Page 44 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Dave shook his head. “I wore an orange coat, Patrick. I wore an orange raincoat that my mother bought me, and you made a joke about it, and everyone called me Terry for three years.”
I let out a chuckle before I could stop myself. The orange coat. Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Terry. That did ring a bell, now that I came to think of it. I wondered if the Terry’s brand still even existed and, if it did, if those big orange-flavored chocolate balls in their orange foil wrappers were still a staple in kids’ Christmas stockings. Dave White’s face remained impassive.
“We lived on the same floor, Patrick. In college. I was literally in the room next door to yours the whole final year,” he said.
“Of course!” I exclaimed, finally seeing something of the teenage Terry’s pinkish, puffy face in the tanned and chiseled one in front of me. “You’re Next-Door Terry!”
A smile played across his lips. Not a wholly friendly smile, but a smile nonetheless. “I was Next-Door Terry back then, yes. But we’re not here to talk about old times, are we, Patrick?”
I found myself smiling too, in nervous relief. There had been a horrible moment when I thought he was just going to order a magnum of vintage Krug, tell me what a prick I had been, and walk out leaving me the bill.
“Right, yes, good idea,” I said, thankful for the change of subject. “The painting was found at Longhurst, by Harry Willoughby, a direct descendant of—”
He cuts me off. “I know who Harry Willoughby is. I was at his twenty-first too.”
Were you? That was my first thought. Then I remembered that table of oddballs.
Dave White asked me why I thought Harry had come to me, to the Lambert Gallery, rather than to any of the big London auction houses. The real answer was simple: Harry wanted as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. This was not the answer I gave, naturally, because selling art at this level is 1 percent expertise, 99 percent PR.
“Well, for one thing, because we’re old friends, and for another, as you know, the Middle East is one of the most exciting art markets in the world, with multiple major institutions actively acquiring—the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, multiple new galleries in Saudi—not to mention some very wealthy private collectors...”
It never hurts to let potential buyers know they are not the only people interested in a painting.
“And you genuinely believe it’s authentic?” he asked curtly. “Because I really don’t see how it can be. I’ve done my homework. Juliette was working on Self-Portrait as Sphinx right up to the time she put it on display. There is no mention of any other versions of the painting in her journal. There was no time for her to paint any others...”
“And yet here we are,” I said, shrugging. “As I say, we are flying out the world’s leading expert to give her verdict in the next few days.”
“Caroline Cooper,” he said. “Your ex-wife.”
“She is also my ex-wife,” I conceded, a little reluctantly.
“So how are things between the two of you now?”
I mumbled something about things being perfectly amicable. They were certainly more amicable than they had been. It was five years since the divorce, after all. I was married to someone else now. From time to time, Caroline and I ran into each other at events in London, and we had always been perfectly civil. Once or twice, when I had a question about something that fell within her area of expertise, I called to get her opinion.
“And you are sure she’s going to come?”
It was a reasonable question. After all, Caroline had authenticated the painting in Tate Modern and then spent a career writing and talking about it. I could hear it in her voice on the phone, her shock at what I was telling her, the steady dawning of the professional implications if this new version of the painting proved authentic. Perhaps even the faint suspicion that I might be enjoying springing all this on her.
But if Dave White was fishing for details about how the marriage had ended and why, I was not going to satisfy his curiosity. One of our strengths as a couple had always been a reluctance to air our dirty laundry. Caroline and I had both done things, said things, of which we were not proud, and had hurt each other in ways we couldn’t have imagined possible. Love was never uncomplicated for Caroline, nor was that something which could be cured just by meeting the right person. The first time I proposed, she would not speak to me for a week, and then it took two more tries before she said yes. Even on our wedding day, as I was standing at the altar, part of me wondered whether she would actually show up. But there was no part of me that wondered whether she would come now.
“She’ll be here,” I told Dave.
She would come because when she examined the photos I had emailed her, she would see exactly the same thing I had: that this new painting was no straightforward copy of the painting in Tate Modern. Because as Caroline would recognize—even more swiftly than I had—there were two subtle but very suggestive differences between them. Two significant details which did not match up and which might shed light on the riddle she had spent decades trying to unravel.
She would come, I promised Dave, and myself.
Because if Caroline did not come, I thought as the bill for lunch landed on the table and Dave watched me pull out my wallet without reaching for his own, I was absolutely fucked.
JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938
There are some things that can never be written down.
We had to leave. Oskar and I. That was what I kept telling him. That it was not safe there. That if my uncle knew I was in Paris, then my father would know, and if my father knew where I was...
I was letting my nerves get the best of me. That was what Oskar kept insisting. Every time he caught me peeking around the curtain down into our courtyard, flinching at a tread on the staircase. I was not painting. I could not settle to read. Leaving the apartment, even popping around the corner to buy dinner or a little wire-wrapped bundle of firewood from the street seller, was an ordeal. As for my journal, I was far too unsettled to write in it, even if I had wanted to. The very idea of committing my thoughts to paper appalled me. Instead, the words swirled around in my brain. More than once, Oskar caught me in the kitchen muttering to myself, or had to shake me awake at night to tell me I had been babbling incoherently in my sleep.
In a moment of panic, I hid my journal and passport in the heavy-lidded cast-iron pot we used for soup, placing it on the highest shelf in the kitchen. Without my passport, my thinking went, how could my uncle force me to return to England? In that hidden journal, at least some part of my true story was preserved for others to read, some trace of my existence.
