‘I hate winter.’
‘Oh, winter’s OK. It has to be like this so summer can come.’
As she stroked Isla’s hair, and rubbed her tummy, which she had always loved, Juliet realised they needed, all of them, to be anchored to the place more. They had to understand their mum worked here, and that they lived here. That this wasn’t an extended break, an experiment in living. She had to start looking for a job. To put down more roots.
Bea reappeared in the doorway. ‘Fin’s busy. I’ll speak to her later. Can I have some crumpet and Nutella, please?’
‘Yes!’ Juliet cried, practically throwing Isla off her lap and herself towards the freezer, fingers fumbling to get the crumpets out and in the toaster before Bea could disappear again. And as she heard the children chatting quietly in the dining room she let her shoulders rise, and fall, as George kept telling her she needed to do.
‘Scrunch them up around your ears, high as you can. Let everything that’s bothering you be scrunched up in there. OK? Then you let them fall, see?’
Dear Juliet Horner
Thank you for your email, which my office forwarded to me. We are looking for an assistant curator. Do you have a CV? Email it over and I’ll take a look.
Yours
Sam Hamilton
Director, Fentiman Museum
PS Are you the Juliet Horner with whom I studied at Oxford? Hope you’re well.
Dear Sam:
Yes that’s me. I’m well thank you. You didn’t have to reply so soon; I know it’s still Christmas. I have recently moved west of Oxford and wondered if the position you mentioned is still vacant. I’d love to come in and discuss it with you if so. I attach a copy of my CV and look forward to hearing from you.
Juliet Horner
Dear Juliet
Thank you for your job application.
Unfortunately the position you mention is no longer vacant. I will be in touch with you on my return to the office, 4th January 2015. I’d be happy to meet you to discuss what you feel you might be able to offer the Museum.
Yours sincerely
Sam Hamilton
P.S. Happy New Year.
Matt took the children for a week’s skiing two days later, and Juliet began her week alone with terrific intentions. She wrestled with damp patches and mice and collapsing curtain rails, with dusty trunks full of Grandi’s junk, waterlogged plants, slimy pathways. Every day brought some new challenge and she ended it always exhausted, sleeping like a log in only the way fresh air and physical exertion can make one.
She had parted from them in high drama, Sandy having to be torn away from her at the gate screaming NO AIRPLANE STATION, Bea whistling casually as she strolled towards her father, then shooting a heartbreakingly scared look back at Juliet from under her fringe to see if she’d seen her, and Isla howling angrily at everyone in Departures and calling a poker-faced Tess that horrible lady. Juliet made the drive back to Nightingale House in an equally cliched howling gale, sobbing loudly as she listened to ABBA’s Arrival on repeat. It was all awful, and clichéd, and hysterical.
Yet when she had been alone for a few days, Juliet began to realise something. As the year drew to a close, she was out every morning in the garden with the sunrise, raking leaves, cutting back branches and staking things to sticks. Slowly, she came to understand that she felt different, that she was changing. No longer was she the sad, low-level unhappy being whom the slightest thing could make cry, as she had been when she was still with Matt. She had been sleepwalking through life.
At midnight on New Year’s Eve, sitting alone at the bottom of the curving staircase, a headscarf tying her hair back, her limbs aching from dragging furniture and unpacking her own cookbooks and novels and the children’s books and games, shaking out rugs and quilts, Juliet opened a bottle of champagne given to her by Zeina and slowly, luxuriantly drank two small glasses from a coloured plastic beaker.
As she sat there, head spinning slightly, she promised she would make these last twelve months count towards something.
On 1 January, she woke up early and relatively un-hungover for the first time in years. She went for a brisk walk through the windswept, empty lanes, collecting broken twigs, husks of silver birch bark that had peeled away, discarded pine cones. She made a hearty leek and potato soup and built a ‘roaringly’ successful fire, then huddled inside in the study, and reread every published word she had ever written, and all the articles she could find online about the Fentiman, Sam Hamilton, current critical thinking on Victorian painting, and so on.
Unfortunately the position you mention is no longer vacant . . . Even the tone of Sam Hamilton’s emails, the careless repetition, set her teeth on edge; she could practically taste his self-satisfaction, oozing through the pixels on the screen. On 31 December, two days before the children were due back, Juliet gritted her teeth and emailed the directors of three other museums with significant collections of Victorian or Edwardian art: the Tate, the V&A and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
That was the other thing she’d realised during this period of solitude: she was not adept at pushing herself forward. When she’d started working, job vacancies were in newspapers, and it seemed more democratic: you applied, you had an interview, you got the job, or not. But Matt, she kept recalling, had been given a promotion and a pay rise at his old company because he’d told them he ought to have one. Juliet would no more have done that at Dawnay’s or at the Tate than she would have bought a pair of jeggings or eaten beetroot.
Somewhere down the line the women she knew started getting pregnant, and boys who were five years younger were suddenly running some department or other, and friends of hers didn’t come back to work, but appeared sometimes in the park, smiling with anxiety, their story down pat. ‘It’s been really great taking this time while he’s so small.’ Then they started getting jobs: a boy at her college was, at thirty-nine, the youngest ever managing director of the CBI. One guy she’d been with at university was an MP already; another was a TV journalist; what happened to the women? Juliet knew the answer. She wasn’t quite right for the job. Didn’t have quite the commitment necessary for the hours. Wasn’t quite on top of the brief. Quite.
Alone with her thoughts these memories kept bobbing to the surface. It made her think of the apples she and Ev used to drop in the stream that would eventually reappear, floating along until carried out of sight by the eddying water. For how long had she been simply carried along by the tide? How long had she let it happen?
The replies were swift. The V&A had nothing, they said, with regret, but the director invited Juliet in for coffee, ‘to discuss future options’. The Tate and the Walker Gallery replied in the same vein, but with courtesy; they made it clear they had heard of her, and Juliet was almost buoyed into confidence by the tone, even if nothing had come of it. Another week went by and Juliet, who had already dipped into her Premium Bond savings, drew up a list of options.
AirBnB the house.
Rent out half the house.
Sell some of the land.
Sell the house.
In the meantime the children returned with peeling noses, flushed with the success of the holiday; Elise and Isla were ‘best friends’, Tess had taken Bea shopping in Turin and they’d bought matching leather belts, and Sandy had spent the whole day in ski school, where he had apparently become friends with a llama – Juliet didn’t really understand, two-year-olds not being the best reporters of their own lives. ‘Dad was on great form, Mum,’ Bea told Juliet, the first evening, as they sat on a faded rug playing Uno in front of the fire in the chilly sitting room, each edging as close to the flames as possible. ‘I think he’s much happier, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Of course I don’t mind you saying. I’m really glad.’ Juliet watched Sandy, toddling off to the lavatory, Isla proudly holding his hand.
Bea blinked hard, so her lids vanished, like she was making a wish. ‘They both said the divorce should be smooth, Mum – it will be, won’t it?’
‘It’s not your thing to worry about. It will be OK. I promise. All things pass, Bea, you have to remember that.’
‘All things?’
‘Eventually, yes. Well, they have to, don’t they?’
The next day Sam Hamilton got in touch.
Our appointee has dropped out. Would you be able to come in for an interview? – Sam
Chapter Twenty-Six
There’s a smell to art galleries, one Juliet could never quite identify. Perhaps it’s linseed, or a special cleaning fluid, or new carpets. Something fresh and clean. She loved it, anyway.
It was pleasant, sitting in Sam Hamilton’s white, clean office at the Fentiman Gallery, the Oxford traffic blocked out, the only sound that of birdsong. Dawnay’s had smelled of musty old books and heavy perfume. She inhaled and looked out of the window which gave out over a small courtyard, where yellow winter flowering jasmine festooned itself over railings. Juliet had given herself a pep talk in the car. Be calm. Don’t talk for the sake of saying something. He’s probably a nice person now. Don’t mention Ginny.
She repeated it again to herself now. Be calm. He’s probably nice – as the door opened and Sam Hamilton came in, hand outstretched. ‘Hi, Juliet. Good morning, thank you so much for coming in. Sorry to keep you waiting. An important call . . .’ He shook her hand firmly. ‘So it is you. Hey. You look exactly the same.’
Juliet stood up, shaking his hand, and stared at him as much as she could without showing her surprise for she, on the other hand, wouldn’t have recognised him in the street. He had been a rangy Canadian grunge boy with a backpack who wore sandals and thick mountaineering socks, and had long hair hanging in curtains in front of his eyes. His hair was still dark brown, almost black, but it was short. He was very tall, dressed in a well-fitted dark suit and open-necked shirt.
Wrongfooted, she heard herself say, ‘Yes, it’s me. How many art historian Juliet Horners do you imagine there are?’
‘I should imagine plenty, wouldn’t you? Oh, of course. You think you have a particularly unusual name, I recall.’ He sat down, gesturing for her to do the same, watching her with dancing eyes and she saw he was enjoying this. ‘So, how are you, Juliet?’
‘I’m well, thanks.’ Juliet said, suddenly. ‘I am – I don’t remember you being this tall.’
He unscrewed a fountain pen, and scribbled something on a memo pad in front of him. ‘Yeah. Well, it’s fair to say at college I distracted myself from homesickness by channelling Brett Anderson as much as I could. That meant stooping a lot. Art college pop stars and Seattle guitarists don’t tend to stand up straight.’ He shrugged. She noticed he had a lock of hair at the front which occasionally fell into his eyes, almost a harking back to earlier grunge days.
‘There was a lot of greasy hair around then,’ Juliet said. ‘Not yours, I’m sure. Then, or now.’ She trailed off, astounded that despite her car pep talk she had still managed, within ninety seconds of greeting him, to say three embarrassing things. ‘Thank you very much for meeting me.’
‘But of course. There was some confusion in-house about the guy we appointed. It was set in motion before I joined and it went on for months. His references didn’t check out, and no one had spotted this. I had to unpick it and it took a while . . .’ He smiled somewhat cautiously across the desk at her. ‘So. I’d have had you in anyway, if you hadn’t emailed.’
‘That’s really kind of you.’
‘I wasn’t being kind. I’m only sorry for the to-ing and fro-ing. We’d be thrilled to have someone of your calibre.’ He smiled again, then tapped his fountain pen on the desk. ‘I don’t remember you being this coy at Oxford.’
‘I’m not being coy,’ said Juliet, wishing the weird energy in the room would dissipate. Perhaps this had been a mistake.
Sam Hamilton was notorious amongst her friends for being literally the most superior person they’d ever come across. When he dumped her friend Ginny after four dates, he’d said it was because she was quite intelligent compared to him. ‘Quite Intelligent’ became their catchphrase for everything they wanted to damn with faint praise.
He’d come from Canada as a Rhodes scholar to her comparatively scruffy Oxford college and he had also been the only person she knew, apart from herself, who delighted in its high Victoriana: the Pugin-esque arches, purple stone, the Dalbeattie-inspired wooden interiors. Sam had also studied Art History and so, long after the famous dumping of Ginny and the calling her Quite Intelligent, to her annoyance Juliet found she kept being thrown together with him.
He seemed to want to let you know how clever he was, which in a place where everyone was there because they’d already proved they were clever was a big no-no. He was dark, intense, sarcastic, aping the art-school bands he loved. (Not Blur. She remembered him once, laughing bitterly at a guy in the bar who asked if he liked Blur.) Justine Frischmann was his ideal woman, as he kept telling everyone, and everyone else, who thought he was weird, would nod politely. He talked about himself too much. They used to mimic him to cheer Ginny up. ‘I’m from Oddawah. It’s got more PhDs per square mile than any other Canadian city.’
But at the same time he had a sardonic side, a way of smiling that pricked pomposities. She had seen him once pointing out to a Piers Gaveston-esque type – who had been loudly hectoring a porter about letting his girlfriend into college – that his boxer shorts were bunched up over his trousers, before quietly melting away, tucking his hair behind his ears with a self-satisfied flick. She often saw him with the porters, or down at the pubs in town where students didn’t drink. Sometimes when Juliet took herself out for a walk away from her books, she’d bump into him coming across Christ Church Meadows, or lingering in backstreets, admiring the architecture of the vast Victorian villas at the edge of town. ‘Oh, hi,’ he’d say, Walkman headphones on, raising his hand and smiling at her in a curious way, then walking on with no further attempts at conversation.
It was as though he found all these British people mildly hilarious, straight out of central casting. Juliet alone felt she saw this, knew that he was laughing at them.
Only once had she seen him discomposed. She had asked him to move out of the way rather late at night at a Commemoration Ball – he was blocking her exit into the quad, where a young man was waiting for her. Sam had been at the ball she assumed for he was in black tie, the bow tie unfastened. He was leaning against the stone doorway. He’d nodded, expression unreadable in the dark, and then he’d said:
‘Dull sublunary lovers’ love.’
‘What?’ she’d screeched at him, as ‘Boom! Shake the Room’ echoed around the panelled corridor. ‘Dull what?’
He seemed to hesitate. ‘Oh. Well, I said dull—’
Juliet didn’t want to waste time – she had been after Hugo for a term, and he was the kind of bloke who if you didn’t pounce fast would simply wander off and nab someone else to snog. ‘Oh God. You always have to be so superior, don’t you?’ she said, briskly. ‘Could you just please get out of my way?’
‘Right. Juliet.’ He had stared at her, his dark eyes large, his face pale in the floodlit archway and for some reason this image of him had stayed with her afterwards. ‘I’m so sorry. Yes. Of course.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, pushing past him.
When she’d reported this back to Ginny the next day, Ginny had raised her tangled head of hair above her duvet and said in a low croaking voice:
‘Sam Ham’s a rando. One of those guys who thinks he’s better than you but also has to tell you he’s better than you. He’s a pratt. He was a great kisser though. I mean the best snog I’ve ever had. Which is annoying.’
Dull sublunary lovers’ love. Juliet thought of this now with a smile. She wondered what had happened to Ginny. She’d gone off her when, in their final year they’d lived together and she’d turned out to be one of those people who minds about the washing up. She made Juliet pay extra for washing-up liquid because Juliet liked her tea really strong; Ginny said this left tanni
c stains around her mugs that were harder to clean. The last Juliet had heard of her she was a vicar of four different parishes in Yorkshire. She wondered how hard the water in Yorkshire was – and then, with a start, realised Sam Hamilton was talking again.
‘. . . acquired the archive last month, in fact, at auction. I say auction, but we were the only bidders. He’s not the star he once was, although I remember you like him too.’
Juliet took a wild guess. ‘Dalbeattie? Yes, I’m – I love him.’ She pulled herself together. ‘Sorry. You’ve acquired his archive? I’d heard it was up for auction. That’s thrilling.’
‘Isn’t it? I love the guy. I’m from Ottawa, that’s where he ended up, you know.’ It didn’t sound funny any more. Oddawah. Maybe it never had been. Maybe she’d been a cow at college – Juliet shifted in her seat.
‘Yes, I remember. So sad. Such a tragedy. I often wonder why he went there.’
‘Why? Why shouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, because he should have had everything here, I think. Something obviously happened. Marvellous as Ottawa is.’
‘Ha.’ He laughed, lifting his eyes to hers. ‘I can’t wait to look through the archive. He kept notes on everything. Every last detail.’
‘Oh yes. That’s what I love about being at Nightingale House – the detail. He thought of everything. Hooks on the back of every door, hinged window seats in every room so there’s storage for everyone, the bird boxes outside . . .’
‘So you do live there now,’ he said, and he leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped together. The light from the courtyard caught his right cheekbone, played in his dark hair. ‘Juliet, that’s wonderful.’
‘Yes,’ Juliet said, and she folded her arms. ‘Yes, I was made – I left Dawnay’s, as you probably heard. I inherited the house around the same time so we moved here in July.’
‘How great for your family to grow up there.’
‘Well I think so.’ She was laughing.
‘Why’s it funny?’
‘They’re not so sure, not just yet. But I think it’s great.’
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 30