Page 3 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“People always go on about Dalí and Magritte,” I continued, “but the painter who really encapsulates the movement for me is Oskar Erlich.”
This was clearly not something she had expected me to say. She raised a slightly surprised eyebrow and gestured for me to continue.
“Anyway, I want to focus my dissertation on the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, their last great show before the war. It was a huge media event, all the artists associated with the movement showing: Erlich, Picasso, Man Ray, Miró...”
Alice Long made a little gesture with her hand as if to say, I know all this.
“I intend to explore the way the exhibition was organized,” I continued. “The manner in which it was publicized, its cultural impact.”
She greeted this with a thoughtful frown. “You have a potentially interesting topic there. The argument will need development, though,” she said.
“Oh, definitely,” I said, a little crushed. Potentially interesting? Potentially interesting?
Alice Long then pivoted in her chair to ask Caroline what she was working on. Caroline cleared her throat, brought out her notebook, and started to read. It quickly became clear that she had done a lot more preparation than I had. She intended to explore Sphinxes in Surrealist art, she explained. She had notes on the different types of Sphinx (royal and monstrous, Greek and Egyptian), male and female, winged and unwinged. She made the point that we use the Greek word Sphinx—masculine, I interjected, pleased with myself—to describe interchangeably what were actually distinct and unrelated creatures in Greek and Egyptian mythology. She ended by saying something like: “And that’s as far as I have got, Sphinx-wise.”
Alice Long—engaged, enthusiastic, a lot livelier than when I had been talking—asked her which particular works she would write about. Caroline mentioned Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté, Dalí’s Three Sphinxes of Bikini, Leonor Fini’s Little Hermit Sphinx...
“What about Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx?” asked Alice Long.
“Oh yes, of course,” said Caroline, although with a trace of hesitation in her voice.
If that was a line of inquiry Caroline was interested in pursuing, Alice Long continued, she should examine the Willoughby Bequest. “It’s a collection of Egyptological materials formerly in the possession of the Willoughby family deposited at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, here in Cambridge,” she explained, in response to Caroline’s confused frown. Caroline wrote this down and as she did so glanced at me meaningfully. I offered her in return the facial equivalent of a hapless shrug.
Juliette Willoughby? The Willoughby Bequest? Was Alice Long being serious? Like most people with an interest in the Surrealists, I knew only two things about Juliette Willoughby, the most obvious being that she had been Oskar Erlich’s lover. All his biographies recounted their love story and its tragic ending.
This had to be some sort of test. If it was not, then I really did think we were going to have to talk seriously to our respective directors of studies about this supervisor they had assigned us. From the look on Caroline’s face, she was thinking the same thing. I raised my hand.
“Mr. Lambert?” Alice Long said curtly.
“Isn’t there a bit of a problem, for anyone planning to write about Juliette Willoughby?” I asked. Because there was only one other thing everyone knew about the artist and her work. “Her paintings don’t exist.” I continued. “None of them. Everything she produced at art school was lost when she left England for Paris in 1936. Self-Portrait as Sphinx, the only thing she ever exhibited publicly, is listed in the catalogue of the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition and described in a couple of reviews, but that’s it. Not a single photograph of it survives, none of her sketches or studies, and the painting itself was destroyed in a fire in Paris in 1938.”
The same unexplained fire that killed both Juliet Willoughby and Oskar Erlich.
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Philophobia. That’s the technical term for it. A fear of falling in love. A chronic fear of falling in love. I didn’t know it even had a name back then, but thanks to Patrick Lambert, I knew its symptoms well enough: panic attacks, dizziness, nausea, a feeling that your throat is closing up and you are about to pass out. Every time you think about someone, or how much you like them.
The first time I met Patrick, I was instantly smitten. The dark curls, the hooded green eyes, the lopsided grin that poked a dimple in one cheek. He was funny, smart. Unlike a lot of the boys I had met at Cambridge, when he asked you a question, he genuinely listened to your answer.
The second time we slept together, we were both quite drunk. We kissed on the dance floor. We kissed on the quad. We kissed in his room, unable to keep our hands off each other, then sat, sheets wrapped around our naked bodies, talking and laughing for hours. He told me how it felt being sent off to boarding school at the age of seven, suddenly surrounded by larger, louder, more confident boys and desperately missing home. I listened intently, deftly deflecting his questions about my own childhood.
“Hey, I really like you,” he said at one point, casually cool, bumping bare shoulders affectionately.
“I really like you too,” I said back truthfully, although even then I could feel my spine stiffening, my stomach tightening. Because how many times had I heard from my grandmother about what a brilliant, joyful girl my mother had been, growing up. About her painting, her drawing, all the competitions she had won. All the friends she had, all the hopes and ambitions, before she met my father. How many times had I promised myself I would never allow anyone to stand between me and what I wanted to achieve? No matter how much I liked them. No matter how tousled their hair, how appealing their dimple.
Perhaps I could have handled things better, tried to explain all this to Patrick. But where would I have begun? How could I have explained something that I could not yet put a name to?
Even now, it is hard to describe the roil of emotions, the hot surges of embarrassment and alarm, of horror and happiness, that I felt when Patrick pulled up outside Alice Long’s house and it dawned on me we would be meeting like this all year. I spent quite a lot of that first hour-long supervision trying to work out if I could politely decline a lift back into town. Then we got outside and saw the weather.
The drizzle had turned into a downpour. Patrick was standing a step ahead of me on the porch, trying unsuccessfully to angle his umbrella so it sheltered us both from the rain.
“Can I offer you a ride?” he asked.
“Um, well...” I hesitated, aware of how long I’d had to wait for a bus out here.
“On a count of three, then,” said Patrick. We ran to the car in attempted lockstep under the umbrella, his bag bumping between us.
I had never been in a sports car before and was unprepared for the intimacy of the experience. How close to each other we were sitting. The way that every time he changed gear, his hand brushed my knee. Just like in the supervision, I tried not to think about the last time we had been this physically proximate.
