Page 19 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Then something else caught his eye.
“Mais cette peinture,” said Breton, eyes widening. “C’est incroyable!” I glanced at Oskar’s face, to see his expression. His eyes did not meet mine. His smile looked stiff, frozen. Breton took several quick steps across the room, clapping his hands together as he did so, an almost girlish gesture. “Vraiment Surréaliste!” He turned to smile, first at Oskar and then at me. Why had Oskar not said anything to him about this piece he was working on, he asked playfully. Of course this must be in the exhibition.
Oskar did not answer. It seemed he was incapable of speech. I returned Breton’s smile but found myself temporarily unable to reply either. Because it was not one of Oskar’s paintings that had caught Breton’s attention.
It was my Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
I suppose it should have been no surprise that it would appeal to Breton. After all, the piece had started life as an experiment in automatic drawing at his apartment, all of us sitting there in silence with our paper in front of us, very serious, trying not to let our conscious minds interfere with what our pencils were producing. It was only when I was finished that I understood what I had drawn.
“Are you alright?” Oskar had asked. “Is something wrong?”
I had told Oskar by then about my time in the asylum. What I had not been able to bring myself to admit was exactly why I had been committed, the accusations I had been flinging around. Symptoms of my illness, was how doctors told me to think of them. Sick products of a hysterical mind. “Think of your father,” they kept telling me. “Think of his reputation.” That was the message, day in, day out, for months.
I had promised that if I was released, I would never say those things again. I understood this was something on which my freedom was conditional. Even now, when I think of writing my darker suspicions down in this journal, my fingers flinch from the task.
What I never promised was that I would not draw or paint them.
Chapter 5
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Our second supervision with Alice Long was scheduled for ten the following morning, although when she opened the door she showed no sign of having been expecting us. For a moment, it was unclear if she even remembered who we were.
“Well, you’d better come in then,” she said, eventually.
Caroline waited until we were all in the living room and Alice was sitting down before she told her about the journal. Where she had found it. What it contained. Juliette’s words. Her drawings. On the back page, she had realized after some research, were Juliette’s color notes, where she had daubed different shades, perhaps keeping it on hand as she was painting to remind herself of their exact composition. Alice leaned forward in her chair to listen. She let out little gasps—of delight, of surprise, of amazement. Her eyes were bright.
“This was in among the papers in the Willoughby Bequest?”
Caroline said yes. Along with Juliette’s passport and pendant. “What I was hoping you might be able to help me with is how they got there.”
“I have no idea, I am afraid,” Alice said. Caroline and I exchanged a look, and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod.
“There’s something else,” I said. “We don’t think the journal is all that survived the fire.”
Alice tilted her head, raised an eyebrow. “And what would make you think that?”
“Did you know Self-Portrait as Sphinx was withdrawn from the International Surrealist Exhibition?” I asked her. “That Juliette only allowed it to be shown for a single night?”
“Of course I do,” said Alice, a touch sharply. “That’s well-documented. After the opening night of the exhibition, she decided that she did not want the painting on public view, and that it was no longer for sale. That’s why it was in their apartment when the fire broke out. That’s why it was destroyed.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” said Caroline. “What if it survived?”
As I explained about the photograph we had found at the Witt, Alice Long let out a few coughs and splutters of surprise and—I was pathetically pleased to see, given her obvious disdain the first time we met—a nod of what looked like grudging admiration.
I did feel bad that she was the first person with whom we had shared our discoveries, and not my father. Given his connection to the Willoughbys, to Longhurst, given he was the reason we had stumbled across the photograph of the painting in the first place. Should I have told him? Probably. Somehow, though, this felt like something Caroline and I were meant to do together—or to put it another way, what I did not want was for him to swoop in and grab all the credit.
As with most people in his profession, one of the dreams that had kept my father crisscrossing the country from auction house to estate sale all these years, that had him thumbing through typewritten auction catalogues in bed every night, was the dream of stumbling across a valuable work that no one had correctly identified. A sleeper. Unlike most people in his profession, he had actually already stumbled across one, once.
When I was about a year old, when money had never been tighter, he convinced himself he had found the painting that was going to make his fortune, change our lives. What he believed to be a small early Madonna by Raphael that had spent a century hanging in a country house outside Norwich, then ended up in a general sale of its contents. It was in bad condition, varnish thick and darkened. Someone had overpainted an arm (at a jarringly peculiar angle) to cover up damage to the canvas. Nevertheless, my father said, he knew.
It required a lot of expensive restoration that he would need to cover the cost of. He would have to spend months in the archives establishing a convincing provenance, and then it would have to be authenticated by an authority on the artist—he asked his former college tutor, an acknowledged Raphael expert. Dad brought the painting up to the professor’s rooms himself, the murk of decades removed, the original colors glowing from the canvas. The expert scratched his chin, peered first at one corner of the painting then another through his glasses (Dad did a very convincing impression of this). His verdict was—School of Raphael. Probably undertaken by a follower, a decade or so after the master’s death. A very nice piece, impressive in its way, but no Raphael. He even estimated what it might be expected to fetch at auction: about ten thousand pounds (when Dad sold it, it achieved just over eight, and he recouped only a fraction of his costs).
As they were walking to Dad’s car, the professor—apologetic, friendly—had mentioned that he was working on a new edition of his own authoritative book on Raphael. Dad wished him luck. To my father’s surprise, when the revised book was published, the professor’s opinion had for some reason changed and the painting Dad had shown him was included among the canon of works by the master himself. The next time the Madonna came up for auction, three years later, it sold for fifteen million. There were many ways my dad told this story. Wry. Rueful. Self-pitying. Furious. I must have heard it in every variation at least a hundred times.
He had been robbed of that sleeper. There was no way, if I dropped even the slightest hint at what Caroline and I had found, he would not try to somehow claim this one for himself.
“What I don’t see,” Alice said, sounding genuinely confused, “is how it could have got there. Juliette’s painting. To Longhurst.”
