Page 14 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
I have always hated practical jokes, I told him.
It would be almost impossible to express how tedious I found it at Longhurst whenever we had guests. The apple-pie beds. The unscrewed salt cellars. The way my grandfather and father would delight in misintroducing people at dinner. The cruelty, the reliance on an unspoken imbalance of power, had always turned my stomach.
Would Oskar ask his friends tonight, I pleaded, if one had left the newspaper there as a joke? “Of course,” he said, unconvincingly, on his way out the door, clearly bored of the topic. It was three in the morning when the sound of his key in the lock woke me up. I listened to him grapple his boots off, splash water on his face, grope his way to bed. I moved over to make space.
“Did you ask them?” I murmured. “About the newspaper?”
An irritated grunt was my answer.
The thought troubling me was this: what if it was a signal, from my father? Meaning: I know where you are. Meaning: you are under observation. Meaning: I shall not allow myself to be embarrassed by you. Meaning: watch your step.
Oskar was already snoring, flat out on his back.
It is not possible they know I am here, I told myself in the dark. I could be anywhere, with anyone, doing anything. When people take pictures of Oskar, I am careful never to be in them. Jules, he calls me, never Juliette.
I fell asleep anxious, listening to the clunk of the pipes in the wall. I awoke much calmer, in a room flooded with sunlight. It was a fine morning, so I went out to pick up some things—eggs, saucisson, a bottle of vin ordinaire—from the little market in the square around the corner. It was as I was walking back along the rue Jolivet that I realized I was being followed.
My first thought was: Oh God, not this again. Not all this again.
For months after we arrived in Paris, Oskar’s wife had trailed us everywhere. Even after he had told her he wanted a divorce, moved all his things out. Even after it was clear he was in love with me. Somehow, she seemed to believe that if she stalked us, pale and miserable, simply stood there, never confronting us, just staring, he would change his mind and take her back.
It did unsettle me, at first. To look up from dinner and find her at the restaurant window. To be leaving someone’s apartment late at night after drinks or an evening of intense discussion with Oskar’s friends to find her in a doorway across the street, watching. Arriving to meet people in a café to see she was already sitting there, waiting.
I did feel sorry for Maria. I could also not imagine anything more likely to burn off any guilt Oskar did feel for her, curdle any lingering affection for her. Making herself look ridiculous was one thing. Making him look ridiculous in front of his friends and fellow artists? Unforgivable. The only response was to ignore her, Oskar said, to refuse to treat the whole thing seriously. Just once he had lost his temper with her, crossed the street to remonstrate, began making threats about what he would do if she did not leave us alone. It was the first time I had ever encountered that side of him. The way his face contorted, the little flecks of spit flying from his mouth, the wildly waving arms, the strong sense that this was someone no longer in control of himself, a million miles from the kind and playful Oskar I knew. Maria had not flinched. She just stood there, staring impassively. At him. At me.
It did sometimes worry me, what could be going on in her head. What dreams of revenge might be brewing. I have seen what a person with a broken heart is capable of, I would tell him. I have watched the way someone can lash out at a world they believe has wronged them. Oskar always laughed at me. He insisted that if we ignored Maria, she would eventually grow bored. And after a while, she did seem to.
Now it was all starting up again. Well, I simmered, catching a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the shadow creeping along the street after me, feeling my pulse quicken, I had spent enough time feeling sorry for Maria and now I was angry. Now she had to go away and leave us alone. Rarely, I think, have I been so full of rage, so ready for a confrontation.
I turned and the street was empty.
There is a reason I am writing all this down in my journal and not telling Oskar.
One of the side effects of having spent time in a lunatic asylum is that it sometimes feels like everyone who knows about that is continually on the lookout for signs you are going mad again. Sometimes at parties, when you hear what someone is saying and you reply with a non sequitur, you catch a little glance they give you, a little puzzled frown. Sometimes in a café, you laugh at something too loudly, and the person you are with flinches.
Nor is it always easy to convince even those closest to you that you are sane.
I dream of it often, that hospital. Those months of indescribable boredom and horror. For at least the first week I was convinced that any minute the doctors would realize there had been a terrible mistake, tell me I was free to go. Then it finally sunk in that there had been no mistake and I no longer had any idea how many days I had even been there, or what day it was, the only way to measure the passing of time those horrible, painful injections.
They kept asking me, the doctors, if I knew why I was there, if I could remember the things I had been saying. The terrible things I had been shouting in the street. I could see now how revolting, how absurd they were now, couldn’t I? Of course they are revolting, I kept saying. Of course they are absurd. But I did not invent them. I am not the mad one.
Each time I said it, I could feel their frustration. And I could feel how easy it would be to agree with them, knowing that in agreeing lay my only hope of freedom.
It was not easy, telling all this to Oskar. Knowing, during those first few exhilarating weeks in Paris—meeting his friends, discovering his world—that there was something so huge he did not know about me, something I had kept from him that might change how he felt about me so drastically. Because as much as Oskar and his friends might talk about madness, and praise the art of the mad, that is something quite different from realizing the woman with whom you are in love has only recently been released from a madhouse. And because if I told him half the things I was locked up for saying, I am sure he would think me quite mad too.
Chapter 4
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
When I first noticed Athena Galanis approaching, outside the department after our lecture, I assumed she was going to ask me for a cigarette.
“Hi, Patrick,” she said. “What are you up to tonight?”
The question threw me a little, to be honest. I knew about her and Freddie, and I knew she was friends with Caroline, but Athena and I had been studying the same subject for almost three years now and this was the first time she had actually spoken to me. I was a bit surprised she even knew my name.
“I’m having a dinner party,” she told me, even before I had answered her question. “You should come.”
“I would love to,” I said. “But actually I have plans already...”
