Julia Read Online Free

“The what? I take it you mean my fiancée.”
    “Your victim, Magnus.”
    She heard Magnus sigh. “Well, you might as well come in then, since you’re here.”
    “You are typically generous, Magnus.”
    Julia had thought of Mark as a potential ally since she had heard Lily and Magnus first disparage him; he was at leastflawed and might be expected to be sympathetic to her. Her heart beating a little quickly, she thrust the
Guardian
behind her chair and stood to meet him.
    Magnus came scowling into the room, leading a tall young man with long, shining black hair. Julia saw Magnus’s grimace at the sight of the wrinkled newspaper, wadded up behind the chair; then she saw that Mark Berkeley was the kind of man women might turn around to stare at in the street. He was beautiful—sexually beautiful. The long dark hair framed a face a few shades lighter than olive, with high Mongol cheekbones and a full, curving mouth. Beneath black eyebrows, in the dark amused face, his eyes were unbelievably blue. When he held out his hand, she noticed that his fingernails were filthy.
    “You’re almost as pretty as Lily said you were,” he said. “I wish I’d seen you first. Be nice to have another beautiful woman in the family, won’t it, Magnus? Now that Lily is getting a bit past it.”
    Holding his rather grubby hand, Julia felt, as an undercurrent to Mark’s remarks, that he was looking straight through her; he might be an ally, but not of the sort she had anticipated. Mark, too, was formidable. Yet he seemed far from unsympathetic. As Julia felt herself warming to her fiancé’s younger brother, a number of impressions went rapidly through her mind. Mark seemed more like Magnus’s son than his brother: he had an air of irresponsibility which seemed nearly cultivated. It was impossible to imagine Mark holding a job—any job but lecturing. And she considered, still holding his hand, that perhaps she was being conned by an expert. It was certainly all too easy to find oneself instantly liking someone so attractive. She disengaged her hand. She was not sure that she approved of men as beautiful as this.
    “Really, Magnus,” Mark said, “doesn’t she look like a vision Lily might see in one of her crystal balls? What an extraordinary person she must be to want to marry you.”
    “Oh,” she said, trying to save the situation, “sometimes I think half the women in London want to marry Magnus.”
    But Magnus had turned impatiently away from her. The rest of the afternoon had staggered painfully along, Mark taunting Magnus, Magnus becoming increasingly blustery. Julia had not known at all how to read Mark.
    A year later, when Julia realized, sickened, that Magnus had not ceased to see his other women for as much as a month, she had angrily, furiously proposed to him that she could begin taking up with his brother. “Why should you have all the fun?” she had demanded, raging.
    Magnus had gripped her hard enough to leave bruises on her arm: she saw, trembling with both fear and anger, that he was barely restraining himself from clubbing her. Then the pressure lessened, his jaw unclamped, and he moved a step backward. “I’d happily kill you if you ever slept with Mark,” he said. His tone was so cold that she believed him at once: despite all that talk about “unbalanced” Mark, she had never before seen that he hated his brother. At least, that was what she thought she had seen.
    It was not long after this explosion that they began to discuss having a child.
    Kate was born the following summer. For the next nine years, the Loftings lived conventionally in Hampstead, traveling abroad—Magnus bought a farmhouse a mile from the Dordogne River, and they spent three summers doing it up—seeing Lily at intervals, seeing Mark two or three times a year when he dropped in unannounced. Clearly, he was kept informed of events in the Lofting house by Lily: he senta beautiful dollhouse on Kate’s first birthday, he frequently