Read Julia for Free Online Page B

kitchen.
    The light bounced, harshly white, from the gleaming surfaces of the oven and refrigerator. Julia looked in the cupboard for a glass, but realized despairingly that the McClintocks had taken all of the kitchen and dining things with them, as well as all the linen. The kitchen held no food, no drink. And now it was hours past closing time for shops. Julia turned on the cold water from the taps over the sink and applied some of it to her face; then she cupped her hands and tried to drink from them, but she could not hold enough water in her palms. Eventually she reduced the flow of water from the tap and bent her head so that she could drink directly from it. The water tasted metallic and brackish: she let it run for a minute, and tried it again. Now it was slightly better, but it still tasted as though it were full of metal particles. She supposed she would have to buy bottled water; but maybe she would get used to the taste.
    Julia dried her hands and mouth on the long reddishdrapes over the outsize hall window. While doing this, she remembered the bloodstain from the morning and looked down at the side seam of her dress. The light-blue seersucker showed a stiff brownish crescent an inch long. The stain seemed larger than it had that afternoon. What an odd scene that was, reflected Julia; surely she had found those things in the sand by some bizarre accident, she had probably been nowhere near the place where the girl had been playing. No child would do a thing like that—well, a boy might. She could imagine Magnus cutting up live turtles as a boy.
    Did hot or cold water remove bloodstains? She had been told a hundred times, but could never remember. It was the one you didn’t think it was, so she decided to try cold water. Julia went back through the hall to the big ground-floor bathroom, the one the McClintocks had lined with rose-tinted mirrors. (The McClintocks, in most ways utterly conventional and even a shade stuffy in their tastes, had revealed a secret decadence in their bathrooms. The tubs and sinks were marble, the upstairs tub shaped like a huge sunken shell; the taps were swans’ necks, gold. Most surprising were the walls, lined with tinted mirrors. Julia’s bathroom upstairs had black mirrors, against which the gold faucets dully gleamed.) Julia took off her dress and draped it over the edge of the sink, so the stained portion would soak, and then filled the sink with water. Cold was right, she thought.
    She turned away from the sink and caught sight of herself in the wall mirrors. Funny to see yourself front and back, half nude. Julia wore only underpants and tights.
My shell
, she thought. She was beginning to get a little fat: she would have to be careful about pants. But, she told herself, you don’t look so bad, considering: if no Playmate, no matron either. The rose tint made her skin look darker and healthier than it was;Julia decided to get more sun this summer. It was a vision of Magnus-free peace—to be able to sprawl in the sun in the park outside her home.
    Leaving the bathroom, she sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom she had chosen that morning. Though it was still not dark, she turned on the lights in the hall and bedroom. This gave the house a cavernous, echoing aspect which made Julia realize how little she knew her new dwelling. She crossed to the windows of the bedroom, pulled the drapes together, and began to dress. In a few minutes, buttoning on a floppy blue blouse she had always liked, Julia realized that it had become very warm in her bedroom; she was perspiring as she had outside. The rest of the house had not seemed so warm. She drew apart the drapes and opened the window by pulling it up from the bottom. The air which streamed in seemed magically cooler than the air within the room. It could have been because the house had been empty for a month; or could it have been something else?
    Julia went to the storage heater set against the wall and touched it with the flat of