Julia Read Free

and the rest of the party were beginning another game, one in which a “murderer” assassinated his “victims” by winking at them, Magnus said quietly to her, “I think I’ll be going. Shall I give you a lift? How did you get here?”
    “I took a bus,” she confessed.
    “Too late for a bus now.” He stood up. He was a head taller than she and too big to be merely burly. When he raised a hand, she flinched; but he carried it to the back of his head and smoothed down his hair. “I’ll take you home unless you live somewhere unreasonable. Blackheath or Guildford are out of my range.”
    “I live in Hampstead,” she said.
    “Grace abounds. So do I.”
    They walked to his car, a black Mercedes, parked on the Fulham Road; she learned that he was a barrister, and that he had once lived next door to Sonia Mitchell-Mitchie, who had become a kind of adopted niece. He asked few questions of her, but Julia found herself talking compulsively. For some reason—a reason she was not to understand for years—she even mentioned Robert Tillinghast when describing why she had left New York.
    It was only when she knew that she was going to leave Magnus that she recognized that she had married him—had fallen in love with him—in large measure because he reminded her of her father. And they were both prodigal, casual adulterers. Julia saw very early that Magnus had other women: he was brutally offhand about them. On the ride back to Hampstead, he had said that he wanted a drink, and drove to a club behind Shepherd’s Market, where he signed her name in a guestbook and led her into a dark, half-filledroom in which elegance was still a few paces in advance of shabbiness. The waitresses wore long pastel gowns revealing out-size, separated breasts. A third of the men were drunk; only two women, besides Julia and the hostesses, were in the club. One of the drunks put his arm about Julia as soon as she entered the room. Magnus pushed the man away without looking at him. He ordered drinks and began to look aggressively about the room as if he were looking for another man to knock down. Both of the other women, Julia saw, were looking at him. She felt pleasantly excited, stimulated, sipping at her drink.
    “Do you gamble?” Magnus asked her.
    She shook her head.
    “You won’t mind if I do?”
    “No,” she said. “I suddenly feel very awake.”
    Julia followed him through a door at the end of the lounge and continued, following his broad back, to a grilled-in counter where Magnus took money from his wallet and bought chips. She watched as he placed five fifty-pound notes on the counter, and, after hesitating a second, a sixth. He seemed to get a surprisingly small amount of chips for all this money.
    Together, they skirted various gaming tables and went up to a roulette wheel. Magnus placed four of his chips on the red. Breathless, Julia watched the ball spinning across the ratchets. It landed, clattering, on red. Magnus left his chips where they were, and the ball landed again on red. Then he moved everything he had won to black; again he won. How much money did those chips represent? Five hundred pounds? More? As she watched Magnus glowering down at the stack of chips, she felt exhilarated, slightly disoriented: he must have loathed the party, she realized. The next time the wheel spun, he lost some of his chips, but his face remained immobile.
    “Your turn, Charmaine,” he ordered. He shoved a stack of chips toward her. With desperation, Julia realized that they were worth at least two hundred pounds.
    “I can’t,” she said. “I’d lose your money.”
    “Don’t be cowardly,” he said. “Bet any way you please.”
    She pushed the chips onto the red, since that was what Magnus had first won with. This time the ball clattered down onto the black. She looked up at him, stricken.
    “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Put more on it.” He slid chips toward her.
    She did as he said, and lost again. She stepped away from