He took a moment to process this. “You mean the whole evening . . . ?”

  “Was my best friend playing Cupid, yes,” I said, laughing.

  The instant Patrick walked into that dining room, I had realized it was a setup. That Athena—despite all my attempts to convey to her the complexity of my feelings about Patrick, despite all the times I had tried to explain to her the intensity of my anxieties around relationships generally—had taken it upon herself to matchmake. I was not sure if I felt annoyed about this or amused. Athena had always been so easy to read, at least to me (except when it came to Freddie, whose appeal was eternally baffling). Apparently the same could not be said the other way round.

  Then again, I had often felt that Athena’s brain was not wired quite like other people’s—the directness of the way she approached things, perhaps to do with the way she had been brought up, an assumption that if she wanted something enough she would always get it.

  It was a little irritating to think she would claim credit for all this, and yet as Patrick and I stood in that doorway, his lips pressed against mine, never before had I been so certain about what I wanted to happen next. Never in a moment like that had I felt so in control of my anxiety, so confident that if a wave of panic did start rising, I could face it down.

  We giggled all the way up the stairs. We kissed in the corridor outside his room. There was a clash of teeth, more laughter. Then we were on his bed. His body on mine. My body on his.

  It was only afterward, lying there, that I started to feel that familiar anxiety simmer. I sat up, asked Patrick for a glass of water. He passed me a mug, with a grin. “Even if it was Athena’s doing,” he said, “I’m really glad this happened. I really hope that maybe this time around . . .”

  I tried to keep my breathing steady, to stop my throat from constricting. “Maybe,” I said. “I think, perhaps . . . it’s just that . . . it’s not that I don’t like you. There’s just quite a lot of stuff I’m working through. Family stuff. Complicated stuff. I’m sure I’ll tell you about it one day, but for the moment we are going to need to take things very slowly, okay?”

  “Of course,” he said. “We can take things at whatever pace you want. Just know that I like you—I don’t think I ever stopped liking you—and I can be patient.” He thought to himself for a minute and frowned—or pretended to. “Although I was going to ask you if you wanted to come to the Witt Library with me tomorrow. But if you think that would be too . . .”

  “That sounds great,” I said, with genuine enthusiasm.

  Then somehow, we were kissing again, urgently. But even as we melted into each other, at the back of my mind was the knowledge that if I wanted this to be more than a three-night stand, I would have to find a way to open up to him. To try to explain why Juliette Willoughby’s journal spoke to me so personally. To explain that I could remember exactly how it felt, that sense of constant anxiety she described, of always being on guard, never knowing if you were being too paranoid or not paranoid enough.

  I was ten years old when my mother finally left my father. She must have spent years building up the courage to do it, months working out the practicalities, weeks waiting for the perfect moment to run. I understood implicitly that I would not be going back to that school or seeing my friends again. That we would be in a new place, a new city. That this was the last time I would ever see our house. I was allowed one bag and had half an hour to pack, and all that time she was standing by the window, watching for his car, terrified he would return early from work.

  He had always said that if she ever tried to leave, if she ever tried to take me away from him, he would find her and he would kill her.

  PATRICK’S VISION, I THINK, had been for us to cruise up to London in the MG with the roof down, stopping somewhere for a pub lunch in the sunshine. When we woke up it was raining. We got to the car and found it would not start. He was touchingly apologetic about this as we waited for a lull in the rain and then made a dash for the train station. All the way to King’s Cross, Freddie Talbot was our main topic of discussion.

  It was a relief to learn that Patrick was as uncharmed by him as I was. His not turning up for dinner the night before was typical, I explained. As was Athena’s reaction to it, the realization visibly dawning on her that Freddie was either not going to show or would be wasted if he did come.

  “There are good reasons why he is the way he is, though,” Patrick commented. “Because my dad is friends with Philip Willoughby, I spent a lot of time at Longhurst as a kid, hanging out with Harry. Often Freddie would be there too. I remember playing hide-and-seek for hours. Freddie would always win—you’d spend ages looking for him and there he would be, stretched out on a rafter.”

  I tried to imagine them, three little boys with the run of a great big country house—the very house that Juliette grew up in. Perhaps I should have been more surprised than I was to discover that Freddie was Harry’s cousin—when I had first arrived in Cambridge I would have thought it almost as bizarre a coincidence as the discovery that they were both related to Juliette. Now, though, it just further underlined the interconnectedness of the circles into which I had stumbled.

  “Why was Freddie at Longhurst so much—did he live there too?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Patrick said. “Most of the time he was at boarding school, but he’d stay during holidays when Arabella—his mother—didn’t want him. She’d be in Monaco on someone’s yacht, or in Spain on honeymoon, or doing yoga up a mountain. She moved to South Africa with husband number five when Freddie started secondary school, but I don’t think he’s been over there once.”

  “That must have been unsettling for him,” I said.

  “He certainly never liked to talk about it. If you really wanted to annoy Freddie, asking him where Arabella was would always do it. Not that upsetting Freddie was ever really something you wanted to do, because he’s always had a mean streak. To freak Harry and me out, he used to tell us about all the creepy stuff Cyril kept in the house—the mummies, the old scrolls. He also had this Usborne World of the Unknown book of unsolved mysteries with the story of Longhurst’s Missing Maid—this servant who disappeared there back in the 1930s. He always claimed that the room I’d been given to sleep in had been hers, and he would tell us about various family members who had definitely seen her ghost. Which, aged eight, you laugh about when you’re all together, but come bedtime I’d sleep sitting up, back to the wall, with all the lights on.”

  Patrick paused. “The thing that really explains Freddie, though, the root of all that bitterness, is that technically Longhurst should be his.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Juliette’s father, Cyril, was the oldest of three brothers, but he never had a son. So when he died, Longhurst should have passed sideways to the second-eldest brother. That’s where it gets peculiar. Freddie’s grandfather Osbert was the next in line. Harry’s grandfather Austen was the youngest. It skipped a brother: the house, the inheritance, all of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Not sure,” Patrick said. “Harry says he doesn’t know and neither does Freddie. My dad thinks it was to do with Freddie’s grandfather being a drinker, that Cyril was worried he’d piss the lot away. But I would imagine it does rankle with Freddie.”

  What none of that explained, I said, was what I had seen the other day, the peculiar incident in the car, Freddie being screamed at. Patrick said he was not sure what that could have been about either, or who had been screaming at him.

  “The thing about Freddie is, he’s always had a peculiar talent for pissing people off.”

  THE WOMAN BEHIND THE Witt Library’s front desk explained it would take me a little time to get a reader’s card. Patrick asked if I would mind if he went ahead of me to start on the task his father had set him.

  “Of course not,” I said. It sounded like he had a lot of photographs to leaf through.

  Frustratingly, in contrast, my search for material on Juliette Willoughby yielded slim pickings. Predictably for an artist with no extant art, her name was not listed in the library catalogue at all. Instead, I contented myself with leafing through the files for work by other Surrealists featuring Sphinxes. I was sifting through a box full to bursting of photographs of Salvador Dalí’s paintings when Patrick’s face appeared over the top of my carrel. He was grinning.

  “Did you find the paintings you were looking for?” I asked.

  He shook his head. He was still grinning.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve made a bit of a discovery. Come with me.”

  A box was open on Patrick’s desk. It was labeled Longhurst Hall, 1961.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit. “This is one of those boxes of photographs I told you about,” he said. “The ones my dad asked me to go through.”

  He indicated the picture at the top of the pile. It showed a painting of a sad-eyed bloodhound, the background incomplete, the work unfinished, the painting unsigned. The photograph was old and of poor quality, black-and-white. He shifted it across to a different pile. Under it was a photograph of a painting of a wolfhound, nose to the ground, clearly undertaken by the same hand. Patrick added that photograph to the other pile too, revealing the one underneath.

  “What do you make of that?” he asked me.

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  The photograph—frustratingly fuzzy, annoyingly monochrome—was centered on a single female figure. I could feel Patrick watching my reaction. It was her. The young woman from the passport photograph. Juliette Willoughby.

  On her face was an expression of bold challenge. Around her neck was a familiar pendant, which she was pointing at with an index finger. Her paws—this figure was from the waist down feline—were crossed on a rock in front of her. Around the central figure, infuriatingly hard to make out, were other scenes. A pale girl with dark hair. A hooded figure in a boat.

  “It can’t be. Nothing in that apartment survived the fire,” I said, shaking my head. “Everyone knows that. You said it yourself.”

  “What about the journal, what about the passport you found, the locket?” said Patrick. “They clearly survived the fire. They somehow found their way to Longhurst.”

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  Patrick shook his head. “It’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx,” he said.

  JULIETTE’S JOURNAL, PARIS, 1937

  Third Entry

  Monday, 13th December—I sometimes wonder how history will remember us, Oskar and me.

  For days he has been tinkering with Three Figures in a Landscape, the enormous, overwhelming painting in oils he has been working on for as long as I have known him, agonizing over, wrestling with.

  All morning, Oskar has been bouncing over to the front window to peer out, expectantly. This being a Monday, the concierge’s wife was mopping the stairs and landings, and every time her mop collided with the baseboard he would start, convinced it was a knock at the door. Every time Oskar passed the mirror he would run a hand through his hair, straighten his tie—gestures that made him look rather like a nervous maître d’ waiting for opening hour.

  He checked his watch. He picked up the paper and stared at it. He checked his watch again. Finally, with a grating sound, we heard the big wooden street door opening. Voices, one of them the concierge’s wife, the other the man we were waiting for: André Breton. The acknowledged leader of the Surrealist movement, certainly its most celebrated theorist and spokesperson. The man whose opinion Oskar respects more than that of anyone else in the world.

  I have always found him a bit pompous, if I am honest.

  There are some celebrated people who seem at all times very conscious of that fact. My father, the MP, is one of them. Breton is another. The first time Oskar brought me to a Surrealist meeting—at the Promenade de Vénus café, where they all used to gather at five thirty every day except Sunday—the first thing I thought about Breton was: he speaks like he is expecting someone to write it down. He was certainly more than happy to pose for my photos, self-consciously holding thoughtful, photogenic poses—elbow on the marble table, or smoking and gazing out the window.

  The reason Oskar was so nervous about this visit was that Breton was here to decide which—if any—of Oskar’s paintings is worthy of inclusion in the upcoming International Surrealist Exhibition.

  It took him a long time to climb the stairs. Finally came the knock at the door, Oskar literally leaping across the room to open it. As usual, Breton was almost comically courteous, formal, greeting me with a little bow, a polite question in French about how I was.

  “Very well indeed,” I answered, in my best schoolgirl French. “Très bien, merci.”

  “And this is what you have been working on?” Breton asked Oskar, again in French. Taking up an entire wall of the studio, the one with the best light, was Oskar’s near-complete masterpiece.

  Breton lingered in front of it for a while. In some ways it must have been familiar already, given how many nights Oskar spent describing it to him, all the preliminary studies he had seen. He gave a satisfied grunt. He awarded it a little approving nod of the head.

  Then something else caught his eye.

  “Mais cette peinture,” said Breton, eyes widening. “C’est incroyable!” I glanced at Oskar’s face, to see his expression. His eyes did not meet mine. His smile looked stiff, frozen. Breton took several quick steps across the room, clapping his hands together as he did so, an almost girlish gesture. “Vraiment Surréaliste!” He turned to smile, first at Oskar and then at me. Why had Oskar not said anything to him about this piece he was working on, he asked playfully. Of course this must be in the exhibition.

  Oskar did not answer. It seemed he was incapable of speech. I returned Breton’s smile but found myself temporarily unable to reply either. Because it was not one of Oskar’s paintings that had caught Breton’s attention.

  It was my Self-Portrait as Sphinx.

  I suppose it should have been no surprise that it would appeal to Breton. After all, the piece had started life as an experiment in automatic drawing at his apartment, all of us sitting there in silence with our paper in front of us, very serious, trying not to let our conscious minds interfere with what our pencils were producing. It was only when I was finished that I understood what I had drawn.

  “Are you alright?” Oskar had asked. “Is something wrong?”

  I had told Oskar by then about my time in the asylum. What I had not been able to bring myself to admit was exactly why I had been committed, the accusations I had been flinging around. Symptoms of my illness, was how doctors told me to think of them. Sick products of a hysterical mind. “Think of your father,” they kept telling me. “Think of his reputation.” That was the message, day in, day out, for months.

  I had promised that if I was released, I would never say those things again. I understood this was something on which my freedom was conditional. Even now, when I think of writing my darker suspicions down in this journal, my fingers flinch from the task.

  What I never promised was that I would not draw or paint them.

  Chapter 5

  PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991

  Our second supervision with Alice Long was scheduled for ten the following morning, although when she opened the door she showed no sign of having been expecting us. For a moment, it was unclear if she even remembered who we were.

  “Well, you’d better come in then,” she said, eventually.

  Caroline waited until we were all in the living room and Alice was sitting down before she told her about the journal. Where she had found it. What it contained. Juliette’s words. Her drawings. On the back page, she had realized after some research, were Juliette’s color notes, where she had daubed different shades, perhaps keeping it on hand as she was painting to remind herself of their exact composition. Alice leaned forward in her chair to listen. She let out little gasps—of delight, of surprise, of amazement. Her eyes were bright.

  “This was in among the papers in the Willoughby Bequest?”

  Caroline said yes. Along with Juliette’s passport and pendant. “What I was hoping you might be able to help me with is how they got there.”

  “I have no idea, I am afraid,” Alice said. Caroline and I exchanged a look, and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “We don’t think the journal is all that survived the fire.”

  Alice tilted her head, raised an eyebrow. “And what would make you think that?”

  “Did you know Self-Portrait as Sphinx was withdrawn from the International Surrealist Exhibition?” I asked her. “That Juliette only allowed it to be shown for a single night?”

  “Of course I do,” said Alice, a touch sharply. “That’s well-documented. After the opening night of the exhibition, she decided that she did not want the painting on public view, and that it was no longer for sale. That’s why it was in their apartment when the fire broke out. That’s why it was destroyed.”

  “But what if it wasn’t?” said Caroline. “What if it survived?”

  As I explained about the photograph we had found at the Witt, Alice Long let out a few coughs and splutters of surprise and—I was pathetically pleased to see, given her obvious disdain the first time we met—a nod of what looked like grudging admiration.

  I did feel bad that she was the first person with whom we had shared our discoveries, and not my father. Given his connection to the Willoughbys, to Longhurst, given he was the reason we had stumbled across the photograph of the painting in the first place. Should I have told him? Probably. Somehow, though, this felt like something Caroline and I were meant to do together—or to put it another way, what I did not want was for him to swoop in and grab all the credit.

  As with most people in his profession, one of the dreams that had kept my father crisscrossing the country from auction house to estate sale all these years, that had him thumbing through typewritten auction catalogues in bed every night, was the dream of stumbling across a valuable work that no one had correctly identified. A sleeper. Unlike most people in his profession, he had actually already stumbled across one, once.

 

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