the image of me in her thoughts. She did not know that in reality she needed me in order to exist, that without the concentration of my thoughts she was just a phantom. It was something that I would have to teach her. But until then I could always take her in my dreams behind her back.
To explain to you the intensity of my longing seems an impossible act, but it is what the story of Justine is about. The story is the writing out of my desire: there is no other motivation, neither of intellect nor of revenge. They came later (or before I now write). Justine was the location of my desire, she had trapped it inside her body. It was up to me to track it back down.
I did not know under what circumstances I would see her again. But I knew that I would. Now that I had seen her in the flesh there was no other possibility. By the first time I had seen her, it was already too late.
THIRTEEN
The next Sunday after my mother’s funeral, I decided to pay a visit to the National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. The permanence of the art inside, I thought, would demolish any notion of the mortality of beauty. The afternoon was warm and heady and the cool air and the presence of such exquisite paintings in the gallery’s interior did indeed offer consolation. The high arches of the pale grey rooms of the Sainsbury Wing reminded me of the church I had been in the week before. My obsession with Justine had become less highly charged, had calmed down. But due only to the premonition that I would inevitably see her again.
I turned the corner into the final west room of the wing. It was where one of my favourite paintings of the gallery hung: Uccello’s St. George and the Dragon. A woman was standing in front of it, staring at it, absorbed. It was Justine.
I continued to observe her, unseen, from the entrance of the room. But there was something imperceptibly different about her. In the church she had exuded a sublime self-confidence. Here in the gallery, she was standing in a less poised manner, her back hunched, as if, as she stared at the painting, she was afraid that the dragon might break free. Afraid that it would make a sudden, unprovoked attack upon her. The painting’s triangular relationship of man, woman and monster seemed to be crunching up her posture as I watched.
Her whole appearance was dishevelled and incoherent. Her dress was covered in a grotesque pattern of flying birds. Her face had lost its alabaster effect that I had noticed in the church. But I was so overcome by seeing her again, that I did not dwell on these superficial changes to her demeanour. Rather, I could not look at her and her and breathe at the same time.
FOURTEEN
The dove-grey walls behind Justine formed a backdrop to her gilt hair. The golden sheen of the Madonna’s clothes in the Byzantine paintings all around us picked up her hair’s colour and scattered it across the room. Justine was in relief: her profile was as clear cut as when I had last seen it in the church, as if the edge of her profile had been cut out of black paper and her face made up of the white space that remained.