Page 48 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
When I was with Sarah I felt younger, and more optimistic than I had in years. It was not until my last night in Dubai that we slept together. A month later I was back again. Three weeks after that, she came to stay with me in London. It was bad timing—the boiler in my flat was acting up, the rent on my Dover Street gallery had just been hiked for the third time in as many years, and on the plane Sarah picked up (and then gave me) an absolutely stinking cold.
All the time she was there, she kept telling me how exciting the art scene was in Dubai, what a fabulous time it would be to move there. Why not get away from all this? Why not start afresh? I proposed at Heathrow Airport. She said yes immediately, eyes damp, visibly delighted I was down on one knee with an antique diamond ring next to the check-in. I was intoxicated by the joyful ease of the entire thing.
Within the year, I had sold my gallery in London and moved. To launch a new gallery. To begin a new life.
There were times when it felt like that might have been a bit hasty. As it turns out, you could get bored of sunsets. You could get tired of the beach. You could get sick of constantly having to project success, exude confidence, muster up charm. You could start to wonder whether you were actually deluding yourself, questioning if it had actually been a smart move to sell everything you owned back home to set up a new business in the UAE, a country in which you knew precisely one person. You could, in your darker moments, start to feel a creeping doubt about whether that one person was in fact the right one person for you.
“You’re having a midlife crisis,” was Caroline’s only comment when I told her I was emigrating. I put this down to jealousy at the time. In retrospect, she may have been right.
It was a gamble, the move, the new gallery, the loans I had taken out to do both, and I was losing. Unless Harry’s sale came off, unless I could persuade Caroline and she could help me persuade the world that Harry’s painting was authentic, and we could find someone to buy it, I would be bankrupt in weeks. I would lose the business. I would lose this house. Nor was that the worst of it.
“Does she understand?” Sarah kept asking me, “Have you told her what happens when you go bankrupt here? She can’t wish that on you, can she?”
It would not help, I said, putting pressure on Caroline, trying to influence her professional judgment. You couldn’t pay most academics for their involvement in authenticating works for that very reason—they were terrified of being accused of underhanded dealings. Nevertheless, the truth was I was one painting away from bankruptcy in a country in which going bankrupt landed you in prison. Nor was skipping the country an option—I’d be handcuffed at passport control.
I was just thinking about easing myself up off my chair and heading inside for another drink when my phone rang.
Sarah glanced at it. “It’s her,” she said, an edge to her voice, gesturing for me to answer.
I sat upright and picked up the phone.
“Caroline! How did the trip to Longhurst go?”
“Fine. I mean, Harry looked like a sad ghost, wandering around those halls, and I have concerns about him, health-wise. But the visit was useful. Actually that’s why I’m calling. This painting, the pictures you sent. You mentioned two differences between yours and the one in Tate Modern. Have you got yours there with you?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m at home. The painting is in the gallery, where it’s safe,” I said. Where I had invested in quite a lot of extra security measures, to ensure that it was safe, at no small cost.
“How long would it take you to drive there?”
“At this time of night? Fifteen minutes, probably.”
“Patrick. There’s a third difference. Between the paintings.”
Twenty minutes later, I was climbing out of a cab at the Dubai International Financial Centre. The gallery was locked, of course. It was almost ten o’clock at night. I typed the code into the keypad and closed the door carefully behind me. Caroline had said she would call back in half an hour. I was standing in front of the painting when she did.
“Well?” she asked me.
“I’m not seeing it,” I said.
“Look more closely at the bottom right section.”
I did so.
“Jesus, you’re right,” I told her, a fizz of excitement gathering between my shoulder blades. “It’s in the boat, isn’t it. There’s something lying in the boat.”
“Exactly, exactly!” She sounded triumphant. “That’s what I mean. A white shape. But what is it? I’ve been sitting here zooming in on your photos, but I can’t quite make it out. Can you?”
I held up my phone and turned on its flashlight. Squinting, holding my breath, I leaned in closer, the sharp beam of light illuminating the normally invisible craquelure in the painting’s varnish.
I carefully stepped to the side and held my phone up at a different angle.
“I think it’s a body,” I said. “A body all cross-crossed with bandages. That’s what it is, the object in the boat. A mummified body.”
JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938
The exhibition ended and with it our dream of escape.
Oskar’s painting had not sold, nor in all these weeks had he started on anything new. I could understand that. For as long as I had known him, he had been working on Three Figures in a Landscape, convinced this was his masterpiece, a work that would attract derision and scorn and praise and acclaim, a work that would set the critics searching for superlatives, and buyers scrambling for their checkbooks.
