Soul

By the time she had finished arranging the first book of notes into the semblance of a chapter, it was past midnight. James still hadn’t returned. Wearily, she rested her head on the desk. Surely a man with such an insatiable lust for adventure and challenge was not of the nature to settle? Perhaps he had been inflicted with the kind of infatuation middle-aged men often felt for young girls. Or was it merely that he desired an heir? Her husband was an enigma, and, despite her new anxiety, one she found fascinating.

She traced the outline of a dried blossom, a tropical flower James had discovered near the shaman’s hut. He had named it Luna albus. Her husband was a collector: of beauty, of rarity and of experience, she decided.

She began to consider how to resurrect their physical relationship, but before she reached a conclusion she fell into a light sleep, her head lolling against her arm. She dreamed she was running through a dark maze of corridors, running towards a figure she could barely see ahead. As he slipped around a corner, she caught sight of his shadow thrown against a wall—a huge bull’s head with clearly delineated horns, and a thick neck that tapered into the slim torso of a man. The Minotaur, the lost chimera.

Why am I not afraid, Lavinia asked her dreaming self. Why am I drawn to him so irresistably?

18

Los Angeles, 2002

JULIA PULLED THE LEXUS INTO the driveway and switched off the ignition. Everything appeared as it should: the sprinklers had automatically switched on at five; the cat next door, an overfed ginger animal, leapt down from the wall to greet her as he did every evening, twisting himself around her ankles; the chimes hanging off the jacaranda tree rang in the breeze. There was only one element that was disturbingly out of place—the mail protruding from the mailbox. Usually Klaus collected it in the morning.

If Julia had paused then, if she had stood immobilised on the lawn, her suede sandals sprayed every 20.8 seconds as the sprinklers continued their relentless rotation; if she had taken this crystallised instance to step out of her life and analyse the sequence of events that had already punctuated her week, she might have had a premonition. But she didn’t. There was no reason to, for this is how we view the world, through the lens of our relationships—a perspective that is nearly always tragically subjective. It was a notion Julia herself subscribed to. She was a woman who had no cause to doubt the continuity of her life: a successful scientist, a contented wife and an expectant mother. She reached the front door and, with her briefcase in one hand, balanced the mail under her chin and opened the door with her key.

Throwing the letters onto a side table, she noticed a thread of packing straw on the ground. She picked it up. Klaus must have received a package from Belgium, she deduced, pleased with her detective work.

‘Klaus?’

Her voice fell flat against the walls, sounding pathetic and doubtful. It was only when she walked into the lounge room that Klaus’s absence became achingly apparent.

‘Presence doesn’t just live in the material,’ Julia had once reasoned to Carla, pleasantly tipsy on the veranda one late summer afternoon. ‘We leave a whole stream of existence behind us, a constellation of evidence—invisible particles of skin, heat, breath, lingering sound, hair in plugholes. Then there are the stains, the dents, the scratches—the markers of passion, of arguments, of lovemaking, of the clumsy, stumbling move into a first embrace and the clumsy stumbling step backwards out of the last. If there is an afterlife, it must exist in how we are remembered. Our spirit can only live on in the others we have touched—those who have loved us and those who have hated us.’

This was the hypothesis Julia had arrived at at the age of forty. An age when she assumed she would be safe, when she had known loss and thought that she would never have to know it again; would never dream of a parent or lover only to wake to the awful realisation that they were absent.

His chair’s missing, she thought now, looking around wildly, terrified that they’d been burgled. Her mind spiralled as she tried to calculate what else had been stolen. The 1930s dentist’s chair was one of the defining possessions Klaus had brought to their marriage, an icon from his student days in Brussels.

The portrait of Lavinia Huntington was still there, but around it were several blank spaces where prints had once been—a Van Gogh, an Aubrey Beardsley, a Chagall—all belonging to Klaus.

She stared at the wall; she knew it had changed but her brain wouldn’t allow her to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. Suddenly other differences became clear. All her husband’s books were gone from the shelves, leaving gaps like broken teeth in the dark oak, her own volumes left tilted and abandoned.

She ran outside, out into the evening sunshine that illuminated the fine smudge of smoke from someone’s bonfire that filled the air. Someone whose world had not been inverted like a cheap paperweight so the snow was now falling upwards, against gravity, against all rationality.

Julia stumbled into the writing studio and a dusty emptiness. The stripped walls clasped the shadows of her husband’s secrets like a faint tracing of fig leaves. The worktable was naked except for the abandoned wood vice, which now seemed to be yawning in sudden fear.

Julia’s heartbeat hammered against her eardrums. Outside a cicada began to scream. Now desperate for clues, she raced back to the house and up to their bedroom, the last bastion of intimate terrain.

The door swung open; there was a new chip in the frame. The cupboard was ajar. All of Klaus’s clothes had been taken except for a pair of trousers she’d given him which he’d never liked.

She flung herself on the bed, her hands clasping the mound of her womb. Rolling towards his side, she noticed the letter. Neatly folded into an envelope, her name printed on the front in her husband’s distinctive left-handed scrawl: Julia.

Lifting herself onto her elbows, Julia stared at it, his handwriting an obscene point of normalcy in the emotional turmoil that pounded through her. Like a plot point in a fable she wondered what would happen if she didn’t open the letter, if she acted as if she hadn’t found it—would her life continue unchanged?

Taking a shuddering breath, she reached for the phone, the unopened letter sitting on her lap. She dialled his mobile phone and waited until the dial tone finally cut any possible thread between them.

Dear Julia,

I don’t know how many times I have started this letter. Too many times. It’s like the thousand times I’ve tried to get the courage to begin this conversation, but have failed in the face of your happiness. Your blind belief. When I think back over our marriage I don’t know how I got in so deep. You are so much more evolved than me. You’re so lucky you know what you want. I never have really. I think for years I have allowed myself to be defined by your needs. How you see me. It’s only now that I’ve finally woken up to my own potential—both the lack of it and the true extent of it. I have always been a secret coward. Forgive me.

I’m leaving you. Wish I’d had the bravery to wait for you and tell you to your face, but that moment has passed. You’re a survivor, you are so much stronger than me, you’re going to be okay, you and the baby. I will always love you and maybe one day we can be friends.

Klaus.

Julia screamed, a wail that filled the house like blood, her husband’s presence tearing away from her in the very anguish of the sound.

Doubling over, she vomited on the bed cover. Still retching, she gathered it up and ran to the bathroom where she dumped it into the bath. As she sat on the edge of the bathtub, a strange practicality possessed her. She walked back into the bedroom.

He’ll come back. Just talk to him, talk to him.