The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel (7 page)

‘Oh. I think perhaps you’d best never marry,’ she said between hiccups of laughter. ‘It really wouldn’t be fair.’

Charlie, who had begun to laugh with her, stopped.

‘Don’t look so fierce, Charlie. I’ve met your mother, God help me. Now I’d like to meet your father.’

 • • • 

Mr Fussell’s portrait hung in a bright drawing-room cum study overlooking the garden. The walls were painted butterscotch yellow, the plasterwork icing white. Even the sofas and armchairs were covered in a pale caramel candy stripe reminiscent of sweetshop paper bags. Juliet felt like Gretel grown up, although rather than a gingerbread house this room was an Antonin Carême confection. There were matching white bookcases with carved roses that looked as if they were made of sugar rather than wood. When Juliet read the titles of the books, she realised every one was a gardening manual.

‘My father’s lair. See, it has the best view of the garden.’

The bay windows framed the ponds and lawns in such perfect proportions that outside looked more like a work by Fragonard than real life.

‘My mother doesn’t come in here much. That’s why the painting’s here. She was always telling Daddy to bugger off to his study and stay there.’

Juliet blinked. She still wasn’t used to the way Charlie swore, casually using ‘bugger’, ‘damnation’ and ‘bollocks’ as condiments to sprinkle over his conversation. She was not offended, simply aware that he lacked her middle-class aversion to bad language. In thirty-odd years she had never heard her father swear and her mother only once – on the day she finally accepted that George was not coming back.

Juliet studied the portrait in the trim gilt frame. It was of a balding, middle-aged man, thin-lipped and with pouches beneath his eyes. He looked neither happy nor sad, kind nor cruel. She backed away and regarded him again from a distance. The man remained flat and cold; his face empty.

‘It’s nothing like him,’ said Charlie.

‘Why didn’t you paint him?’

‘I was going to. But then he died. And I was only fifteen. I’m not sure that mine would have been much better.’

‘You should take it down. One day you’ll forget exactly what he looked like so you’ll look at this to remember and then eventually you’ll see this blank man instead of him.’

Juliet perched on an overstuffed sofa, pretending to be at ease, and glanced around the room again.

‘The light’s good. I think we should hang the paintings in here.’

‘Mummy won’t like it. Yes. We absolutely should.’

Juliet wished she drank. Then she might feel less nervous. After tea she and Charlie had arranged all the pictures they’d brought and all in the right order, poised on easels around the room. Juliet had written out neat labels for each one. The light was perfect – late afternoon sun drifting across the lawns and turning the walls the colour of
crème caramel
. The evening wasn’t simply about the pictures though: it was about her. She fidgeted inside her special-occasion frock, a sleeveless blue dress cut just below the knee. Charlie had told her to bring a ‘cocktail dress’ but Juliet had never had a cocktail and was unaware that drinking them required a particular outfit. She’d gone to Minnie’s
on the high street and the girl there assured her that this dress was just the thing; now, standing here, Juliet had her doubts.

‘You look the business, love. Not as good as me. But you know, you did what you could.’

Juliet turned, smiling, to face a man of about twenty-five with hair conker-brown and as tightly curled as wood shavings. He preened in a dinner jacket slightly too large for his pickpocket build.

‘I feel like a Teddy Boy. But a fucking handsome one. Let’s blow this place and go somewhere good, Fidget, my love.’

As he spoke, Jim slipped an arm about her shoulders and walked her around the pictures.

‘You done good.’

‘You like the new frames? I know you didn’t want to . . .’

‘No. You was right and all. I just didn’t see it before. Jesus. It does something to them blues.’

‘I like the light in here. It should be good for another couple of hours. Is everyone here? Do you have the other pictures?’

‘Course. Me and Phil brought the lot. Max did two new ones special. Well. Probably not special. But he did two new ones anyways. Here.’

Jim heaved up a pair of canvases wrapped in brown paper that he’d stacked against the wall and placed them onto the large desk. Juliet prickled with excitement as she fumbled in the desk for scissors. The other artists – Charlie, Jim, and Philip – she knew. They shared the Fitzrovia studio and one by one Juliet had been allowed to meet them, Jim confiding that Charlie had wanted to keep her to himself for as long as he could. But Max she had never met. He’d been a friend of Charlie’s father, lending a voice to Charlie’s cause when he’d rejected Cambridge for the Royal College. It was Max who’d persuaded Valerie to pay for the rent on the studio and allow her son a generous allowance. So perhaps it was gratitude that had made Charlie bring a selection of Max’s paintings to the studio for Juliet to consider for the gallery. Max didn’t like strangers and he never came to London, not any more. She wondered what he looked like. Despite having seen so many of his paintings, somehow she could never picture him.

‘What is it about that fellow? Always his stuff you get gooey over. Enough to make a chap jealous.’

‘Come on, Jim. You know I’ll always be your girl.’

Juliet blew him a stage kiss, at ease with him in a way she never was with Charlie.

‘Always. You and me, we got to stick together, doll.’ He surveyed Juliet’s display for a second time, nodding his approval. ‘Give me a tick and I’ll get the last pictures from the car.’

He went out whistling; if he felt overawed by his surroundings, he wasn’t going to show it. Juliet wished she were as relaxed or as accomplished an actor. She sliced through the layers of string and paper swaddling Max’s pictures, relieved Jim had left her alone to open them. She lifted out the larger canvas and leaned it against the bookcase, taking a few steps back before turning to look.

A flock of greylag geese swept across an empty moor, but the colours were all inverted. The geese were pink so that at first glance they looked almost like flamingos; the dark moor wasn’t brown but red and purple, while black stars fastened onto a grassy sky. The paint was so thick in places that Juliet wondered if Max had given up on using brushes altogether and used his fingers to ply the canvas. Despite its oddness, the painting did not seem abstract or showy; instead she wanted to smile and say, ‘Ah yes, of course geese look like this. How silly of me to think they could be any other way.’

She unpacked the second, smaller, painting and set it down beside the geese. A robin. This time the colours were true to life but the robin’s eye wasn’t the black bead of a bird but the eye of a girl, big and blue with tremulous lashes. And again, Juliet knew that he had captured something about the bird, something true that she had not known until then. She thought of the little garden robin that Leonard and Frieda sometimes fed, and how it beseeched the children with its sad eyes. Was it a painting of a feathered girl trapped like Papagena or just a greedy garden bird?

Jim and Charlie returned and came to stand beside Juliet.

‘Right, what’s our boy done this time? Always with the birds,’ said Jim, shaking his head. ‘I like it. But Jesus, why not a cat or a fox or a bloody hippopotamus, just for a bit of variety?’

‘He used to paint other things,’ said Charlie. ‘It was only after the war that he started with the birds. In fact I’ve got a couple of early ones around here somewhere.’

‘Show me,’ said Juliet.

‘Now? Do we really have time?’

‘Please. I want to see.’

Juliet’s fingers tingled and she ignored the pictures waiting to be propped onto easels. Charlie shrugged and stooped to rummage through a large cupboard. In a minute he straightened and pulled out a large portfolio, placing it on the floor.

‘A few of the things in here are Max’s. He left them when he stayed here during the war. Apparently I trailed about after him while he got drunk and flirted with my nanny. According to my father he was very good at playing the
artiste
back then, especially when there were girls around. Ah – here we go.’

He drew out a sheet of watercolour paper and handed Juliet a pastel of a young, bosomy girl with a trace of a smile, mischievous and tender.

‘That was Hazel. She was the nanny. She actually was very pretty, but Max was not above flattering a girl if he thought it might help get her into bed. Not that they usually needed a whole lot of encouragement from what my father told me.’

Juliet took it to the window, a spotlight of sunshine striping the paper. The unfinished girl stared back, her eyes creased against a bright afternoon long ago. Juliet studied her, trying to glimpse the artist beyond the edge of the page.

‘Max had the ideal portrait painter’s gift – he always drew the sitter how she wanted to be seen.’

Juliet wondered what it would be like to have Max paint her.

‘Did you ask him again to come tonight? And did you give him my note?’ she asked.

‘We shoved it through the door,’ said Jim. ‘He weren’t there. Didn’t come to the door anyways. Them pictures was just left in the porch for us. Well, we assumed they was for us.’

Charlie frowned. ‘Juliet, I told you he wouldn’t. He doesn’t go anywhere. He won’t see anyone he doesn’t know. He gets up. He stalks his birds. He paints them. He gets drunk. He goes to bed.’

Charlie bent to gather up the papers and stuff them back into the portfolio case. Juliet’s fascination with Max Langford irritated him. Charlie liked – no, that wasn’t true – admired Max’s work. As a boy he’d adored him – the young and glamorous friend of his father, the former war artist, a pencil behind his ear and an inappropriate story to confide. Max had appeared indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not – appreciative but baffled by the affection others inevitably bestowed on him. Back then Charlie had marvelled at the effortlessness with which Max painted and sketched, presuming it to be an effect of age and that when he too grew up, pictures would fall off the end of his brush with no more effort on his part than flicking paint. For Charlie it was never easy. Painting was often a great pleasure, he could imagine doing nothing else, but it remained an act of will. He found himself resenting both the continued ease with which Max seemed to work, and the fervour of Juliet’s admiration. When she had first visited the studio to consider work of his various friends and colleagues for the new gallery, she’d spent hours and often days or weeks looking through their portfolios, deciding who they should include and which pieces. Max, once again, had been a different case. She had glanced at a series of watercolours of mallards and other dabblers. ‘I want these. All of them,’ she’d said, without a second look.

In the hall a clock chimed the half hour with an elegant tinkling of bells.

‘We need to finish up,’ said Charlie. ‘Everyone will be here soon. Help me with these.’

Under Juliet’s direction, Jim and Charlie set out the final pieces. As they stood back admiring the display, Phil entered with a pretty girl on his arm. Her fine blonde hair was the exact colour of Charlie’s, her wide mouth a copy of his, and Juliet guessed her to be his elder sister.

‘Goodness, you’ve been busy,’ said Sylvia, lifting her cheek to be kissed by Charlie with precisely the same movement as her mother.

‘This must be the famous Juliet.’

She offered her perfectly manicured hand to Juliet who shook it, conscious of her own bare nails.

‘I see that I picked the right moment to make my entrance,’ said Philip. He rubbed his hands together and turned to Charlie. ‘Have you rung for drinks?’

Juliet watched as Charlie pressed a small brass button beside the light switch and, with Sylvia’s hand tucked under his arm, drifted among the pictures, pointing out something here and there with a wave of his cigarette. Unlike Jim’s hired suit, Charlie’s fitted him perfectly. Like an egg into an eggcup, she thought. It was odd to see Charlie dressed so smartly. She was used to him in his carefully faded jeans and meticulously battered shoes and at first she was puzzled: he looked wrong somehow, but then she realised that he looked right. The other Charlie, the familiar one, was the one playing dress-up. Unlike Charlie and her, Philip and Jim were always at ease. Neither of them pretended or aspired to be anything other than what they were. Philip was part of the smart set – he’d paint the odd racehorse or hunter if he needed cash – and never felt the need to conceal it. Jim was equally proud of his background. His parents managed the pier arcade at Clacton-on-Sea as well as the town’s ‘oldest and best’ chip shop. It was Jim whom Juliet envied most. He succeeded in combining ambition (no stinking of cod and grease for him) and loyalty to his roots. Juliet liked his Clacton paintings best – fat women with an ice cream dripping in one hand and a fag smouldering in the other, the sea thrashing with wagging dogs and children and pale grandparents and pregnant girls bursting forth from their swimsuits, and the pier at the end of season, unlit and deserted except for a boy having a pee beside a seagull.