The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel (27 page)

I don’t know, George. At that point, it simply all became too much for me. Overwhelmed not just with regret at my past choices, but also with the futility of the project, I felt that on top of it all I was making a catastrophic mess of everything else that really mattered to me. Not only was I about to lose you for good, but I had also just alienated the two other people in my life I cared for most. Something in me snapped. Suddenly, I felt the strong need to get out of my flat, out of London. I needed to leave it all behind – my files, my notes, my computer, my phone. I had to get away from everything.

Very early the next morning (it was 30 October), I knocked on my neighbour’s door and asked her to take care of Aisha for a few days, threw a few random items in a bag, and got into my car. I drove to my parents’ cottage in a daze, and I don’t remember much about my stay there. I remember I was cold all the time, as cold as I’d never been before in my life. I remember I couldn’t eat. I remember sitting in a brown dilapidated armchair by the fireplace, wrapped in my father’s dressing gown and one of his scratchy woollen blankets.

I passed seven days in a stupor, dazed and apathetic, and then, early in the morning on the eighth day of my stay, I decided to return to London and face the consequences of my failure. I’ve already told you this part of the story. I was ready to confess, to do penance, to start afresh. I would call you first, and then I would call Amanda and Laura. I would invite them out to our favourite restaurant, and I would try my very best to make up for the missed birthday and for my horrible speech.

Back in my flat, early in the afternoon, I gathered together all my courage and switched my phone back on to call you, George. But then I noticed that a caller with an unknown number had tried to reach me several times that morning. They’d left three messages. I listened to the first. The unknown caller was a woman named Jemima Keller. She said she was Julia White’s lawyer. I hastily shuffled through my notes, and found that I had indeed contacted her firm, Keller, Cain & Candle, at the very beginning of my research to request an interview with Julia. Jemima asked me to call her back immediately. I listened to the second message, in which she once again urged me to get back to her. She said she thought I’d be very interested in what she had to tell me. In her third message, she said that it was of the utmost importance that I call her back right away. And call her is precisely what I did. God, if only I hadn’t. If only I’d done what I’d been meaning to do, and called you instead, George.

‘It’s Clare, Clare Hardenberg,’ I said when she answered. ‘You said you had something important to tell me?’

‘Indeed,’ Jemima Keller responded crisply. ‘Julia White would like to see you. Tomorrow. At ten. We’ve already put you on her visitors’ list, and the formalities are all sorted. I assume you can make it?’

‘Yes, I can, definitely,’ I said, trying to control my breathing. ‘Where?’

Jemima told me the name of the institution and instructed me to bring ID. Before I could ask any further questions, she’d hung up.

XIX

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t sleep again that night. The next morning – it was 7 November – I got up very early, showered, washed my hair, put on my favourite silk blouse and skirt, and tried to render my drawn and tired face at least semi-presentable. I put on lipstick and perfume. I felt nervous, almost nauseous, as though someone with whom I was secretly in love had, after months of shy, persistent courtship, finally consented to grant me an interview.

HM Prison Holloway, an all-female Victorian detention centre in Islington, has had its share of famous inmates – the suffragettes, Diana Mitford and Myra Hindley had all served time in the shoebox-shaped red-brick building in which Julia was being held. Although my name was on the official visitors’ list, just as Jemima had told me, the security checks to which I was submitted when I reported to the woman in charge were excruciating. I was only allowed my pen and my notebook, and had to leave everything else in a storage box – my phone, key, purse, even my tissues. But when she also demanded I surrender my recording device I protested.

‘How am I supposed to conduct an interview without this?’ I asked.

The guard just shrugged her shoulders. She evidently didn’t care. But I just couldn’t allow her to ruin this unique chance by disturbing the most important conversation of my life with frantic scribbling, nor could I trust my memory alone, so I pleaded and pleaded, until finally she threw up her hands and said: ‘What
ever
. Take it in, then.’

Eventually, one of her colleagues (a portly, kind-looking Indian woman) opened a massive iron door and led me down a long corridor. We had to pass through various other locked doors until we reached our destination. The room we entered looked like a cell rather than a visitors’ room – lime-green tiles covered not just the floor, but also the walls and the ceiling, from which a naked lightbulb dangled, casting everything in an unforgiving, clinical brightness. Apart from a table in the centre of the room and two chairs, the space was empty. The guard (who had not spoken a word) signalled for me to sit down on one of the chairs while she remained standing next to the door. I put my recording device and my pen and notebook on the table. Although there were a million things I wanted to ask Julia, I’d written down a few questions, just in case nerves got the better of me. My last two interviews had not exactly gone according to plan, and I wanted to be prepared if I lost my footing again. I tried to read them over while I waited, but was too nervous to concentrate. I felt sick, and also utterly exhausted and very agitated at the same time. When I switched on the recording device I noticed my hands were shaking. A couple of minutes later, another guard opened the door. And then, in came Julia, her hands handcuffed in front of her.

She was wearing khaki-coloured military trousers and a large knitted brown pullover. Her face was white and taut. She looked paler and older than in the pictures I’d seen. The two parenthetical lines on either side of her mouth had deepened. She put her cuffed hands on the table between us and sat down on the edge of her chair, carefully and very upright, without saying anything. She held her head slightly tilted backwards and slanted to the left, as though she was scrutinizing something potentially dangerous. And then she looked at me with her deep pond-green eyes. I found it difficult to hold her gaze; in fact, it profoundly disconcerted me. It was so different from what I had expected. Instead of the hard, cold stare of a ruthless sociopath, I saw in Julia’s eyes something I couldn’t quite name – sorrow, perhaps? Sympathy? Or something else entirely? Nobody had ever looked at me like that, and I felt myself blushing, averted my eyes and checked my recording device.

‘Hello, Clare,’ Julia said eventually. ‘You wanted to meet me.’ Her voice, too, was nothing like I’d imagined it – deep and resonant like a cello, it was also gentle and quiet. It must have been the quietness in that voice that caused me to lean slightly towards it, as though afraid I might lose it in the cavernous space.

Julia gestured with her head to the guard who had brought me there, and who was staring straight ahead at the wall behind us. ‘The guard will remain in the room with us. Don’t worry about her. She doesn’t care what we say. She’s heard it all before. Haven’t you, Anita?’

We both looked at her. Anita didn’t respond, and her face betrayed no emotion.

‘See?’ Julia said. ‘Feel free to say whatever you want. Ask me anything. You must have questions for me. Fire away, Clare. We have fifty minutes.’

My heart sank. How on earth would I be able to ask Julia in such a short time all the questions that had been burning in my mind? There was so much I needed to know. I cleared my voice.

‘Thank you for meeting with me,’ I said, feeling very self-conscious. ‘I appreciate that. As you may know, I’m writing a book about you.’

Julia smiled, and I was utterly surprised to see the transformative effect it had on her features. She was breathtakingly beautiful when she smiled, her marble-hard countenance suddenly becoming gentle, soft and kind. ‘So I’ve been told,’ she said. ‘That’s why I wanted to meet you. I know who you are. I hope it’s going OK?’

Again I felt myself blushing. ‘It’s going fine,’ I said, ‘but I wondered whether I could ask you to clarify a few things for me. I’ve been talking to your family and to some friends of yours, and the picture they’ve painted of your character has not always been… well, it’s a mixed bag. I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond to their version of events. So…’ Again I cleared my throat. My voice sounded hoarse and rusty, as though I’d spent all night talking in a smoke-filled nightclub. I found myself wishing I’d brought along some water. I felt very hot. ‘Amy. I spoke to your sister first.’

When I mentioned Amy’s name, I saw something like sorrow in Julia’s face, and she raised her cuffed hands to her forehead to push back a strand of hair that had escaped from her bun.

‘Yes, I thought Amy would want to talk to you. How is she doing?’ Julia had bent forward a little in her seat, eager to hear my response, her eyes wide open. She looked vulnerable.

‘Not well, I’m afraid. She seemed lost, very lonely and confused. She’s awfully thin – but you know that, of course. She feels that you’ve stopped loving her, and that you no longer care about her. She said you’ve been ignoring her for years, ever since you came back from your travels, and that you used to be very close in the past. She can’t make sense of what’s happened between the two of you. Is it true – have you abandoned her because she fell ill?’

For a split second, Julia looked genuinely shocked. I could hear her breathing in sharply. Again she tried to brush the unruly loose strand of hair from her forehead. ‘Of course not,’ she said eventually. ‘It makes me sad to hear that Amy feels that way. I love my sister, and I always will. I had to make a very, very difficult decision. Amy’s illness has been so painful for everyone in our family. We all have different opinions on how best to deal with it. I miss my sister terribly, and I wish we could be close again, but I really believe that any form of contact with me while she continues to self-destruct would make things worse.

‘Above all Amy wants pity, and to be looked after. I think that by falling ill, she tried to force me to continue caring for her just as one cares for a little child. It’s no coincidence that she stopped eating exactly at the moment when it was time for her to become more independent. I know she’s scared and desperate, but I believe that allowing her to think that her illness behaviour
works
would destroy any chance of her ever recovering. Amy wants to continue to play the helpless victim for ever, and I just can’t encourage that. It’s wrong. She needs to learn to take responsibility for her life. She has to
want
to get better. When she does that, we can have a proper relationship again, but not before. She knows that. It’s the same as with alcoholics and drug addicts – at a certain point, their family has to stop enabling their destructive behaviour. It’s hard, it’s terribly difficult, but you need to let them hit rock bottom, and only then will they find the will to recover.’

‘But that’s so
extreme
, Julia,’ I objected. ‘Don’t you feel pity, don’t you feel any sympathy for your sister’s weakness? I take your point about the manipulative dimension of her behaviour, but can’t you see beyond that? I don’t think she’s in control of any of it. What if she dies? What if rock bottom means death in her case?’

Again Julia looked aghast. ‘Of course I pity her, and I miss her dreadfully; I can’t even begin to tell you how much. But if I give her what she wants now, she’ll never recover. Her self-inflicted illness will have
worked
, can’t you see that? And then she’ll continue to use it all her life. The only chance she has is to learn that such behaviour
doesn’t
work, not with me, and not with others, either, and that if she wants me back she’ll have to change.’

‘But what if she can’t change?’

‘But she can. Of course she can. Everyone can. I believe in free will, Clare. We’re all born with the ability to make rational choices – that’s the ultimate prerogative of our species. All those deterministic theories about weakness, trauma, bad parenting and so on, they’re one of the true banes of our times. They’re always the ultimate excuse for
not
taking responsibility. Freud’s done more harm to human society than any other theorist of our age. He’s generated an epidemic of self-pitying narcissism, a reactionary concentration on repairing the self rather than society, of privileging the ego over the community. We live in the age of the
selfie
– that really says it all.’

I thought about that for a while, and I couldn’t altogether disagree with her. ‘What about Jonathan?’ I said eventually. ‘Your brother believes you were born evil – that’s the word he used:
evil
. He thinks
you’re
responsible for Amy’s illness, and that you’ve destroyed your entire family. He thinks it’s all personal, what you did, designed to make your parents and him suffer.’

Julia sighed. ‘Jonathan and I never got on. He hated me from the very start. He thought of me as an intruder and felt jealous of me, and he believed I’d destroyed his special relationship with our father. He could never get over the fact that Tim loved all of us equally, not just him. Or that, at least, he tried very hard to make it look that way. But that’s another story. I’m not surprised that Jonathan presented things in that way. He’s not a very imaginative person. You could see that, I’m sure. As for describing me as evil…’ Julia paused for a moment. ‘That fits perfectly, actually. Evil is a concept that tends to be used by those who prefer not to think, not to question, not to understand more complex causes. It’s the resort of the lazy.’

Again, I found myself agreeing with her. ‘Jonathan seemed particularly upset about a speech you made at his wedding, which he felt was very hostile and designed to ruin his special day.’

Julia laughed. ‘I can’t believe he’s still talking about that. I’m the first to admit that his wedding wasn’t my finest hour, and I’ve tried to apologize to him many times. But he made that impossible because he stopped speaking to me. Yes, I suppose I wanted to tease him a little bit about his conformist life choices. I wanted it to be funny, you know? But maybe I got the tone wrong, and I can also see that his wedding wasn’t the right moment to do what I did. And I should obviously also have known that he lacks any sense of humour whatsoever. I mean any! His guests got what I was trying to do, though. They were all laughing and cheering. I got standing ovations, Clare. They
loved
it. The whole party was in stitches. It was only Jonathan who didn’t get it. And his wife, of course. Anyway.
Mea culpa
.’