Justine

by Alice Thompson

  Her hard pale eyes, set wide apart in her face, contained the knowledge that nothing was of any consequence outside of how she looked. Her gaze did not look directly at me, but coyly, to one side. This meant I could look at her to my heart’s content. By looking away she put herself even more on display to me. This oblique sacrifice of herself sealed my love.

  In the half-state of consciousness that smoking opium induced in me, I could look at this portrait with contentment for the entire day until evening fell and she would turn her head towards me and smile. The background of the picture would change also. Instead of sitting in the shadowy room she would be sitting in a formal garden. Just to the right of her would stand a line of yew trees which I could see, on closer inspection, formed the side of a maze. What never changed about the picture, no matter how many times I looked at it, was the plaque on the lower edge of its gilt frame which read Justine.

  This was how I spent the last days of my life until my mother’s death. Interior, self-reflexive days where the source of all my pleasure were my day and night dreams. Drugs and absolute solitude gave me ultimate control over my life. My solipsistic universe could never stray from the strictures that I set it.

  eight

  On the day that I discovered my mother’s body I had driven up to Blenheim House, one early summer afternoon, for tea. For the past year my mother, in spite of being physically fit, had taken to her bed. It was her way of hiding from the world. She could no longer hear the gaze of others. However, her self-confinement had weakened her. What had started off as a gesture had become an ending in itself.

  That Sunday afternoon it was raining outside as I made my way down the lonely corridors of the house that I had once played in as a child. I softly knocked on the same bedroom door through which I had used to watch my mother dressing for dinner. As there was no reply I assumed that she had fallen asleep and I opened the door and entered. But her unmade bed was empty, the sheets trailing on the floor. I could hear behind the closed door of the adjoining bathroom, the slow relentless sound of a tap dripping. Walking up to the door I noticed that the carpet beneath my feet was damp and soft like moss. Water was seeping from underneath the bathroom door. I turned the handle of the door and it opened easily.

  The naked body of my mother lay in the overflowing bath. What shocked me more than the fact that she was dead was the extent to which her body had been ruined by age. When I had last seen her naked the fullness and suppleness of her flesh reflected in her mirror had entranced me. Now her breasts were slack and pendulous. Varicose veins scoured her legs, like purple buds about to burst into bloom. The shape of her body was concealed by roll upon roll of fat. Blood spiralled into the water in arabesques from her swollen split wrists. The make-up that she had so carefully applied to her face before cutting her wrists had smeared. Mascara ran down her cheeks in black lines like the bars of a cage.

  I bent down over her and carefully lifted her body out of the bath. I carried her out into the bedroom where I placed her as gently as I could onto the bed. I dried her body and wiped the remaining make-up from her face. But this revealed the second mask of her age-ravaged skin. With the aid of her make-up, I tried, as she had tried, to restore back to the face some of its youth and beauty. I tried to paint the blood back into her lips and the blush of life back into her cheeks. In vain I tried to repair the damage of mortality.

  Evening had fallen by the time I walked back out through the house. I passed by the various statues and figurines, with their absent limbs, that stood about the rooms. One by one I knocked them down, hearing them crash to the floor behind me. They broke into such tiny pieces, which scattered across the floor, that mending them would have proved impossible.

  nine

  My flat seemed cool and at peace as I entered it later that same night. I lay down on the sofa and took out my opium pipe. It was of ivory, ornately carved with woodland animals. Deer and squirrels leapt and clambered over its stem. The pipe had been bought purely for aesthetic reasons, for its intricate decoration, and I had only begun to use it for its original purpose after I had started to handle it and realized that its patterns demanded to be read. The pleasure of using the pipe became entwined with the pleasure of the drug until the two became indistinguishable: just as the figures of the leaping deer were inseparable from the actual structure of the pipe.

  The sweet taste of the opium was pleasantly nauseous and my gaze fell inevitably on to the portrait of Justine. To my shock a change had come over her expression: the consolatory quality of her beauty had disappeared. Her face had grown malevolent, her eyes had narrowed, and the book that she had been writing had fallen to the floor as if she were no longer interested in the mere construction of words. I had the strong impression that she was angry that she was still trapped inside the room and that her painted background had not been transformed into the garden where she preferred to sit. I shut my eyes to block out her anger that seemed directly aimed at me. When I opened them she had returned to her normal posture serene and self-contained, her eyes looking off to one side. However, after this incident I perceived a distinctly erotic edge to her beauty which had not been there before.

  ten

  Looking back now, I see that it was only natural that I should first meet Justine at a funeral. Justine and Death had a natural affinity for each other: they followed each other around. Her icy demeanour enticingly challenged the warm and passionate breath of death. Death as soon as he laid eyes upon her, would have wanted his way with her. It was just that Justine played hard to get.

  At the altar, my mother lay in the open coffin surrounded by the whiteness of lilies. Her ruined beauty now lay on display to the world. The service was simple and apart from the Priest there were only three people at the funeral: myself, my mother’s maid and a woman who was standing three rows in front, her back turned to me. She was wearing a dress which was cut low at the back so that I could see the sinuous muscles that twisted like snakes under her skin. Often now, when I think of Justine, it is of her back, of her turning away from me, walking away. Her back is the place from where it is always safe to watch. She was sheathed in beige silk, the colour of shadowed snow. Even from the back I could tell that she would cost me too much.

  The arches of the Norman church that we stood beneath reproduced in their fluid form the curve of her shoulder. The combination of proportion and grace which was the architecture of the church, also formed the body of the woman. I still had not seen her face and as I waited for a glimpse of it I fantasized the various ways in which the bones might be sculptured. However, I had no doubt in my mind that her face would be devastating, that she would in one pure way devastate me.

  The stone of the church was pale gold, like her hair, and light shone through the blood-red of the stained glass casting shadows on both. The church smelt of dust.

  Only when the coffin was carried down the aisle by the bearers, did I catch a glimpse of her face as she turned to look at it. It was Justine. The face of my painting had been brought to life in front of me. The image had been made flesh. Except the flesh of this Justine was chiselled out of ice. No facial expression disfigured the Madonna-like purity of her face. The look as she followed with her eyes my mother’s coffin down the aisle had the indifferent but focused attention of a child. In the moment of recognition this stranger had been frozen into my heart. As soon as I saw her, I wanted her for my own. To place her in my flat in the best position for the light.

  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.

  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.