Page 60 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
“What do you think is going to happen up there, Patrick?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s just how it looks. You go up first. Tell me the room number. I’ll wait here and be up in five minutes. You can open the tiny wine and have a tiny drink on the balcony while you wait.”
She checked her room number. We parted. She glanced back from the elevator as the doors were closing. I smiled. She smiled back. There are some people in the world who just by looking at you can make it feel like they are squeezing your heart gently in their hand. It was just a drink, I told myself. A drink on the balcony to unwind after an extraordinary day. What was the worst that could possibly happen?
JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938
The stairs were what I had most been dreading on that tense walk home, remembering how hard it had been wrestling those mannequins up five flights, knowing any sound I made at this time of night would bring the concierge out, bleary and curious in his slippers.
It was past midnight when I finally got there. The whole building was silent and dark.
I abandoned the wheelchair on the landing, for disposal later. The body, once I had it over my shoulder, was surprisingly light. They do say the desperate are capable of superhuman feats of strength sometimes.
I offered her another silent apology as we began our climb.
The slam of our front door behind me gave me such a start that I almost screamed aloud. Oskar was still lying on the floor exactly where I had left him—was I expecting him to have moved, somehow? I could not have said how long I had been away from the apartment. Two or three hours at least. Already the skin I could see on the back of his neck, on the hand emerging from the sleeve of one outflung arm, was beginning to mottle. I felt a sudden urge to sink to my knees, to beg his forgiveness. Instead, I forced myself to focus. It was only a few hours until dawn. There would be time for self-recriminations later. A lifetime, perhaps.
My first task was to arrange both of them on the bed. I did this with much effort, putting his arm around her, again apologizing. Then I removed the necklace from around my neck—the one with the wedjat eye pendant, one of the matching pair my sister and I had always worn—and gently fastened it around hers.
I had the other, Lucy’s, in my suitcase still, to remember her by. Into that same small suitcase, I gathered my paints and brushes, camera and photographs, my journal and both passports, my real one and the forgery that had cost me and Oskar so much, one change of clothes, and all of the money, stepping over a dark puddle of blood each time I crossed the room. I set the suitcase by the door and put on my coat and shoes.
I fetched the long matches from the top of the stove and—whispering more apologies and wiping silent tears with my coat sleeve—I made my way around the room, lighting matches, scattering them. On the floor. On the bed. By Oskar’s discarded canvases. By my second circuit, things were already catching. I took another bundle of matches, struck them at a single go, and forced myself to hold the flame with a quivering hand to the bottom of the curtain. Then, closing the door behind me—quietly this time, feet light on the stairs as I descended—I left.
Crossing the courtyard, I looked back to see the window already illuminated orange. Something caught, and for a moment the room glowed incredibly brightly, then a window shattered. The landlord and his wife were asleep on the ground floor, their windows dark, shutters drawn. I paused, hesitated. Then before I had a chance to change my mind, I made a fist with my hand and hammered it, four or five times against their door.
Then I ran. As fast as my feet could carry me in my shoes, into the night, carrying my little case. What surprises me now is how calm I was. How ruthlessly pragmatic I could be. What I proved to be capable of. What I have since proved capable of forgiving myself for.
Then again, ever since I was six years old, I can hardly remember a time when I did not feel like a murderess.
Chapter 17
CAROLINE, DUBAI, 2023, THE NIGHT OF HARRY’S DEATH
I had to admit the view from my balcony was impressive at night. The illuminated pools and fountains down below. The Burj Khalifa in the distance, its tip piercing the clouds. The oddity of looking down at the city from this high up and being able to see where the lights come to a halt, where the darkness of the desert began on one side, the sea on the other.
What are you doing here, Patrick? I thought. Meaning in this country. Meaning on this balcony, too, perhaps. With me.
It was nearly midnight, but the air was still warm on our faces. We had drunk the first bottle of champagne fast, both of us talking a lot. He pointed out other hotels, other towers, his hand once or twice brushing against my bare arm. We looked for his gallery, standing on tiptoes; he pointed out his Jumeirah villa, clearly proud of its proximity to the coastline. Every so often, he would repeat the amount the painting had sold for, in an incredulous voice.
“Will it be enough?” I asked.
He looked puzzled.
“For Harry, I mean.”
“Enough to keep Longhurst? Probably. Enough to stop it crumbling?” Patrick shrugged. “Who knows? It’s funny, I used to think it would be exciting and glamorous to inherit a house like that. Now I think it would be a pretty dreadful fate. Never knowing what’s going to go wrong next, or how much it’ll cost to fix. I’m not surprised Juliette ran away.”
We watched a distant plane cross the skyline. I felt the tingle of the champagne in my veins.
“I’m sorry, Patrick, about the way things ended between us. It was a horrible thing I did to you.”
He thought about this for a while. “I am sure I have plenty of things to apologize for too,” he said. “I mean, I can understand why you did it, I think. I do remember what it was like, that whole period. We weren’t exactly getting along.”
That was an understatement. They were so many evenings that would start well enough, dinner in a restaurant, a pint at a pub by the river, and then some offhand comment would get taken the wrong way, and by the time we got home we would not have spoken for half an hour, would go to bed fuming and spend the whole night resenting every time the other person rolled over or tugged on the blankets.
We had sometimes discussed having a child, but there was no way I wanted to bring a baby into the world with someone that angry, that unhappy, that fragile. Someone obsessed, even if he wouldn’t admit it, with the idea that he had failed to live up to expectations—his own, his father’s, whatever they had drilled into him at school about the way his life would turn out. Patrick refusing ever to admit he found it difficult, dealing with my success, my being the star of the relationship. My resentment silently growing at pouring our savings, my book’s royalties, into Patrick’s failing gallery. Watching each disappointment gnaw away at him and seemingly being able to do nothing about it.
Toward the end, it was almost impossible to think of the Patrick I was married to and the Patrick I had fallen in love with as the same person at all. Now it felt like it was the old Patrick I was with, on this balcony.
