Page 37 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Trying to decipher Juliette’s handwriting had always been a challenge, but these four pages were so cramped and jagged as to be almost illegible. If they did not divulge anything illuminating, then that was it: the remaining pages were blank.
One full day in the library. That was all it would take to finish my transcription. First thing in the morning I would be there once again, to take my place at my usual desk by the window, my enthusiasm for the task, my consciousness of the enormous stroke of good fortune I’d had in stumbling across her journal at all, haunted always by the painful thought that within just a few weeks of writing that final entry’s last full stop, Juliette would be dead.
The college chapel clock clunked five, and, realizing the library would open in just a few hours, I reluctantly covered the painting back up and closed the trunk. As I turned the corner toward the college front gate, a bright sweep of headlights momentarily blinded me. A car pulled up across the road. Its door opened and then slammed. I stood there for a moment, partially concealed by Patrick’s car, hoping that nobody had seen me.
Even though the figure across the road had her back to me, I recognized that dark tumble of hair, the elegant camel coat: it was Athena, being dropped off outside her house by the same silver Rolls-Royce that had driven her to Longhurst. I couldn’t imagine what she was doing at this hour—never an early riser, she only ever saw dawn if she hadn’t been to bed, and given what was going on with Freddie, it hardly seemed likely she had been out partying.
For a moment, I genuinely did not know how to react.
Athena had barely said a word to me since she’d stormed off at Longhurst. She hadn’t turned up for lectures, wasn’t answering her phone or her door, had not replied to a single one of my messages. I felt horrible for having doubted her intuition that something had happened to Freddie, for not having acknowledged from the start the seriousness of the situation and of her feelings about it. I felt hurt and baffled by how she had been acting since.
I crossed the road, and only when I was close enough to her that ignoring me would be impossible did I make my presence known. “Athena, where have you been?” I asked, meaning tonight but also the past week, trying to sound concerned rather than accusatory.
She gave a start. Once she had established who was addressing her, she focused on fumbling for her keys in her pocket.
“London,” she said, curtly, over her shoulder.
“Are you okay? Look, I’m sorry if some of what I said the other day came across wrong. You’re my best friend. I’m here, please talk to me. Let me help. I’ve been taking lecture notes, you can have them, it’s an important term and you won’t want to get behind, not with just months to go before finals.”
I wanted to let her know that I was sorry, that I was here for her.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, hanging around outside my house at five in the morning, spying on me. You’ve made it perfectly plain how you feel about Freddie, you literally told me I would be better off without him in my life, so there’s no point pretending to be worried about him now.”
“I am worried about Freddie. And I’m worried about you.”
Of course I was. This whole situation was a nightmare for everyone, and a special kind of nightmare for Athena, but none of that changed the fact that he had treated her terribly and whether he was alive or dead, throwing everything away because of him was a mistake she would surely come to regret. Someone needed to say that to her, even if this was not the most sensitive time to say it, and if no one else was going to, then perhaps I should. Only I didn’t get a chance.
Athena had her key in the lock now and turned it, stepping into her darkened hallway. She flicked a switch. She turned to face me and I thought she was about to invite me in. In that moment I was sure I detected a brief wobble of her lower lip, as if she was about to start crying. Instead, her expression hardened.
“I don’t need you to worry about me, Caroline. I don’t need your pity, and I don’t need your sympathy. I don’t need your lecture notes and I actually don’t need your friendship. I just need you to leave me alone.”
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
All around us, as if nothing had happened, the term continued. People had essays to write, lectures to attend, exams to revise for. Even though it had only been a few weeks, Freddie Talbot’s disappearance had become little more than Cambridge gossip for most students—something to idly speculate about in the lunch line or library.
Although Caroline had made me promise we would take things slowly, we were now spending much more time with each other than we did apart. We worked together, we ate together, we slept together, and we panicked together over the work in progress Alice Long had asked to see before our next supervision. Our two-thousand-word samples were due on Monday afternoon, and only on Saturday did either of us really start writing, Caroline sitting at my desk with her notepad and pen, me hunched over a lined legal pad on my scratchy armchair.
By the time we finally finished on Monday morning, after two near all-nighters fueled by biscuits and tea, my spine felt like it might never unfurl. “I’ll drive them over to Alice Long’s house this afternoon,” I told her, tucking both stapled manuscripts into my messenger bag.
“Just post them through the door, though, right? Otherwise she’ll ask about our trip to Longhurst,” Caroline said as we crossed the quad. “And about the painting...”
“The painting? You mean the stolen painting?” I said, only half joking. “The painting you stole, from the home of one of my best friends...”
“I didn’t steal the painting, Patrick,” she said once again, a little wearily this time. “I rescued it.”
I doubted Harry or his parents would see things that way. Might Alice Long?
Something Caroline and I went back and forth about a lot, late at night in my room, was the rights and wrongs of what she had done—and what on earth we were supposed to do with the painting now.
Keeping the thing in the trunk of the MG was obviously not a long-term solution, but at least there it would not be discovered by a bedder when they came to clean one of our rooms or spotted by a police officer come to ask some follow-up questions about Freddie.
Returning Self-Portrait as Sphinx with apologies to the Willoughbys was an option Caroline had overruled out of hand. “They didn’t even know it was there, until we told them,” she reminded me. “If I hadn’t taken it, they would have burned the thing.”
It was also specifically by burning the painting, Caroline kept reminding me, that Austen Willoughby had told Granny Violet he had destroyed it. A weird coincidence, didn’t that seem, given how Oskar and Juliette had died?
What Caroline did not have was any explanation yet of how the painting had survived that fire, or how it had made its way to Longhurst—or how we could share our discovery with the world. And she was adamant that it was a discovery that should be shared.
The central practical problem was this: as far as the art world was concerned, the painting was ash, and without solid provenance, there was no way to convince anyone that what we had in our possession was Juliette’s great lost work. But in order to establish it as genuine, we had to connect it to Longhurst, and in doing so identify it as stolen property, and therefore announce ourselves as its burglars.
