The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part I: The Journal
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part II: The Painting
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part III: The Dilemma
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part IV: The Murder
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Ellery Lloyd
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
With the exception of the fictional Juliette Willoughby, Oskar Erlich, and Austen Willoughby, all the artists mentioned or who appear in this novel are genuine historical figures.
Prologue
CAROLINE, DUBAI, THE PRESENT DAY
It is time to begin.
I am standing at a podium in front of a painting in an art gallery in Dubai. It is not a large painting—30 inches by 21 inches, to be precise. It is not a very large gallery—we are in the biggest of its three rooms, a white-painted space about the size of a school classroom. Arranged in front of me are several rows of folding chairs, occupied by reporters. I have already been introduced to a writer from the Telegraph and the Gulf News podcast team. A group of press photographers are clicking away, flashguns strobing. At the back are two TV crews, one from a local Arabic station, one from BBC News.
Beside me at the podium is the owner of the gallery, the organizer of this press conference, Patrick Lambert.
“Dr. Caroline Cooper,” Patrick is saying, “is a Fellow of Pembroke College and professor of modern art at the University of Cambridge, specializing in the Surrealist movement in the 1930s, with a focus on Surrealist art by women, in particular the British painter Juliette Willoughby.”
Patrick lists my publications, highlighting my 1998 biography of Juliette, the first ever written and still—he reminds everyone—the definitive account of the artist’s life, work, and untimely death. He also mentions how long he and I have known each other. One or two audience members smile knowingly.
The painting on the wall behind us is entitled Self-Portrait as Sphinx. It was painted by Juliette—then twenty-one years old—in the winter of 1937–38, and was first displayed at the era-defining International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1938. For decades it was lost, believed destroyed. Last night it was sold, right here, for £42 million.
“Thank you, Patrick,” I say as he takes a seat in the front row. He gives me a wink. I stifle a smile back.
I have been asked to keep my speech short: just five minutes in which to explain Surrealism, its historical context and underlying philosophy. To convey why this artwork matters, why I believe it to be genuine, and why I am prepared to stake my professional reputation on that opinion. To tell the story of the artist and this painting, and how it was lost, and how it was found again—twice.
It is a story that begins one wet autumn morning in Cambridge in 1991, at our first dissertation supervision with Alice Long, with the conversation that set Patrick and me on a path that would eventually lead us to Juliette’s lost masterpiece.
It is a story that begins one winter evening in Paris in 1937, when a runaway British heiress embarked, in the cold and cramped Montmartre studio she shared with her famous artist lover, on one of the most remarkable paintings of its era.
It is also, I suppose, the story of Patrick and me. How we fell in love. How a painting brought us together, drove us apart, and now seems to have united us once more.
Of everything I have to say, I am aware that thirty seconds at most will make it onto TV, a sentence or two into the newspapers. The headlines will be all about the sum the painting sold for, and who bought it.
What I really want to tell everyone in this room is: Look at it. Look at her, I almost said. Because it is her you notice first. The work’s dominant central figure. Her wild auburn mane. Her ice-blue eyes. Her expression: defiant, fearless. Then you notice her breasts are bare. Then you notice there are six of them, arranged like the teats on a cat. Then you notice she has a cat’s legs too, a cat’s haunches, tortoiseshell-patterned. Sharp claws. And you start to wonder what it might mean, to depict yourself as a Sphinx. As this Sphinx.
Only up close can you truly appreciate the painting’s vast intricacy, the people and creatures arranged around the central Sphinx, all intent on their individual tasks, seemingly unaware of one another, in a setting that is part overgrown English country garden, part junglescape. Each new group you notice inviting reflection on the story that together they might tell, your initial bewilderment perhaps fading, perhaps deepening, as patterns and echoes emerge and new mysteries present themselves.
The mystery that the journalists in this room are interested in, of course, is a far simpler one: how can this impossible painting exist at all? The answer is that I am not sure. All I can confidently state is my belief in its authenticity, which means we need to reconsider everything we thought we knew about Juliette Willoughby, her life, and her work.
As it turns out, in the end, I don’t have time to say any of that. I have just wished everyone a good afternoon when there is a commotion at the doorway—three latecomers have loudly barged in, asking the same question repeatedly in Arabic. Someone turns to shush them. I am just about to point out that there are still some empty seats at the front when I notice they are in uniform: khaki shirts and trousers tucked into shiny black boots, with angled gold-badged berets. A gallery assistant points out Patrick and they make their way in our direction. I am still—somewhat distractedly—talking about the painting. Patrick, frowning, is out of his chair and advancing to meet the men. The photographers are snapping away, the TV cameras are rolling.
Capturing for posterity and a global audience Patrick Lambert’s arrest for murder.
Part I
The Journal
What do you consider the essential encounter of your life? To what extent did this encounter seem to you, and does it seem to you now, to be fortuitous or foreordained?
—ANDRÉ BRETON, Mad Love (1937, TRANS. MARY ANN CAWS)
Chapter 1
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Oh bloody hell. That was my first thought as I plowed through an axle-deep puddle and turned onto Elm Lane, making out through my windshield a bedraggled figure, her blond hair hanging in dripping ringlets down her back. This was going to be awkward.
It was Caroline Cooper.
There seemed little doubt we were headed for the same place—why else would she be wandering up a windswept street on the outskirts of Cambridge on a weekday morning? My director of studies had mentioned that these final-year dissertation supervisions would be taking place à deux. He said he hoped that would not be a problem and I reassured him it would not be, vaguely hoping my supervision partner would be attractive, female. I should also have hoped for someone with whom I had not already slept.
She was standing at the end of a driveway, peering up it, presumably looking for a house number. I slowed the MG to a crawl. Even rain-soaked, she was stunning. I checked my own appearance in the rearview mirror. Caroline Cooper. What were the chances of that?
She and I had slept together twice, back at the very beginning of our first year. Once after a party, then again a few weeks later, having tipsily bumped into each other at a college dance. The first time was in her room, with its fairy lights around the mirror and Frida Kahlo poster on the wall. I recalled the narrowness of her bed, waking up in the night desperate for a pee but not wanting to disturb her or break the moment’s spell, our legs entangled, her head on my chest.
The second time, we had meandered back to my room holding hands, stopping now and then to kiss in a doorway. Half that night we stayed up talking, drinking cheap white wine from chipped mugs and smoking out the window, surveying the moonlit quad below. Talking about Cambridge, her first impressions of it. Discussing art and artists. I told her stories about my father, about boarding school. It was obvious we were attracted to each other. It also felt like we were really connecting, as if this was the start of something very exciting indeed.
What happened next was . . . nothing. I left a note in her college cubbyhole. No reply. I kept an eye out for her in lectures. She began arriving just before they started and sitting on the opposite side of the lecture hall, then slipping off quickly at the end.
I turned that second night over and over in my mind, trying to pinpoint what I’d done wrong. Was it something I had said? I probably was a bit of a show-off in those days, keen to make an impression, establish myself as a bit of a Cambridge character. Driving around town in my silly sports car. Playing up to the public schoolboy thing, the floppy hair, the posh accent . . .
It quickly became obvious what while I may have felt a spark between us, Caroline had not. When we passed in the Art History Department corridors or she accidentally sat opposite me in the library, I received only the faintest of acknowledgments. Once or twice
I tapped the horn lightly and Caroline looked up. She recognized my car, of course—how many students tooled around Cambridge in a red MG convertible?—and forced an unconvincing smile. I pulled over and rolled the window down. It was not a situation in which we could just both ignore each other, after all.
“I suspect we’re looking for the same place,” I said.
“I think this is it,” she replied. “Number thirty-two?”
“That was the address Dr. Bailey gave me.”
The house certainly looked the part. Let’s put it this way: either an academic lived here or the place was derelict. Slates were missing from the roof. The downstairs curtains were drawn. Something shrubby was sprouting from a sagging gutter. Caroline pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened.
“Are you sure you . . . ?” I asked.
She invited me to try for myself. It was unclear if the buzzer was even connected to anything. Tentatively at first, then again more firmly, I knocked. Caroline took a step back to peer up at the first-floor windows.
“There are no lights on,” she pointed out. “Do you think she’s forgotten?”
“Maybe. She must be getting on a bit, after all. Have you ever heard of her, this Alice Long?”
I had not, although the university library did list three books by her—one on Man Ray, one on Brassaï, and another on the history of photojournalism. She had been a press photographer herself, for Time and Vogue, according to the author bio in the last of these, published in 1980. Even a decade ago, Alice Long had looked quite old in her author’s headshot.
“Maybe she can’t hear us,” I said. “Do you think I should go around and shout over the back fence?”
“For God’s sake,” Caroline muttered behind me. “Who is this person, anyway? She isn’t part of the faculty. She isn’t affiliated with a college. Why is she supervising final-year dissertations? I might complain. This project is an important part of our degree, you know.”
I could understand Caroline’s anxiety. Even in the first year, she had been clear about how seriously she took her subject, what her end goal was: a life of scholarship, teaching, writing. I could easily see her as a cool young academic, inspiring her students, probably while wearing a leather jacket and red lipstick. Like a dickhead, trying to impress her, I had detailed my own career plans: a first-class degree, a job at Sotheby’s, my own Mayfair gallery by the age of thirty. I must have sounded obscenely entitled and overconfident, but in my defense, I was eighteen. I said a lot of things out loud in those days that I have since learned to keep to myself.
Still, the bottom line was this: if we had been stuck with a dud supervisor and it impacted badly on our final-degree result, we could both kiss our respective dreams goodbye.
From the other side of the door, a bolt was pulled back with a screech. It was another few minutes before the door finally opened—in the meantime much fiddling with other locks could be heard.
“Hello there,” I said loudly, I hoped reassuringly. “It’s Patrick and Caroline. We’re History of Art students. From the university.”
The face in the doorway was wrinkled and sallow, topped with a tangle of white hair. Alice Long was wearing a brown pleated dress, gray knee-length socks, and a suspicious frown. She looked even older than I had been expecting.
“You’re late,” she said sternly.
“Sorry,” I told her. “We have been knocking for a while . . .”
As I stepped into the hallway, I checked my hair in a foxed little wall mirror. Alice Long shuffled off, disappearing through an open door, obviously expecting us to follow her. In the gloom, I was vaguely aware of a Persian rug underfoot, dirt-darkened, threadbare. Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the wall, a thick layer of dust obscuring their subjects.
I let Caroline go ahead of me and when she reached the end of the corridor I saw her stiffen.
“Please,” Alice Long said, indicating a very small sofa—a large armchair, really—with high sides. “Sit.”
She settled on a wooden chair next to a table piled with books. Caroline and I sat gingerly on the sofa, trying to avoid touching each other. The room’s net curtains were drawn, its main source of light an unshaded bulb hanging from a wire.
“So, Patrick,” said Alice Long without preamble. “You’re interested in Surrealism, are you?”
“Very interested,” I said firmly, leaning forward to emphasize this, eager to make a good impression. “What fascinates me is the way Surrealist art fearlessly explores the inner workings of the mind. Its rejection of conformity and willingness to embrace the mythical and dreamlike. All those haunting, seemingly random scenes and images that seem to spring direct from the subconscious.”
Alice Long smiled faintly, eyeing me intently.
“People always go on about Dalí and Magritte,” I continued, “but the painter who really encapsulates the movement for me is Oskar Erlich.”
This was clearly not something she had expected me to say. She raised a slightly surprised eyebrow and gestured for me to continue.
“Anyway, I want to focus my dissertation on the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, their last great show before the war. It was a huge media event, all the artists associated with the movement showing: Erlich, Picasso, Man Ray, Miró . . .”
Alice Long made a little gesture with her hand as if to say, I know all this.
“I intend to explore the way the exhibition was organized,” I continued. “The manner in which it was publicized, its cultural impact.”
She greeted this with a thoughtful frown. “You have a potentially interesting topic there. The argument will need development, though,” she said.
“Oh, definitely,” I said, a little crushed. Potentially interesting? Potentially interesting?
Alice Long then pivoted in her chair to ask Caroline what she was working on. Caroline cleared her throat, brought out her notebook, and started to read. It quickly became clear that she had done a lot more preparation than I had. She intended to explore Sphinxes in Surrealist art, she explained. She had notes on the different types of Sphinx (royal and monstrous, Greek and Egyptian), male and female, winged and unwinged. She made the point that we use the Greek word Sphinx—masculine, I interjected, pleased with myself—to describe interchangeably what were actually distinct and unrelated creatures in Greek and Egyptian mythology. She ended by saying something like: “And that’s as far as I have got, Sphinx-wise.”
Alice Long—engaged, enthusiastic, a lot livelier than when I had been talking—asked her which particular works she would write about. Caroline mentioned Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de bonté, Dalí’s Three Sphinxes of Bikini, Leonor Fini’s Little Hermit Sphinx . . .
“What about Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx?” asked Alice Long.
“Oh yes, of course,” said Caroline, although with a trace of hesitation in her voice.
If that was a line of inquiry Caroline was interested in pursuing, Alice Long continued, she should examine the Willoughby Bequest. “It’s a collection of Egyptological materials formerly in the possession of the Willoughby family deposited at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, here in Cambridge,” she explained, in response to Caroline’s confused frown. Caroline wrote this down and as she did so glanced at me meaningfully. I offered her in return the facial equivalent of a hapless shrug.
Juliette Willoughby? The Willoughby Bequest? Was Alice Long being serious? Like most people with an interest in the Surrealists, I knew only two things about Juliette Willoughby, the most obvious being that she had been Oskar Erlich’s lover. All his biographies recounted their love story and its tragic ending.
This had to be some sort of test. If it was not, then I really did think we were going to have to talk seriously to our respective directors of studies about this supervisor they had assigned us. From the look on Caroline’s face, she was thinking the same thing. I raised my hand.
“Mr. Lambert?” Alice Long said curtly.
“Isn’t there a bit of a problem, for anyone planning to write about Juliette Willoughby?” I asked. Because there was only one other thing everyone knew about the artist and her work. “Her paintings don’t exist.” I continued. “None of them. Everything she produced at art school was lost when she left England for Paris in 1936. Self-Portrait as Sphinx, the only thing she ever exhibited publicly, is listed in the catalogue of the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition and described in a couple of reviews, but that’s it. Not a single photograph of it survives, none of her sketches or studies, and the painting itself was destroyed in a fire in Paris in 1938.”
