Page 18 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Frustratingly, in contrast, my search for material on Juliette Willoughby yielded slim pickings. Predictably for an artist with no extant art, her name was not listed in the library catalogue at all. Instead, I contented myself with leafing through the files for work by other Surrealists featuring Sphinxes. I was sifting through a box full to bursting of photographs of Salvador Dalí’s paintings when Patrick’s face appeared over the top of my carrel. He was grinning.
“Did you find the paintings you were looking for?” I asked.
He shook his head. He was still grinning.
“What is it?”
“I’ve made a bit of a discovery. Come with me.”
A box was open on Patrick’s desk. It was labeled Longhurst Hall, 1961.
“What is it?” I asked.
He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit. “This is one of those boxes of photographs I told you about,” he said. “The ones my dad asked me to go through.”
He indicated the picture at the top of the pile. It showed a painting of a sad-eyed bloodhound, the background incomplete, the work unfinished, the painting unsigned. The photograph was old and of poor quality, black-and-white. He shifted it across to a different pile. Under it was a photograph of a painting of a wolfhound, nose to the ground, clearly undertaken by the same hand. Patrick added that photograph to the other pile too, revealing the one underneath.
“What do you make of that?” he asked me.
“It can’t be,” I said.
The photograph—frustratingly fuzzy, annoyingly monochrome—was centered on a single female figure. I could feel Patrick watching my reaction. It was her. The young woman from the passport photograph. Juliette Willoughby.
On her face was an expression of bold challenge. Around her neck was a familiar pendant, which she was pointing at with an index finger. Her paws—this figure was from the waist down feline—were crossed on a rock in front of her. Around the central figure, infuriatingly hard to make out, were other scenes. A pale girl with dark hair. A hooded figure in a boat.
“It can’t be. Nothing in that apartment survived the fire,” I said, shaking my head. “Everyone knows that. You said it yourself.”
“What about the journal, what about the passport you found, the locket?” said Patrick. “They clearly survived the fire. They somehow found their way to Longhurst.”
“It’s impossible,” I said.
Patrick shook his head. “It’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx,” he said.
JULIETTE’S JOURNAL, PARIS, 1937
Third Entry
Monday, 13th December—I sometimes wonder how history will remember us, Oskar and me.
For days he has been tinkering with Three Figures in a Landscape, the enormous, overwhelming painting in oils he has been working on for as long as I have known him, agonizing over, wrestling with.
All morning, Oskar has been bouncing over to the front window to peer out, expectantly. This being a Monday, the concierge’s wife was mopping the stairs and landings, and every time her mop collided with the baseboard he would start, convinced it was a knock at the door. Every time Oskar passed the mirror he would run a hand through his hair, straighten his tie—gestures that made him look rather like a nervous maître d’ waiting for opening hour.
He checked his watch. He picked up the paper and stared at it. He checked his watch again. Finally, with a grating sound, we heard the big wooden street door opening. Voices, one of them the concierge’s wife, the other the man we were waiting for: André Breton. The acknowledged leader of the Surrealist movement, certainly its most celebrated theorist and spokesperson. The man whose opinion Oskar respects more than that of anyone else in the world.
I have always found him a bit pompous, if I am honest.
There are some celebrated people who seem at all times very conscious of that fact. My father, the MP, is one of them. Breton is another. The first time Oskar brought me to a Surrealist meeting—at the Promenade de Vénus café, where they all used to gather at five thirty every day except Sunday—the first thing I thought about Breton was: he speaks like he is expecting someone to write it down. He was certainly more than happy to pose for my photos, self-consciously holding thoughtful, photogenic poses—elbow on the marble table, or smoking and gazing out the window.
The reason Oskar was so nervous about this visit was that Breton was here to decide which—if any—of Oskar’s paintings is worthy of inclusion in the upcoming International Surrealist Exhibition.
It took him a long time to climb the stairs. Finally came the knock at the door, Oskar literally leaping across the room to open it. As usual, Breton was almost comically courteous, formal, greeting me with a little bow, a polite question in French about how I was.
“Very well indeed,” I answered, in my best schoolgirl French. “Très bien, merci.”
“And this is what you have been working on?” Breton asked Oskar, again in French. Taking up an entire wall of the studio, the one with the best light, was Oskar’s near-complete masterpiece.
Breton lingered in front of it for a while. In some ways it must have been familiar already, given how many nights Oskar spent describing it to him, all the preliminary studies he had seen. He gave a satisfied grunt. He awarded it a little approving nod of the head.
