Soul

‘That were a pair of curling tongs I threw at him. The poor man was right to kill me off and bury me. He did you a favour.’

Meredith Murphy leaned forward, breathing a stench of gin, stale perfume and rotting teeth over Lavinia. ‘My own flesh and blood, so beautiful. You’ve done well to get where you are. I shan’t compromise you, daughter, not over my dead body, that much I can promise you. Meredith Murphy looks after her own. But tell me, is there a child? Do I have a grandchild?’

‘A boy called Aidan.’

Overwhelmed, Meredith clasped Lavinia’s hand to her bosom. Lavinia, revolted, pulled herself free and, murmuring her excuses, fled.

While the hansom cab jolted over the huge potholes that pitted the lanes, Lavinia considered how transformed her future was now. Would she ever be able to forgive her mother for abandoning her? And could she ever abandon her own child, even if it meant surrendering him to a better life?

Once secure in the sanctuary of her own bedroom, Lavinia lifted the whispering box from the mantelpiece. She placed it on the stone of the hearth and stood for a moment with the heel of her shoe poised, ready to shatter it into pieces. Then, changing her mind, she hid it in a drawer.

57

Los Angeles, 2002

‘FREE WILL IS A NINETEENTH-CENTURY liberal mythology—we learnt that in first year philosophy. It’s the legacy of Rousseau and all those other deluded utopians, so are you going to seduce me now?’ Gabriel raised one eyebrow provocatively, his face a streaked montage of light and shade.

Julia rolled over onto her front, pulling the duvet with her, and looked at him. The sun fell across his torso and face, highlighting the fine hairs that swept down his chest to his pubic hair. He had one hand behind the back of his head, his face tilted towards her. Running her fingers along the sweep of his nose, she noticed how his mixed ancestry showed in his face: the Semitic nose, the sharp Latino cheekbones, the hooded green eyes, the olive skin. He will probably never be quite as beautiful as he is now, she marvelled, pushing her own age and the implications of their relationship to the back of her mind.

‘You’re outrageously precocious,’ she said, ‘however, you know as well as I, that while we might be genetically predisposed towards an action, that doesn’t mean—given social conditions, intellectual discipline, cultural contexts—we actually carry out that action.’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you, or you wouldn’t be doing the research you do.’

In the ensuing silence, Julia wondered about her true motives. An image of Tom Donohue, and then a masked Amazonian Indian fighting for his life suddenly seemed to loom up from the patterned bedcover; was she being disingenuous? Was she placing ambition over ethics?

Gabriel rolled onto his back and watched a daddy-long-legs pick its way delicately across the ceiling.

‘We have another hour before I’m due home,’ he said, and nudged his hard penis against her thigh.

She smiled; she’d forgotten that other wondrous thing about younger men: the fourth erection. He pulled her across and she fell onto his chest, his thick soft lips searching for her tongue, sucking at it, tugging a path of ecstasy that shot right through her centre. Her vagina, swollen from so much lovemaking, felt as if it had been transformed into a new organ, a deliciously burning extension that made her hum with pleasure. He buried his face between her breasts.

‘I can’t believe how gorgeous you are.’ His voice was muffled as he pressed her flesh against his cheeks.

‘Not too old?’

He gazed up at her. ‘You must be joking, you’re perfect. Besides I told you before, I prefer older women.’

‘I thought I was your first.’

‘Exactly.’ He began pushing her high above him until she was forced to steady herself against the wall, her hips held over him, his face buried in her, her buttocks cradled in each of his hands. Naively, she’d imagined she would have to teach him the intricacies of the female body. Instead she’d found him reminding her of the enthusiasm of first lust, the sexual imagination that always coloured the beginning of a liaison.

She closed her eyes. She’d always been better at giving sensually than receiving. Klaus had this in common with her;

they’d even joked about it. Klaus. Her memory stuttered like a faulty fluorescent. She opened her eyes; for a second, the curve of Gabriel’s chest turned into Klaus’s; his mouth, her husband’s.

Determined to exorcise the vision in sensation, she lowered herself onto Gabriel, the smell of her a sweet smudge across his face. Pinning his arms above his head, she caught the tip of him between her labia. Closing her legs, she rode him like a man.

His huge eyes stared up at her as he tried not to orgasm, summing up a thousand irrelevancies as distractions—the names of protein molecules, the number of Bob Dylan hits between 1968 and 1978, the Dodgers’ highest score for that season; until he knew from a sudden tightening that she had started her orgasm, and a huge jolt buckled his own body.

Julia lay in the crook of his arm, her limbs lolling in total relaxation, echos of her climax still ricocheting.

‘I would love to give you a baby,’ Gabriel’s voice broke into her reverie, a rare moment of no thought, a respite now lost as recent history rushed in.

‘Thank you, but that’s an absurd idea.’

Belittling me again, he thought, staring up at her beamed ceiling, wondering how long the age difference was going to hang between them. She can’t help herself, he decided. It would be immature of him to be offended, but he was anyway.

Julia turned away; her back was an arch of freckles and tanned skin Gabriel longed to touch. Curling around her, he was amazed by how imposing she looked but how small she was to hold.