Page 28 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“You’re welcome. Would you like a tissue?”
I nodded, having not realized until then that my face was damp, my eye makeup presumably smudged with tears.
We stood there a moment or two in silence. It dawned on me that if Terry had heard the row from all the way over at his table, pretty much the whole tent must have too.
“There’s going to be dancing in a minute, I think,” he said eventually.
“I’d better pop back to the house for a moment to change my shoes, then,” I smiled, pointing at my mud-caked stilettos. “If you’ll excuse me...”
The rear of the property was a confusing collection of doors and porches, flights of stepped and layered terraces, all overlooking a large ornamental pond. I climbed a set of steps in the moonlight and found myself at the back of the house. I stopped for a second to get my bearings.
The only light visible here was coming from an open window on the ground floor, a few feet away from where I was standing. I could hear voices inside: one was that of Harry’s father and the other—high, strained, still distinctly querulous—was Granny Violet.
“I should have known. I should have known not to believe your father. He said he had destroyed that awful painting years ago. He told me he had burned it.”
Harry’s father was trying to soothe her, or shush her, or a bit of both. Unsure what I would say if anyone caught me, I held my breath.
“Promise me,” she was saying again and again. “Philip, promise me. You have to find it. You have to destroy it. It’s not art. It’s an abomination. She was not well when she painted it. She was not well when she allowed it to be shown. The whole thing was a deliberate attempt to cause this family—her own family, our family—as much hurt and harm as possible.”
“Please calm down, Mummy,” he begged. “Come back out to the party, have a dance with the birthday boy. He’ll want to see his granny enjoy herself. I’ll look for the painting in the morning and if I do find it, I’ll chuck the thing on a bonfire myself.”
His footsteps got closer and suddenly the window shut with a bang and the curtains were drawn.
My heart was thumping. My brain was whizzing. God, what a mess. Because of my clumsy attempts to learn more about Juliette, Self-Portrait as Sphinx, if it had survived the Paris fire and been brought back here, would tomorrow be found and burned. I could not let that happen.
There was only one thing to do.
I made my way over to where I could see waiters filing in and out. The kitchen door was open. With dinner finished and the bustle of cooking over, there were only a few people left in there now, clearing and stacking plates. I shrugged and gestured at the shoes in my hand.
“Going to have to admit defeat on these,” I announced, a bit stagily, perhaps, as I made my way through the kitchen, up the back stairs, and up to our bedroom. Instead of fumbling for the lamp, I sat on the bed in the dark, taking a moment to gather myself. I put my hand to my chest, feeling my heart thumping. Breathe, Caroline, I told myself.
Suddenly, joltingly, there came a loud bang from the next-door bedroom. Something heavy thrown against the wall, perhaps. Raised voices. Athena and Freddie. It sounded like their usual argument. As usual, neither was holding back.
“What is this?” she was shouting, before something else landed with a thud against the wall. “What is going on with you? Why are you like this?”
There was no audible reply from Freddie. A door slammed. Swift angry steps could be heard from the corridor. A minute passed. A lighter set of footsteps followed. “Freddie? Freddie, come back!” I could hear Athena calling from the top of the stairs, her voice plaintive. I sat in the dark in my room and waited until she went downstairs too.
I swallowed down the nausea that always washed over me at the sound of fighting, a cold mouthful of spit. I told myself that Athena would be fine, that the clunk had just been her launching something at Freddie and missing. A thick-soled shoe, a hairbrush. Freddie was a prick, but not a violent one. Not all men were like my father. Not all arguments ended in a shower of punches and kicks.
I put on my flat shoes and made my way back to the door that Patrick had shown me earlier, the one that led to the east wing. When I got there I found the door still open just a crack—Patrick must not have shut it properly—and I gave it a gentle push, reasoning that if anyone saw me I could start to sway and slur, a drunk girl looking for a loo to throw up in or a place to lie down.
The door opened. I stepped through, closed it again behind me, and waited for my eyes to adjust. This part of the house had a different feel than the rest—eerier, more ornate, more oppressive. The corridors smaller, narrower, darker. Directly ahead—visible through an open doorway, drenched in moonlight—was the library, a long room, two stories high, each story lined with case after case of leather-bound books. No art in there except for one massive painting over the fireplace of a plucky Irish setter, no doubt the work of Austen Willoughby. I ran up the curved staircase, taking the steps two at a time. At the top, I pushed open a door and stumbled into the room that must have been Austen Willoughby’s studio, with an enormous skylight above. Ghostly white canvas dust sheets covered what looked from their outlines like stacks of furniture and paintings, throwing monstrous shadows onto the walls. I lifted one of the sheets, tentatively. A cloud of dust rose swirling into the air.
Slowly, methodically, telling myself that nobody at the party apart from Patrick and Athena would miss me, I began sorting, item by item, through the contents of the room. It was a somewhat heart-sinking prospect. Locating anything in here was going to be no small task. The room was like a cross between the world’s poshest jumble sale and the dumpster behind an auction house. There were chipped glass chandeliers, dented furniture, cracked mirrors, threadbare sofas. A box of copies of Country Life from the 1950s. An open black plastic bag full of fur stoles. And under every other sheet, stacked canvases, some half-finished, some blank but in ornate frames. Others, clearly deemed not of sufficient quality either to hang or sell, falling apart. The canvas sheets were heavy to lift and the jumble awkward to navigate around, especially with only the moonlight from overhead illuminating the room. I was starting to worry I might not be able to sift through it all in a single night when suddenly, there it was. A little smaller than I had been expecting, tucked at the end of a run of much larger canvases.
I was literally holding in my shaking hands Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
A bright flash of light illuminated the room. Startled, I let out a cry and stumbled backward, tripping as I did so over a group of stacked paintings that fell, domino-like, with a loud clatter. For a moment, I thought I was going to go sprawling after them.
The room was dark again. I stood there blinking, my heart thumping in my ears, trying to work out what had happened, where the flash had come from. The room was silent. As far as I could tell I was the only person in there. The door behind me was still shut. I had the painting so tightly grasped I could feel it digging into my arms.
Directly overhead a loud thump was followed a second later by a burst of green and pink across the sky. Fireworks! That was what the flash must have been. The start of the fireworks display.
Pull yourself together, Caroline, I thought.
I knew what I had to do.
Everyone would be on the back lawn watching the display. If this was going to work, it would have to be now. Small enough to be portable but still pretty unwieldy, the painting just about fit under my arm. I draped my shawl over the top, a half-hearted attempt to disguise the theft as I made my way back through the house. No. This wasn’t a theft—it was a rescue. I was saving this painting. On behalf of art history. On behalf of Juliette. On behalf of my mother.
