Page 2 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
The second time, we had meandered back to my room holding hands, stopping now and then to kiss in a doorway. Half that night we stayed up talking, drinking cheap white wine from chipped mugs and smoking out the window, surveying the moonlit quad below. Talking about Cambridge, her first impressions of it. Discussing art and artists. I told her stories about my father, about boarding school. It was obvious we were attracted to each other. It also felt like we were really connecting, as if this was the start of something very exciting indeed.
What happened next was... nothing. I left a note in her college cubbyhole. No reply. I kept an eye out for her in lectures. She began arriving just before they started and sitting on the opposite side of the lecture hall, then slipping off quickly at the end.
I turned that second night over and over in my mind, trying to pinpoint what I’d done wrong. Was it something I had said? I probably was a bit of a show-off in those days, keen to make an impression, establish myself as a bit of a Cambridge character. Driving around town in my silly sports car. Playing up to the public schoolboy thing, the floppy hair, the posh accent...
It quickly became obvious what while I may have felt a spark between us, Caroline had not. When we passed in the Art History Department corridors or she accidentally sat opposite me in the library, I received only the faintest of acknowledgments. Once or twice, I caught her crossing the street to avoid me. After a while, no matter how much you like someone, you have no choice but to take the hint.
I tapped the horn lightly and Caroline looked up. She recognized my car, of course—how many students tooled around Cambridge in a red MG convertible?—and forced an unconvincing smile. I pulled over and rolled the window down. It was not a situation in which we could just both ignore each other, after all.
“I suspect we’re looking for the same place,” I said.
“I think this is it,” she replied. “Number thirty-two?”
“That was the address Dr. Bailey gave me.”
The house certainly looked the part. Let’s put it this way: either an academic lived here or the place was derelict. Slates were missing from the roof. The downstairs curtains were drawn. Something shrubby was sprouting from a sagging gutter. Caroline pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened.
“Are you sure you...?” I asked.
She invited me to try for myself. It was unclear if the buzzer was even connected to anything. Tentatively at first, then again more firmly, I knocked. Caroline took a step back to peer up at the first-floor windows.
“There are no lights on,” she pointed out. “Do you think she’s forgotten?”
“Maybe. She must be getting on a bit, after all. Have you ever heard of her, this Alice Long?”
I had not, although the university library did list three books by her—one on Man Ray, one on Brassaï, and another on the history of photojournalism. She had been a press photographer herself, for Time and Vogue, according to the author bio in the last of these, published in 1980. Even a decade ago, Alice Long had looked quite old in her author’s headshot.
“Maybe she can’t hear us,” I said. “Do you think I should go around and shout over the back fence?”
“For God’s sake,” Caroline muttered behind me. “Who is this person, anyway? She isn’t part of the faculty. She isn’t affiliated with a college. Why is she supervising final-year dissertations? I might complain. This project is an important part of our degree, you know.”
I could understand Caroline’s anxiety. Even in the first year, she had been clear about how seriously she took her subject, what her end goal was: a life of scholarship, teaching, writing. I could easily see her as a cool young academic, inspiring her students, probably while wearing a leather jacket and red lipstick. Like a dickhead, trying to impress her, I had detailed my own career plans: a first-class degree, a job at Sotheby’s, my own Mayfair gallery by the age of thirty. I must have sounded obscenely entitled and overconfident, but in my defense, I was eighteen. I said a lot of things out loud in those days that I have since learned to keep to myself.
Still, the bottom line was this: if we had been stuck with a dud supervisor and it impacted badly on our final-degree result, we could both kiss our respective dreams goodbye.
From the other side of the door, a bolt was pulled back with a screech. It was another few minutes before the door finally opened—in the meantime much fiddling with other locks could be heard.
“Hello there,” I said loudly, I hoped reassuringly. “It’s Patrick and Caroline. We’re History of Art students. From the university.”
The face in the doorway was wrinkled and sallow, topped with a tangle of white hair. Alice Long was wearing a brown pleated dress, gray knee-length socks, and a suspicious frown. She looked even older than I had been expecting.
“You’re late,” she said sternly.
“Sorry,” I told her. “We have been knocking for a while...”
As I stepped into the hallway, I checked my hair in a foxed little wall mirror. Alice Long shuffled off, disappearing through an open door, obviously expecting us to follow her. In the gloom, I was vaguely aware of a Persian rug underfoot, dirt-darkened, threadbare. Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the wall, a thick layer of dust obscuring their subjects.
I let Caroline go ahead of me and when she reached the end of the corridor I saw her stiffen.
“Please,” Alice Long said, indicating a very small sofa—a large armchair, really—with high sides. “Sit.”
She settled on a wooden chair next to a table piled with books. Caroline and I sat gingerly on the sofa, trying to avoid touching each other. The room’s net curtains were drawn, its main source of light an unshaded bulb hanging from a wire.
“So, Patrick,” said Alice Long without preamble. “You’re interested in Surrealism, are you?”
“Very interested,” I said firmly, leaning forward to emphasize this, eager to make a good impression. “What fascinates me is the way Surrealist art fearlessly explores the inner workings of the mind. Its rejection of conformity and willingness to embrace the mythical and dreamlike. All those haunting, seemingly random scenes and images that seem to spring direct from the subconscious.”
Alice Long smiled faintly, eyeing me intently.
