Soul

Several shopping bags sat next to her in the passenger seat. They were filled with baby clothes; three cotton jumper suits, two bonnets and a tiny silver rattle. She’d also bought a book on pregnancy her gynaecologist had recommended; ironically she felt as a geneticist she knew everything scientific there was to know about the developing embryo, but little as a woman. She’d even been amazed to find herself standing outside a baby clothing store in the Beverly Center shopping mall. She knew it was rash to buy such things when she hadn’t quite finished her first trimester, but she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation. Walking in and purchasing the clothes had felt like a public declaration of her pregnancy, and her exhilaration, standing there holding the small pale blue suit, the empty feet impossibly tiny, had astounded her. Julia reached across and caressed the bags, the sense of her future comforting under her hand. She turned back to the road.

The Lexus swept past a huge poster of the latest celebrity actor with political ambitions. His resolute jaw and gunmetal eyes made it impossible to separate the man from the action hero. None of Julia’s friends—typically nonchalant Democrats—viewed his campaign as a real threat. It all seemed too bizarre—especially the rumours that he might run for Senate the following year. Julia took him seriously, however. A secondhand comprehension of the film industry made her aware of the existence of a parallel world, a universe where the slavish worship of celebrity underpinned an aberrant pecking order. Could a man who had played a robotic killing machine run for Governor? At the dawn of the twenty-first century the cult of celebrity made anything possible and the Actor/Candidate himself embodied the great dream. Darwin would have approved, Julia observed wryly.

Lights spluttered then glowed as the local cinema switched its sign on; while on the opposite side of the street the usual line of tourists and moviegoers queued in front of Pink’s, the famous frankfurter stall that had been in existence since the 1930s, with

its hand-painted signs reading ‘Polish Dog’, ‘Hotdog’, ‘Chili Dog’ swinging from the white wooden frame beneath which three Latinos laboured over boiling pots.

La Brea—a wide boulevard lined with furniture stores, antique shops, and the occasional shopfront with ‘Psychic’ scrawled across the glass—was imbued with the same impermanency like many of the blocks south of Hollywood, where brick veneer mixed with a frontier-town sensibility. It was as if the ever-present awareness of catastrophe, natural or otherwise, made it impossible for the Los Angelino to ever really relax into the landscape.

The geography of Hollywood was also an atlas of Julia’s marriage. She drove past the tapas bar where she and Klaus had had their first date and remembered how he’d given off the jittery aura of the recently arrived, defiantly un-American in his formal dress pants and linen jacket.

Tall and big-boned, Klaus was a combination of French and German ancestry—his physique northern European; his high cheekbones, black eyes and black hair a throwback to the ancient Celts who had settled the cities of Flanders. Attractive in a feline, eagle-eyed manner, Klaus seemed to be both awed and revolted by the insatiable appetites of the entertainment industry. The son of a retired Belgian diplomat, he was fluent in English and had arrived in LA as a stringer for a small Belgian online magazine, which had recently been consumed by an international publishing house and was now compelled to extend its market and take a more popularist direction. Sending Klaus—popular for his satirical dissections of the big blockbusters—to LA had been their first strategy.

By the time Julia met him, Klaus had managed, through both his natural charm and aloofness, to make himself a commodity at the press conferences held by the Foreign Press Club. However, his degree in philosophy and his leftwing leanings soon made him too sardonic a critic for the machinations of the promotion of celebrity; besides, Klaus had his own ambitions. Julia remembered her secret dismay when, over tapas, Klaus had confessed all of this.

‘I would like to be a real writer—a novelist, or failing that, a writer on one of those TV series about lawyers and crime. Maybe set in Antwerp,’ he confided in his curious Flemish accent, which made Julia imagine the consonants being ironed flat as they fell out of his mouth.

Regardless of her reluctance to become involved with someone who appeared so directionless at thirty, Julia had smiled encouragingly then drunk another two glasses of chardonnay, while secretly trying to fathom whether there was a girlfriend back in Europe, and, if not, what hidden (and potentially horrendous) emotional debris could this very attractive single man be carrying? Despite her reservations, Klaus made her laugh and his attentions were flattering. Having just won her first laboratory appointment, she was swept away by optimism and so, buoyed by this, their courtship continued.

Nevertheless, her ambivalence lingered for several weeks, but only seemed to fuel Klaus’s advances. He was, she suspected, a man not used to being refused and her hesitancy appeared to both perplex and excite him. In reality, the situation could have gone either way, Julia now reflected. But then, didn’t the most profound relationships often start in a deceptively arbitrary fashion? Two strangers waiting to board a plane, a man reading the same article as a woman in a doctor’s surgery, a car denting the bumper of another. And events that seemed initially portentous often dwindled away into meaninglessness she concluded ironically, as she accelerated through a traffic light.

The arbitrary event that propelled her and Klaus’s relationship forward was a surprise trip to the planetarium at the Los Angeles observatory for her birthday. It was a week night and the auditorium was almost empty—a Texan family and a row of giggling Korean schoolgirls were the only other visitors. They had sat in the front row to watch the light show of the Milky Way, the guide’s prerecorded voice sounding out in the darkness like a narrator from the 1950s, from an epoch when, somehow, stars had seemed more fixed. Suddenly, another tiny beam of light had appeared on the Sagittarius–Carina arm of the galaxy.

‘See that?’ Klaus had whispered, concealing the torch with his sleeve. ‘That’s the Huntington star, found on the tattooed arm of the impossible-to-seduce Huntress planet formation…’

By this time the Texan father was hushing them. Julia had broken into laughter, but to her further surprise Klaus had reached into his jacket and pulled out a certificate, which he placed onto her lap. ‘No, really—the star exists and you own it. Happy birthday.’

Their kiss had them falling onto the empty seats alongside, and to Julia’s acute embarrassment the Korean schoolgirls broke into applause.

That night they had slept together for the first time. There was something unnaturally familiar about Klaus’s scent and skin and, intuitively, Julia had sensed this would be a long-lasting relationship. They had a questioning intelligence in common; Klaus’s thinking skipped across disciplines in a similar manner to her own. Julia’s first degree had been psychology, her second genetics, and they shared a fascination for behaviour—human or otherwise. However his physical beauty initially made her question her own motives: his rugged masculinity had an authenticity that made people turn and stare, even in a town where physical beauty wasn’t just a commodity, it was commonplace. Julia had found it hard not to be suspicious and judgemental of his good looks, even a little intimidated. But Klaus’s own indifference to his beauty, and his deliberate negation of that power, had convinced her not only of his sincerity and monogamy but also that he, like herself, valued intellect above everything else.

Julia placed her left hand over her womb. Aidan: her son, their child. She was determined to be a good mother, an attentive mother in a way her own had never been. She had calculated that her research would be concluded by the time she was due to give birth, and after that she planned to take a year’s maternity leave. It was going to be her year for consolidating both her career and her marriage, she decided, vowing that she would be more thoughtful of Klaus’s ambitions in the future.

A car hooted behind her; the lights had changed to green. She swung the car into the parking lot.

8

The Rhineland, 1859

HE ENTERED THE HOTEL BEDROOM unexpectedly, catching her preparing to wash, her chemise unbuttoned to the waist, her hair pinned up and flat against her scalp. Startled, Lavinia froze, staring at her new husband in the mirror, her tiny breasts and boyish figure elongated and pale in the candlelight.

They had not yet made love. It was an act Lavinia had been anticipating ever since they had arrived by boat the night before, but sensing a delicacy, a certain ritualised timing to his courtship, she had decided to wait for his caress.

Her excitement fluttered wildly at her throat. I have imagined this for so long, she thought, trying to guess at the unawoken lovemaking that lay under her skin like an exotic language, waiting to be translated. I am so ignorant of what is to be expected; will I know how to pleasure him? Despite her anxieties she knew she had begun to love him, her initial infatuation deepening first to admiration then to this fierce desire to please him.

Lavinia had discovered she did not like the way other women noticed her husband; his upright handsome figure attracted glances wherever they went. She wanted him to see her only; to treat her as a peer but also as someone he could learn from, rather than always having to play the mentor. But how, when their life experience was so unequal?

The idea that he should be as preoccupied with her as she had secretly become with him now possessed her completely. Sitting there, her skin sharpened in anticipation of his touch. But now, as their gaze met, it was not how she had imagined. His eyes held just to her face as he moved towards her. She began to turn.

‘Don’t move,’ he said.

Now behind her, stroking her shoulders, he lifted her to her feet, her bony back rippling out of the silk top of the undergarment. He ran his fingers lightly down her spine, over the fabric, and to her narrow buttocks, as firm and rotund as a young boy’s.

Shivering, she watched his face in the looking glass, saw

his eyes half-close. The caress of his fingertips—the lightest of touches—sent waves of bliss down her back and into the very nucleus of her, tantalising her, promising so much more. She wanted him—she wanted him to take her, to exercise his authority over her.

His hands encircled her buttocks, then his fingers moved over to her hips and to her sex.