by Peter Straub
“He would be,” said Lily. “Let me give you these presents. I’m sorry I haven’t more to welcome you into your new house, but it’s on such short notice. First, here’s a lovely big book full of pictures, and it’s all about your new neighborhood.” She held the big volume before Julia’s eyes: The Royal Borough of Kensington, by Eda Rolph. “Full of astonishing tales. Haven’t read the book in years. The other present is some of these flowers.” She waved her hand at the small, vibrant garden growing in boxes at the end of her terrace.
“Oh, I can’t let you cut these beautiful flowers,” said Julia, who disliked all cut flowers. “That would be a terrible crime. You can’t cut them for me.”
“But I can,” said Lily, bending down and beginning to snip off nearly a dozen flowers. “Some tulips, some of these beautiful begonias, some of my favorites here, these monstrous pinks, and a few more of everything else. Now. Take these home and put them in water,” she said, giving Julia the double handful of bright flowers, “and they’ll stay fresh for as long as you like.”
Julia looked apprehensively at the flower boxes, but was relieved to see that the loss of her dozen scarcely affected their appearance at all: the flowers grew there in such abundance that only a few small gaps were now visible. The massed scent of the flowers in her hands made her light-headed. They were overwhelmingly sensual. One of the fleshy tulips brushed her face.
“I don’t mean to look as though I’m sending you away,” Lily said. “These flowers can always be put in water here until you leave. Why don’t you have dinner with me tonight? I’ve got …let’s see, some nice little chops. Or was this one of my vegetarian nights? There is enough food, anyhow. Afterwards we could watch a delicious new series on the television. One of those wonderful costume dramas. I’ve never read much Trollope, you know, but it means so much more all acted out. And the language is so beautiful, none of the vulgarity the younger playwrights go in for now. Will you watch it with me? It’s fascinating, and I could tell you what’s happened in the earlier five hundred episodes.”
“I’m out of the television habit,” Julia said, smiling. “Your brother wouldn’t allow one in the house. I do think I’ll go home. Thank you for everything, Lily.”
“Have you a telephone?”
“I’m not supposed to, but I do,” said Julia. “It’s still in the name of William McClintock. But I could practically shout across the park to you.”
Lily nodded, apparently satisfied.
Julia slipped the book under her arm and, still holding the flowers with both hands, turned to leave the terrace.
“Now remember your promise!” she called over her shoulder to Lily.
Later, Julia regretted that she had not accepted Lily’s offer of nut cutlets and The Pallisers. She had fallen asleep on the McClintocks’ enormous gray velvet couch just after lying down on it to rest her feet; she had been trying to read a novel she had bought and begun in the Knightsbridge hotel the night previous, a Penguin edition of Herzog, but had fallen asleep after two pages. When she awakened, the smell of Lily’s flowers pervading the large room, her mouth felt unpleasantly thick. She was very hungry, despite a dull pain just behind the frontal bone of her forehead. She marked her place in the book with a wrinkled tissue from the pocket of her dress and went through the long room to the kitchen.
The light bounced, harshly white, from the gleaming surfaces of the oven and refrigerator. Julia looked in the cupboard for a glass, but realized despairingly that the McClintocks had taken all of the kitchen and dining things with them, as well as all the linen. The kitchen held no food, no drink.
And now it was hours past closing time for shops. Julia turned on the cold water from the taps over the sink and applied some of it to her face; then she cupped her hands and tried to drink from them, but she could not hold enough water in her palms. Eventually she reduced the flow of water from the tap and bent her head so that she could drink directly from it. The water tasted metallic and brackish: she let it run for a minute, and tried it again. Now it was slightly better, but it still tasted as though it were Ml of metal particles. She supposed she would have to buy bottled water; but maybe she would get used to the taste.
Julia dried her hands and mouth on the long reddish drapes over the outsize hall window. While doing this, she remembered the bloodstain from the morning and looked down at the side seam of her dress. The light-blue seersucker showed a stiff brownish crescent an inch long. The stain seemed larger than it had that afternoon. What an odd scene that was, reflected Julia; surely she had found those things in the sand by some bizarre accident, she had probably been nowhere near the place where the girl had been playing. No child would do a thing like that—well, a boy might. She could imagine Magnus cutting up live turtles as a boy.
Did hot or cold water remove bloodstains? She had been told a hundred times, but could never remember. It was the one you didn’t think it was, so she decided to try cold water. Julia went back through the hall to the big ground-floor bathroom, the one the McClintocks had lined with rose-tinted mirrors. (The McClintocks, in most ways utterly conventional and even a shade stuffy in their tastes, had revealed a secret decadence in their bathrooms. The tubs and sinks were marble, the upstairs tub shaped like a huge sunken shell; the taps were swans’ necks, gold. Most surprising were the walls, lined with tinted mirrors. Julia’s bathroom upstairs had black mirrors, against which the gold faucets dully gleamed.) Julia took off her dress and draped it over the edge of the sink, so the stained portion would soak, and then filled the sink with water. Cold was right, she thought.
She turned away from the sink and caught sight of herself in the 4vall mirrors. Funny to see yourself front and back, half nude. Julia wore only underpants and tights. My shell, she thought. She was beginning to get a little fat: she would have to be careful about pants. But, she told herself, you don’t look so bad, considering: if no Playmate, no matron either. The rose tint made her skin look darker and healthier than it was; Julia decided to get more sun this summer. It was a vision of Magnus-free peace— to be able to sprawl in the sun in the park outside her home.
Leaving the bathroom, she sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom she had chosen that morning. Though it was still not dark, she turned on the lights in the hall and bedroom. This gave the house a cavernous, echoing aspect which made Julia realize how little she knew her new dwelling. She crossed to the windows of the bedroom, pulled the drapes together, and began to dress. In a few minutes, buttoning on a floppy blue blouse she had always liked, Julia realized that it had become very warm in her bedroom; she was perspiring as she had outside. The rest of the house had not seemed so warm. She drew apart the drapes and opened the window by pulling it up from the bottom. The air which streamed in seemed magically cooler than the air within the room. It could have been because the house had been empty for a month; or could it have been something else?
Julia went to the storage heater set against the wall and touched it with the flat of her hand. She snatched it back in pain. The heater had been turned up to the full. The real-estate agent must have turned it on, Julia thought, so that he would not be showing customers a chilly house. Perhaps some of the downstairs heaters were on as well. She switched off the bedroom heater at the wall and went into the black-mirrored bathroom to comb her hair. The small heater in this room, she discovered, was also on. She flicked it off at the wall, and straightened up to look at herself. In these bathrooms it was impossible not to look at oneself. Julia wondered what sybaritic tricks the McClintocks had got up to before these sinister black mirrors. Yet her hair shone in them: and she supposed that she looked good enough for a restaurant. There was a decent-looking French restaurant, she remembered, just off Kensington High Street on Abingdon Road. And hadn’t she seen a Chinese restaurant too? Now, she was embarrassed that she had cried, however briefly, before Lily; Lily had, though, demonstrated an almost otherworldly kindness. It seemed to Julia that she had very little to weep about—the sensation of debating be
tween restaurants was one she had not had since her wedding, and it was charged with a nostalgic, delicious liberty. Still drowsy, hungry as she had not been in years, Julia felt for the moment young and capable of anything.
She decided, once on Kensington High Street, to try the French restaurant, remembering that it had been awarded a Michelin rosette some months before. On this first night, she could afford to be lavish with herself. She had, in the past, argued bitterly with Magnus about restaurants; spending twenty pounds on a meal for two at Keats was obscene; but surely tonight she had something to celebrate. Julia drifted down the busy street, looking in the shop windows, conscious of the multitude of cars surging past on her right, noting where she might buy things she needed for the house. She saw a bank: she would transfer her own account here and leave Magnus what she had put into their joint account. Up ahead was a W. H. Smith for buying books. She noticed a surprising number of package stores. At length she reached Abingdon Road and crossed the High Street to walk up toward the restaurant. The night air moved languorously about her, slipping past her skin. As she opened the door of the restaurant, a beautiful black-haired girl wearing large tinted glasses coming down Abingdon Road smiled at her, and Julia smiled back, feeling as though the girl had given her the liberty of the neighborhood. She too was a capable young woman, living alone in Kensington.
After dining luxuriously and slowly, relishing every mouthful of her snails, then half a seafood pancake, and finally a suprême de volaille, Julia paid for her meal with a check and walked back along the crowded street. Traffic seemed perpetual here, gnashing and snarling past as if it too were on its way to a meal. Only when she reached the quiet corner of Ilchester Place did she remember she had left the house key in the pocket of the dress now soaking in the sink.
“Christ,” she moaned. She went up the steps and tried the front door. It was locked. Julia looked up at the windows and saw that she had left lights burning in the bathroom and bedroom. At the rear of the house, she had left the bedroom window open, but it was far out reach. Perhaps a window in the kitchen or dining room might be unlatched. Julia walked around the side of the house, pushing randomly at the windows she could reach. After she had walked down the entire length of the right side of her house, she looked down in frustration and saw that she had trampled many of the little flowers the McClintocks had grown in a border around the house—small, brilliant flowers with thoughtless, optimistic faces. They lay crushed and broken in a weaving line down the side of the house, just visible in the darkness. Julia felt as though the massive dark bulk of the house were rebuking her—it was a strong but momentary impression: she did not deserve this house and the house knew it now. “Oh, please,” she breathed, and pushed at another window. It resisted her.
Julia rounded the corner at the back of the house and found herself in her moonlit back garden. The grass looked spectral, some color between green and black. Indeed, the entire garden looked unearthly in the dark light, the flower banks at the far end massive and colorless, like stationary clouds. Behind them reared the brick wall at the end of her property. Julia had a momentary tremor of fear that someone besides herself was concealed in the garden, but pushed this from her mind by the decisive action of vigorously trying each of the windows in turn. At the far end she discovered that the small window in the bathroom was opened out at the bottom, unlocked and with its ratchet set so that the window protruded two or three inches beyond the frame.
She reached in and released the ratchet, freeing the window so that it swung freely, opening a space about a foot high and fifteen or sixteen inches long, set in the wall at the height of her head. When she threw up the window and poked her head beneath it, she could see, in the rose mirror opposite, the light space of the window filled with the black orb of her head. Ordinarily, she would not think it possible that she could lift and squeeze her body through this small space, but now she had no other choice. The air in the bathroom felt silkily warm to her facial skin; she had to crawl in this way. The only alternative was to break a window, and she shrank before doing violence to the house.
On the verge of pulling her trunk up to force her shoulders through the window, Julia again sensed that another person was somewhere in the back garden: her stomach frozen with fear, she whirled about. No one was visible. The grass, tinted that expressionless color, lay unbroken to the mass of the flowers. Nothing moved. Julia narrowed her eyes and tried to see into the McClintocks’ flowers. She braced her legs and felt some of the zinnias of the border crush beneath her feet. “I know you’re there,” she said. “Come on out. Now.” She felt both foolish and courageous, uttering these words in as commanding a voice as she could summon. Still there was no movement from the featureless dark bank of the flowers. After another long scrutiny, she felt safe enough to turn her back to the garden.
Again she felt the heavy warmth emanating from her house. She braced her elbows, bowed her head, and scrabbled up the wall with her feet while pushing her shoulders through the window frame. The window, let loose, dug her painfully in the back of the neck. Hitching up on one arm, she banged the aluminum border of the window with her other hand; this gave her enough leverage to push herself through the window nearly to her waist.
She wriggled, dropping her upper body so that her weight might drag her bottom through. Instead, she stuck in the window like a swollen fruit. She jerked forward twice, abrading the skin at her hips: from sudden though tolerable pain, she knew she had begun to bleed. Julia pushed with all her strength at the wall, bending with as much torque as she could muster, and felt her hips slide through another half inch. With one further push and bend, she came through, banging her heels on the protruding window, and fell to the bathroom carpet on her right shoulder. She had lost both shoes.
She lay for several minutes on the bathroom floor, breathing heavily. Her fingers found the cool marble of the tub. Her hips ached; her stomach fluttered. For some minutes Julia was unable to move, fearing she might be sick. The skin of her face and hands felt very hot. Eventually she sat upright and rested her back against the bathtub. Through the material of the blue blouse, the marble felt very cool. Modern urban people, peaceful and sedentary, are crippled by shock when they receive otherwise ordinary physical distress; Julia had read this theory in a magazine recently, and she now ruefully reflected that it seemed true in her case. She could nearly feel the blood beating in her facial skin.
Supporting herself with one hand on the rim of the tub, she unsteadily stood up. The wall mirrors reflected a tangle-headed, stooping female figure in pale, ripped trousers. Everything glowed darkly, pinkly, as if through a haze. What she could see of her face looked black. Julia moved slowly to the sink. She tugged at the seersucker dress and let it drop wetly to the carpet; then she pulled the plug, not moving until the standing water had been sucked away, and ran fresh water, which she splashed on her face. The water smelled like greasy coins. When she peeled off her trousers, she saw that she had scraped skin from both hips; the trousers, bloodied, were ruined. By morning, she would have the beginnings of spectacular bruises on both hips. Julia bent down to the sodden dress, extracted her key from the pocket, and turned on trembling legs to the door. Then she had a second thought, and patted the heater by the door. It nearly burned her fingers, and she flipped up the wall switch to turn it off. Before leaving the bathroom, she remembered to place the blue dress back in a sinkful of fresh water.
The entire house seemed sluggishly hot; Julia thought it might take her an entire morning to find all of the heaters. Yet the warmth spread seductively throughout the living room, and she sat on the gray couch to relax for a second before attempting the stairs. Her hips ached. One of the downstairs heaters was set into the wall beside the big windows; yet another smaller heater was in the kitchen. Julia leaned back in the couch, stretching her legs out before her. She closed her eyes. Her hips smarted, but at least had stopped bleeding from the abrasions. Then she blinked, imagining that she had heard a series of sharp clicki
ng noises from the dining room. Perhaps they had come from the kitchen: refrigerators made all sorts of noises. She heard one sudden, definite clicking noise, and her eyes opened involuntarily. It had come from the dining room—the noise had sounded like someone tapping at the window. Julia looked across the width of the living room into the dining room, directly off it. Its large French windows were set in line with the living room windows, so that a passerby could look through the house into the garden. The dining room drapes hung a foot apart. Through the gap, Julia could see nothing but black. She felt an extreme disquiet; she wore only the blue blouse and underpants, and sat in view of the window. Perhaps someone had been hiding in the garden after all.
Her heart accelerated. Julia bounded up from the couch and ran through the hall to the bathroom and latched the window through which she had crawled. Then she crept back through the warm house to the dining room and peered out, concealing her body behind the drapes. A second later, she thought she had distinguished a standing figure—it was a darker shape posed before the mass of the flower beds. It moved slightly. She had no impression of height or sex; she needed none. Julia knew that it must be Magnus. She fell to the floor as if by instinct. Julia lay there for some minutes in a panic before she recognized that she must have been wrong. Magnus did not know where she lived.
If it were Magnus, and he wanted to hurt her, he would have assaulted her in the garden, He could scarcely have missed her scramble through the bathroom window. And it was possible that no one was in the garden. The motion might have been a bush, moved by some breeze.
Julia opened her eyes and peered out to the garden, her face at ground level. The garden held nothing untoward. Her heart had begun to beat normally once again, and Julia sat up, blotting her face with the heavy drape. The grass still had that spectral, shining blackness, and she could see the brick wall quite clearly. Nothing between the house and the wall was moving. Julia stood up and, holding one hand to her chest, went back into the living room, moving slowly in the darkness. Heaters, she thought, and glided across the room to the big storage heater set into the wall. It too had been turned on, and she flipped up the switch set into the wall.