Soul Read online

  ‘Seamus won’t make a good soldier,’ he declared. ‘He’s barely five foot, and that’s in his shoes.’

  ‘Surely you agree that fighting for the end of slavery is a just cause?’ Lavinia interjected, surprised by the coachman’s reservations.

  ‘I’m not saying it’s not; it’s just that my brother and I—we’ve only survived this far by the grace of God himself, so I’m thinking it’s mighty foolish of Seamus to voluntarily put his life in danger, for anyone.’ He turned to Samuel. ‘Forgive me, Samuel.’

  ‘I understand, my friend. I’ve been told the Irish are little better than slaves themselves under their English masters.’

  ‘A working man has no time to think on ideals, madam, you must know that,’ Aloysius replied.

  ‘Which makes your brother’s choice even more admirable, surely?’

  But the coachman stood there in silence, his heavy brow knotting and unknotting. Finally, a crooked smile spread slowly across his face.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right, madam. Besides, he could be the first general in the O’Malley clan yet. They say anything is possible in the New World.’

  ‘It is for the white man,’ Samuel muttered gloomily.

  The three of them stood silent for a moment, contemplating their own providence and the immense differences between them.

  Lavinia broke the silence. ‘Would you like to reply?’

  Again, Aloysius found himself angry at her insensitivity. Could she not see that would be out of the question? Shrugging, he refilled his pipe and, using a small wax wick to catch a flame from the lantern, lit the bowl. He exhaled; a small white cloud hung in the air before dispersing.

  ‘I think not. No, my brother would not expect me to reply.’ His gruff words betrayed the frustration he felt at his own inadequacy.

  ‘We could compose them together. There is a return address—the postmaster…’

  Suspicious, he stared at the soft whiteness of her hands. What did she want with a lowly coachman? Was she one of those rich Christian ladies who sought redemption through good works? Was that how she saw him—as a charity? An ignorant young man she intended to educate? An irksome thought indeed, and a position Aloysius had no intention of adopting.

  ‘What’s in it for you then?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Aloysius, the young mistress just wants to help!’ Samuel exclaimed, shocked at the Irishman’s irreverent tone of voice.

  ‘It would please me to be of some use to a fellow countryman. And, as a great admirer of Mr Lincoln, I would welcome the chance to assist his war effort in any way I can.’

  ‘Oh Lordy! Now I really have seen the elephant!’ Samuel interjected, grinning. ‘No one must ever know I visited this house. The ambassador will ride me out on a rail!’

  ‘Fear not, Samuel, the name Huntington will stand well with your master,’ Lavinia smiled back. ‘My husband and most of his associates are staunch supporters of the Confederacy.’

  She turned back to the Irishman. ‘Your answer, Aloysius? Will you allow me to assist you?’

  ‘Perhaps when I drive you to church on Sunday, we could take a moment to compose a letter then, madam? Private from the rest of the household. I shouldn’t want Mr Poole thinking I was reaching above my station.’

  The coachman’s tone was tentative, but secretly he felt a rush of eagerness at the thought of writing to Seamus, a brother he hadn’t seen for over five years. Or at least, that was the reason he gave himself, not daring to examine his excitement further.

  ‘Then Sunday it shall be,’ Lavinia concluded.

  24

  Los Angeles, 2002

  JULIA PICKED UP THE COPIES of the Los Angeles Times lying on the doormat where they had fallen with depressing regularity. Staring at the top paper’s date in disbelief, she realised Klaus had been gone for over a month.

  His absence had left a void. All that remained were aural signatures, which had seeped into the brickwork, settling around the couple’s movements as a tree might entwine a fencepost—ghost-trails of their lovemaking, their laughter, the cry of her name. Lying in bed, Julia had found herself expecting every passing vehicle to be Klaus’s car; imagining she could hear the squeal of his brakes, the click of the engine dying, the crunch of his footfall on the gravelled pathway.

  The loss of her closest friend had been as painful as the loss of her husband. Julia swung wildly between deep anger at Carla’s betrayal and a desperate need to talk to her, when she would find herself dialling her phone number. And so she lay there, for nights on end, her loneliness circling above her in a numbing orbit, rocking herself, her arms clutched around her empty womb.

  After a time, the anti-depressants gave her grief a tone. Its ululation became muffled, merged with the roar of the freeway, the ocean—the imagined sound of a storm pounding against the eardrum, pushing everything out towards the horizon, a frequency that took her out of the small moments. Hues were brighter. Life with the colour turned up—the psychiatrist had promised, as if centuries of philosophising about perception could be reduced to one banally cheerful metaphor. Naturally Julia hadn’t believed her, but on the tenth day, miraculously, the sky was bluer, the leaves greener, the roses bloodier.

  A need to spend money was a more insidious side effect—an impulse fuelled by the delusion that the dollars in her hand were toy money set against the greater tragedies of love and hate, abandonment and union. It was only after she’d spent three hundred dollars at the lipstick counter at Nieman Marcus that it occurred to her that her compulsive shopping might be drug-induced. The lipsticks stood in her bathroom cabinet, balanced on their ends like a platoon of forgotten toy soldiers.

  Julia had no energy left to grieve for others. The two burning towers of New York, and the ensuring implosion of the national psyche, became even more personalised for Julia, as if her own internal logic had been shattered along with what she had naively believed to be untouchable America. Nevertheless, she found herself sobbing at news images: a child-soldier leaning against an army tank; a pool of burning oil in some distant sea; the bewildered face of a juvenile gorilla trapped behind bamboo bars.

  It became difficult for her to listen to music with lyrics. Most songs, she realised, were about loss or impending loss—an incessant chorus of victimhood that divided humanity into two categories: the leavers and the left. In her darkest moments, she wondered about which synapses the anti-depressants had fired and which they were repressing, but the end result was the same: her depression continued. It was a hidden iceberg, shifting and splintering; great subterranean ruptures that tore through the glittering shell of the drug, spiking in inappropriate moments of elation.

  Duty of care, mouthing the words like a curse into the gathering evening shadows, Klaus and Carla had failed in their duty of care, for surely both friendship and marriage have an unspoken contract, Julia would argue with herself, trying to make logic out of the irrational.

  Night became an escape from the world. Sometimes she’d sleep until 11 a.m., her limbs stretched over to the side of the bed that Klaus used to occupy. Waking, she would conjure up the fragrance of his skin, a rich mix of sweat and oils, the crook of his neck, the hollow of his thighs. She couldn’t imagine experiencing desire with anyone else. The idea of revealing her history all over again to a new man appalled her; even contemplation of the idea felt like an obscene infidelity. It was impossible to believe she would ever share the same humour, wit and sensibility. Klaus was meant to be her final relationship, and she clung to the conviction that he would return.

  Desperate for a sense of family, of continuity, Julia had placed a photograph of her grandfather, Aidan Huntington, next to the bed.

  He was still a boy in the image, standing posed on the docks in front of the hull of an ocean steamer, his long pale face staring bleakly into the lens. The words ‘Oona May Cork—Chicago’ were painted on the side of the ship, and streamers twisted and snaked through the air. Passengers crowded on the decks and at the portholes, punctuating the phot
o with fuzzy activity. An American flag fluttered in one corner, the stars trailing points in a lazy breeze. A blurred figure—probably a porter, Julia thought, was pushing a trolley past the boy.

  The young Aidan looked about twelve, his curly hair was carefully oiled and combed behind his ears, he was dressed in a jacket and knickerbockers that reached just below his knees. There was pathos in his taut, serious thin face as he attempted to appear a man. A small suitcase sat on the ground beside him while a parcel of books, belted around with leather, dangled from his hand. The motherless child, Julia thought, and wondered about Lavinia Huntington and the demise of her marriage. Colonel James Huntington had been quite a famous scientist in his own right, so Julia remembered her father telling her, but he had never spoken about his grandfather’s death or the trial of his young wife. Some years after Julia’s own mother had died, he had told her he’d always been convinced of his grandmother’s innocence.

  Switching on the lamp, Julia pulled the photo into the light. Her grandfather had died before she was born, and stories about him had always fascinated her. She remembered them vividly. Apparently, Aidan had resembled his mother, Lavinia, in colouring alone; Julia assumed the broad nose and strong chin were inherited from his father. In the photograph, his facial features were slightly blurred, as if he had moved during the long camera exposure, but his eyes were sharp. A direct stare that travelled through history and connected unswervingly with the gaze of the viewer—the child had inherited his mother’s confrontational gaze. It made Julia think about her own Aidan, the son that might have been.

  As Klaus had promised, the divorce papers soon arrived, making it apparent that he must have been planning his departure for months. The revelation horrified Julia. Staring down at the documents, she found it difficult to recognise the husband she had lived with for twelve years. He must have been compartmentalising the whole time, she concluded.

  Without being allowed to communicate with him, she found herself mythologising their life together. Holidays, birthdays, celebrations, conversations that had inspired her all came flooding back, filling her nights with crisp heightened images—everything they had experienced together amplified to legendary happiness. She had considered herself content; she had assumed Klaus was content, except for his work situation—a situation Julia knew Carla had the power to change. Was that it? Was Klaus that mercenary? Or was it that Julia had been so self-absorbed she’d been blind to his real needs? Obsessively she began to dismantle the marriage, to look for indications, torturing herself by analysing their last few months together over and over.

  25

  JULIA COULD SEE A REFLECTION OF HERSELF thrown down onto the pavement she was flying over. Even in the twilight she recognised the buildings along Sunset Boulevard: the Viper Room, the House of Blues, Sunset Five, the Chateau Marmont. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, floating on this thick viscous sea, a buoyant soft wind carrying her.

  To the west she could see the incandescent strip of blue-grey that was the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. The sky itself was the dark cobalt of just before dawn; streaks of salmon-pink had begun to bleed up from the horizon, freckling the sky. In her dreaming mind, she judged it to be about five in the morning. A minute later she was passing over the emerald and russet breasts of the Hollywood hills, sweeping up from the streaming band of car lights that was Sunset Boulevard. Below, each valley cradled residential blocks that lay across the green like embroidered handkerchiefs, each with a rectangle of glistening blue—the swimming pools—that threw back a framed reflection of the firmament. The canyons wound into the hills like hieroglyphs on a raised parchment.

  Mi ciudad Hermosa: the words were whispered puffs of smoke that kept her buoyant. It was only then Julia became aware of the warm weight she held beneath her; Aidan, her lost son.

  As they flew, Julia realised that she was entirely unencumbered by her waking grief, and that flying like this, united with the panorama that sweltered and muttered and glinted thousands of other stories, she was finally at peace. Aidan smiled up at her and, without thinking, Julia opened her arms. The child hovered, and for an instant they flew as one, the boy a miniature shadow of his mother, across the tiled roofs until he left her side.

  ‘Now, you might not have voted for Proposition 49 in the past, and you might have had strong reasons not to, but you cannot tell me, Mr and Mrs Dumont…’ The Candidate’s voice was interrupted by the automated insertion of Klaus’s and Julia’s names, a robotic rendering that destroyed the attempt at a personal tone. Julia, her head buried under the covers, her nightdress wrapped around her eyes in a desperate attempt to block out the early summer light streaming in through the cane blinds, clicked the phone off and pushed it under her pillow.

  ‘Christ,’ she groaned out aloud. Could she get up, did she want to? It was a month since her miscarriage, two weeks since she received the divorce papers and the day lay cavernous before her, frighteningly empty.

  She curled around her pillow, wishing she wasn’t such a coward. A breeze rattled the cane blinds and jolted her back to the dream. The aerial view of Los Angeles had been so accurate she could have described the landscape to a pilot, and then there was the image of her son. Black eyes like his father; his narrow face a combination of her cheekbones and Klaus’s pointed chin.

  She wrapped her hands around the pillow and almost slipped back into sleep. The alarm clock startled her awake again.

  She sat up and stretched then reached for a tape recorder she kept in the bedside cabinet. A psychologist she’d spoken to at the hospital had suggested it might be therapeutic to record messages to Klaus—messages he would never get to hear. She switched on the tape recorder and waited in silence. It felt like she was whispering to a ghost. The tape ran a full three minutes before she had the courage to begin.

  ‘…I keep finding myself laying the table for two. Sometimes, when I’m reading or watching television, I forget and think I hear your footsteps in another part of the house and call your name. It makes me feel so goddamn stupid. You live inside someone’s skin for over a decade and then find you didn’t know them at all. Did you ever think about the consequences of your actions? You must have. You must have analysed every outcome meticulously. If I can’t live without you, how am I to live?’

  Julia drove without thinking about where she was going; a hazy geographical comprehension guiding her through the maze of LA’s suburbs. Her mobile rang; she ignored it. She knew it would be Naomi who had developed the habit of ringing her twice a day to check that she was safe. Her friend’s vigilance irritated Julia. Reaching down she switched the phone off.

  She turned into a narrow street where small neat lawns encircled white bungalows, jasmine climbed over trellises at the front doors, and the obligatory SUV sat in each driveway. Klaus had originally wanted to buy in the beachside area, but they hadn’t been able to afford it. Houses that were built in the Californian post Second World War industrial boom when aircraft construction usurped oranges. Julia’s knees began to tremble and her stomach clenched as she recognised where her instinct had brought her.

  Lavender Street, Number Twelve; how many times had she visited this house? How many times?

  Pulling into the kerb, she carefully hid the car behind a large van. The gate hadn’t changed; an old pumpkin with a grinning ghoul-face carved into its peel still sat by the fencepost—a relic from a past Halloween night.

  The house was quiet; there was a light dimly visible through one of the front windows. The office, Julia thought. At least, that’s what Carla called it. It was a converted laundry, barely more than a cupboard. The house itself was an original piece of German-influenced modernist architecture, a construction of planes that translated into a spacious geometric structure designed so the sun travelled around the house, flooding each room in turn with light. It’s a sunhouse, Carla would say, I live in a sunhouse not a greenhouse. Just remembering her saying it made Julia nostalgic.

  She recalled how she’d rushed here on
ce at 2 a.m., convinced that Klaus was having an affair. He was away sailing and she hadn’t been able to get through on his mobile. The image of him making love to another woman had thrashed through her head. She knew she had to talk out her fear and had immediately driven to Carla’s. Tousled, but unfazed, her friend had let her in. They’d spent the rest of the night getting drunk together on some obscenely sweet liqueur Carla had brought back from a film shoot in Krakow, regaling each other with anecdotes about the worst lovers they’d ever had. Two hours later Julia had reached Klaus; he’d told her she was paranoid but he loved her anyway.

  There were two narratives in Julia’s head: the ongoing dialogue with the woman she had loved, an imagined conversation in which she told Carla her latest news, asked her advice, provided the unconditional empathy women offered each other; and the second, a monologue so vitriolic that Julia could barely form words to fit her anger.

  Hate is an interesting emotion. Because of its epic nature, the awkward, ugly shape it makes in these rational post-modern times, it is unfashionably polarised, terrifyingly illogical, Julia thought as she crouched in her car. But hate was what she felt. Carla’s betrayal was as unfathomable to her as her husband’s departure, and both obsessed her—like an equation she needed to solve.

  People fall in love, Julia, and they have no control over their choices. Klaus’s words hung in her mind like a ghostly afterimage. Julia did not believe them. ‘Marriage is a negotiation of temptation,’ she said aloud, suddenly furious at finding herself reduced to a voyeur of a life she felt was, by rights, her own. ‘I could kill him for having reduced me to this,’ she added softly, her breath misting up the window.

  The streetlights came on and clouds of gnats shifted direction like shoals of fish under the bluish glow. Julia continued watching, fascinated by the silhouettes passing across the house’s drawn blinds. The gleaming hull of Carla’s BMW in the driveway taunted her as she fought the impulse to get out and walk directly up to the front door.