Page 45 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
If I fell again into my family’s clutches, I was certain that I would be spending the rest of my life back in an asylum. Some nights, I dreamed in horror that I was there already, being made to detail to a doctor precisely what Self-Portrait as Sphinx meant. One night, after the third or fourth time I had woken him up with my gasps and twitching and insistent mumbling, Oskar angrily went off with a blanket to sleep on a chair.
I had never seen him as surly and abrasive before.
He was angry that I had withdrawn my painting so abruptly from the exhibition, especially given the excitement it had generated. He was even angrier that no one had bought his painting yet.
I wanted to leave, to run. Not to England. Not Germany. Perhaps, I said, I could see a future for us in New York. Finally, reluctantly, after much nagging, Oskar went to the American embassy.
I could hear just from his boots on the stairs that the expedition had not been a success. He kicked them off at the door, their heels slamming against the wall. “Idiots,” was his only comment as he threw himself down onto the bed in our room. A cloud of dust rose and settled. “Idioten.” Both of us aware that for the classical Greeks, an idiot was simply someone who took no interest in public affairs. Like a man tasked with allocating passports, who has a number of boxes he is permitted to tick and can find no combination of them that can accommodate an applicant with a German name and a German accent, whose parents are German and whose first language is German but whose hometown is now, after the end of the last war, solidly in Polish territory.
Oskar had, aware of the line of people behind him, attempted to give a condensed history of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, from the eighteenth century onward, believing that if he explained things clearly enough, emphatically enough, then all the bureaucratic pettifogging could be swept to one side and some arrangement arrived at. I could imagine the sinking spirits of the desk clerk, as on and on Oskar thundered, the shuffling resentment of those waiting behind him. The response, inevitably, being: had he tried the Polish embassy?
All afternoon, I sat in our apartment and listened to the flat metallic ticking of the clock, wondering if it had always been that loud. All day long, all night long, that ticking.
Then, all of a sudden, it seemed as if Oskar and I might have a future after all.
He had been out for lunch with friends (I turned the invitation down, as he knew I would), and when he arrived back he announced before I even said hello that he had found a man who could get us passports, who could take care of all the immigration paperwork for the United States. We would both have new identities—for the journey, at least. Oskar would be French. For reasons of plausibility, because it was the only language in which I was fluent, I would remain English. He would no longer be a stateless Galician. Juliette Willoughby would have vanished from Paris without a trace.
“So this fellow is a forger?” I asked.
“A very good one,” said Oskar. A lot of people in this man’s line of work, explained Oskar, had trained as artists. He was known, in our circle. People had vouched for him.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked.
It was all arranged, Oskar said. He must meet the man at a certain café, with our photographs. Within three hours, he would return with our new passports. We could take the pictures ourselves, with that little Leica camera Oskar had given me for my birthday, and develop them here, in the apartment.
“We can leave,” Oskar said. All we needed to do once we had those passports was to buy our tickets. Six hours to Le Havre. Within twenty-four, we could be in sight of the cliffs of Dover. And then? It had to be America, I told him. The new world. A new life. New York. He took my face in his hands, kissed me. Yet his smile had something a little cracked in it, like he could not quite believe all this either. As if there was a catch he had yet to spring on me. All we need now is the money, he said.
Then he told me how much money.
Chapter 13
CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 2023, FIVE DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
“Hello, Harry,” I said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to see me on short notice.”
“Caroline!” Harry said, hesitating a moment before embracing me in an awkward hug. “Of course, of course, you’re always welcome here.”
We both knew that had not always been the case. For decades, as Juliette’s biographer, I had been petitioning Harry’s parents (through Harry, or by letter and email) for access to the house at Longhurst, feeling there were aspects of Juliette’s personality, elements of Self-Portrait as Sphinx, that being here would help me decode. Not a chance was the answer I always got, via Harry, apologetically.
“Once my parents have made up their mind about something, or someone...,” he would regretfully begin, before trailing off. “And I can’t say you made a great first impression at my twenty-first.”
In the end, all it took to arrange a visit was one of the Willoughbys having something to gain financially from saying yes.
The painting itself was already in Dubai with Patrick, but I wanted to hear from Harry’s own lips how and where he had found it. Nor was that all I wanted to investigate at Longhurst Hall.
“Well, Harry’s in the process of selling the place,” Patrick had advised. “So it may well be your last and only chance to visit before it changes hands.”
I had seen the estate agent’s listing online, so I knew that the house was in a bad way. What I had not been prepared for was the state Harry himself was in. He looked not only much older than I was expecting, but a lot less well. In my mind, he was forever fixed the way he had looked at university: flushed, cherubic, with buttery curls. Now his frame was angular and slight, his hair reduced to fluffy duckling tufts around the temples. He was wearing a shirt that might once have fitted but was now several sizes too big, with red corduroy trousers worn shiny at the knees and bunched at the waist with an ancient cracked leather belt.
Admittedly, it had been a long time since we last met. Harry had been at our wedding, and a few times the three of us had been out for dinner, usually somewhere stuffy and expensive, at Harry’s suggestion, although somehow Patrick always picked up the bill—Harry never seemed to have the right wallet with him or the right credit card. Since then, I had caught Harry on TV too, interviewed in the lobby of the House of Commons, or sent out to defend the government’s position on Newsnight. For a Cambridge graduate with such lofty political ambitions, his career had been surprisingly unspectacular, marred by the MP’s expenses scandal and the discovery that he had claimed tens of thousands in taxpayer money for repairs at Longhurst. Shortly after the scandal broke in the newspapers, Harry announced his decision not to contest his seat at the upcoming election.
“It’s freezing,” he blustered, waving me in off the doorstep. “Come in out of the cold.”
It was actually far colder inside the house, the kind of chill you get in a building in which the heat has not been turned on for a very long time.
“Can I offer you a cup of tea? Something stronger...?” he asked.
I said I would take a tea. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Although from the way he was stumbling and shuffling, the sudden odd lurches a step or two sideways, I did wonder if Harry had attempted to warm himself up with a nip of something already.
