Page 46 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
He led me to a sitting room, where he had promised a fire was burning. This turned out to be an enormous hearth with a single smoldering log. There was a plastic kettle on a trolley in the corner, which he filled from a battered Evian bottle. He opened the window to grab a pint of milk from the ledge and I realized that I was standing in exactly the room where Harry’s grandmother and father had been when she demanded Self-Portrait as Sphinx be found and burned.
“It’s not the ideal setup for receiving guests. But I’ve accepted an offer on the house and there is a lot to pack up and clear out, so I’m living in just a few rooms. I’ve been sleeping in the east wing, the oldest part of the house. The walls are thicker, so it’s slightly warmer.”
This room remained an extraordinary space, even half empty—elaborate but injured plasterwork ceiling (chipped cherubs, denuded fruit baskets), overlapping moth-eaten rugs, and a dusty chandelier. On top of a grand piano were family photos. While he busied himself with the tea bags, I picked up a silver frame. The picture showed Harry and his parents, smiling stiffly in front of a Christmas tree.
“My mother passed away last year. I’m not sure if you heard? Father died a few years ago,” Harry said, handing me a steaming mug. I pretended not to notice the way his hand quivered.
“I had no idea. I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Thank you. At least they’ll never know if I end up losing this place because of the inheritance tax. Millions, the taxman wants. Millions! Outrageous.”
He glanced around as if to underline the absurdity of it all. I tried to look as sympathetic as I could.
“Anyway, they both lived long and full lives, so at least that’s something,” Harry said, and it struck me how many people associated with this house hadn’t. Juliette and Lucy dying so young, Jane Herries and Freddie Talbot simply vanishing.
Occasionally, when I gave a talk on Juliette, someone at the end would ask whether I believed in the Willoughby curse. My answer was always no. Definitely not. What I could understand was why, faced with so much tragedy, people might feel a strange comfort in the idea that there was at least some organizing logic behind it all.
“Is that from the night of your party?” I gestured toward a photo of Harry in a lineup of fresh-faced, dressed-up young men on Longhurst’s terrace. Harry nodded.
“All the members of Osiris. Ivo Strang. Benjy Taylor. Arno von Westernhagen. Eric Lam. And Freddie, of course. That’s how I always picture him still: in white tie, sipping champagne. Poor Freddie. For years I think we all expected him to come sauntering back into our lives one day. That’s why he has never been legally declared dead, you know, why there has never been any sort of official memorial service, because nobody in the family ever wanted to admit the obvious. And then you realize ten years have passed, twenty...”
I remembered Athena’s tear-stained face when she told me he had vanished. Over and over I had replayed that morning, my clumsy attempts to reassure her, too distracted to apologize properly. Often in the past thirty years I had tried to imagine what more I might have done in the weeks after to stop her from pushing me away.
Harry and I both fell silent for a moment.
“Anyway,” he said eventually. “That’s not why you’re here. Did you have anything specifically you wanted to know about the painting?”
I nodded. “Can I ask where you found it? Patrick said you were clearing out one of the bedrooms?”
Patrick’s name felt a little odd in my mouth, and I realized I had been putting off saying it. Even now, I was never entirely sure how much his old friends knew about how our marriage had ended, how they would respond to seeing me, what they had heard and from whom.
It is hard to explain exactly how a partnership implodes, but I have sometimes wondered if the issue was not us but marriage itself—or at least the wedding. Because up until then, he and I had been two people who loved each other, trying every day to make each other happy. Then suddenly we were planning a Big Day and all these other people were involved, with their own expectations. For the first time, I saw how much Patrick had internalized his father’s little snobberies, how much it mattered to Patrick to impress him. I’ll never forget the look Patrick gave me when I suggested, in front of his dad, that we might have cava instead of champagne. The unshakable opinions Patrick suddenly seemed to hold on cutlery-related matters, whether the cheese course was served before or after dessert. Which might have been fine if he was the one doing all the organizing, but of course he wasn’t. I had a book to write, and plenty of other things to do, and for me the wedding felt like admin for a job I had never applied for—especially since the only person coming from my side of the family was my grandmother, and at every stage of the planning process someone would ask me about my parents.
I hoped that after the wedding, we could get back to the way we had been, but somehow, on some level, we never seemed to. The older we got, the more different we grew, and the less either of us felt like those two people who had fallen in love with each other.
Fortunately, Harry did not seem inclined to ask anything much on the topic of my divorce at all. It was very much the painting he was focused on.
“I was clearing out the Green Room,” he said. “And it was in a cupboard, along with a whole load of other paintings. Basically every time it rains this house is like a bloody colander. So over time all the good furniture, all the paintings, migrated into fewer and fewer rooms, into wardrobes and cupboards, for safety. I can show you exactly where I found it, if you like?”
As he led me upstairs and through the house, all sorts of memories seemed to rise and swirl. Some of the rooms and corridors and objects I vividly remembered. Others I had forgotten completely.
Despite it being barely midday, it was almost completely dark once we got away from the end of the house Harry was living in, all the curtains drawn, all the shutters closed. Harry stopped and opened a door. We were at once assailed with a smell of damp and mold.
“The wardrobe I found the painting in was over there,” he said, pointing to a space by the fireplace, where its outline could still be seen on the faded botanical-print wallpaper.
“You recognized it at once?” I asked, before realizing with a wince how patronizing that sounded.
“Well, yes,” he said, bristling ever so slightly. “It is quite a famous painting, thanks to you, Professor Cooper.”
“Something I have been wondering about is why the first person you contacted was Patrick, not a big auction house or a Mayfair gallery?” I asked.
We exited the room and Harry invited me with a gesture to make my way back down the hall. “Sentimentality, I suppose. I trust Patrick, like my father trusted his father. It was also part practicality—auction houses don’t work at speed, and I really need this sale to happen quickly.”
“By the end of the month, Patrick said. Do you mind my asking why?”
“Not at all. Although I expect you can probably guess. That’s when I’m meant to exchange contracts on this place, the point of no return. But if the painting is worth what Patrick says it is, I won’t have to be the Willoughby who loses Longhurst, will I?” he said with a sigh. “I might even be able to stop the bloody place falling down around my ears...”
He turned to me, fixing me with a beady eye. “What do you reckon, by the way, about the value of the thing?”
