Julia Read Online Free Page B

knowledge that marriage to Magnus was no longer possible. Really, Kate had kept them together. Kate had been their focus.
    Interesting
, she thought, and then realized that she had spoken the word aloud. “I’m going to be the kind of woman who talks to herself,” she said. “Well, why shouldn’t I?” She turned to the McClintocks’ mirror and began to arrange her long hair, which now glowed a little in the light pouring in the bedroom window.
    When she had put everything away, scrubbed the already spotless kitchen and vacuumed the living room carpet, Julia took a shower and afterward left the house. She had been making up her mind that she would see Lily after all—Lily now lived in Plane Tree House, just across Holland Park. Surely she could persuade Lily not to betray her to Magnus. “Poor Lily” had become, during the past nine years, a good friend: one of the attractions of Ilchester Place was that it was so close to Plane Tree House. In fact, Julia had moved near to both of the other members of the Lofting family. Mark’s flat in Notting Hill was so close that she could walk to it.
    Julia made sure she had her key in her pocket, and then turned up into the park. Almost immediately, she saw the blond girl again. The child was sitting on the ground at some distance from a group of other children, boys and girls, who were carefully watching her. Julia stopped walking, almostfearing that she would interrupt whatever performance was going on if the child should notice her. The blond girl was working intently at something with her hands, wholly concentrated on it. Her face was sweetly serious. Julia could not see what it was that required such concentration, but the other children were as grave as the little girl, indeed scarcely breathing. This was what gave the scene the aspect of a performance. Thinking of Kate, who could keep a dozen other children still while she loosed some fantastic story from her imagination, Julia, smiling, stepped off the path on the side opposite to the play area, so that she was perhaps twenty yards from the girl and her audience, and sat on the grass. The girl was seated, her legs straight out before her, in the sandy overspill from one of the sandboxes: a sort of pit like a golfer’s sand trap. She was speaking softly now to her audience, ranged on the scrubby grass before her in groups of three and four. The other children playing in the sand took no notice of them. They were certainly unnaturally quiet, completely taken up by the girl’s theatrics.
    Julia forgot that she was going to see Lily: she forgot all about Lily. It was five-thirty and still very hot; Julia felt the sun’s great weight on her forehead and arms. Like most London women, she was as white as if she lived under permanent clouds, and for a second considered that for the first time in years, she might get some color. Watching the child continue her intricate movements and brief, admonitory-looking bursts of speech, Julia felt peaceful, slowed by the sun, her tension for the moment gone. She
had
been right to buy the house; she had turned a corner, and could begin to live differently. For a second she thought the blond girl had darted a quick glance at her, but it was far more likely that she had merely looked sideways, aimlessly. There could be no doubt that shewas the same blond girl Julia had seen before, floating along up the street: she did not really look like Kate, except for the accident of that silky, innocent, nearly white shade of hair, but she somehow suggested Kate. Oddly, watching her was not painful for Julia: instead, there was a rootless exhilaration in it. Julia felt disconnected from everything, watching the girl, a pure, happy, sunstruck disengagement. The girl’s face, at Julia’s distance, looked aristocratically fine featured: her profile was heartbreakingly clear. She seemed to be not so much storytelling as lecturing—holding the others by force of personality.
    Her hands were moving;