I crossed the empty room towards her and stood just to the left of her in front of the painting. Engrossed by the painting, she did not even register my presence. Any nervousness I had was dispelled by my sense that Fate was acting on my behalf. Fate began to propel my next moves, regardless of my will. I deliberately caught her eye, but for all the recognition she showed me, I might as well have been a total stranger. To my horror Justine then proceeded to move away from the painting. Words now had become my only option but they stuck in my throat like stones. I had to gag them out.
‘We’ve met before,’ I said to her retreating back.
She looked tentatively over her shoulder. I had the uncanny sensation that my words were even truer than they appeared, that I had seen her before somewhere, outside of the church, outside of her similarity to the portrait of Justine.
‘I don’t think so.’ If she had noticed I was a cripple her expression didn’t betray it. Her eyes didn’t flicker from my face.
‘Yes we have. At my mother’s funeral, last Sunday. I saw you in the church.’
‘You are making a mistake. Last Sunday I was spending the day in the country. Where I have a house.’ I looked at her in disbelief. The expression on her face suddenly indefinably changed. Then she said, as if she had said it a hundred times before,
‘You’re talking about Justine.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You.’
‘No. Not me. My sister. My identical twin.’
I was so taken aback that she was not Justine, that the further act of fate that not only did Justine share the face of the painting but also its name passed me by.
Justine’s sister walked back and stood next to me in front of the Uccello.
‘“And he lay hold on the dragon, that odd serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.” Milton. Don’t you find dragons fascinating? The way man has made them up only so he can go round slaughtering them. But I don’t think he’s made them up altogether. I believe in them too.’ She clapped her hands together and laughed.
She was quite clearly insane.
‘I’m always on the look out for a dragon,’ I said. ‘The reward for killing one is so immense.’
‘A beautiful princess?’
‘A beautiful princess.’ I smiled at her.
‘I’m Juliette.’ She repeated it, as if she were afraid that I might forget her name. ‘Juliette. It doesn’t pay to get us confused.’ She had a smudge of red paint on her cheek near her left ear, that looked like blood.
‘You have to admit it’s a coincidence,’ I said, ‘To have bumped into you so quickly after meeting Justine for the first time.’
‘No. I don’t.’ She smiled again. I didn’t know what to make of this. Did she, like me, not believe in coincidences?
She seemed direct, so I thought I would try a more direct approach.
‘You have an unforgettable face.’
The expression on her face changed frighteningly quickly, a cloud of resentment covered it, black and turgid.
‘You mean Justine has an unforgettable face.’
The differences between the two sisters were becoming more and more noticeable the longer I spent with Juliette. Juliette’s expressions were flung onto her face more thoughtlessly and erratically than Justine’s. Juliette’s smile had the charm of complication and her hair, when she moved her head, gave off the smell of burning wood. She had a disarming smile – a sure sign of neurosis. The charming always depend on the resources of desperation. The image of Justine I had imprinted onto Juliette’s face was being gradually effaced by Juliette’s child-like movements and disturbed sexuality. Juliette, I ascertained quickly, would believe in the best in people, look for the best in the worst of men. Juliette believed in fairy tales.
However, I wondered secretly if her role as child-woman was a part that she played rather than had thrust upon her. Her nervous fragility seemed almost too blatant to be realistic. But perhaps, I reasoned, it was simply because the contrast between her manner and Justine’s was so great that the identity of Juliette somehow ended up spurious.
I pointed back to the painting. ‘I like so much the way the painting which is about such primitive themes as desire and death and myth is constructed with such elaborate control.’
At least, I think that is what I said. As far as I can remember, the beginning of my seduction of Justine’s sister began with those words. However, I may have said something completely different – memory is so unreliable. Who can tell? It is too late to tell – except for me. Juliette has long since gone. I will always have the last word. There is no ghost in this machine.
FIFTEEN
That same afternoon Juliette and I went for tea in the gallery. As we walked together through the rooms of paintings down the wide stone steps to the tea-room, I had to stop my hands trembling from the excitement of it all. At one point I almost stumbled and Juliette reached out her hand to stop me from falling. Her fingers, as long and as slender as Justine’s, held on to my hand for longer than was strictly necessary. I saw the image of Justine cross her face briefly and then dissipate into the cool dusty atmosphere of the gallery.
As we drank tea, I continued to observe Juliette closely. Her leaf-green eyes seemed translucent, as if perpetually wet from tears. Her eyes had an open expression as if sending out a general invitation to be hurt. Simultaneously her gaze went in on itself, exhibiting that she had an interior world without betraying its contents. On the occasions that I glimpsed Justine in Juliette’ s face, Justine would at once turn her back to me and walk away.
Juliette sat like a child, her legs together and her hands tightly clasped. Her body language was like that of an infant. But also, like a child, she would have the odd moment of utter unselfconsciousness where she would suddenly splay her legs wide open and I could see straight up to her centre between her white shadowy thighs. Her mouth was tremulous and soft as a ripe pear that had just been sliced open.
We walked slowly out into the hot light of Trafalgar Square. We said goodbye with the pigeons fluttering at our feet. The sun was dying behind Nelson’s head. She wrote her phone number on my hand in large unformed handwriting. I watched her walk away slightly stooped, as if scared that the tall handsome buildings of London were about to collapse on top of her.
Exhausted but excited I took a taxi back to Kensington Gardens. Some of my mother’s possessions now stood around me, an African mask hung on the wall and a silver Chinese Mandarin stood on the rosewood side table. Everything else, broken or otherwise, remained under the dust sheets in Blenheim House.
SIXTEEN
It was already almost dark when Juliette and I came out of the cinema. Juliette was wearing, on our first date together, a thick cotton dress covered in purple stars and white moons; she reminded me slightly of a pantomime witch. Her hair was loose and tangled. The faces of the other people in the audience who were crowding around us at the exit, looked half dead as the light of the real world first hit them. We had just been to see the rescreening of Alfred Hitchcock’ s Vertigo.
‘I know a place where we can eat,’ she said as we stood stationary amongst the walking dead.
She led me back into the centre of London from the South Bank, over Hungerford Bridge. St. Paul’s was lit up by a blue light like an architect’s painted model and the buildings overlooking the river had the appearance of a theatrical façade. Stopping in the middle of the bridge, we looked down over the dark waters of the Thames, dense and fluid with its own deep currents. The lights of the city of London shone across it, emphasizing the force of the water’s movement.