Page 49 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Instead, it had been met with almost total silence. Barely mentioned in most of the reviews. His embarrassment—and mine—only compounded by the fact that in terms of column inches, the painting I had withdrawn from the exhibition was attracting more comment than his, which remained on display.
Embarrassment is perhaps too mild a word. By the third week of February, when the exhibition ended, the situation was excruciating. Every day Oskar would get up in the morning and grimly select one of his unfinished canvases, add a few touches, then return it dejectedly next to the others. Every afternoon he would go for long walks, or find some bar to sulk in. He was out past midnight every night. When he was home, he could hardly bear to look at me, and refused to look at Self-Portrait as Sphinx at all—he turned it around to face the wall, like a naughty child.
I had tried to explain to him my decision to withdraw it from public display. Still, I could not get him to understand why I was so afraid. “What can your family do, even if they find us?” he would ask mockingly. “You are not a minor. This is not England. You are here of your own free will.”
It was weeks since I had been outside, and Oskar kept badgering me to leave the apartment. It was for my own good, he insisted. I was still not painting. I was barely eating. Did I really think it was possible for me, for us, to go on like this much longer? Even if my uncle was still in Paris, Oskar pointed out, how did I think he would have found out my address? Oskar reminded me that of all his artist friends, only Breton had ever been here, once, to see our paintings. It was an international exhibition in which our work had been shown, he would repeat, with fourteen countries listed in the catalogue. There was nothing in the catalogue to connect me to Paris. There was nothing in the catalogue to connect Oskar and me. As far as my uncle knew I could be in Spain, Italy, America, Japan.
Eventually, I gave in.
It felt strange to be out in the world among people again. To walk the banks of the Seine, water brightly sparkling. To feel the cold breeze on my face. I kept seeing things and thinking, I must remember to tell Oskar about that.
But when I got back to the apartment, Oskar was gone. And so was my painting.
The rest of the day I sat there, waiting for him to return, trying to distract myself. I started the kettle going and wandered off, confused moments later at the shrill noise coming from the stovetop and the ceiling roiling with steam. I made cups of tea and did not drink them. The light changed. The room grew dim. Dinnertime came and went. It was just before eight when his footsteps fell on the stairs, their uneven clatter making it clear how drunk Oskar was. The ancient banister complained when he put his weight on it. I could hear him muttering to himself as he fumbled his key out of his pocket and began attempting to jam it into the lock. When at last he did manage to get the door open, he came practically tumbling into the room.
When he saw me sitting there, arms folded, legs crossed, face stony, it took him a moment to readjust his focus. When he bent forward to kiss me—I did not react—I could smell the stale cigarettes on his breath. His stubble scraped my cheek.
“Before you say anything,” he said, holding one hand up, reaching into the pocket of his jacket with the other. He extricated a large brown envelope, turning his pocket lining inside out in the process, and threw it on the kitchen table.
“What is that?” I said, making a point of not looking, a touch of Willoughby hauteur chilling my voice. Some people boil and hiss and pop when they are angry. I freeze. To the casual observer, perhaps even to Oskar, I might have appeared perfectly calm.
“Passports,” he said, a sloppy grin spreading across his face. “Our new passports. Train tickets. Boat tickets. All in our new names. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? A clean break with the past? A new start in the new world?”
Our ship was due to sail from Le Havre the following afternoon. There was a moment when the future seemed to open up brightly before the two of us. New lives. Then I asked him how he paid for all this. What had happened to my painting.
He grew furtive. I asked about my painting again and it all came tumbling out. About the gentleman—a real gentleman, Oskar emphasized, English, educated, a serious collector—he had bumped into at the café the other day. Who had sidled over and asked if he was Oskar Erlich. Who had talked to him about his work. Who inquired about his Three Figures in a Landscape and the work displayed next to it, my painting, and why it had been withdrawn. “What could I tell him?” said Oskar. “I said no one knows except the artist herself.”
I could feel my nails digging into the softness of my palms, my face growing taut. “An English gentleman?” I said. “You fucking fool.”
Oskar sneered, the way he always did when women swore. And then he went that color he did when someone calls him a fool. His fists were flexing, the veins on the back of them standing up. I had never seen him so angry. I looked around for something to ward him off with, if he lost control. There was a fork on the table. There was the little knife Oskar used to scrape paint off old canvases on the corner of the sink.
“A fool, am I?” he said. “A fucking fool?”
As he was saying it, he reached into the inner pocket of the breast of his coat, and when his hand emerged it had another envelope in it. He threw it on the table and it landed with a thump.
“Open it,” he said. “Count it.”
“You stole my painting,” I hissed, shaking my head. “You stole my painting and you sold it.”
He told me again to open the second envelope. I refused.
“Tell me his name,” I said.
“George Brown,” he said in an attempt at an English accent. “His name was George Brown.”
Describe him, I demanded. Oskar did so. And with every detail, my heart sank further. The long narrow face. The tidy mustache. The slicked-back blond hair with the comb marks visible. My uncle. He had been drinking all day with my uncle. He had sold my painting for an envelope of cash, to my uncle. I called him a fucking fool again, then I picked up the envelope and threw it, hard, in his face.
That was when he hit me. An open-handed slap with all his strength across my face that left my ears ringing, my jaw numb, and a taste of blood in my mouth. And he kept coming. His eyes blank with fury, he kept coming at me. He swung again and missed, knocking the rickety table across the room. I stumbled backward, up against the sink.
I raised my arms to defend myself, not really thinking about what I was holding, vaguely aware of one of my hands having closed around something on the edge of the sink. He lunged at me again, as if to seize me by the throat, and as he lunged I felt a jolt in my palm. When I looked down, I saw that it was the palette knife I had been holding, intending to wave it at him, to bring him to his senses.
But now it was embedded handle-deep in his chest, the shirt puckered around it, the blood spreading dark and sticky. And for a moment it looked like he was going to laugh, like it was absurd that I had thought this little thing was going to hurt him, like he might pluck it out and cast it across the room and then there would really be trouble.
Instead, even as he was reaching for it, even as he was formulating something to say, his knees went, and he came crashing down onto them, shouldering one of the kitchen chairs aside as he did so. Then he let out a groan. Then he fell forward, knife handle first, onto the floorboards.
Chapter 14
PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, THREE DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
