Page 21 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“Most of the Egyptian stuff is on the first floor, I think,” Patrick told me.
Halfway up the stairs something creaked and both of us froze. What would they do, the Osiris boys, if they caught us here, I wondered. From the sounds of it, at the very least, Patrick would be out of the club.
All the doors on the first-floor corridor were shut, so we began trying their handles. The first one Patrick turned did not open, so he moved on to another. The first door I tried, the large brass knob did not budge at all. I turned around and tried the door directly opposite. This time, it gave. I tried not to flinch as it squeaked.
I stepped inside a room illuminated only by the light creeping in around the edges of its heavy velvet curtains, giving a vague sense of glass cases lining the walls. The gilded frames of the paintings on the walls were visible, but it was too dark to see the paintings themselves. Dust motes hung in the air. I made my way over to the curtains and parted them slightly.
“Good God,” I said aloud.
In one corner was a whole case of wedjat eyes. Opposite it, another full of jade scarabs of varying sizes. Next to that was a trio of painted limestone busts. It was hard not to feel like this should all be in a museum. It was easy to see why the Egyptian authorities might want some of this stuff back.
Each glass case rested on a waist-high wooden cabinet with drawers. Gently, carefully, I tried one of these. It slid open to reveal a carefully arranged selection of papyri under glass.
I closed the first drawer and opened a second. For a moment, I genuinely could not quite take in what I was looking at. In the drawer was a single long strip of papyrus, its edges cracked and flaking. Clearly, at some point it had been ripped in half. The portion that survived showed the lower half of a robed figure, standing in a boat, steering it across the river. The boat itself—high in the prow and stern—was identical to that in the murky old photograph of Juliette’s painting. The boat bobbed confidently amid stylized waves, their color astonishingly fresh and bright. If it was of a similar age to the papyri Sam showed me in the Willoughby Bequest, I was nevertheless looking at something thousands of years old.
I was leaning in to get a closer look when a door I had not seen, on the far side of the room from the door I had come in through, suddenly swung open. I froze.
From the door emerged Freddie, with something under his arm. What was he doing here? He was not supposed to be in Cambridge. He had told Athena he would be driving up to the party at Longhurst from a friend’s place in London and that was why he could not give her a lift.
Quietly closing the door through which he had entered, Freddie locked it with a key which he then returned to his back pocket. He had not seen me yet, but if he turned his head just a little to the right, he was bound to.
He double-checked the door. He patted the key in his pocket. He turned to cross the room. Something, a creak of floorboards from another room, a change in the atmosphere, gave him pause. He stood where he was. He looked like he was listening for something.
I had been holding my breath for almost a minute, squeezing into the shadows. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Freddie had crossed the room and was closing the door behind him. Finally, with a gasp, I let out the breath I was holding.
From the downstairs hallway, I could hear voices—Freddie’s, Patrick’s. Then I heard the front door slam. A few minutes later, Patrick appeared.
“Are you in here?” he asked loudly.
“Over in the corner.”
“No sign of a dinner jacket anywhere. I’ll have to pick one up on the way,” said Patrick. “Freddie was here. He came sneaking down the stairs and gave me the fright of my life. He didn’t see you, did he?”
I shook my head. It had been a close call, though. Even now my heart was thumping.
Patrick asked me if I had found anything of interest. “Yes. I don’t know what it means yet, but it must mean something. Remember that boat in the photograph of Juliette’s painting?” I said, beckoning him over to the open drawer in front of me, the one with the papyrus in it. “Well, look at this...”
WE WERE HALFWAY TO Longhurst before Patrick revealed that the place we would be stopping off to pick up a replacement dinner jacket was his mother’s house. That I would be meeting her for the first time. The plan had been to get to Longhurst early, so that Patrick could help Harry set up, and therefore I was dressed for comfort—hoodie, jeans, sneakers—rather than elegance. It was midday—were we expected to have lunch with her? Should I have brought flowers, a present? I tried to ignore the rising panic in my chest.
I had only the vaguest idea of what Mary, Patrick’s mother, was going to be like. I knew he had lived with her when he was home from school for the holidays. That after the divorce from Patrick’s father, she had trained as a paralegal. That she had a partner, Steve, someone Patrick always spoke of with mild disdain. He had made it very clear that Steve was her boyfriend, not his stepdad.
The house was not at all what I had been expecting. It was in Suffolk, and I suppose I had been imagining something charmingly rustic—a cottage, maybe, or a farmhouse. To my surprise, it was in a row of houses, in a village that reminded me of my grandmother’s. The same sort of redbrick two-story 1930s semidetached houses, with about the same amount of front garden, the same red tiled roofs. The same sorts of cars in the driveways.
The MG was definitely an anomaly.
I remembered various self-deprecating things Patrick had told me about himself as a teenager—the smoking jacket he affected at home for a while, the hours he spent in the bath reading Proust and Wilde and L’Uomo Vogue—and found myself rapidly recontextualizing them.
“Well, here we are,” he said, as we turned onto a sloped cement driveway. “Don’t forget to take your shoes off. My mother is very particular about her cream carpets.”
It is surprisingly tricky to extricate oneself with dignity from a sports car parked on a slope. By the time I had done so, the front door of the house had opened, and Patrick’s mother was bustling out to greet us and to tell Patrick off for being late. She had sandwiches. Did we want sandwiches?
“It’s fine, honestly,” said Patrick. “We don’t need anything. We had breakfast. We were thinking about stopping at a pub for lunch. It’s going to be a big dinner tonight. Unless you want anything, Caroline?”
I said I did not unless she had gone to the bother of making it. Which is how, as Patrick and his mother searched his bedroom, I found myself sitting alone on the living room sofa with a large plate of crustless smoked salmon sandwiches in front of me.
“It was definitely here,” I could hear Patrick saying, through the ceiling.
On the mantelpiece sat school photos of Patrick at different ages. Patrick and his mother and Steve on vacation somewhere, Spain, perhaps, Patrick with a center part and wearing an enormous white T-shirt and baggy swim trunks.
