Page 40 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Feeling suddenly lightheaded, I placed both palms on the desk next to me to steady myself, realizing that it, too, with its cracked leather top, had been in the house. Scanning the aisle, I could see that I was surrounded by remnants of the old lady’s life. Lamps, umbrella stands, the very couch Patrick and I had sat on, all scattered around an unfamiliar room, all labeled with lot numbers. Things that had been chosen with care and intention, the accumulated effects of a woman who had been forgotten by everyone but us, now stripped of all context and meaning. And mixed in with all that were things that did not belong to Alice Long at all. A collection, in a basket, of dog leashes and water bowls. A stack of Punch annuals.
I felt a tap on the shoulder and spun around to see a very excited Patrick. Wordlessly, he grabbed me by the hand and led me to the end of the row, gesturing with a flick of his eyes to the back of a canvas that had been thoughtlessly shoved between a matching pair of threadbare armchairs. I knew it instantly from having handled it, and flung my arms around his shoulders.
“It’s here,” I whispered into his ear, feeling his breath hot against my cheek. “That’s it!”
Patrick smiled and nodded and winked. Then he leaned in to give me a kiss, and I felt sure he must have felt the thump-thump-thump of my heart in my chest. Juliette Willoughby had believed—for reasons I could not fully fathom—that her family would stop at nothing to destroy this painting, take it from her, punish her for making it. For half a century it had been hidden away. Now, thanks to us, it was about to dazzle the world.
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Provincial auction houses always remind me of my childhood. The smells—of dust, of varnish, of musty coats. The cases of military uniforms and memorabilia, folding screens, old records, walking sticks. The occasional stuffed crocodile.
This was what Dad and I did together on weekends, the thing I used to look forward to all week: hopping in the car and driving off somewhere “to see what we can see,” as Dad put it. Only when I was older did I work out that Saturday was the one day Dad did the childcare, and that his version involved doing exactly what he was going to do anyway, but with me in tow.
He would always know a few people in a place like Ely. He would exchange nods with the owners, other dealers. My father was known to have an eye, so people always asked if there was anything in particular he was interested in. “Just browsing” was always his response.
At the viewings, if there was a painting he was interested in (but did not want to seem too interested in), he would send me to look and tell him what I thought. By the time I was about eleven, he had trained me pretty well at this—I could explain with some degree of technical precision what sort of condition something was in, whether any of his regular clients might be interested in it. Once or twice, I had pointed out a painting he had overlooked and been rewarded with a fiver.
It was not therefore unfamiliar to me, the tingling excitement you get when you know that there is a lot coming up that you think is special and that you are pretty sure only you have noticed. Getting one over on everybody else, that’s part of the tingle, too. Part of the psychological gamesmanship being never to let it show when you are excited about an item, the other part being not to let your enthusiasm overwhelm your better judgment. Never falling in love with something so hard you bid more than it is worth.
It was reassuring to see that there had not been much of a turnout for today’s auction. We sat on our chairs, catalogues on our laps. There could not have been more than thirty other people, all of us waiting for someone to take to the rickety lectern on its raised podium. Caroline and I were the youngest people there by far. There was no one I recognized—none of my dad’s colleagues or rivals. Some of these people looked like they had only come in to be out of the rain.
Then Giles Pemberton walked in.
Caroline noticed him first, and nudged me. Just as she did so he looked over and saw us. My heart sank. Giles Pemberton, from our year, from our course, the chap from dinner who had known all about Austen Willoughby’s paintings and heard us talking about Juliette’s.
Oh fuck, I thought to myself.
I asked him if he was interested in anything in particular. He showed us a pair of antique hand-painted porcelain spaniels. “Aren’t they just the most horrible things you have ever seen? J’adore un petit chien moche. They’re going to look absolutely ghastly on my mantelpiece.”
Caroline smiled. I said he was not wrong.
“And what are you two here for? You know, I love to come to these things. I always dream that one of these days I’ll spot a misattributed masterpiece, a genuine Willoughby.”
For a moment, my whole body froze. Then I realized he was talking about Austen Willoughby, the dog painter. Or was he? Was that a test, to see how I reacted? All of us—Giles and Caroline and I—were smiling. Everyone was being conspicuously amused about how funny it was to have all bumped into each other here. What a strange coincidence.
My brain was spiraling in paranoid circles. Giles had been at the party. What if he had seen Caroline take the painting? Was there any reason he could possibly have to suspect that Self-Portrait as Sphinx still existed, and that we had found it? If he had stumbled across the painting here at the auction house, was there any way he could have put two and two together?
Caroline was telling Giles about a pair of earrings she was interested in. Smartly, I noted she had chosen an item far down the list of lots after the porcelain dogs that Giles was here for.
On the podium the auctioneer appeared—frizzy hair, bow tie, waistcoat—and the auction itself began. I had expected to be a little nervous. The presence of Giles had sent me for a loop.
This was not the sort of auction with formal paddles you raised to make an offer, I had explained to Caroline. Here, you just nodded or shook your head. Caroline made the same joke that most people make at their first auction about hoping she did not buy anything by accident by scratching her nose. All through the early bids she kept her arms carefully folded across her chest.
Our painting was lot number 76, and so we sat and watched as everything preceding it went under the hammer, most selling at a first and only bid, easing my nerves slightly. Giles got his dogs, at a snip. He trotted off to collect them, apologizing on his way down our row. We mouthed our goodbyes.
I don’t think I have ever felt so relieved to see the back of anyone. Even after he had left to collect his dogs, I kept dreading he would come back, for a forgotten umbrella, to see if he had left something under his chair.
We were ten lots now from our painting. With each one that passed I could feel my pulse quicken. Was this really going to work? Ahead of me seemed to open whole vistas of possibility—the career dreams I had so boastfully told Caroline about in the first year suddenly within reach. What a start to both of our careers this would be, what a start to our lives together. I could just picture us, on the cover of the Cambridge Evening Post with our discovery, being interviewed with the painting on the local news: Caroline explaining the art historical significance of this discovery, the interviewer asking us to tell the amazing story of how we had spotted it. I was already imagining how I would break the news to my father, the mixture of pride and jealousy he would feel.
“Lot seventy-six,” shouted the auctioneer from the podium finally. I took a deep breath and straightened in my seat. “Who will start me at twenty-five?”
I nodded. The auctioneer acknowledged this. He looked around the room. In the corner, a man at a desk was taking offers over the telephone from remote bidders. I saw him catch the auctioneer’s eye, give a nod. The auctioneer acknowledged it. Back to me.
“Fifty,” I said.
Back to the man with the phone. He said something into it and waited for a response. “Seventy-five,” he said.
The auctioneer turned to me again. I nodded. “That’s a hundred, then,” said the auctioneer.
