The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  ‘Talk to him,’ said Charlie. ‘Soon.’

  • • •

  It was Tom’s advice she sought before speaking to Max. They were both heading to Dorset for the weekend to see him and met on the train. Tom insisted on their sitting for the duration of the journey in the first-class buffet car, ordering champagne as soon as they sat down.

  ‘Really, I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Juliet.

  Tom re-folded his long legs. ‘It’s the done thing in first class, I believe. Anyway, don’t all ladies like champagne?’

  Juliet smiled. ‘Actually, I’d much prefer a cup of tea.’

  Tom threw his head back and laughed, a fulsome sound. ‘That’s why we’re pals, you and me.’

  Tom listened as Juliet spoke, head cocked to one side like a garden blackbird waiting for crumbs. She noticed that he looked tired. The once thick dark hair was combed with white, and his skin was yellow and translucent – like an old painting starting to crack. She broke off mid-sentence to ask, ‘Are you quite all right, Tom? You’re looking a little thin.’

  He smiled. ‘Working too much, eating too little. Nothing a touch of gin and a few hot dinners won’t fix.’

  Juliet shifted on her seat, not quite believing him, but deciding it was rude to ask more questions. Tom rubbed his eyes and gave a sigh of real weariness.

  ‘I don’t know what you do about this other business,’ he said. ‘I always thought that Charlie was fond of our Max.’

  ‘He used to be.’

  ‘It’s a wonder they don’t chuck me out too. I’m nothing but a mythmaker and landscape painter. I haven’t changed subject in more than thirty years. The world flits by faster and faster but me and mine stay just the same.’

  Juliet reached out and took his hand. ‘Don’t even think it, Tom. Everyone at the gallery loves your work. None of the boys wants you to go. It’s Max they’ve got it in for.’

  The train stuttered through the suburbs, the grey kitchen-sink-school cityscape giving way to green pastoral and hedges strewn with feathered lace. Tom said little and hunched in the corner of his seat, so quiet that Juliet wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Usually this part of the journey relaxed her – as the train carried her further from the city the knot in her stomach would ease, but today it remained, tight as heartburn. If she didn’t include Max’s pictures in the show, would he even notice? In the seven years she’d known him he’d never been to a single exhibition. No, she shook her head, she couldn’t do that, it smelled of cowardice. Perhaps she could hold a solo exhibition of his work next year. Fidgeting on the hard seat, she realised with unease that she couldn’t remember having seen a new painting of Max’s for months – he’d never be able to fill a solo show with new work. The train eased into Salisbury and Tom interrupted her thoughts. He stood abruptly, knocking over her tea and, not pausing to apologise, rummaged in the luggage rack. He heaved down a painting swaddled in brown paper and thrust it into her arms.

  ‘Take this. Give it to Max. I can’t come this weekend.’

  He turned and hurried to the doors, stepping out onto the platform. Juliet dropped the package onto the seat and rushed after him, calling from the doorway.

  ‘Tom! What are you doing? Come back. Give it to him yourself.’

  He was already halfway down the platform, a thin, stooped figure. It started to drizzle. He turned and called back to her. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t. Give him. Give him,’ he paused, swallowed, ‘my best.’

  The guard slammed the door as the train pulled away from the platform. Juliet craned forward, leaning out of the window. ‘Tom! Tom!’

  He waved and vanished into the hurrying crowd.

  • • •

  Max didn’t notice that Tom wasn’t with Juliet. He was making supper when she arrived, and she suspected that he’d forgotten Tom should have been there too. She meant to give him Tom’s parcel straight away, but somehow she propped it up against the banister in the hall and didn’t remember it at all until the letter arrived a few days later. That evening was the first of spring, and they took their plates outside to perch on the front step and watch the first of the sleep-addled bees emerge from the trees. It was too early for the leaf canopy to be in full umbrella and so the late afternoon light slid through the trees, making green and yellow mosaics flit across their skin. Max was in good spirits, loquacious even, and just as Juliet began to wonder about the source, she noticed the tell-tale stain of paint on his fingers and beneath his nails. Leaning over to kiss him, she inhaled the once familiar smell of linseed. For months she hadn’t smelled it on him. The scent used to be part of him and when it disappeared it had taken her a month or two to place what was different – like biting into a favourite cake and realising it was missing an essential ingredient. She breathed deeply and smiled. Max was painting again. As they ate rabbit stew and sipped badly fermented plum wine, Juliet couldn’t bear to puncture the smooth perfection of the evening. She resolved to tell him about the gallery and the wedding in the morning.

  When she woke, Max was already up and working in the lean-to shed at the side of the kitchen. Alone she made coffee and wandered around the house, savouring the busy stillness of the wood. Early sunshine rushed through the windows, warm and yellow, throwing buttery light on all the paintwork and under its glare Juliet noticed for the first time that some of the ornamentation was starting to look old and worn. The ochre dragon on the fireplace had lost his gleam, his scales chipped like an old tooth, his crimson flames no longer as fierce. The golden camels caravanning around the cornicing had faded into the desert behind, so that only the black beads of their eyes shone against the sand. Here and there Max had tried to patch them up – the butterflies fluttering across the windowpane had re-glossed wings, but although it could have been her imagination or the effect of the light, their fretwork patterning lacked the delicacy of before. Juliet sighed and decided that, much like herself, the house’s inhabitants were simply starting to age.

  In the middle of the afternoon Max came inside humming, his trousers spattered with paint. He insisted that they have a picnic lunch – the fact it was after three o’clock didn’t concern him – and he marched her through the wood to the edge of the great house. They sat on a felled oak, eating egg sandwiches and strong cured sausage as they watched tourists meander through the gardens of Max’s ancestral home.

  ‘We don’t usually come this way,’ said Juliet.

  ‘No,’ agreed Max, through a mouthful of apple. ‘But I fancied seeing the place again. Sudden attack of nostalgia. I suppose I avoid it in general. I don’t mean to but it is quite odd watching strangers traipse through my mother’s rose garden with their guidebooks in search of cream teas.’

  ‘I wish I could have met your mother,’ said Juliet.

  Max laughed. ‘I’m awfully glad you didn’t. She wouldn’t have liked you – a Jew with a missing husband and worst of all ambition. Definitely not her sort.’

  Juliet frowned, wondering whether she ought to be hurt, until Max put his arm around her, pulling her close and kissing her.

  ‘I like you. You’re my sort,’ he said.

  Juliet smiled – coming from him this was a Shakespearean declaration of devotion. Above a kestrel circled, his cry echoing into the fading afternoon. She closed her eyes and listened. The conversation about the wedding and the gallery could wait another day.

  • • •

  The letter arrived the following morning, while Juliet was sleeping. When she traipsed downstairs Max was sitting at the table, the letter already in his hands. He held it out to her.

  ‘Read it. It’s from Tom.’

  Something in his voice made her obey. She sat and started to read, ‘Dearest Max—’

  ‘Aloud.’

  She began again. ‘Dearest Max, I’m an anachronism like that monstrous house you grew up in. All those painters, the big ones like Warhol, the tiddlers like Charlie F
ussell and the ones in-between like Jim Brownwick, are all searching for something modern, something new. And the truth is: I Just Don’t Get It. Their stuff babbles at me and I put on a jacket and I go to their wretched shows and I sip warm white wine and I look and I look at the pictures and prints and reliefs and try to see what they all see but I can’t. Instead I look at them with their happier lives and see there is no room for me and my work. No one is interested. They don’t think I have anything to say. And perhaps I don’t. I’ve only ever had one idea – the human figure in a landscape. And it’s been enough for me to paint for a lifetime. But I’m done. I’m tired of being an irrelevance. I’m sick again and this time I can’t face it. The pills have been swallowed and now there’s nothing to do but wait.’

  Juliet broke off with a cry. ‘Is this real? We must do something.’

  Max shook his head. ‘What can we do? Look at the date – he wrote it two days ago. Finish it. Please.’

  ‘I can’t. I won’t. You read it.’

  She shoved the letter at him but Max gently placed it back in her hand.

  ‘Please. I can’t face it alone.’

  He drew her onto his knee and he wrapped his arms around her middle. She took a breath.

  ‘I don’t feel anything yet. Dying feels much like living.’

  She stopped and Max motioned for her to continue.

  ‘There’s nothing else.’

  She showed him the paper. The words trembled and slanted like falling trees, tapering away into squiggles, then oblivion and the empty page. There was no signature or hurried sign off – there was nothing at all. Juliet pictured Tom’s final morning. She saw him climbing out of bed, shaving and dressing properly in one of his aged but immaculate suits – he always looked as if he had just stepped out of a gentleman’s outfitters from twenty years back. She pictured him brewing his cup of Fortnum’s tea, setting out his fountain pen and watermarked stationery, looking out of the window at the pleasant spring morning swelling over Primrose Hill, before swallowing his pills and writing his letter while he waited to die. The letter would always be in the present tense. The moment before death preserved like a blow about to fall. She glanced round at Max and saw that he was crying too, round tears streaming down his cheeks. She reached out to brush them away but he stayed her hand, kissing her fingers.

  ‘No. We should cry. Who else does Tom have to weep for him but us?’

  • • •

  Tom’s housekeeper had found the body, the letter beside it, envelope neatly addressed and stamped. Knowing him as she did, she ignored the proper protocol and posted the letter before telephoning the police. There was to be no funeral. He had no relatives. Max remembered that there had been a boyfriend some years before, but he couldn’t recall his name, let alone his address. The afternoon after the letter’s arrival, they took the parcel out into the wood and unwrapped it. Max was well on the way to being drunk. He’d not eaten since the morning and had worked his way through a grimy and ancient bottle of spirits he’d produced from the back of the shed. He pulled a knife from his pocket and slit the string from around the parcel. With something like tenderness he drew back the brown paper, unwrapping the painting like a baby from its bath towel. He shook it free and held it up under the trees.

  The painting was of a beautiful sandy-haired boy lazing on a pinstriped lawn. In the background stood an ugly, sandstone manor, softened by a splash of rosebushes. The boy was naked. Every strand of hair was lovingly painted in gold or russet or blond, the bleached furze along his arm catching the light. His knees splayed to the side, penis curled against his leg. Unlike Tom’s other paintings, in this one the boy looked directly at the viewer, his eyes blue and his smile arch.

  ‘Oh,’ said Juliet. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

  She remembered that Tom had once told her that in his youth Max tempted girls and boys alike, and even now she experienced an adolescent flutter in her belly. Here was Dorian Gray unmarked by age, his skin flushed with sunshine.

  Max swallowed hard, unable to speak for a moment. ‘Yes, this was me, aged eighteen, at art school. Before the war.’

  He shoved the painting at Juliet and turned back to the house. She heard the door slam. Gathering up the discarded paper, she followed him, picture tucked under her arm. He waited for her in the kitchen, glowering over a mug of something foul-smelling and black.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  Juliet sensed the world grow quiet, the birds’ singing muffled and the creak of the trees silenced. Dizzy, she leaned back against the kitchen cabinet, managing not to drop the painting as she laid it on the table. She felt rather than heard Max speaking, and it took her a full minute to realise he was talking about leaving the gallery rather than her. She felt a brief pulse of relief and then sadness balled in a lump at the back of her throat.

  ‘This is their fault,’ Max was saying. ‘Charlie Fussell and his stooges. They drove Tom to this.’

  Juliet clenched the wood of the countertop, watching as he circled the table, oddly articulate through his alcohol-fuelled rage.

  ‘They’re not painters. They’re unthinking mirrors, as reflective as bloody tinfoil. An artist must think and feel and respond. They believe that they paint the times, but they don’t. It’s nothing but surface art. Sometimes what they do is pretty for a poster and other times it’s ugly for the sake of ugliness. They’ve confused monstrosity with profundity. Unless you’re a thinking painter you’re just a maker of knick-knacks. That’s all they are – knick-knackers.’

  He paused, leaning over the back of a chair and downing the rest of the liquid in his mug.

  ‘And then there’s Tom who was quiet and thoughtful and principled and melancholy and they killed him. I won’t see or speak to any of them again. And I won’t have my pictures shown with them. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but what is a man if he allows his principles to be painted over? I can’t and I won’t.’

  Juliet nodded, his fury making her dumb.

  ‘I’ve spoken to a dealer in Blandford, Kitty West. I like being shown by a woman,’ he added. ‘You can pass along any unsold pictures of mine to her.’

  Juliet thought of all of his paintings stashed in the gallery, familiar to her as her own reflection – they were her friends, her talismans. Sometimes after a long day she opened the door to the cupboard just to glimpse that window into the sky – as long as she looked she wasn’t in London any more but in Dorset, looking at greylag geese through Max’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Juliet, voice firm. ‘She can take the new work but those pictures are mine.’

  ‘Yours to sell. Not yours.’

  ‘I love those pictures. I won’t give them up.’

  ‘Is that why you haven’t sold them then? Hoarding them to yourself.’

  Juliet stared at the furious stranger, his eyes black with drink. She swallowed, retreating from his fury, blood buzzing in her veins.

  ‘You know that isn’t true. But if you want the old pieces back then you’ll have to come to London and fetch them.’

  Max stared at her but she met his eye, both of them knowing that he’d never come up to town and her beloved pictures were quite safe.

  Juliet went upstairs, shoved her clothes into her suitcase and caught the next train back to London. Sitting in the carriage, she resented the impossible prettiness of the countryside. The perfect green of the water meadows and the blue haze beneath the trees of the bluebell woods flashing by only annoyed her. She wanted drizzle and grey skies. She drew her coat around her and allowed herself to cry, messy sobs that dribbled down her chin until an old lady in a tea-cosy hat leaned forward to offer her a tissue. She wondered whether it was she who’d left Max or if it was he who’d broken things off with her. It didn’t much matter. She must do her best not to miss him. At least she wouldn’t have to tell him that Frieda refused to invite him to the wedding. With another sob, she realised that Char
lie was probably right and he wouldn’t even care. Loneliness curled around her, thick as smoke. For the first time in many years she thought of George.

  • • •

  Mrs Greene yielded over the flowers. Frieda wanted to hire one of those fancy florists in the high street and, believing that a bride ought to be pandered to in almost all instances, Mrs Greene agreed. She supervised Mr Greene’s writing of the cheque even though it pained her, knowing as she did that there were a dozen pretty plastic vases all nice and new in the synagogue cupboard and a multitude of flowers in the garden. But she drew the line at the cake. There she was immovable. Shop cake was worse than inadequate: it was slovenly and no daughter, granddaughter even, would eat it at her own wedding. She was willing to try to copy those nasty colours in the window displays that Frieda admired so much and bought bottles of green, blue and yellow food colouring from the Co-op and experimented in a variety of garish sponges.

  Mr Greene soon tired of being forced to taste crimson cake glued onto a chocolate base with sickly yellow butter icing and on finding his comfortable front room vanished beneath a snowstorm of nylon white bridal magazines, he retreated to Juliet’s house. There at least the wedding chatter was limited to meal times and the kitchen mercifully free of sticky bottles of food dye bleeding onto every surface. There was, however, another problem. He’d escaped the frantic joy of his wife and granddaughter but as he watched Juliet over the top of his Daily Mail, Mr Greene realised that she was unhappy. Fatherly tact prevented him from enquiring as to the cause, so he said nothing. Instead he allowed her to make him cups of tea but ensured that he washed up his cup himself in a tiny, and unnoticed, act of sympathy.

  Lining the stairs of the small house was a series of Juliets. Charlie Fussell had started it, and now every artist with whom Juliet worked seemed to have painted her at some time or another. At first Mr Greene had found his daughter’s penchant for having her portrait painted a very odd thing, something a little close to pride, and he worried that it might irk his jealous and cantankerous God, but Juliet remained un-smoted and, over the years, he’d decided it was a rather intriguing thing to do. Most people’s daughters only provided them with grandchildren and latkes and tsorros, but Juliet wasn’t like other daughters. There were no latkes, or only soggy burned ones, but there was something else. She was interesting. Mr Greene appreciated that most of his friends were a little dull. He liked them very much and understood he wasn’t an exciting man himself, preferring ease and quiet over adventure, but he admired his daughter’s spirit. Each of the portraits caught a little piece of her. None was the whole person, but walking swiftly up or down the stairs he passed through a crowd of Juliets. He liked some, was indifferent to others and detested one or two. It was a strange sensation to suddenly have so many daughters – it quite exhausted him. Surreptitiously he watched the flesh and blood Juliet potchki about in the kitchen, and he was overwhelmed with the need to tell her that she was the one he loved best. His hand shook and he wanted to tell her that whatever sadness was making her rub her swollen and sleepless lids, it too would pass and all would be well in the end. Sensing his gaze, she turned.