Juliette started to cry. Through her tears she began to speak quietly, so that I could only just make out her words.
‘She does everything better than I do. She also writes but unlike me she has been published. Her first novel, Death is a Woman, was an international success. Critics adored her literary pretensions, the public her realistic insight into character. I can’t even get an agent.’
She stopped for breath and then began to speak more loudly as anger took over from pain.
‘She even makes love better than I do. In spite of her sangfroid, Justine is unutterably generous with her flesh and all its hollows. Her lovemaking weaves a web: it catches her lover, like a fly, between its intricate lines. You see, I know all the intimate details. Would you like to hear how?’
I didn’t know what to say. By this time her face had hardened so much, it looked as if her blood had frozen into ice.
‘The only man I have ever loved told me. “It’s the way that she kisses me,” he began. As if he were cutting off the head of a flower for his button-hole. As if the explicit details he then gave me of their lovemaking were a justification for him leaving me. Hard to believe that someone could be so cruel, isn’t it? But then he is an artist.’
She’s talking about Jack, I thought. The name on one of the corners of the square.
‘She is so devious. You have no idea how. She asked for permission to steal him from me. That was her way. At the time her novel and Jack were only ideas in her head. She took me aside: “I want to make the hero of Death is a Woman an artist. Could I borrow Jack for a few days? Just for research?” I felt as if the flesh on my body would fall away as she spoke. Because I knew she was asking for the reality of him, the reality of his body and soul, not for a character in her book but for herself. There was nothing I could do to stop it from happening. How could I argue against the reality of Jack?’
The more Juliette told me about Justine, the more bewitched I became by Justine’s cool treachery of her sister. Any adjective used to describe Justine, any verb to sketch in the way she behaved, only added to my desire for her. Every word to do with her had this effect on me, no matter what the word meant.
It had grown so dark in the room I could barely make out Juliette’s outline. We were still standing in the same place where we had fucked an hour earlier. Rain was beginning to patter hard against the window pane and the skylight above. The room took on the appearance, in the increasing shadows, of a cubist painting, rectangles and circles projecting into the darkness.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was as if, once she had started, Juliette could not stop talking about Justine. Her hatred of her sister had become an obsession.
‘As children, Justine and I spoke the same language. But over the years the differences have built up like bricks to form a high wall between us. It is a wall I feel protected by now. Justine knows this too: we need our differences.’
The intensity of her feelings was now finding full expression in her voice, seeping through from thought into articulation, like blood into a bandage. Even the structure of her face seemed to be concaving under the power of her emotion. The acidity of her passion was dissolving the edge of her physical features.
I was beginning to realize that Juliette might prove an unpredictable go-between for myself and Justine. But if she were still prepared to be used, I was still prepared to use her. I conjectured that the only way she had of separating herself off from her twin, was to relentlessly perceive herself as the failure and Justine as the success. The two sisters were like shadow and light. Each needed the negation of the other. Her determined reading that I preferred Justine to herself did not precipitate it as a fact (for it would have been true, whatever she did), but rather confirmed a need of her own. She had wanted me to choose her sister over her, all along. She was fed up with the gruesome shades of half-truths and betrayals that had, up until now, marked out her life. The junk in her room consisted of the trophies of all the hurts and deceptions that had filled up her mind.
Juliette had told me her story and I wanted to get on with my own again.
‘Do you think you might be able to arrange a meeting for me with Justine?’
Juliette didn’t flinch.
‘She likes her anonymity. It is difficult for even me to get in contact with her. She is also extremely wary of strangers. She has particularly obsessive fans.’
I felt as if bars were enclosing me one by one, that any fact now about Justine, good or bad, would be made of iron. I could tell Juliette had no intention of giving me any more details tonight. I would wait until she fell asleep, and see what I could find out about Justine, on my own.
TWENTY-FIVE
I watched Juliette fall asleep, from nervous and sexual exhaustion; on the floor between a three-legged cane chair and a bag of golf clubs. In the dark she looked like just another mannequin. I wondered where to begin looking. The sheer multiplicity of objects in the room seemed to mock me, as if daring me to examine each miscellaneous object in turn, for the rest of my life. I was also reluctant to turn the light on in case I woke her.
I decided to try another room first. Coming out into the corridor, a line of doors on either side faced me, as in Alice in Wonderland. The first door I tried was locked, but the second opened slightly and then stuck. Shouldering the door, I shoved hard and the door opened to the sound of books crashing to the floor. A bookshelf had been propped up against the door. Inside manuscripts and books covered the floor and a single bed stood in the corner. A stuffed raven, its feathers oiled black, was perched on the mantelpiece, next to a half-full coffee cup. This was Juliette’s bedroom.
I tried the tall-boy first – the drawers were filled with pastel, silk lingerie, clothing I would never have associated with Juliette. It was late and I felt tired and hadn’t eaten for hours. I was also beginning to feel inexplicably nervous as I searched through Juliette’s things, as if I were on the edge of some kind of disaster. A disaster that my search would directly instigate. This did not stop me looking, only made me the more determined to find something quickly, that would have to disturb me.
When I did find what I was looking for, I almost passed it by. Having unearthed a child’s scrapbook from beneath a layer of frothy negligée, I unthinkingly flung it on to the ground. Only when the book fell face up, and open, did it catch my attention. It was a catalogue of photographs, stuck neatly in columns on to the coloured pages. Each photograph depicted an explicit sex scene between two lovers, obviously taken without their knowledge. Through each photograph a knife had been drawn in red ink on to the Polaroid snap that dissected their bodies in half. The words ‘Jack and Justine’ had been printed clearly above each photograph. I noticed that Justine had moles in the star shape of the plough across her torso.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ Juliette’s voice sounded cold behind me.
Luckily, as my back was turned to her, my body was blocking her view of what I was looking at. I slipped the scrapbook under the bed and turned round. She looked terrible – rings, like huge bruises, hung under her eyes.
‘I’m looking for clues.’
‘Clues to where you might find Justine?’ She laughed mockingly, ‘You won’t find them in this room. They’re all up here.’ And she tapped her head.
TWENTY-SIX