Page 4 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
By the time we approached the center of town, the rain was even worse, bouncing off the car windows, hammering on the roof. When we stopped at a set of traffic lights, Patrick turned and fixed me with a serious look. “So what do you make of Alice Long, then?”
“Well, she’s certainly... unusual.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“I also think she’s kind of... amazing? All that stuff she was saying about Juliette Willoughby?”
There had been moments over the last three years, in lectures, in seminars, when it felt like my whole world was being tilted slightly on its axis. When things I had unquestioningly accepted my whole life suddenly came apart to reveal their constituent components and they all fitted together, or else disintegrated entirely. When the thing that everyone took for granted turned out to be not the end of the discussion but the start of a much more important one. Had Juliette’s masterpiece been lost? Maybe so, Alice Long had conceded. But what does it mean to say lost? Lost why? By whom? Are you happy—her bright eyes burned into mine as she asked—to simply accept that? Her Self-Portrait as Sphinx was personally selected for the exhibition by André Breton—the pope of Surrealism himself, the movement’s great theorist and propagandist. Contemporary reviewers compared her talent to that of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, Alice Long reminded us. Why not reexamine those reviews, the letters and diaries of Juliette’s Paris circle? There must be mention of her work somewhere. Lost? Pfft, Alice Long exclaimed. Lots of things in the world are only lost because no one has bothered to look for them.
It sounded like a challenge. It sounded like a life’s work. It made me think of my own mother and her dreams of becoming an artist, and all the overlooked, underappreciated women like her over the centuries.
Patrick did not seem to have found all this quite as inspiring as I did.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, squeaking. He mused in silence for some minutes. “Lots of Oskar Erlich’s work was lost in that fire too, you know,” he said defensively.
“Exactly Alice Long’s point! Lots of his work was lost but lots survives, because he spent pretty much his entire career being celebrated and collected and written about in books that barely mention Juliette, let alone the fact that she was an artist in her own right.”
The light turned green and we sped off, Patrick careering through a massive puddle and soaking from head to toe a student in an orange raincoat. In the rearview mirror I could see him shaking himself down, staring after us. I turned in my seat to mouth an apology.
“Here we are,” said Patrick, flicking the indicator too late as he swerved over to the other side of the road. “The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.”
It was time to lay my cards on the table. “Patrick, had you ever heard of it before, this Willoughby Bequest? Have you any idea what Alice Long thinks I’m going to find there?”
He smiled. “I do know a little about it,” he said. One of his hands was resting loosely atop the steering wheel. The other was on the stick, ready to shift his car into gear. “Have you ever read anything about Juliette’s family and their history?”
“Not much. I know the Willoughbys were well-off. Her father, Cyril, was an MP, wasn’t he?”
“And a collector of Egyptian artifacts. He filled an entire wing of his house with them. Quite an eccentric, by all accounts, and a bit of a recluse in his later years. He’s buried at Longhurst Hall, the family estate, in a mausoleum he commissioned, supposedly a scale model of the Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, the oldest known pyramid in Egypt.”
“So Alice Long wants me to explore if there is a personal angle to Juliette’s interest in Sphinxes?”
“I’d imagine so, and in that case this Willoughby Bequest would certainly be a good place to start. When Juliette’s father died, Longhurst Hall and his collection all went to his youngest brother, Austen, Juliette’s uncle. Who kept the house but off-loaded the Egyptian stuff to the University of Cambridge.”
“And that’s how it ended up here?” I gestured out the window to the looming redbrick building that Patrick’s car was currently double-parked outside, hazard lights flashing.
“Exactly. As it happens, my dad was at Cambridge with Austen’s son Philip. And I was at school with his son, Harry.”
Of course you were, I thought. It was still astonishing to me, after three years as a student here, how frequently and how casually people like Patrick would slip this sort of thing into conversation. That his father had been at Cambridge with Juliette Willoughby’s cousin. That Patrick had been at school with his son. Like my friend Athena Galanis, who halfway through a Picasso lecture had told me she was pretty sure her father had at one point owned the painting in the slide. Like the boy in a second year tutorial whose uncle turned out to have written the definitive work on the week’s topic (Flemish Mannerism in the Early Sixteenth Century). It was a small world and it felt very distant from the one I grew up in.
“The thing is,” Patrick continued, “even Philip and Harry can’t quite explain what happened. Because the family never even tried to sell what Cyril spent decades accumulating, although it was worth a fortune. They just gave it all away. Which, if you knew the Willoughbys and what they’re like about money...”
Someone trying to squeeze their car past us down the street honked their horn. “Okay, okay! Keep your wig on,” Patrick muttered over his shoulder. He returned his attention to me.
“The rumor is that the Willoughbys wanted to get rid of all that stuff because—well, they have had a lot of bad luck, that family. Odd and unfortunate things have happened in that house.”
“Patrick, are you seriously trying to tell me they believed the collection was cursed?” I asked.
He shrugged stagily. I opened the car door and climbed out.
Patrick rolled down the window and rested his elbow on the frame. “I guess all I am saying is”—he dropped into a parody of a horror movie voice, adding a little creak and echo to his words—“be careful, Caroline!”
He grinned and winked, then revved the engine and sped away, and with a slight tingle of apprehension—and a lurch of the stomach—and perhaps just a touch of annoyance I realized just how attractive I still found Patrick Lambert.
FIVE HOURS LATER, MY excitement about working on Juliette Willoughby, and much of my enthusiasm about working with Alice Long, was wearing off. The library was airless and silent. Through the windows, the gloom of an autumn afternoon was deepening rapidly to night.
As far as I could see, the Willoughby Bequest was a mess. The first thing the librarian—an elderly woman with striking blue eyes and a somewhat suspicious manner—had asked me was which part exactly I wanted to view. I must have looked blank. She explained that the bequest was divided into three parts: the artifacts, some of which were on display in the museum upstairs; the many papyri (very fragile, not accessible without special permission); and the seventy-two boxes of unsorted general material, unlabeled, undated. Assuming this was where anything relevant to Juliette and her interest in Sphinxes would be, I asked for this unsorted ephemera first.
It was possible this had been a mistake.
