Page 84 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
That he was trying to bring them back. That he was trying to bring them all back. The maid. The cat. My sister. That the mad old fool, with his mummies, with his hieroglyphics, had convinced himself that the ancient Egyptians really had found a way of dragging people back from the dead. He believed the reason that the descriptions of the afterlife in the spells of The Book of the Dead are so realistic is because what is being described is actually a set of rituals to ensure your resurrection and survival in this life.
That was what his collecting was for. He founded the Osiris Society as a community of scholars who would work toward recovering that magic. Whether or not anyone else at Cambridge took it as seriously as my father, it’s impossible to say. Perhaps he did not take it all as seriously then as he would go on to in later life. What I am sure of is that the death of my sister turned an eccentric interest into a macabre obsession. Because, he believed, if only he could establish the authentic, uncorrupted, original version of the correct ritual, the right way of saying those words, he could bring her back. He could row my sister back across the river of the dead and restore her to us.
Poor, sweet Jane had not run away. There had been no affair. He had drowned her and taken her body to his mausoleum and done to her exactly what he’d done to the cat and I fear many other creatures.
It was not a story you could tell and expect to be believed. My experiences in the asylum had taught me that.
That was why I painted the truth. If I hadn’t, I think I really might have gone mad.
So many secrets. So many deaths. And now I am dying. The time has ticked on, and I have six months left, the doctors say. My lungs. My liver. My heart. All riddled. The other day I joked with my oncologist that it would be easier to list the parts of me that are not cancerous. Sometimes at night I wake and my sodden, gasping lungs make it feel like I am drowning.
Quentin Lambert—listed in the phone book as an expert in antiques and estate sales—was not a difficult man to find. He was one of those charming, slightly flashy types who turns up at elderly women’s houses when their eyes are failing, undervalues their art and antiques, and offers to take it all off their hands. A spiv, we called them in my day. A spiv who thinks he is a gentleman. When he turned up at mine, he started sniffing around, telling me what this little Arts and Crafts chair and that little chipped Clarice Cliff vase might be worth.
I was the one who brought up Austen Willoughby. Immediately he became effusive. “Austen Willoughby?” he said with delighted pride. He had sold more of his paintings than he could count. He was a close friend of the artist’s son, in fact, and had been a frequent visitor to Longhurst for decades.
“I know,” I said. “Except some of the paintings you have been selling have not actually been by Austen, have they?”
All at once, his manner changed. He became defensive, started blustering about the Witt, how I could check the records there. I said I was sure the photographic records did match the paintings he had sold, probably because he had also been falsifying those records. His bluster died on his lips.
“What do you want?” he said.
All I wanted, I explained, was a little favor. Or perhaps a small series of favors.
First, I needed him to take a photograph of my Self-Portrait as Sphinx on whatever camera and film stock he had been using, and place it in the Witt with the other photographs from Longhurst.
He agreed without hesitation.
“Is that all?” he said.
“No,” I replied.
I had already been supervising students for several years at Cambridge. This year, I just had to make sure I got the right ones, to make it clear I was only interested in students studying the Surrealist 1930s.
It is three thirty on Thursday, October 3, 1991. A red sports car has just pulled up on the road outside my house. From an upstairs window, through a gap in the curtains, I watch as the handsome young man driving gets out, scurrying swiftly around it to catch up with the pretty girl who is already making her way up the drive. They are peering up at the house, exchanging comments, perhaps trying to decide if they have been given the right address. They look young. They look eager. They look perfect.
Their names are Patrick Lambert and Caroline Cooper. One of them comes very highly recommended by her director of studies. The other is Quentin’s son.
“Does he know?” I had asked Quentin suspiciously on the telephone.
“He has no idea. All I’ve done is suggest Surrealism as a dissertation topic. The rest is up to him.”
I will send Caroline to examine the materials in the Willoughby Bequest, where I have hidden my journal, along with the pendant and passport that came back with me from Paris—enough, I think, to convince them the journal is genuine. Quentin will find a way of persuading Patrick to look through the Longhurst photographs at the Witt. Which should, with luck, lead them to my painting, carefully planted in the Green Room at Longhurst, where Quentin is staying right now and where his son will no doubt be for Harry Willoughby’s twenty-first birthday in a few weeks’ time.
That was Quentin’s flourish. “There is a stack of paintings at the bottom of the wardrobe. If he has any suspicion this Self-Portrait as Sphinx might be at Longhurst, he’s bound to look through them. He wouldn’t be my son if he didn’t.”
It will be a gift, the painting, from father to son. The kind of gift that must remain unacknowledged, unacknowledgeable. The gift of a discovery that might launch a career. Just as I shall be passing on my journal to Caroline, a journal full of my sketches and studies for the painting, a journal that tells part of the story of its creation, hoping she knows what to make of it, hoping she understands the importance of what she has been given.
I have not told Quentin who I am. Who I was. Why I am doing this, and why I am so determined it not be a Willoughby who finds this painting. Perhaps he has his suspicions, but I have him in too much of a bind for him to inquire. He knows I could ruin him, so he does what he’s told.
I do wonder if I shall live to see my scheme’s fruition. The final act of a long and surreal life.
Patrick Lambert rings the doorbell, stands back, frowns as if he is not quite sure whether the doorbell is working, whether there is anyone home.
As I am making my way to the door, I catch sight of myself in the mirror, of Alice Long, of Juliette Willoughby. I turn down a corner of my collar, smooth it out, brush a strand of silver hair from my forehead.
It is all about to begin.
I am about to achieve what my father spent his whole life and sent himself mad trying to do.
