Page 75 of The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby
Then there I was, too. A photograph I had never seen before—marked as on loan from the estate of Man Ray, the little description naming me as “Jules” Willoughby—that Oskar must have taken when I was asleep, my hair flowing over the heavy bed frame, a thin sheet barely concealing the curves of my naked body. That Oskar had taken with my own bloody camera, without my permission, and given to his friend.
There was no mention of the fact that I too was an artist, just a somber few sentences identifying this as the iron bedstead in which Oskar Erlich and his young lover, a runaway heiress, had perished.
On the shelves in the gift shop were all the biographies of all the men. All the histories, all written by men. All the memoirs, by men. The influence of André Breton on Oskar’s thinking was discussed, in the catalogue I angrily flicked through but did not buy. Oskar’s work was compared to Dalí’s. His friendship with Man Ray was detailed at length, his rivalry with Max Ernst unpacked. There was no mention of any impact I—or any of the other women working and talking about their work all around us—may have had on the men. The one picture in the catalogue of the female Surrealists—of Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini—was one I had taken of them strolling arm in arm on the banks of the Seine. This is how we get painted out of history, I thought.
All these years, I had told myself that it did not matter, that Juliette Willoughby had been laid to rest and forgotten about. That things were better and safer for me that way. Even after I learned that my father had died—the obituary suddenly springing up from the Times one morning, with the strange news that it was Uncle Austen and not Uncle Osbert who had inherited Longhurst—I did not make myself known. Even though it should have been me that the house was passed down to.
I had no desire to inherit Longhurst, knowing what had happened there. I had no desire to go near the place ever again. I had a life; Alice Long had her career. I was proud of my photographs, proud of what I had achieved. I had made a name for myself, a new one. Nevertheless, there was something about that picture of me that I could not get out of my head.
Two weeks later, on a gray Thursday afternoon, a very young, very serious doctor told me it would appear from my test results that I had less than a year to live.
That was when it came to me. I might only have a year left, but I still had time to set the record straight, in all sorts of ways. It should have been up there, on the walls of the Tate, my Self-Portrait as Sphinx, along with the Erlichs, the Dalís, the Ernsts, the Man Rays.
I was the only person in the world who knew that the painting believed burned in Paris in 1938—or at least a version of that painting, painstakingly repainted by the artist herself—existed. In fact, it had been hanging on my bedroom wall in Cambridge for the past fifty years.
Yet if it were simply found on my bedroom wall by whoever came to clear my cottage, nobody would have a clue what on earth they were looking at. I had the only surviving photographs of the original tucked away in the now tatty suitcase I brought back from Paris. Without those, the only description of Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx was a single line in a 1938 exhibition catalogue, a couple of mentions in contemporary newspaper reviews.
I let the problem percolate, hoping the solution would present itself. Coincidence multiplies when we pay attention, Oskar had once said, probably parroting Breton. So I pottered about. Took my medicine. Attended my appointments. Supervised the occasional Cambridge student. Intermittently accepted invitations to private views, a guest lecture or two, a funeral.
Then something happened that changed everything.
It was in a window on Cork Street that I saw it, right there in a big fancy gallery. An Austen Willoughby, supposedly. An obvious forgery—at least to me. I came to a dead stop right there in the middle of the pavement. It was a greyhound in a wooded landscape, a decent enough attempt to the untrained eye, but the angle of the head was completely off—no greyhound ever held its head like that. Nor were those a greyhound’s eyes. If anything, they were the eyes of a terrier. It was a painting by someone who had studied a lot of paintings of dogs, and not a lot of actual dogs.
I went inside, and I asked about the work. Humoring the old lady, they explained all about Austen Willoughby, his career, his life.
“The provenance is impeccable,” I was assured by the gallerist. “This piece comes from Longhurst Hall, the artist’s home. There was a complete photographic survey of the estate’s art collection made by the Witt Library in 1961, in which this painting was included. It’s held at the Courtauld—”
“I know where the Witt Library is,” I said curtly.
I also knew that this was not an authentic work. Which meant the photographic records at the Witt had been falsified. What I wanted to know was who had falsified them. Who was bringing paintings in and out of Longhurst. Who was selling them on behalf of the family to galleries like this one.
The answer, it seemed, was a man named Quentin Lambert.
Chapter 21
CAROLINE, DUBAI, FORTY-TWO HOURS AFTER HARRY’S DEATH
The drive back to my hotel from the polo club feels so fast—the city rising out of the sand like a shimmering mirage—that I barely have time to process what I’ve just seen. Could Harry have been embroiled in some sort of scheme with Athena? If he had, it backfired badly.
I’ve agreed to meet Dave at a rooftop bar next to my hotel and I arrive first, expecting a long wait—from up on the twenty-seventh floor I can see traffic snaking all the way down to the Palm, where Patrick said Dave lives. I take a seat and watch a DJ being ignored by everyone except the pouting model types in his immediate vicinity, who are self-consciously hand-waving and hair-flicking. I am so fascinated by the scene I don’t notice when Dave walks in.
He plonks himself down in the seat opposite me. “Alright?”
“Jesus, how did you get here? Helicopter?”
He smiles, shrugs.
“You didn’t actually?” I ask. He seems remarkably chipper for a man who may have just been scammed for tens of millions.
“Well, we have quite a lot to talk about,” he says.
“That’s definitely true. If you don’t mind, can we start with how you got hold of the CCTV footage of Athena’s fake buyer so quickly? I don’t understand...”
“It’s my business,” he says matter-of-factly. “Well, part of it. We develop and operate extremely sophisticated surveillance technology. My systems capture and identify people and track them as they move from place to place. Even if attempts have been made to conceal their identity. Even as their appearance changes with age.”
I was poised to interject. He lifted a finger.
“I think I know what you’re going to say. Like most people, the first thing that occurs to you is all the uses an authoritarian state could put this stuff to. I understand those concerns, and I share them. But don’t forget all the extraordinary, positive things it can achieve. Combating child trafficking. Helping find missing persons.”
