By eight o’clock I had drawn the curtains and lit the candles and watched the fingers of the flickering flames point their way up to heaven. In the candlelight the portrait of Justine grew increasingly enigmatic. She was watching everything I did, including the premeditated seduction of her sister. It was the fact that it was about to happen in her presence that made it morally right: Justine sanctified it.
The doorbell rang. I heard Juliette say her name in her soft and placatory voice over the intercom. In a moment I was letting her into my flat and the symptoms of nervousness and anticipation that she noticed in me were not altogether feigned.
Juliette sat down on the sofa. She had not seen the portrait of Justine hanging above – the mantelpiece directly opposite her. She was too busy looking anxiously about the rest of the room, as if I were about to kidnap her and imprison her in it for the rest of her life.
The patterns on her dress this evening were of apple trees. What made her so frightened, I wondered, of a simple, coherent design? The trees were planted all over the material, their branches intertwining with each other to create an intricate lace-like pattern. The apples were almost hidden by the leaves.
‘May I open the window?’ she asked.
As she pushed up the window, the cool breeze of the night air gushed into the room between the fluttering curtains.
It was the noise I heard first, a loud angry sound like the beating of flames and then I saw what looked like an open book being violently hurled from one side of the room to the other. The whole room suddenly burst into life with movement. A starling had flown in through the window. The bird dashed about the drawing-room, flying headlong into the mantelpiece, the walls, the portrait, perching momentarily on the sofa before thrusting itself up into the air again.
Unexpectedly, Juliette didn’t utter a word or a cry. She stood up, and keeping as still as a statue, held out her arm. Moments later the starling had landed on her outstretched hand, as if she were just another European ornament. Quickly, she brought her other hand down over the bird, trapping it within the cage of her fingers. The bird fluttered hopelessly against its human bars. Transferring the bird to the tight grasp of a single hand, with the other hand, Juliette began gently to stroke the bird’s neck. The bird’s soft feathers gleamed in a rainbow of colours but its eyes were black with panic. She then with her second finger and thumb ringed its throat for a second, as if she were going to snap its neck, kill it with the fine slim fingers that belonged to Justine. But instead she walked over to the open window and opening up her hand let the starling fly out into the night air of London.
‘I hate seeing things imprisoned,’ she said.
As if her words were an unconscious directive, I looked at her intent interior face and suddenly spontaneously identified her with the bird. I simultaneously realized that it was not her fear of imprisonment speaking, but her desire for it. She wanted to be clasped in someone else’s hand. Her only way of living in the world was to be locked up inside it. Imprisonment was a form of rescue for her.
‘Would you mind being imprisoned?’ she asked me.
I was taken aback – I had not considered the idea in relation to myself.
‘Appalling idea. I wouldn’t be able to go to art exhibitions,’ I quickly said.
‘But you have your own exhibition here. Your own private collection of art. I think you would be quite happy to remain in one or two rooms for the rest of your life, as long as you had your artefacts around you.’
I tried to hide my unease in a slightly disjointed smile. I also attempted to get back a sense of control. In order to do so, I pretended that I had a ventriloquist’s doll, not a woman, sitting in my drawing-room. I was unconsciously throwing my voice into her. Without understanding how I was doing it, I was somehow pulling her strings, making her talk, crossing her legs at my will.
Over supper I decided to ask Juliette what she did for a living and later, subtly, when the time was right, probe her for more intimate details about Justine.
‘I write. I hardly make a living.’ ‘What about?’
‘It’s a kind of autobiography.’
‘But you’re so young. Nothing much can have happened to you.’
‘Things are happening to me all the time. Besides, I’m older than I look.’ She smiled.
I tried to get her on to the subject of Justine but she kept on returning to the subject of my mother which seemed to preoccupy her.
‘How did your mother die?’ she asked.
‘She committed suicide.’
‘Out of loneliness?’
‘No. Because she couldn’t bear to grow old.’
I was beginning to resent the directness of her questions, but to get what I wanted from her, I felt I had to answer them politely. It was nearing midnight and I had to find a way of making her stay.
TWENTY
Midnight came and went and Juliette’s behaviour began to change. She is a sorceress, I thought, dictated to by the fullness of the moon. She brushed up against me as we passed in the room so that I could smell her perfumed skin. She stroked Lethe, my Burmese cat, until the cat’s fur shimmered like moonlight and her back arched voluptuously. Juliette drank glass after glass of Corvo, as if it were water. Did she have any idea at all as to what was inside my head, the double-dealing of my plot? My motivations were hard set and wrapped up in my mind like gifts hidden in a cupboard.
As the carriage clock chimed one, Juliette curled up on the sofa, her dress falling back over her thighs, the flesh of her legs above her stockings as smooth as Venetian glass. Her manner had shed its nubile gaucherie, as if it had been invaded by an occult force that had incorrigibly transformed her identity.
I sat down beside her, close, and she didn’t flinch. Lethe, however, leapt from her lap. I bent down towards Juliette, raised up her chin gently with my hand, and kissed her. Her soft mouth opened for mine. But suddenly she drew back and sat up. I expected her face to be flushed with desire but instead it looked quiet and reflective.
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.
I tried to control my sense of panic that she had guessed my real reasons.
‘Why are you so intent on seducing me?’ she continued. ‘It would be as obvious to an idiot that you despise me. And find me physically vaguely repulsive. But you are acting as if driven by the devil himself.’
I clutched desperately around in my head for an answer that might satisfy her, appease her insecurity.
‘I don’t understand how you can say that,’ I replied. ‘You are completely mistaken. I find you incredibly attractive.’
I leant towards her again and started to play deliberately absentmindedly with a strand of her hair. She turned her head towards me hut her eyes were lowered.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Ignore me. Writers have such terrible imaginations.’
She raised up her face to be kissed and we began to play out that silent language which has its own grammar. The portrait of Justine watched the proceedings from above the mantelpiece, a smile flickering about her lips in the candlelight. She’s smiling at me, I thought, smiling at what I will do for her.
TWENTY-ONE
I woke up the next morning to find that the bedclothes had fallen off us during the night. Juliette was lying next to me, looking up into my eyes. Already I was picking up on a change in her since we had had sex. She was beginning to smell of need. The need of a woman was rotten at the core, it seeped through her whole body, permeated its edges: need spread. It would start in the eyes, make its way through the posture, interfere with the vocabulary, and finally invaded what was once a sensibility. Need provoked the worst crime of alclass="underline" self-consciousness. Already I could see that what lay beyond Juliette’s desperation, her clumsiness, her seriousness, was her encroaching self-consciousness. It crippled her identity, deformed it, crystallized and then shattered it. She was like a cracked mirror, always self-reflecting an image that was deformed.