The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  Juliet trod up the front path, her shoes nipping at her heels like a Jack Russell, and hoped that whatever happened next, Frieda was happy at this minute. Somehow, as the years passed, the troubles with George faded enough that, like wallpaper smeared with a layer of paint, the roses began to show through once again. As she turned the key in the lock and entered the kitchen, she shuddered. It had stayed exactly as it was left. The milk curdled on the table from the last family breakfast. The drip-drip of the tap she’d never had fixed. Leonard’s muddy shoes discarded beside the door. At the sight of his shoes, Juliet felt a hiccup of sadness rise in her throat. Both children gone. It was too soon – they were both much too young. And now for the first time in her life at thirty-eight years and – she glanced at the calendar – two months, she was quite alone.

  • • •

  The following morning an invitation arrived embossed on yellow card:

  The Hambledon Gallery Summer Party,

  including new works by Dorset painter, Max Langford.

  Kitty West requests the pleasure of your company

  on the 31st July, 7.30 p.m. Salisbury Street.

  Blandford Forum.

  RSVP.

  At the bottom, a looping female hand had added: ‘Max and I do hope you’ll come, KW.’

  Juliet deposited the invitation straight into the kitchen bin. Half an hour later she retrieved it with a curl of mouldering apple peel stuck to the envelope. Irritation and hurt prickled her skin. She definitely would not go to the exhibition. No question at all.

  • • •

  The exhibition was held upstairs in a small brick building in the market town of Blandford. The summer was cleaner in Dorset than in London. Juliet was nervous and tugged at her skirt, unsure whether she was over- or underdressed. One could never tell at these country events. The gallery building had a bowed Georgian shop front in which were propped several canvases of hot Mediterranean landscapes – an odd contrast with the old-fashioned prettiness of the sloping houses and shops trundling down the hill outside. A rural county town was a strange place for an art gallery but perhaps that was why it appealed to Max. At the prospect of seeing him again, Juliet felt slightly dizzy, as she did after too much of Mr Greene’s awful plum schnapps. It had been a mistake to come but somehow she’d couldn’t turn and leave. It wasn’t even eight, but as she entered the low shop door, the bell tinkling into the street, she supposed that she must be the last to arrive. The limewashed room heaved with people smelling sweetly of sweat seeping through country tweed. Juliet was swept up in the warm press of bodies and funnelled up the stairs and handed a glass of champagne – good stuff, not the yellow acidic wine passed out at most gatherings. Glancing around the paintings she realised she’d been guilty of prejudice – she’d been expecting dreary but competent watercolours of amiable country scenes with perhaps the odd awkward oil or portrait which held charm only for the sitter’s pals. Instead, she took in modern and skilful paintings by some of the country’s best artists. As she studied a gouache of Stonehenge, the vast stone slabs metamorphosed into Mondrian rectangles of grey and blue against the expanse of Salisbury Plain, she decided that there was nothing provincial about the pieces or the prices. There was no work here for under a hundred guineas. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m so glad you came.’

  Juliet turned and found herself face to face with a woman of about fifty with curling grey hair, thin un-rouged lips and bluish eyes. Around her neck she wore a pair of large metal-framed specs. She took in Juliet for a minute without smiling, and Juliet felt herself shift under her scrutiny like a first-former caught by the head girl wearing non-regulation socks. At last the woman gave a tiny nod and stretched out her hand saying, ‘I’m Katherine West. Everyone calls me Kitty.’

  Her voice was clipped and smart, and Juliet decided at once that Kitty was the way lady gallery owners were supposed to be – she was the type who knew instinctively when to serve Pimm’s, how to nibble a cucumber sandwich and whether fish forks were in vogue. She was quite certain that Kitty managed to send out invitations to exhibitions without resorting to Debrett’s before addressing every other envelope.

  ‘Max will be so pleased you came.’

  Juliet glanced about, trying to glimpse Max amid the throng, wondering whether or not he was even here. He’d never made it to London and he might well have decided that even Blandford was too far away. Kitty was still speaking but Juliet hadn’t taken in a word. Kitty frowned and repeated herself with the patient and exasperated air of someone speaking to the slow or foreign.

  ‘I was saying that Max has told me all about your portrait collection. I think one day that I shall paint you. Do you have many portraits by women?’

  Juliet tried to look grateful while privately deciding that being painted by Kitty was a frightful prospect – voluntarily laying herself open to such scrutiny and disapproval.

  ‘I must admit I don’t have many.’

  Kitty slid her spectacles onto her nose and peered at Juliet, inspecting the angles of her face.

  ‘Well, I think I ought to paint you. Next time you’re visiting Max, I’ll pop by.’

  Juliet drained her champagne, wondering why Max hadn’t told Kitty that things between them were finished. At least it meant she wouldn’t have to pose under that gaze. As Kitty moved away to greet other guests, Juliet allowed herself to be topped up with more champagne. She considered whether she dreaded seeing Max more than not seeing him. Seeing would be worse, she decided. Definitely.

  ‘Hello, you.’

  She turned to face him and instantly felt a sob rise up in her throat which she battled to swallow like a piece of bread. He was so familiar and yet when he held out his hand she could not take it. She’d been away from him long enough to notice that he had aged, his hair was now more white than blond and his leanness stretched into thinness. He leaned in and kissed her, brushing her hairline with his lips. With a pang, she realised he no longer smelled of linseed. He’d stopped painting again.

  ‘Come.’

  He took her arm and steered her through the throng to the back of the gallery. It was hot and the air stale and Juliet felt a channel of perspiration tickle the length of her spine. Max seemed to collide with everyone, and Juliet issued a litany of mumbled apologies.

  ‘Why’d she invite so many damned people?’ complained Max, making no effort to keep his voice down.

  ‘The more people there are the better chance that someone will buy one of your pictures.’

  Max snorted. ‘Well, that doesn’t seem likely. If you couldn’t sell them.’

  Juliet faltered, taken aback by this change of heart. Max sighed, ‘I know I was awful. Just awful.’

  Juliet swallowed, unwilling to talk, inhaling the choking hotness of the room and aware of the strangers pressing against them on every side.

  ‘And I am sorry.’ Max stared at the floor, a school-boyish gesture in a middle-aged man. ‘But I still can’t come back to what is it? Tuesday’s?’

  Juliet tried not to mind that after nearly a decade he still didn’t know the name of the gallery.

  ‘There’s just one picture. And you won’t want me when you see it,’ he said.

  Juliet was about to argue when the crowd slid aside for a moment and she saw the painting, and found herself quite unable to speak. It was her portrait. Not as a bird or metamorphosed into any creature but as herself, Juliet Montague. He’d painted her in his bed at the moment of waking; she glanced up at him from the tumble of sheets, shoulders bare and freckled, green eyes fat with sleep, only half aware of the watcher. As she looked at the painting, Juliet understood for the first time that Max loved her.

  He’s painted me. Every piece of me. Here I am.

  He’d never told her that he’d loved her and she couldn’t bring herself to ask if he did in case she hadn’t liked the answer. Sometimes she suspected that
he thought of her as a habit – something he enjoyed but could always give up should it be required. Seeing the portrait she knew this was not true. She was necessary to Max. The awfulness of the wedding, the gossips who whispered her name, the good folk who hadn’t seen her for years except as a cipher for bad luck and a warning to daughters – none of it mattered. Juliet Montague was invisible to them but not to him. She found that she was crying.

  ‘Have you noticed the title?’ asked Max gently.

  Juliet wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and read, ‘The Last Time I Saw Her.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m afraid,’ said Max in a low voice. ‘I’m going blind. There’s the shape of you,’ he reached out and brushed the space around her cheek, ‘but your mouth has gone, and your nose. I’m a figurative painter, and now I can only see in bloody abstract.’

  ‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘There. That’s it. What I was afraid of. I don’t want pity. Not from you.’

  ‘It isn’t pity. It’s sympathy. I’m sad for you. I’m allowed to be sad.’

  He frowned. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘You don’t know how I’m looking at you. There’s a big hole around my face,’ said Juliet, doing her best to keep her voice light.

  Max harrumphed. ‘Let’s go to the pub. I’ve had enough of here. Too many bloody people.’

  ‘All right,’ said Juliet, allowing herself to be led away but staring over her shoulder at her portrait, feeling it pull at her like a lover standing on a station platform. She noticed with dread a little red round ‘sold’ dot on the frame.

  They sat in the garden of the Greyhound listening to the rustle of the River Stour at the edge of the water meadows beyond.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t know how,’ said Max draining his first pint then clasping his second. ‘I know that you love my paintings. I know that look you get when I show them to you. It’s greedy. Ugly and most unfeminine. I didn’t want that look to disappear. I’m a painter who can’t paint. I was always a fairly useless creature – but now . . .’

  He laughed. She reached out for his hand and then withdrew again before she had touched him, not wanting to be accused of pity. She supposed she was allowed the facts.

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘A few years ago I first began to notice a weak spot in my left eye. A bit of blurred vision. It was always worse after painting in bright sunlight. I thought it was lack of sleep. Too much booze. The usual. For a while I thought it might have been caused by a nasty bout of malaria I had in Egypt back in the war. Then last year it got much worse.’

  ‘Did you see a doctor?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Max shrugged. ‘Chronic and progressive eye disease. They did lots of tests and told me to go up to Harley Street and visit a specialist. But when I pressed, they all agreed that all he would tell me was that I wasn’t blind yet, but I would be soon.’

  Juliet was glad that he couldn’t see her face, and held her breath so he couldn’t tell that she was trying not to cry. ‘And now? What can you see?’

  Max finished the second pint. ‘Now the weak spot has grown to an empty hole in the centre of my vision. Painting is a torment. I peer around the subject – if I try to focus on the thing itself I can’t see it all. I can only see you now by not looking. I have to catch you at the edge of my vision.’

  ‘How on earth did you paint that portrait of me?’

  Max grinned. ‘Months and months. I’ve never spent so long on any painting. Never will again. It’s my last. So it had to be of you.’

  He turned and looked at her with those too blue eyes and Juliet could almost not believe that he couldn’t see her. They weren’t bloodshot or yellowed but white and clear and useless.

  They sat for the rest of the evening in the garden of the pub, listening to the twittering of the house martins as they zoomed low over the Stour and the sighs of the cattle drifting amid the long grass. The orange sun sank into a coal fire of clouds and transformed a pair of dawdling swans from white into gold but Juliet observed them in silence. She told Max instead about the wedding and he laughed over the hat incident, snorting beer from his nose. Then she confessed how she worried that she’d lost both children – Frieda to a dreary husband and a dull life of chores and the raising of children and baking of endless loaves of challah.

  ‘And Leonard? Why is Leonard lost?’ asked Max.

  ‘He wants to paint.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Max, understanding. ‘That was always the case with him. There was nothing you could do. It’s an affliction. Like alcoholism. Or good looks.’

  Juliet smiled and realised he was flirting with her. She understood that Max assumed that she would return with him to the cottage in the woods and everything would be almost as before. She closed her eyes and thought of the portrait.

  ‘It’s yours, you know,’ said Max. ‘The painting. I gave it to Kitty to sell in a fit of pique and then I told her I wanted it back but she wouldn’t give it to me. She said if I really wanted it, I’d have to buy it like anybody else. So I did. Fifty sodding guineas it cost me. She charged me every penny of her commission.’

  Juliet leaned over and kissed him. He smelled of alcohol and the wood.

  ‘The children will come back,’ said Max. ‘Give them time. Count it in portraits. In one, two, three, four or ten Juliets they will come back to you.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 75

  Woman Bathing,

  Max Langford, Clay and Wire Mesh, 1982

  ‘PLEASE DON’T TELL your grandmother.’

  Frieda looked at Juliet in surprise. ‘That’s all you have to say? Not “You must think of the children” or “I never liked him”?’

  Juliet poured Frieda another cup of coffee, wondering if she ought to be offering her a glass of something stronger but the only liquor in the house was an ancient bottle of schnapps she’d won in a raffle. ‘You always think about the children and you already know I don’t like him. He’s too dull for you.’ Juliet sighed. ‘I always hoped that if you stayed married that at least you’d find an exotic lover.’

  Frieda laughed. In her thirties she’d discovered that having an eccentric mother wasn’t quite the curse it had seemed when she was in her teens. ‘I did sleep with a Frenchman when I went to Paris.’

  Juliet smiled and helped herself to another chocolate biscuit. ‘I’m glad. I hope he was handsome.’

  Frieda sighed. ‘Not really. He was a little fat and starting to go bald. But he was nice.’

  Juliet rolled her eyes. ‘Never mind nice for once. Your husband is nice. For now you need selfish and frivolous and fun – you remember the Gainsborough portraits of the Regency rakes I used to take you to visit at the National? You need the modern equivalent of one of those.’

  ‘You want me to sleep with a man in red velvet trousers?’

  ‘If that’s what he happens to be wearing, then yes. I want you to have some fun. Go out with a man who’s a bit of a dish and who’ll break your heart. It’ll do you good, you know. A dash of heartbreak.’

  ‘And don’t tell Grandma.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The women lapsed into silence, both considering Mrs Greene, who like a sturdy apple tree had suddenly gone from being in her prime to being hollow and thin, frail against the wind. She still wore coral lipstick every day and brewed eight-hour chicken soup on a Friday night, but this feat meant that the rest of the weekend was spent napping in the chair by the electric fire. Juliet had once suggested that the nap might be more restful upstairs in the new bed she’d persuaded her parents to purchase, but Mrs Greene fixed her daughter with a look of disgust declaring, ‘Only babies, women during their confinement and old people take to their beds in the afternoon.’ Juliet said nothing more, glad that he
r mother still had her vanity and pride. The young doctor’s diagnosis had not been good and he was banal in his sympathies: ‘It’s a shame, but your mother’s had a good life and a full one, and it comes to us all in the end.’ Juliet and Mr Greene had decided not to tell her. They expected that she knew without it being said and the truth was she’d rallied over the last few months – there was less forgetting at the grocer’s and she’d been making an effort to eat a bit more herself as well as urge cakes and latkes on her great-grandchildren. The colour in her cheeks wasn’t just rouge from Woolworths.

  • • •

  Mr Greene dared to hope. As the years passed he’d learned to put more faith in his God – touchy and cankerous as he was, the aged ruffian and he were old pals and, frankly, Jehovah owed him one. He prayed at home every day, pretending he was singing in the shower when really he was wearing his yarmulke instead of a shower-cap and his tallis instead of a towel. God didn’t mind his nakedness – they were old men together and he pictured God much like himself – a bit of a paunch, inconveniently old, struggling to pee. Mr Greene put down the improvement in his wife to these acts of bathroom devotion, although he did not mention this to anyone. His daughter and granddaughter would give him that look of fond indulgence, as if he was a doolally old fool who mustn’t be contradicted. He preferred to say nothing. What did it matter? He didn’t need to be right; he just needed his Edie to be all right.