Page 26 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
If anyone in the world deserved to find that painting, it was Caroline Cooper. If there really was a secret of some kind encoded in it, I could not imagine anyone more likely to unravel it.
She discreetly wriggled her feet back into her shoes as we hit harder ground. Inside, guests loitered around the tables, and we all looked for our names on the little handwritten cards at each seat, while waiters circulated with champagne and a jazz band parped and noodled away at one end of the tent. At the other end was a formal table arrangement, as at a wedding.
“My God,” she whispered to me. “I feel like we’ve walked onto the set of some costume drama.”
The funny thing was, as a child I had never found it strange, Harry living in a house like this and having his own library and lake with an island in his back garden. It was just a great place for running around. Only as a teenager did I start to reflect seriously on the peculiar dynamic between Harry’s father and my father, an old friendship that was very much not a relationship of equals, that was also one of the defining relationships of Dad’s professional life. Only later had I begun to wonder what it might feel like for Harry, knowing that whatever else he did with his life first, one day sooner or later he would inherit Longhurst and have to try to keep it all going.
The seating was arranged along fairly obvious lines. There were a few tables of Harry’s fellow classics students plus Giles Pemberton, and four or five tables of school friends. Freddie and the Osiris boys were near the back, their long-suffering girlfriends interspersed among them, being talked over. Arno von Westernhagen, still not drinking, was holding forth on the reasons for this at top volume—he seemed to have been out cold on that rugby pitch slightly longer each time I heard the story. It was a predictable crowd, all apart from one group that seemed utterly out of place: a cluster of mathematics and computer science students from our college, none of them friends of Harry’s as far as I knew, all looking as surprised to be there as I was to see them.
“What’s that about, then?” I asked Harry as we filed over to the top table.
“Dad made me invite them,” he explained, with mild embarrassment. “His idea being, they’ll end up making all the money, so might be useful to know.”
It made sense, I supposed.
To be honest, even if they spent all night daring each other to recite pi to a hundred decimal places, they were going to have more fun than anyone on our table.
Harry was in the middle with Caroline on one side and his grandmother—Granny Violet—on the other. Next to Caroline was Harry’s father—I could already hear him explaining some idea he’d had about setting up an ostrich farm, detailing at length how many omelets you could make with a single egg. Georgina was next to me, and I was at the end.
At every place on every table, a little disposable camera had been set. Freddie had immediately gone around stockpiling them and was already making a nuisance of himself: earlier I had seen him step outside with one and return a moment later looking very pleased with himself and zipping back up his fly.
The third time my wine glass was topped up, I became conscious of how quickly I was drinking and resolved to pace myself. As we were all seated in a row, the only person I could comfortably have talked to was Georgina, but every time I did ask her a question, some urgent task would occur to her, and she’d scurry off to find a waiter.
On the far side of Georgina, I could hear that Caroline had finally gotten Philip off the topic of ostriches and was asking him about Juliette, trying to interest him in Self-Portrait as Sphinx, asking if he could think of any way that the painting might have made its way from Paris to Longhurst, if anyone had ever mentioned it.
Even from where I was sitting, I could tell she was getting nowhere.
“Good Lord, my dear,” I could hear Philip saying. “I’m sure if it ever was here, someone would have thrown it away years ago. Now if it’s paintings you are interested in, we have some wonderful canine portraits by Harry’s grandfather Austen...”
On the other side of them, Harry seemed to have spent the whole meal explaining to Granny Violet who people were, repeatedly. I could just hear their conversation over the hubbub of the tent, if I strained. “Yes, it is a bit loud,” I heard him agree, not for the first time.
When Philip excused himself from the table, Caroline leaned over to introduce herself to Violet. I caught her saying something in a loud clear voice about Juliette, and as she did so, she reached into her handbag and took out her photocopy of the photo of Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Violet, bobbing her head, took it and looked at it. Then she looked at it again, more closely.
And screamed.
Still screaming, halfway out of her chair now, she began trying to grab the photocopy, to snatch it from Caroline’s hand, as if with the intention of ripping the thing up.
Philip came rushing back to the table and took charge, shooting Caroline a furious look, steering his mother out of the tent by her shoulders. Caroline looked mortified.
I gently took the photocopy from her, tucked it under my arm, and made my way outside after Philip and Violet. Harry’s grandmother was still clearly very upset.
“Please let me explain,” I kept saying, although I am not sure, even if I had been allowed to speak, I was really sober enough to do so. I did try to convey the importance of what Caroline and I had stumbled across, the historical significance of the painting’s possible survival. “There must be some sort of misunderstanding,” I repeated. Every time I tried to bring the photocopy out from under my arm, Violet would begin screeching again and Philip would start furiously flapping his hands at me.
Eventually, Philip, obviously very angry indeed, grasped me quite firmly by the arm and walked me across the grass to a quieter spot. We stopped in a corner of the lawn illuminated only by festoon lights in the trees. His face was close to mine in the semidarkness. His voice when he spoke was trembling with rage.
“How dare you, Patrick?” he barked, and I felt a finger jab me in the chest. “How dare you and this girl we’ve never met before come here and start lecturing us about Juliette? What do you know about her? What do you know about anything? Nothing, that’s what.”
I did try to explain why Caroline and I were so interested in Juliette, why she was so important. He cut me short.
“She was mad, did you know that? Paranoid. Delusional. They had to lock her up as a teenager, in a psychiatric hospital. For the terrible, awful things she was saying. The unhinged accusations she was making. Her father made sure she had the most expensive treatments at the best private hospital in London. And how did she thank him? By pulling a vanishing act, by running off with some married, middle-aged painter. How did she repay her family, for all their kindness and concern? She repaid them with that.”
He gestured with genuine disgust at the piece of paper I was holding.
“I don’t understand,” I said. Never in all the years I had known Philip—even that day Harry and Freddie and I rowed over to the island—had he lost his temper like this.
“I know you don’t understand,” Philip said. “Well, let me explain it to you. Give me that thing.”
I hesitated. He snapped his fingers. I handed it over. He held the paper up between us, turning it toward the light, and pointed at the figure in the bottom left corner of the painting, the pale, ghostly girl with the dark hair. “Do you know who that is?”
