The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  Juliet and Frieda did suspect other reasons for the change. Without having discussed it, they were both quite certain that Mrs Greene was waiting for her great-grandson’s bar mitzvah. She took tremendous pleasure in Frieda’s respectability and her marriage into the Cohens. Whenever her friends enquired after Juliet with one of those looks, Mrs Greene liked to reply, ‘She’s perfectly well, and so is my granddaughter, you know, Frieda Cohen,’ as though the blot from one generation had been washed away by the respectability of the next like an intergenerational stain remover. The bar mitzvah was to be the culmination of it all. Paul Cohen, thirteen, acne ridden and so shy he’d taken to hiding in his bedroom during his own birthday parties, was to recite the Torah before three hundred people, give a witty and devastating speech during a four-course luncheon and be the pride of two families and three generations of assorted Greenes, Montagues and Cohens. Privately Juliet wondered whether her grandson would be the next in his family to vanish.

  ‘How are Paul and Jenny managing?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘We haven’t told them yet. It didn’t seem fair. Not until after the bar mitzvah. Paul has enough to worry about and we couldn’t tell Jenny without telling him. You know she can’t keep a secret.’

  Juliet sipped her tea and thought about her granddaughter, eleven-year-old Jenny, and decided that concealing the divorce of one’s parents wasn’t something that a child should be asked to do. But she supposed that it was she who had taught Frieda that children must keep secrets.

  • • •

  Frieda gave Juliet an invitation for Max to come to the bar mitzvah. They both knew it was a safe offer – he would never come – but Juliet appreciated the gesture nonetheless. She wanted to take Paul with her to the cottage for a rest before the big event, to meet Max. It had been unconscionable before Frieda had told her that she was going to leave Dov. Juliet had never even mentioned Max in front of the children. She wondered if they knew about him anyway, but she supposed not. Grandchildren rarely suspected grandmothers of having illicit lovers. But Frieda still wouldn’t let Paul go, she was only starting to escape the yoke of respectability and couldn’t let her mother take him, not yet. ‘Perhaps later,’ she’d said.

  ‘After the bar mitzvah?’ Juliet had asked.

  ‘Yes, after the bar mitzvah,’ Frieda had answered with some relief. Juliet had said nothing more, only considered the watershed that this great event represented in all their lives.

  • • •

  Max was not disappointed that the boy hadn’t come.

  ‘Why would you bring him here?’ he asked, genuinely perplexed. ‘I’ve never liked children.’

  ‘You liked mine,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did. Especially Leonard. You must bring him again. I should like to see Leonard.’

  ‘Leonard is in his thirties. If you want him to come and visit then you must ask him yourself.’

  Juliet sighed. It was as though for Max people remained stuck at the age they were when he’d lost his sight. Leonard would forever be a promising adolescent and Max always appeared surprised when Juliet read aloud a review or a snippet about him in the press, jolted that the boy had grown up. Everyone and everything changed but Max and the wood at Fippenny Hollow, which altered only with the seasons. The hawthorn and blackthorn bushes bloomed and withered, put out green leaves, lost them and then dangled with scarlet thorn apples or black sloes, which Max gathered up, shoved into foul-smelling bottles and drowned in cheap gin. The rhythm of his life was steady, measured out by sun and snow and the time it took to brew plum wine or for bread to rise. In the last few years he had become almost totally blind, able only to glimpse shadows, all colours lost to him.

  Juliet sat in the kitchen, the windows thrown open to the wood, and chattered as Max cooked. He moved as quickly and easily with the knife as ever, never seeming to cut his finger or scald himself as he put a match to the stove. He peeled the skin from a rabbit, slitting the stomach and then slowly pulling off the fur which he placed on the table, raw and bloody, an empty rabbit sleeping-bag. Juliet shuddered and thought again that she really wasn’t country girl – things that wriggled and slithered appalled her. However, she knew that as soon as the stew started to bubble and the kitchen fill with the scent of herbs and wine and cooking she’d be hungry and ready to eat.

  ‘Leonard has a new show. It’s up north but I shall try to go. Things are very busy with the bar mitzvah preparations and my mother is still so frail, so I might not manage it,’ said Juliet.

  They both understood that this was a lie. No matter what happened, Juliet would be there. Leonard always ensured that she received an invitation to the show. She wished he’d exhibit at Wednesday’s but she was afraid to ask him in case he refused – Leonard had never suggested including so much as a sketch in the summer exhibition. In fact, he’d not asked her opinion on anything he’d produced since the day he’d left home. He hadn’t asked for her help and, unwilling to interfere or face being rebuffed, she had not known how to offer it. No, that wasn’t quite true – she’d written to a dealer friend in New York a few years after Leonard had left college, asking him to look at a few pieces, and he’d responded with great enthusiasm and he’d sold Leonard ever since. It was a strange sensation during her sporadic trips to New York to view her son’s pictures on the vast white walls, as a stranger might. Once the dealer had even forgotten that Leonard was her son, and she listened politely to his spiel as he described the young British artist and his use of colour and collage while she studied the pieces on the walls, relieved that even without the labels she could pick Leonard’s out of the crowd, like distant cousins who still sported the family nose.

  The following morning Max surprised her by asking her to come with him to the painting shed. She traipsed behind him, trying to swallow the waves of melancholy that rose in her throat. Max had kept to his word and his portrait of Juliet had been his last. Every now and again he discovered an old picture in the back of a cupboard or beneath the eaves and gave it to Juliet. He had no use for pictures he couldn’t see. Relieved of the burden of selling them, Juliet hoarded them all in the Chislehurst house, stashing them in her bedroom closet. She was greedy for Max’s paintings and did not want to share them.

  Max ushered her inside the shed. It still smelled of linseed, it had seeped into the woodwork and she experienced a pang of nostalgia, sharp and clear. Early sunshine spilled into the room bright as egg yolk.

  ‘I’m not painting,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  He sat down at the workbench and Juliet noticed for the first time a shape under a scrap of sheet, like a child’s drawing of a ghost. He pulled it off with a magician’s flick, and Juliet saw it was a sculpture of a girl lazing in the bath, a nice leg stretched out, the other knee poking from beneath the surface of the water. As she looked again, she realised the woman was her.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you’ve made me far too young. She doesn’t have a single wrinkle,’ Juliet laughed.

  Max shrugged. ‘But do you like it?’

  Juliet leaned over and kissed him, inhaling the earthy scent of clay on his skin – something new. His beard was dappled with white and in the sunshine she could see the pink of his scalp beneath his hair. He kissed her back with pleasing enthusiasm, reaching to unclip her bra strap with familiar ease and nimble fingers, and Juliet smiled into his mouth thinking how good it was that the young don’t have a monopoly on love or sex and that there are advantages in having a blind lover.

  • • •

  Leonard felt sympathy soft and sticky as treacle as he watched his nephew sitting in the front row of the shul sandwiched between Grandfather Cohen and Great-Grandfather Greene, a black bird between a pair of white gulls. The boy’s father stood at the front mumbling through his blessing, looking as alarmed as any bar mitzvah boy himself. Leonard snorted
– even after all these years he’d never really come to like Dov. Frieda’s husband had grown from a young man with damp palms to a middle-aged man with a shining forehead. Leonard watched Paul fidget in his seat knowing the awful moment approached and sighed, his own guts going on a spin cycle in sympathy. He was glad he’d bought him a decent present to make up for it – an all metal Sony Walkman in blue with several cassette tapes, Van Halen, Thriller, Tom Petty, all sent over by his dealer in America. Hopefully that would make up for the inevitable half dozen Corby trouser presses and seven radio alarm clocks the kid would receive. Leonard’s own bar mitzvah had been too overshadowed by his family’s shame to be much of an event. Even Mrs Greene couldn’t bear to do much more than a bagel lunch for forty. And of course he’d had no father to stand up beside him on the bimah as he read. His grandfather had done his best, but like a tear in a woollen sweater, the gap left behind by his father had stretched to gaping that day.

  The rabbi cleared his throat, the grandfathers slapped the boy’s back and Paul stood, made his way up to the front. Nerves paled him to a nasty shade of chalky white, making his acne shine. The boy stood at the front swallowing. The silence stretched, grew elastic. The women in the gallery shifted, wriggled on sweaty behinds. Everyone was waiting. Paul closed his eyes. Swayed a little. The rabbi peered forward, starting to fret. And then, the boy began. He didn’t speak the words but sang them slow and clear in his new tenor. His great-grandmother reached into her pocket for a tissue. Juliet muttered something in relief that wasn’t a prayer. The furrows in Frieda’s forehead relaxed and she gave a peaceful smile. Only Leonard grew sadder as he listened to the boy. He watched Paul, small beside his father, yarmulke balanced precariously on top of messy black hair, the surprisingly sweet voice swelling into every corner, musical and soft and slow. He knows, decided Leonard. Children always do. He’s standing up there singing and singing and not wanting it to end because he knows that sometime afterwards when lunch has finished and the speeches have been made and the trouser presses unwrapped and the cheques opened and the aunts dutifully kissed, his mother will draw him aside to the corner of the hall and tell him that she’s leaving his father and life will never be the same, and soon afterwards, a day, a week or a month, his adored grandmother Edith will take to her bed again and this time she won’t get up, and childhood will be at an end. Leonard pictured the Sony Walkman and the cluster of tapes in their Ferrari wrapping paper in the boot of his car and felt sadness heavy as a fever stick in his chest.

  CATALOGUE ITEM 101

  Juliet ‘Fidget’ Montague, My Mother,

  Leonard Montague, Oil on 34 Canvases, 130 x 384in, 2006

  MAX DIED JUST before Christmas. Up until the end, Juliet continued to stay with him at the cottage. In over forty years together he never visited the house in Chislehurst. After a while she’d found the journey to Dorset rather tiring, the lack of heating was a bit of a bore and midnight trips to an outside loo at seventy-six lacked romance. Max didn’t notice the petty inconveniences of the cottage. He’d aged slowly – only his thick wheat gold hair was replaced by thistledown – but then suddenly he became frail. A carer was mentioned. Meals on Wheels. He listened patiently and then told Juliet he was going to die – it just seemed less bother all round. He was quite matter-of-fact about it and it took her a moment to realise he wasn’t asking her to bring some more milk or tobacco with her during her next visit. ‘Don’t come next week. I’ll be dead. It’ll be a waste of a trip.’ She’d thought he was joking, but sure enough a nice lady from social services telephoned to say that she was terribly sorry etcetera and Juliet fumbled and replaced the receiver, cutting her off. She cried a little, but most of all she missed him. Suddenly there was no one to save up the stories for. There was nothing particular to tell, only the debris of the week. She’d always supposed that those elderly women who wandered along the high street were muttering to themselves, but now she wondered whether they were, in fact, confiding to their dead lovers. Leonard was terribly kind and brought round hot meals (grief must be fed like a cold, apparently) and reassured her that the pain would lessen in time. Juliet ventured to hope it wouldn’t take too much time, as she was running a little short. Worrying that she might be depressed, Leonard and Frieda colluded and agreed that one or other of them must visit most days.

  • • •

  Frieda knew that something had happened as soon as she called round. She rang the doorbell before letting herself in – Juliet hated it when Frieda simply unlocked the door and wandered into the kitchen.

  ‘I could be doing anything. Anything.’

  ‘In the kitchen? You’re nearly eighty.’

  Juliet had frowned and said nothing more.

  Frieda pushed open the door and found her mother dressed in her Jaeger jacket and smart Hermès scarf, seated at the kitchen table drinking a glass of sherry even though it wasn’t quite half past nine in the morning. Frieda could barely recall ever having seen her mother drink, and leaned against the door for a moment, wondering if grief had prompted the foray into the cupboard.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you.’

  ‘Is it Max?’

  ‘No. It’s another man.’

  Frieda pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her, wondering if her mother was starting to go dotty like so many of her friends’ parents. Perhaps she ought to telephone Leonard.

  ‘Care to join me?’ asked Juliet, gesturing to the bottle. ‘It’s not terribly nice, but I understand that it’s the appropriate response under the circumstances.’

  Frieda sighed. She’d been in her mother’s company for less than five minutes and already she was irritated. Despite Juliet’s breeziness, she noticed the hand holding the sherry glass shake. She took a breath and willed herself to be patient.

  ‘What circumstances?’ she asked, waiting for one of Juliet’s usual cryptic replies.

  To her surprise Juliet did not evade the question but slightly wearily pushed back her chair and retrieved a large round cardboard tube from the draining board. She placed it on the table in front of Frieda.

  ‘It arrived this morning. It’s from your father.’

  Now it was Frieda’s turn to sit and reach for the sherry. She poured herself a good measure into a teacup. She stared at her mother, but Juliet said nothing, only sat with her hands folded in her lap waiting for Frieda to look at the parcel.

  ‘Have you opened it already?’ asked Frieda.

  ‘Yes.’

  Frieda took a swig and eased open the lid of the tube. Inside was a roll of fabric; carefully she eased it out and placed it still coiled on the kitchen table. She stared at it for a full minute, oddly reluctant to unfurl it and look properly. Finally, Frieda stood and uncurled the fabric, feeling it crackle beneath her fingers. It smelled of attics and long journeys.

  ‘Oh, it’s a painting.’

  Juliet nodded, almost smiled. ‘Do you remember it?’

  Frieda looked down at the painting and weighted it at one end with a jar of marmalade, with the salt-shaker at the other. She took a step back and saw the face of a young girl with pale brown hair and green eyes. Her legs were folded awkwardly, and she sat on her hands as though to stop them fidgeting. The child glared at the viewer, neither angry nor smiling, merely interested. For a moment Frieda thought the girl in the picture was herself and then she realised.

  ‘I do remember. It used to hang in the house. In the sitting-room, I think. Then one day, around the time Dad left, it disappeared.’

  ‘He stole it when he vanished,’ said Juliet, voice tight, still angry after all these years.

  ‘And now he’s just giving it back?’

  Juliet reached out across the table and took Frieda’s hand.

  ‘He died, darling. The parcel was sent by his lawyer.’

  To her own immense surprise, Frieda began to cry. Sobs rose in her chest like a sprin
g tide and she bobbed around on the waves of unexpected grief as Juliet moved round to hold her.

  The two women had barely touched in years – fingers brushing across the table when passing the potatoes, a kiss hello and goodbye – but now Juliet clasped her daughter close, feeling the damp of tears and snot on her blouse. She stroked her back and rubbed her head, noticing the grey hair at the base of Frieda’s scalp like unripe corn. Juliet didn’t attempt to hush her. It was perfectly sensible to cry. She had done so for a full half-hour herself before wiping her eyes and rooting in the cupboard for the sherry. It had been more than fifty years since George had disappeared and she’d been long resigned to never seeing him again. And, yet his death startled her. As far as anyone was concerned she was no longer an aguna or a living widow, but merely a widow. An unremarkable grey and white old lady who’d lost her husband. No one was interested enough any more to enquire exactly how she’d lost him or to accuse her of carelessness. Only young women in scarlet lipstick misplaced husbands. Elderly ladies like her merely surrendered them to death in his nightshirt. But she supposed that somewhere her poor mother was relieved that her shame was at an end.

  Frieda dried her eyes and smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I made such a fuss.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. He was still your father.’

  ‘Yes, but I never knew him.’

  ‘And now you can’t. It’s the end of a possibility, however unlikely.’

  ‘Don’t. You’ll make me cry again.’

  Juliet shrugged. Frieda pulled a packet of tissues from her handbag and dabbed her eyes, then rooted around for a comb, fussing in front of her compact mirror. Juliet sighed, wishing that Frieda could replace tidiness with sadness for just a little while longer. After divorcing Dov Frieda was supposed to have been liberated from propriety, but she remained far too concerned with what other people thought. Juliet supposed she ought to care a little more and her daughter a little less.