Justine Read online

  Justine

  Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

  Justine is a painting, a doppelgänger and a woman of beguiling beauty. Set in contemporary London, Justine is a story of a man’s obsession with a woman – or is it two women? For Justine has a twin sister Juliette, and as the story unfolds, the opium-dazed narrator becomes increasingly unsure as to the identity of the woman he desires.

  Praise for Alice Thompson

  “What makes a book happen? Where does literary inspiration come from? These are some of the underlying questions asked by Alice Thompson’s deliciously creepy tale that is almost an homage to surreal horror stories such as Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and John Fowles’s The Magus ... Her prose style tackles these questions in spare and simple language, devoid of drama and, it would seem, ambiguity, and in that sense, she avoids echoing the richness of both Angela Carter and John Fowles, even as she appears to be paying her tribute to both of them. It’s a wise decision, as this prose style also matches better the sparse landscape of the island itself. This is a simple yet clever tale, gently satirising literary ambition as it explores the darker sources of inspiration, and told with all the supernatural horror of the best Hammer stories..” —LESLEY McDOWELL The Scotsman

  “Thompson’s gripping narrative invites the reader to solve the mystery of Burnt Island and the true purpose of Max Long’s fellowship. A dark, compelling novel with strong themes of paranoia and strange eroticism throughout.” —LIZZIE GREENHALGH The Lady

  “Haunting, strange, Kafkaesque, poetic mystery.” — IAN RANKIN on The Existential Detective

  “A gothic music video of a novel that whirls with weirdness... madly energetic ... genuinely scary.” — STEPHEN KING on Pharos

  Justine

  ALICE THOMPSON was born and brought up in Edinburgh. She was the former keyboard player with post-punk eighties band, The Woodentops and joint winner with Graham Swift of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for her first novel, Justine. Her second novel, Pandora’s Box, was shortlisted for The Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year. Her other novels are Pharos, The Falconer and most recently Burnt Island. Alice is a past winner of a Creative Scotland Award. She is now lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh University.

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  Justine (1996)

  Pandora’s Box (1998)

  Pharos: A Ghost Story (2002)

  The Falconer (2008)

  The Existential Detective (2010)

  Burnt Island (2013)

  The Book Collector (2015)

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  The lunatic, the lover and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact:

  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

  That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

  Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:

  The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  one

  The style in which my flat is decorated gives everything away about me. A gift to you which includes the fact that there is something about me that will never be given away, let alone sold for a price. The inner recesses of my flat’s interior, the darkened niches velveted burgundy over, and the paintings with their faces set to the walls, hint at an enigmatic character with a taste more perverse than is entirely natural. These rooms are stuffed full of objets d’art but the space in which I live also requires the rigour of interpretation.

  Interior decoration involves, after all, (and I mean after all), the black art of manipulation and the casting of spells. The arabesques on the walls run circles round my visitors’ preconceptions of me. The sword of perfect taste is brandished with which to chop off their heads. Now, they are too afraid to come in.

  From the day that I was born, beauty surrounded me, embraced me, and picked me up, bloody and screaming, in her arms. She had a face as pale and hard as a pearl and her mouth was congealed from the blood-red drop of a ruby. She took her son home to Blenheim House where I became confused between the symmetry of my mother’s form and the arches that carved up the span between the high-ceilinged rooms. This has been my birthright: the indissoluble link between a house and the person who lives in it. To describe my flat to you in detail is to tell you exactly where I stand. It is my way of throwing down the gauntlet.

  The drawing-room is covered in deep blue tapestries which crawl up the walls like the dying waves of the sea. Peacocks of gold strutting down the corridors of a maze are interweaved into its depths. Curtains fall down over the twelve paned windows in impenetrable tresses of green. The thick tangible texture of the room possesses a landscape of its own. It is easy to slip on the mahogany of the wooden floor which is burnished ox-blood. Lilies of the holiest white sprout from a charcoal vase, their sharp green leaves that could cut skin shafting up between the petals. Their decadent scent makes the air heavy, their sweetness sometimes so suffocating it is difficult to breathe.

  Plants grow in the bathroom and honeysuckle reaches her arms in through the window. The iron paws of lions stand at each corner of the huge porcelain bath.

  The library is from where I am now writing to you, writing out the story of Justine. The shadows on the shelves around me are only books. When I hold up their pages to the light the paper of many of them is so thin that the words of the other side strike backwards, through. From the library steep oaken stairs lead up to my bedroom.

  The colours of my bedroom which are in black and gold have an awful symmetry of their own. It is always evening in here for the curtains are perpetually drawn. The candlestick on the bedside table is of a golden serpent, his head raised as if about to strike, a candle flickering in his wide open mouth. He has holes for eyes. I lie on my bed, my arms outstretched in the shape of a cross and realize slowly that I know of all the suffering and joy that the world contains. I can grasp the entirety of the globe in my hands. In the darkness my body hardens into ebony and my eyes transform into ingots of steel.

  The meaning of my existence lies within these rooms of mine. My anxieties and ecstasies are framed by their walls. I am protected from the profound nausea and terror that the outer world with its lack of pattern can invoke in me at a touch of its filthy hand. Outside I was so vulnerable, so prone to the malignancy of other people. I needed to screw my courage to the sticking-place to make it to the corner of the square.

  two

  At least children are honest. Years ago, when I once suffered little children to come to me, they shouted out ‘cripple’ or sniggered behind their tiny hands at the way I walked. Children speak the truth. It was the adults who lied, big, black, spidery lies. They only pretended to avert their eyes. Adults relish perversion of any kind, but a physical deviation: what a joy. A fleshy symbol of what is different is the glorious manifestation of sin. When I walked down the streets I became an entertainer, a magician who conjured up silver coins from behind his ears.

  As a child I had liked the way the tip of my foot converged into three large toes like the webbed foot of a duck. I had liked the way the skin of my foot, unlike the skin of the rest of my body, was as resilient and hard as the saddle of a horse, but in the space under t
he arch was as smooth and moist as clay. The limping which was the result of the foreshortened leg, seemed only natural. The rocking movement from side to side as I walked made me feel as if I were gliding not over the ground but over water. However, as I grew older, I began to notice that when my mother bathed me she refused to touch my foot or even turn her head in its direction. It was left to my Nanny to soap and caress the arch, whispering in my ear that I was her little Achilles. When I was fitted with the black platformed shoe, it was the absence of the rocking movement that seemed unnatural. I now had to walk on earth like other people.

  As a young boy I used to watch, in secret, my mother dress for dinner. Her beauty besotted me. Standing in the cold of the dark corridor, I would peer into her bedroom out of which warm light and scented skin would pour. She would be sitting, half naked at the mirror, her round full breasts reflected in the glass so that I could feast upon them from every angle. My father would lie on the bed watching her too, but out of sight from where I stood. They would speak desultorily to each other. One evening my father stepped, for the first time, into my line of vision to fasten up a line of pearls around my mother’s neck. Like a stranger, he bent down over her powdered skin.

  ‘If only he didn’t have such a beautiful face,’ she said to him quietly, ‘But he has the face of Adonis. If he looked like a troll, it would make more sense. I could accept his deformity more easily. But the flawlessness of his face mocks me. I can hardly bear to look at him.’

  It didn’t matter that I could not see my father’s face for when I could, I was unable to read it – the canvas was blurred and out of focus with the interior man. Sometimes when he was in the room beside me, I had to look at him twice to confirm that he was there. One spring afternoon I watched him, from the top of the stairs, smuggle a painting up into the attic. The painting was wrapped in brown paper so that I could not see what it represented.

  three

  My mother worshipped at her mirror’s shrine: she adored beauty and her own was no exception. She would gaze upon herself for hours and I would watch her gazing. Idolaters came from all over the country to pay her tribute. They came in the form of men. Their bodies were dark-skinned and pale, svelte and gauche, but they all spoke in the same tongue.

  The heat of my thirteenth summer melted the days and nights together into a cauldron of gold. Time collapsed. Every morning seemed like a drained-blue memory of yesterday. At night, as I lay in bed, my window wide open to the sound of the owl, the heat of the day would slide insidiously into my bed beside me. The heat of the day kept me awake with its feverish stroking turning me from side to side and licking my skin with its hot tongue, as the moon hung quietly outside in the swollen sky.

  One evening, the heat turned me out of my bed, pushed my naked body out with its hands. It forced me to run out of the house down to the lake, past the walled garden. A boat was moored to the small wooden pier. Rowing out into the centre of the mirrored lake I anchored over and below the moon. I stood for a moment balanced on the gunwale of the boat looking out into the night stillness. I dived. The cold water parted open for my body only to grab hold of me again in its icy grasp. I opened my eyes as I plunged down into its blackness, and it was as if I were flying up into the night sky.

  Although I never reached the bottom, now, from the library where I write, I can imagine what it is like. At the bottom of the lake are starfish, as if they are stars fallen straight from the sky in the same pattern that they formed above. Rainbow fish dart like fireflies through the transparent water. Scarves of green weeds wave as if undulating in the breeze. At the bottom of the lake, I am sure, is the silent and profound version of what is above. Down there, at the bottom of the lake, just out of my reach.

  That evening I surfaced to look out over the water at the white-pillared folly that palely glimmered within the shadows of the other side of the lake. Like a ghost, my mother, in transparent silk, her back turned to me, stood on its wide steps. One of her pilgrims stood beside her, his face reflecting blankly the light of the moon. From the centre of the cool water of the lake, I watched this strange man shut his forget-me-not eyes, as with her mouth she plucked out his heart through his open lips.

  four

  When my mother aged, she aged inexorably and terribly. She covered the mirrors in Blenheim House in black net veils, as if in mourning for the lost beauty once reflected in them. The flesh that had once clung so tautly to her high cheekbones was pulled off the bone in jowls and lines, by remorseless invisible hands. Age clawed at the corner of her eyes and drew red veins across her face. But it was in the expression of her eyes that the price she was paying showed most.

  For every new line that marked her face I added to my rooms an object of art. Kensington Gardens became a memorial to her loveliness. I felt pity for her: I understood about disfigurement.

  My own face, however, seemed to grow younger rather than older as the years passed.

  ‘It is not natural,’ she said, ‘For experience to have marked you so little. It is as if life has not long enough fingers to touch you.’

  As my mother’s beauty disintegrated, so did her mind. For her sense of identity was dependent on how she appeared. From being dry and elliptical her language metamorphosed into childish anecdote. The grace of her body turned into the forelegs of a seaside donkey. Every time I came to visit her I noticed that another Dresden shepherdess had lost her arm. The black smiling sand-boy that had stood by the side of the main stairs had had his nose knocked off – the white of the chipped porcelain glared out from beneath. Only when every precious art figurine in Blenheim House had lost a limb did I realize that this was not due to my mother’s clumsiness. Surgical precision had performed each amputation. She had gone around all the statues in the house, deforming them one by one. After her death I discovered the limbs in a large box marked in red felt-tip pen miscellaneous, which she had stored under her bed. Inside, piled up high, were legs, teeth, hands and ears, made of china, clay or coloured glass. I wondered if she had kept them there to gloat over, or if one day she had planned to stick the limbs back on. Our family motto had always been facta non verba.

  five

  Beauty is spring-water cold. She doesn’t twist and weave and shadows only serve to accentuate her features. Her static opacity is like a mirror which refuses to reflect anything but itself.

  My love of beauty is why I collect art. For art renders beauty immortal, traps her for eternity in amber. The painted details of a pure shaft of light, a creamy tuft of ermine fur, a bleeding jewel defy the passing of time. The art I collect must, of course, conform to the ideal. Art that does not is a lower form of life, a form of degradation.

  After the thrill of seeing a beautiful object for the first time, my second desire is to possess her. I want to take her home, touch her, lock her up, take her out, look at her, stroke her, whenever I wish. If I had not been born into money, I would have become an art-thief.

  Do not dismiss this compulsion to own what is beautiful as superficial, as only a matter of style. For the exquisite sense of pleasure I experience when gazing upon an object of beauty is more profound than any meditation on the nature of truth. You may think, perhaps, that this worship of beauty is dangerously romantic. That I have carved out for myself, within the maelstrom of the twentieth century’s final decade, an unnatural vacuum. And you would be right. For tell me, what is so good about reality? Would you prefer that I decorated my flat with famine victims, that I laced my floors with leprous skin?

  six

  It is as if I see the years of my life before I met Justine, through the water of a still pond. I collected art and went to dinner parties and talked to elegant, articulate people on a frequent basis whom I had no desire to meet again. I was in control of my life to the point of the absurd. The future had already happened. Yet at night the predictability of my life began to be disturbed by the recurrence of a single dream.

  I am driving up a
wide avenue lined at regular intervals by tall beeches. The silver light of their leaves is reflecting the blueness of the sky. The hot afternoon is being bled dry by the scarlet rhododendrons which flourish between the trees. I didn’t think that I had a destination.

  It is only when I turn the corner of the avenue that I see the house. A huge Gothic house rears up in front of me like a leviathan raising its head out of the sea. Its skin is of dark grey stone. Gargoyles, grinning and gulping, with wide open mouths line its side. One of the gutters has broken and water trickles down in a line over the surface of its body eroding the greyness to reveal the white chalkiness beneath. Seeing the water, I realize that, in spite of the heat, it has only recently stopped raining. The sky behind its frame is of unlimited blue: unreally, as if a sheet of azure cellophane has been inserted behind the façade of the house. The flatness of the sky contrasts with the thick three-dimensionality of the house. To the right of the house grows a maze of dark green yew, standing taller than a man. In the dream I never reach the house, I always wake up just as I am turning the corner of the avenue and seeing the house for the first time.

  Waking, I would lie outstretched on the horse-hair sofa, the disturbing memory of the dream diffusing in the lilac spirals of the opium I would occasionally smoke. It was through the sweetness of this smoke that the portrait, which hung above the swirling marble of the mantelpiece, invariably drew my eye.

  seven

  The portrait was a full-length figure of a woman. She was sitting at a table, in a bare dark room with a window whose bars flung their shadows across the left-hand side of her face. On the table lay an open hook and a bottle of ink. The writing inside the book was hand-written not printed, in childish form. The script covered half a page. The actual words, however, were illegible. In her hand she held a fountain pen. A velvet dress clung to the contours of her body, her breasts offering themselves up to the viewer by the low cut of its Empire line.