Page 39 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
When Oskar and Breton talk of my painting, they speak of it in terms of nightmare, of private fears given public flesh, as a very personal phantasmagoria. What I don’t think either of them is even close to grasping is how much of what I have painted is the literal truth.
When I entered the room there were plenty of people in there, mostly looking at Oskar’s painting and talking about it, but there was one man, tall, straight-backed, with white hair and a hat in his hands, standing right in front of mine. He stood and stared at it for a long time, before he went to move on. And even before I saw his face, some quality that reminded me of my father, of the men in our family, of the way they carry themselves, gave his identity away.
I must have made some sound, a little gasp, perhaps a slight choking noise. He turned. He saw me. And from the look on Uncle Austen’s face, the look of horror he gave me, I knew he had understood. The painting. What it meant. In that moment, I understood the scale of the mistake I had made, the extent of my foolishness.
The next thing I remember is running, pushing against people, stumbling through the gallery. I kept running when I got outside, despite people’s stares, despite the cries after me. I did not stop running until I got to the river, panting and gasping so hard I thought I was about to choke or be sick. That was when it really hit me, what I had done.
Because it is not just a painting, Self-Portrait of Sphinx. Not to my family. To my family, it is a declaration of war.
Chapter 11
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
I was not sure whether to be impressed or appalled.
It was one thing to process the news that Alice Long was dead. How ought we to grieve for a woman whom we’d met only twice but who had changed our lives irrevocably?
To absorb what Patrick had done—immediately, instinctively, unilaterally—after learning of her death was something else entirely.
“Okay,” I said. “Run me through all this one more time.”
“Alice Long had no relatives, or at least none she left anything to. That’s what the moving guy said. From the looks of things, the house was rented and the landlord wanted it empty as soon as possible, to let it to new tenants, so everything inside was being carted off to Ely Auction Rooms when I arrived. The proceeds from the sale are going to charity, the removal guy seemed to think. They weren’t doing an inventory, as far as I could see—so I slipped in our Sphinx alongside a load of other pictures.”
“So it’s just... gone? You just gave it away? Without even consulting me?”
Patrick shook his head. “I know the Ely Auction Rooms. I know the kind of people who attend those auctions. If it was a print of a laughing cavalier or a Wedgwood tea set, it would be snapped up for well over the estimate. If it was a painting by Austen Willoughby, it would be gone in a shot. What I can promise you is that no one in that room will want some weird painting of a cat lady with six boobs by an artist none of them has heard of. So all we need to do is wait for it to come up in the sale—in a few weeks’ time, probably—and we buy it.”
“With what?”
“I’ve got a bit of money my mother’s parents left me.”
“And then what?” I asked. “What happens after we buy back the painting you have just given away?”
“Then Self-Portrait as Sphinx has a solid paper trail. A provenance. Bought fair and square, at auction, by us—at an auction house in the very same county as the painting’s last recorded location at Longhurst. It is not stolen goods, it’s a sleeper legitimately bought by two lucky art-hunting students who just happened to know what they were looking at. Our supporting evidence? The journal you found in the Willoughby Bequest, the photograph we found in the Witt.”
He sounded proud of himself. “Our receipt and its date will be verifiable, and the auction records will show the painting came from somebody who can’t tell anyone where she acquired it because—”
“She’s dead,” I said.
Patrick did have the decency to look a little embarrassed by this. “She’s dead, and we’re about to rewrite art history, just like she wanted,” he said.
It was his idea that we should attend the funeral, which was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. It was held on a gray Thursday afternoon, in a crematorium out on the edge of the Fens. We were the only guests in the redbrick chapel where the celebrant gave a brief talk about Alice Long’s life and career before pressing a button that closed the curtains around the coffin.
Then we waited.
The Ely Auction Rooms were located in a large dusty shed on a small industrial estate. Patrick drove us there every Friday so we could scour the aisles, and when we’d finished we’d stop at the Four Horseshoes pub for lunch on the way home. Sometimes we talked about our dissertations, the new supervisors we had been assigned. Sometimes we talked about Freddie, still missing, the police having failed to find any trace of him at Longhurst or in any of the bodies of water they had dredged.
Sometimes we talked about how Harry was coping with it all. About Athena, who was still not speaking to me, who had still not responded to any of the messages I had left, the long letter I had written her. I was sorry, I kept repeating. If she needed me, when she needed me, I would be waiting. She stalked right past me in college, and on the rare occasions she turned up to a lecture she pointedly ignored any empty seats near me. Give her time, said Patrick. Give her space. The day after I put the letter through her door, I found it returned, unopened, in my cubby.
As the weeks passed, with the end of term rapidly approaching, I did start losing faith a little in Patrick’s plan. There was still no sign of any of the stuff from Alice Long’s house clearance at the auction rooms. I kept imagining the painting discarded in some trash bin somewhere. Patrick said we just had to be patient, although he always sounded more confident than he looked. He asked Eric Lam, a law student, what happened when someone died and left everything to charity. The gist was it all took a while—some time to apply for probate, then for an executor to distribute the assets as set out in the will. Not a complex process, unless there had been any questions surrounding the death or any challenges to the will. If things had gone smoothly, then where had Alice Long’s auctionable effects gotten to? I asked. Patrick could not answer.
Then, one Friday, there it was.
Before starting our tour that day, we had skimmed as usual the cheaply photocopied catalogue for any mention of the painting we were looking for. Unhelpfully, the individual who compiled these things was not given to flowery descriptions. “Mahogany table.” “Big jug.” “Small jug.” “Chair.” We had been extremely excited one week to see “Picture: Big Cat.” It had taken us an hour to find: a faded poster of a lion in a cracked frame with an asking price of £5. Today the descriptions were even more taciturn than usual: there were twenty-seven items listed only as “Medium Oil Picture” for us to look through.
“Shall we divide and conquer? We’ve been here an hour and we’ve still got about ten pictures left to tick off,” I said. He looked a little put out, but nodded and then stalked off to the other end of the huge room.
It was all I could do not to squeal when I spotted it: a small collection of old cameras and lenses, piled in a battered cardboard box. I closed my eyes and mentally walked around Alice Long’s cluttered living room, scanning up and down her bookcase in my head. Yes, I was sure of it—these had been on the top shelf.
