Page 5 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
The boxes seemed to contain the entire contents of Cyril Willoughby’s study. Old letters. Handwritten notebooks full of hieroglyphs. Notepaper from Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. One by one, the librarian brought these boxes up from the bowels of the building. One by one, I combed through them, trying to give the appearance of someone who knew what they were looking for. She explained that a new archivist, a PhD student, had been hired to put it all into some sort of order. His name was Sam Fadel and if I had any questions I should look him up.
After five hours and nineteen boxes, I was getting increasingly frustrated with the whole process. Promising myself that if I managed to sift through them all I could at least tell Alice Long I’d done my best, I began lifting the next battered manila carton’s contents out item by item and placing them on the table. More letters, invoices. More notebooks. Then a tattered envelope caught my attention, M et Mme Cyril Willoughby written in looping script on the front. It was heavier than I had been expecting, when I picked it up, and much more intriguing than anything else I had yet come across.
Easing the envelope open carefully with my thumb, I tipped it and out slithered a thin gold chain—a necklace, with a pendant attached. The pendant was beaten gold, oval-shaped, about two inches long, etched on one side with an elaborately stylized representation of an eye: a long, curving line to represent an eyebrow, a line sweeping back from the eye’s rear corner, terminating in a curl.
I could also feel the outlines of two book-like objects inside the envelope. One had a grainy texture, and I shimmied this out first. It was a navy blue British passport, the royal coat of arms embossed on the front. Handwritten, in block letters, in the little lozenge-shaped window at the bottom, was “Miss Juliette Willoughby.”
I let the passport fall open, and from the photograph page the most extraordinary face stared back at me—wide-awake, icy eyes; thick, arched eyebrows; a full mouth set in a hard line; a young woman with a dusting of freckles. Juliette’s wild tumble of curls filled almost the entire frame. I turned the pages and found Juliette’s signature and two stamps, one for Rome (1935), one for Paris (1936). It was a stark reminder that she had been a real, living person, just like me. That with this in her hand, she might have imagined traveling all around the world, and instead...
Hands quivering, I placed the passport on the desk and slid from the envelope a fragile-looking notebook, its unlined pages filled (as I discovered when cautiously I opened it) not just with dated diary entries but sketches and studies. Charcoal drawings of a Sphinx, the artist’s fingers dragged across the page to contour the creature’s eyes, lips, mane. Intricate pencil compositions, the same characters over and over placed in different scenes. Interspersed between these, passages of text in spidery, barely legible cursive handwriting. On the back pages there were daubs of color, each with a number and a scribbled comment next to it.
On the flyleaf, in fountain pen, someone had written the initials “J. W.” and an address in Paris.
I traced the letters with a finger. Their curves. Their swirls.
J. W.
Juliette Willoughby.
I turned the pages carefully, terrified that the brittle paper would crack or crumble, until I came to the first entry. It began: 11th November 1937—It is almost midnight. I am writing this in bed....
JULIETTE’S JOURNAL, PARIS, 1937
First Entry
Thursday, 11th November—It is almost midnight. I am writing this in bed. The night is cold and I am tucked up under every blanket in the place, my toes like little lumps of ice in Oskar’s thick woolen socks. I am saving the last of the firewood for the morning, and there is just a very faint glow from the embers in the stove, the occasional clink as they settle.
This appartement that Oskar and I rent is on the top floor of a five-story building. Once it must have been rather grand. Now it is terribly shabby. Every so often you come up the stairs to find another chunk of the cornicing has come off, another strut from the banisters is missing. In the summer, ours is the hottest room in the whole place, in winter the coldest. There is running water in the kitchenette, when the pipes have not frozen. The bedroom and our studio are one space, not especially large, divided by a canvas curtain, made of the same fabric Oskar stretches over wooden struts and primes for us to paint on.
Apart from the bed (iron, ancient, unbelievably heavy), two wooden chairs and a small round table are the only furniture. There is no carpet. There is a little potbelly stove you have to be careful not to brush up against. There is a single flushing toilet (one sits with one’s knees right up against the door) at the end of the corridor. Our windows overlook a courtyard, from which at all hours the sounds of the rest of the house rise. A dog is barking. A woman is shouting. On the walls are paintings, ours and gifts from our friends, as well as photographs I have taken of Paris and people we know, on the little Leica camera that Oskar gave me for my birthday.
It all feels a very long way from Longhurst. From the world of my childhood.
We have been happy here in Paris, Oskar and I. Deliriously happy, at times, and yet... Do truly happy people keep diaries? I wonder. To whom am I really trying to explain myself, on these pages?
I should write something about Oskar.
I first met Oskar Erlich at a party at the New Burlington Galleries to celebrate the opening of the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. It was June 11, 1936. He was standing in front of one of his own paintings, The Young Girl’s Dream—a red-haired waif in a diaphanous dress, back to the viewer, her pale thin face and enigmatic expression reflected in an ornate mirror. He was surrounded by men with notebooks, women in hats, all fawning, asking him to explain Surrealism, what it meant to be a Surrealist. I was loitering by the doorway, hoping no one too boring or awful would talk to me, waiting for the friend who had invited me to come back from the loo.
Then Oskar and I locked eyes.
Oskar always says he will never forget the way I met his gaze and returned it, the unhesitating confidence with which I crossed the room to introduce myself. “Hello,” I said, offering him my hand to shake. “My name is Juliette Willoughby and I’m an artist.”
I may have sounded bold, but inside I was trembling. All around the room I could see—or thought I could see—people staring at me, exchanging looks, wondering who I was, how I had the nerve to just walk up and present myself to the star of the evening like that. It is a question I have since asked myself. It probably helped that I could see from his paintings that Oskar had a type and I was it.
All that evening, Oskar and I talked—my friend rather put out about that, flouncing off back to our lodgings eventually—and the next day we met again, at a little coffee stand in St James’s Park. As we walked around the fountain and examined the art for sale on the railings, he told me about his early years in Düsseldorf, his student days in Paris, the rows he had with his parents about his decision to give up his medical studies and become a great painter. I told him about my life in London, my classes at the Slade, the disappointment I felt in my teachers.
How heroic, how foolish it all appears, written down. Gambling our whole lives on an instant of intense connection, two people noticing each other across a room and feeling an affinity. Making a decision that would transform the course of both our lives after having known each other for less than twenty-four hours. The strangest thing of all being that it did not seem strange when he asked me at the end of that day if I would consider returning with him to Paris.
And live where? I asked him. And live with me, he said. And do what? I asked him. He smiled a little to himself, as if the answer was obvious, and then he said: paint. It should have sounded ludicrous, felt absurd. Instead, in the moment, what would have felt absurd would have been to refuse.
I was under no illusions about how my father would react to all this. It was clear the break must be sudden and final. There would be no wedding in the little chapel at Longhurst, no party in the gardens by the lake. There would be no forgiveness, no reconciliation. To have fallen in love with an artist, that would have been bad enough. To have fallen in love with a foreign artist, a German? Unthinkable. Especially when that artist was more than twice my age and still married to somebody else.
They must have no warning, I told Oskar. Nothing but a letter to let them know I was safe, that I was in love, that they should not try to find me, and they would never see or hear from me again.
I left my farewell note with a friend, not telling her what was in it, asking her to post it in a day or two’s time. It was goodbye to my old life, and good riddance.
I threw all my sketchbooks, all the canvases propped against my bedroom wall, all the awful, lifeless work I had produced at the Slade into the bins at the back of the building. I packed my paints and brushes—expensively replenished on regular trips to an art shop in Covent Garden with my uncle Austen—a very few things to wear, and my passport, acquired for that dull and disappointing field trip to Rome to troop around the Vatican galleries. Then I left my lodgings and took the underground alone to Charing Cross station, and vanished.
