twenty–three

I looked at her, wondering if it was worthwhile bothering to conceal my shock and dismay that she had discovered the truth. Had she known the truth all along? My plot was being rewritten by her and I didn’t like it one bit.

Juliette seemed disinterested in my response. She also seemed indifferent to the fact that she was now writing the story.

‘Of course, you are making a dreadful mistake,’ she said, ‘I mean with regards to Justine. She’s dangerous. She is cold. She is without emotion. I may be neurotic, but at least the only person I hurt is myself.’

I watched her face as she spoke. Standing in the junkyard of her home, as the night grew closer, the fair hair that fell in tendrils about her face turned black in the shadows. The eyes set far apart in the face were opaque. I decided to try to get back in control of the events.

‘What makes you think it is Justine, not you, whom I want?’

‘The disappointment in your eyes in the National Gallery when I told you I wasn’t Justine – it has never left your face.’

I gave up then any thought of continuing my pretence.

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.