to let it lie. She’d had arguments with Klein before, drunk and sober. They were forgotten after a month; two at most.
She got in to find more messages from Estabrook awaiting her. He wasn’t sobbing any more. His voice was a colourless dirge, delivered from what was clearly genuine despair. The first call was filled with the same pleas she’d heard before. He told her he was losing his mind without her, and needed her with him. Wouldn’t she at least talk to him, let him explain himself? The second call was less coherent. He said she didn’t understand how many secrets he had; how he was smothered in secrets and it was killing him. Wouldn’t she come back to see him, he said, even if it was just to collect her clothes?
That was probably the only part of her exit-scene she would rewrite if she could play it over again. In her rage she’d left a goodly collection of personal items, jewellery and clothes, in Estabrook’s possession. Now she imagined him sobbing over them, sniffing them, God knows, even wearing them. But peeved as she was not to have taken them with her, she was not about to bargain for them now. There would come a time when she felt calm enough to go back and empty the cupboards and the drawers, but not quite yet.
There were no further calls after that night. With the New Year almost upon her, it was time to turn her attention to the challenge of earning a crust come January. She’d given up her job at Vandenburgh’s when Estabrook had proposed marriage, and she’d enjoyed his money freely while they were together, trusting - naively, no doubt - that if they ever broke up he’d deal with her in an honourable fashion. She hadn’t anticipated either the profound unease that had finally driven her from his side (the sense that she was almost owned, and that if she stayed with him a moment longer she’d never unshackle herself) nor the vehemence of his revenge. Again, there’d come a time when she felt able to deal with the mutual mud-slinging of a divorce, but, like the business with the clothes, she wasn’t ready for that turmoil yet, even though she could hope for some monies from such a seulement. In the meanwhile, she had to think about employment.
Then, on December thirtieth, she received a call from Estabrook’s lawyer, Lewis Leader, a man she’d met only once, but who was memorable for his loquaciousness. It was not in evidence on this occasion, however. He signalled what she assumed was his distaste for her desertion of his client with a manner that teetered on the rude. Did she know, he asked her, that Estabrook had been hospitalized? When she told him that she didn’t, he replied that though he was sure she didn’t give a damn he’d been charged with the duty of informing her. She asked him what had happened. He briskly explained that Estabrook had been found in the street in the early hours of the twenty-eighth, wearing only one item of clothing. He didn’t specify what.
‘Is he hurt?’ she asked.
‘Not physically,’ Leader replied. ‘But mentally he’s in a bad state. I thought you ought to know, even though I’m sure he wouldn’t want to see you.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Jude said.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Leader said, ‘he deserved better than this.’
He signed off with that platitude, leaving Jude to ponder on why it was that the men she mated with turned out to be crazy. Just two days earlier she’d been predicting that Gentle would soon be in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Now it was Estabrook who was under sedation. Was it her presence in their lives that drove them to it, or was the lunacy in their blood? She contemplated calling Gentle at the studio, to see that he was all right, but decided against it. He had his painting to make love to, and she was damned if she was going to compete for his attention with a piece of canvas.
One useful possibility did spring from the news Leader had brought. With Estabrook in hospital, there was nothing to stop her visiting the house and picking up her belongings. It was an apt project for the last day of December. She’d gather the remnants of her life from the lair of her husband, and prepare to begin the New Year alone.
2
He hadn’t changed the lock, perhaps in the hope that she’d come back one night and slip into bed beside him. But as she entered the house she couldn’t shake the feeling of being a burglar. It was gloomy outside, and she switched on all the lights, but the rooms seemed to resist illumination, as though the smell of spoiled food, which was pungent, was thickening the air. She braved the kitchen in search of something to drink before she began her packing, and found plates of rotting food stacked on every surface, most of them barely picked at. She opened first a window and then the refrigerator, where there were further rancid goods. There was also ice and water. She put both into a clean glass, and set about her work.
There was as much disarray upstairs as down. Estabrook had apparently lived in squalor since her departure, the bed they’d shared a swamp of filthy sheets, the floor littered with soiled linen. There was no sign of any of her clothes amongst these heaps however, and when she went through to the adjacent dressing room she found them all hanging in place, untouched. Determined to be done with this distasteful business in as short a time as possible she found herself a set of suitcases, and proceeded to pack. It didn’t take long. With that labour performed she emptied her belongings from the drawers, and packed those. Her jewellery was in the safe downstairs, and it was there she went once she’d finished in the bedroom, leaving the cases by the front door to be picked up as she left. Though she knew where Estabrook kept the key to the safe, she’d never opened it herself. It was a ritual he’d demanded be rigorously observed that on a night when she was to wear one of the pieces he’d given her he’d first ask her which she favoured, then go and get it from the safe and put it around her neck, or wrist, or slip it through the lobe of her ear himself. With hindsight, a blatant piece of power-play. She wondered what kind of fugue state she’d been in when sharing his company, that she’d endured such idiocies for so long. Certainly the luxuries he’d bestowed upon her had been pleasurable, but why had she played his game so passively? It was grotesque.
The key to the safe was where she’d expected it to be, secreted at the back of the desk drawer in his study. The safe itself was behind an architectural drawing on the study wall, several elevations of a pseudo-classical folly the artist had simply marked as the Retreat. It was far more elaborately framed than its merit deserved, and she had some difficulty lifting it. But she eventually succeeded and got into the safe it had concealed.
There were two shelves, the lower crammed with papers, the upper with small parcels, amongst which she assumed she would find her belongings. She took everything out, and laid it all on the desk, curiosity overtaking the desire to have what was hers and be gone. Two of the packages clearly contained her jewellery, but the other three were far more intriguing, not least because they were wrapped in a fabric as fine as silk, and smelt not of the safe’s must, but of a sweet, almost sickly, spice. She opened the largest of them first. It contained a manuscript, made up of vellum pages sewn together with an elaborate stitch. It had no cover to speak of, but seemed to be an arbitrarily arrayed collection of sheets, their subject an anatomical treatise, or at least so she first assumed. On second glance she realized it was not a surgeon’s manual at all, but a pillow book, depicting love-making positions and techniques. Leafing through it she sincerely hoped the artist was locked up where he could not attempt to put these fantasies into practice. Human flesh was neither malleable nor protean enough to recreate what his brush and ink had set on the pages. There were couples intertwined like quarrelling squid; others who seemed to have been blessed (or cursed) with organs and orifices of such strangeness and in such profusion they were barely recognizable as human.
She flicked back and forth through the sheets, her interest returning her to the double page of illustration at the centre, which was laid out sequentially. The first picture showed a naked man and woman of perfectly normal appearance, the woman lying with her head on a pillow while the man knelt between her legs, applying his tongue to the underside of her foot. From that innocent beginning,
