Page 53 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
There was a gentle knock at my office door, and then the cleaner stuck her head around it to check if my wastepaper basket needed to be emptied. Sam used this as an excuse to hurriedly say goodbye. I switched my computer off, waiting a few minutes to make sure I would not bump into him, then left. It was time to go home. The lights were coming on around the quad as I crossed it to the porter’s lodge. As I was passing, I stopped in to check my mail and grabbed a letter from my cubby.
Taking a seat at the bus stop, I had a closer look at the envelope—it was from Boots, the kind they send containing photos you’ve ordered online. Here we go, I haven’t had one of these for a while, I thought. Like any female academic who does media appearances, I have on occasion been sent some weird things. Drawings. Self-published books. Helpful feedback on how I dress and how I speak and how I have failed to grasp anything about my subject.
I opened the envelope cautiously. Inside were four glossy photographs. I slid them out and inspected the first under the fluorescent glow of the bus shelter light. The photograph was dark, blurry. It took me a little while even to work out whether I was holding it the right way up. Then, all of a sudden, I understood what I was looking at, and when it had been taken. The second photograph confirmed this. It was a lot more brightly lit. I glanced at the third, the fourth. My hands were quivering. My mouth was dry. My eyes felt like they were going in and out of focus.
They were photographs of me at Longhurst, at Harry Willoughby’s twenty-first birthday party. Photographs I had no memory of someone taking. Photographs I could not immediately figure out how someone could have taken. The bus pulled up, but I shook my head at the driver, waved him away again, uncertain whether my legs would support me if I tried to stand. I didn’t understand if the bus stop’s fluorescent light had suddenly started flickering above me or if the bright flashes popping in front of my eyes were because I couldn’t catch my breath.
I reached into the envelope and drew out a piece of paper with the Boots store logo at the top. It read simply: “Authenticate the painting.”
JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938
Oskar was dead. My beloved Oskar was dead, and I had killed him. I had taken a knife and in a moment of terror I had driven it into his chest, into his heart.
At first I could not quite bring myself to believe it. I stood there frozen, looking down at his unmoving body, and despite everything my rational mind was telling me, part of my brain remained convinced that any moment he would suddenly jump up to his feet, with a cry of pain or fury.
Someone on the other side of the courtyard was listening to their radio. Someone else was coughing. I wondered how audible our argument had been, how obvious its sudden end. Oskar and I had often rolled our eyes at that couple in the building opposite arguing—her voice getting shriller and shriller, his louder and louder, until the inevitable crash of a thrown plate, the slam of a door. The thought of that shared memory, of all the memories we had shared, stuck sharply in my throat, and silly as it might sound it was only at that moment I understood the gravity, the true horror, of what I had done, and to whom.
Part of me wanted to stick my head out the window and call for the police. Another part wanted to curl up on the floor next to Oskar, even as his blood seeped onto the floor beneath his unmoving body.
Then my eyes came to rest on the money, next to the envelope on the table with the passports in it. The next thing I knew I was standing at the sink scrubbing at my forearms, the icy water swirling pink in the basin. Then I was making my way down the stairs, passing my landlord’s wife in her doorway, in her apron, the smell of her dinner hanging in the hall, responding to her greeting with a bright bonsoir à vous, trying to keep my face from twitching.
Then I was turning out of the front of our building, passing the café at the end of the street, busy at that time of night. I gathered my coat around me. It was a cloudless night, freezing cold, and by the time I reached the end of the street I was shaking so hard I had to hug myself to stop. Shock, I told myself; this is your body reacting to the shock of what has happened. I was very aware of the need to look normal, the need to behave normally.
I knew that every decision I made that night could change the rest of my life completely.
He was dead. He was dead and I would never forgive myself. But I could also never forgive him for what he had done. I told him that, in my head, as I walked, alternately apologizing and raging at the idiot, the poor stupid dead idiot.
Thanks to Oskar, my painting now belonged to my uncle and there was every likelihood that during the hours they spent drinking together Oskar had let slip enough information to give away where we lived. Uncle Austen might, with a policeman in tow, be hammering on the door of the apartment at that very moment, demanding I return to England with him. What a wonderful gift for my family, for my father, Oskar’s death would be. Just the excuse that was needed to lock me away forever.
How clearly I remember, one of those evenings at Breton’s apartment, his going around the room asking the assembled painters and poets in turn why they hated their father, and everyone giving the usual bourgeois Freudian answers. When it was my turn, I said, “I do not hate my father. My father hates me.” I was not being glib. He blamed me for Lucy’s loss, just as I blamed myself. But even now I could not fully bring myself to hate him. Instead, I pitied him, inasmuch as it is possible to pity someone and fear them at the same time. I pitied him for the sorrow he had suffered. I feared the monster it had made him.
Passing the window of a darkened shop, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection. The bruise on my cheek would soon bloom purple and black, but there was no outward sign of the assault yet. I had expected my reflection to greet me with flashing eyes, wild flying hair, some sort of madwoman’s grimace. Instead, I looked perfectly normal, not even especially flustered. Under my arm I had a bundle of my clothes, tied up with string.
I knew where I was going. I knew what I had to do.
As I walked, I thought of the first time I had taken this route, with Oskar. As I retraced my steps, recognizing buildings I had forgotten, streets and squares I suddenly remembered, I listed all the things that would need to happen for my plan to work, and tried to block out what might happen if it did not.
Chapter 15
CAROLINE, DUBAI, 2023, TWO DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
“Someone knows.”
That was the first thing I said to Patrick, at the airport. There was a moment’s pause before we awkwardly air-kissed, one of my bags getting sandwiched between us.
“Someone knows what?” he asked, confused. To be fair, it was probably not the opening line he had been expecting, after so long, under the circumstances.
“Take me to the gallery,” I said. “Let’s see this painting of yours. I’ll tell you on the way there.”
He picked my suitcase up with a grunt. “Jesus Christ, Caroline, what have you got in here? Bricks?”
“Books,” I said. “Tools of the trade, Patrick.”
With some remark about getting me a Kindle, he pointed in the direction of the airport exit. All the way here, on the plane, I had been turning it over in my mind. Those four photographs, the message that had accompanied them: Authenticate the painting. There was an initial instant when I had suspected Patrick or Harry of sending them, felt a rush of rage that one or both thought I could be bullied. Then I thought things through more carefully. It could not be Harry or Patrick behind this.
The first picture—I remembered that flash just before the first loud thump of fireworks—was of me in my evening dress, outlined against the white dust sheets in Austen’s studio. It must have been taken through a window, from outside, at the very moment I discovered Self-Portrait as Sphinx. The second showed me in the process of trying to work out if I could fit it under my shawl. Presumably, amid the fizz and pop of the rockets, I missed a second flash, and the third and fourth, as I crossed the drive with the painting under my arm and stood in front of the open trunk of Patrick’s car.
The fact it was his car made it unlikely he was the one trying to use these photographs to blackmail me. Likewise, if Harry knew I had stolen his family’s painting, why keep it a secret until now?
