The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  ‘What did you say, Mum?’

  Juliet looked up, not realising she’d spoken aloud.

  ‘Nothing, darling. I said nothing.’

  ‘I suppose he was an awful good-for-nothing and I should be glad I hardly knew him,’ said Frieda.

  ‘No,’ replied Juliet. ‘He was charming and could be terribly funny. He adored you and Leonard. But then he left and that cancelled out everything good that happened before.’

  Frieda laughed. ‘You’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say he was a thief and a drunk and a gambler and a liar. You’re supposed to make it better.’

  Juliet frowned. ‘Well, that is what everyone used to say about him. But it’s only partly true. He was a gambler and he did steal my picture, but he wasn’t a drunk.’

  About his being a liar, she made no remark.

  Frieda leaned back in her chair and watched her mother, remembering the photographs in the bedroom closet with her father’s image cut out.

  ‘There was nothing else in the parcel?’ she asked.

  ‘Just the picture,’ said Juliet.

  She knew she ought to feel guilty about concealing the letter but it had been addressed to her alone, and even at seventy-six one needed to keep some things secret.

  • • •

  The arrival of the painting marked a change in Juliet. Leonard noticed it first. She caught flu after Christmas, which settled into pneumonia and then progressed into a seeping melancholy like endless spring rain. Frieda put it down to age, ‘Oh, she’s just not as young as she was.’ But Leonard knew it was something else. She seemed indifferent to getting well and while she hadn’t exactly started to forget things, she didn’t care to remember them. Her seventy-seventh birthday passed without remark when usually she was steadfast about celebrating, no matter how inconvenient it might be for the rest of her family. If Leonard or Frieda or one of the grandchildren suggested that perhaps the celebration could be delayed until the weekend, Juliet would sulk. ‘I can’t change my birthday any more than I can change the day of my death.’ Leonard and Frieda would sigh and agree that ‘Mother is getting very difficult, even more difficult’ and purchase (Leonard) or bake (Frieda) the necessary cake. But this year the eighth of April drifted past unremarked and it was only on the ninth that Leonard noticed the birthday had been forgotten and telephoned Juliet.

  ‘I didn’t forget. I ignored it. I’m too old for birthdays.’

  Leonard frowned. This was a logic he might have accepted from someone else but not from his mother. He couldn’t quite see that while seventy-six required a picnic in Hyde Park and a walk along the Bayswater Road inspecting every indifferent painting strung up on the railings, seventy-seven was marked by sudden restraint and indifference. He was confident that something was wrong and pondered what to do. He opened his eyes and smiled. Suddenly, he knew.

  Later that evening he brought a birthday cake round to his mother, appearing in Mulberry Avenue uninvited. Like his sister he possessed a key, but unlike her it never occurred to him not to ring the bell. He waited on the doorstep until Juliet answered, observing how her face brightened into a copy of her old self as soon as she saw him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Leonard. ‘I brought you birthday cake from the deli. I thought we could eat it together.’

  He trailed her into the too clean kitchen. It didn’t look as if a meal had been cooked here for a week and even in the gloom she looked too thin.

  ‘Is it poppy-seed?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you bring sour cream?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The proper stuff from the Yiddishy deli, not the supermarket.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Juliet sighed but it was a sigh of happy anticipation. In the last few years she had started yearning for the Jewish treats of her childhood – the chicken schnitzels and chopped fried fish and cinnamon rugelach. She almost wished she’d paid more attention while her mother had been baking. Leonard retrieved plates from the cupboard and cut her a large slice of cake and scooped out a significant dollop of cream.

  ‘Happy birthday, Mama,’ he said and kissed her softly on the cheek.

  He glanced behind her to the dresser and noticed a pile of unopened post.

  ‘You can’t ignore your mail,’ he said gently, trying not to reprimand.

  Juliet shrugged through a forkful of cake. ‘They’re only birthday cards. I pay the bills. I’m not gaga yet.’

  Leonard retrieved the cards and placed them on the table. ‘Let’s open them anyway.’

  He waited a moment but Juliet made no move to pick up an envelope and so he started to open them.

  ‘This is from Charlie. I think he drew it himself.’

  Juliet peered at it. ‘Yes. It’s a self-portrait. I have one for every year since we met. Well, except for the year we fell out. I was so pleased when he sent a card just the same for my next birthday.’ She frowned. ‘He’s made himself much too slim. He’s become rather fat. I can’t blame him. His latest wife is a wonderful cook.’

  ‘And here’s one from Philip. It’s postmarked Santa Barbara.’

  ‘Yes, he spends most of the year there. They’re always telling me to come and visit.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you? The sunshine would do you good.’

  Juliet pushed away her plate, avoiding Leonard’s eye. ‘I’ve been to California. I can’t go back.’

  Leonard toyed with his cake, thinking that now he was actually sitting with Juliet, he didn’t know quite how to start the conversation. His mother always did this to him. Earlier he’d been so certain that it was the right thing to do but even in the car on the way over his confidence had evaporated like a puddle in the sunshine. He stood and slipped upstairs pretending he needed to use the toilet. The stairway was crowded with paintings of Juliet – there must have been at least fifty portraits lined up in neat rows like children in the annual school photograph. His mother stared down at him, sometimes smiling, sometimes not. Another twenty Juliets watched from the landing, crammed frame to frame, shoulder to shoulder. A kaleidoscope of women. There were no family photographs – not one of the usual snaps of ice-cream-smeared grandchildren or black and white shots of babies snoozing in Moses baskets. The only photographs were portraits of Juliet – one taken by Cecil Beaton and another by David Bailey. Leonard had never liked either. She looked impossibly beautiful in Beaton’s and in Bailey’s she was just another of his unhappy, cigarette-smoking women. At the top of the stairs was a mirror and Leonard wondered what it was like for Juliet to look in it and see, in addition to her current face, so many decades of herself reflected back at her. Didn’t she lose herself in the collage?

  Apart from the portraits, it was such an ordinary suburban house. The brown carpet had been updated from the nasty fifties mustard to an equally dubious eighties green and a dozen years ago the wallpaper had been stripped and changed to a Mulholland blue in order to better display the pictures, but Juliet had shown no interest in either moving or further re-decorating. The London gallery was bright and modern and the exhibition space re-painted every year, sometimes twice. Until her flu last year the colour changes were always overseen by Juliet – she’d insisted that the decorators redo the entire gallery when the shade of red was a single grade too dark. She was the first curator in London to reject the glare of white walls and soon the National and the Tate were asking her to consult. It puzzled him, how this determined woman with all her panache still chose to live in this cramped, indifferent house in a suburb filled with the echoes of old disapproving sighs.

  Even now, worn and grey from illness, Juliet wore high-waisted herringbone trousers, an emerald silk blouse and knotted Liberty scarf at her throat. Leonard was often asked, out of the many beautiful women he’d captured, whose style he admired the most. Over the years he’d given
a variety of names – sometimes the woman he was sleeping with, sometimes the woman he wished to be sleeping with – but the truth was it was Juliet whom he most admired. And yet, he supposed she didn’t count – he’d never painted her so he wasn’t allowed to include her in his answer. The house was filled with Juliets, but none of them by him.

  When he came back downstairs she was sitting at the kitchen table perfectly still, hands folded in her lap, staring into nothing like a heron poised by a goldfish pond. Her calm unnerved him. She was a woman always in motion, and this recent quiet irked him. Resolved, Leonard took a breath and reached up to clean his glasses, a boyhood habit that still caught him even though he’d worn contacts for years.

  ‘I’m sending a taxi to collect you tomorrow at nine. It’s taking you to the studio. I’m going to paint you.’

  • • •

  ‘Another tea?’

  Juliet shook her head. She could tell Leonard was nervous and she was relieved as she had the same tingling, half-fearful excitement herself. She so wanted to like the picture. Most of the time with the others she was only curious to discover how they saw her. Their versions rarely coincided with how she imagined herself but it was always interesting, if sometimes disconcerting. With Leonard it was different. Few mothers have the opportunity to discover how their sons really see them. She knew Leonard loved her – that he couldn’t help. But did he like her? She watched as he fumbled with his brushes, set out jars of water, mixed and remixed paints and then finally reached for a pencil. She presumed he wasn’t always this unsure how to begin and decided to be pleased by his fluster. She wondered if he wanted her to talk as he worked, some did, some didn’t, and with a pang she realised that this was yet another thing about her son that she did not know. It was strange how unfamiliar one’s children become. When she thought about Leonard she pictured the small and earnest bespectacled boy of ten, not this man in the expensive sweater with creases around his eyes. Though she was pleased to observe that the creases went in the right direction – Juliet made it a point to like people whose lines curved up from smiling rather than down.

  Leonard gave a tiny sigh and set down his pencil. It was useless trying to force it. The picture would come if he relaxed and thought of other things.

  ‘Let’s just talk for a while.’

  ‘Whatever you like, darling.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever leave Chislehurst? You must have made enough money over the years.’

  Juliet gave a tiny smile. ‘Yes, I did. First I bought out the investors and partners. That took some time. And afterwards, well, despite everything I’m still the girl from the shtetl in the suburbs. It was easier not to fit in at home than anywhere else.’

  Leonard studied her for a moment in silence before asking, ‘How many portraits do you have now in your collection?’

  Juliet frowned, trying to think. ‘I believe nearly a hundred.’

  ‘Why haven’t you shown them? You must have been asked.’

  ‘They’re painted just for me. No one else.’ She reached for a biscuit set out on a low table.

  ‘But I’m sure people would like to see them. You always took us to galleries. Said the best paintings must be shared.’

  Juliet re-crossed her legs, brushing crumbs from her trousers. ‘You can have an exhibition after I’m gone. Write a proper catalogue and a pompous foreword. You know the sort of thing . . . “For fifty years Wednesday’s Gallery and its iconoclastic curator, owner and navigator, Juliet Montague, have been part of the fabric of Bayswater. She chartered the gallery from the early sixties through the perils of Pop Art and abstraction, remaining resolute in her passion for figurative painting . . .” I’ll have an exhibition instead of a funeral. But you’re not to do it till then.’

  She waggled a finger at Leonard, who forced a smile.

  ‘Tell me about the first time you were painted,’ said Leonard pulling out a sketchbook and a stump of charcoal.

  Juliet smiled and stretched. ‘Ah. Well. I was nine years old and it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. But I found it frightfully hard to keep still. To help distract me, Mr Milne told me stories of the Mediterranean and it sounded impossibly hot and blue, like something from the Arabian Nights. Each evening I’d go home to Victoria Avenue and spend hours in your grandmother’s linen cupboard. It held the ancient boiler and was the hottest room in the house, so I’d tangle myself in her sheets trying to imagine Spanish heat. He told me about catching lobsters and eating them with gulps of white wine in the sunshine and in the company of beautiful women. I always think of my old friend John MacLauchlan Milne whenever I eat lobster. You have to understand the littleness of my life until then, Leonard. London was a worn-out grey. Exhausted. There was no colour left after the war – they rationed it all away. And then this old Scotsman came into the Greene & Son workshop to barter for a pair of spectacles and I discovered that the whole world wasn’t like this, that there was something else. He painted me and he painted a window for me.’

  ‘But you never wanted to be a painter?’

  Juliet laughed. ‘Never. I don’t have the talent. But it’s more than that. I’m terribly nosy, darling. I like to know how other people see the world. Is your blue sky different, bluer than mine? That’s how I know that I love a picture, when I love how the artist sees the world. I return to my weekday morning quite refreshed, seeing a little better and right into the heart of things. I think, ah, so that’s a sunflower. I never quite understood before.’

  As she spoke, Leonard quietly set down his pencil and drew out his brushes and started to paint. He didn’t paint his mother but the window over her left shoulder. In it appeared a Mediterranean afternoon, sunlight casting short, hot shadows against a harbour wall where at a table covered in a scarlet-chequered cloth a man ate lobster with a girl. Beside them, a child swaddled herself in sheets like a toga. A pair of spectacles rested on the ground, and reflected in the lenses was a fat yellow sunflower.

  The portrait was supposed to take a week, perhaps two. Leonard had never spent more than a month on a picture before, but then one month stretched into two and then three and then a year had passed and still it wasn’t finished. More and more scenes appeared outside the window in the painting – a pair of naked young men dived into a black swimming pool, white moths flapping against the dark. At the end of each month Leonard’s assistant helped him make the canvas bigger, strapping another one beside it, then another, until soon the painting was the size of the studio wall. And still he had not started to paint Juliet herself. Her life crowded about her but he left her as a white space in the centre of the picture.

  • • •

  Today, today I’ll paint her. Leonard knows that he says this every morning, but this morning he means it. The taxi brings her at nine-thirty and they make tea together and then he listens as she talks. She tells him about a lost fur coat and a pair of sapphire earrings, blue as the Aegean and lost too. He studies her face, the soft creases, the lived-in skin, tiny blue veins cross-hatching her cheeks, the eyes still sharp and green, and picks up his brush and paints. The morning ticks, ticks, ticks and at last he sets down his brush and Juliet yawns and declares ‘luncheon’ and he looks back at the portrait and sees the earrings, so blue, and the back of a young woman in a fur coat with a pawn ticket pinned to the sleeve and a flock of pink-footed geese crossing a fat Dorset moon and he realises that there is still an empty white space at the centre of his portrait. After lunch, says Leonard to himself, I’ll paint her after lunch.

  • • •

  They returned to the studio, pleasantly warm after sharing a bottle of Chianti. Juliet settled in her chair and waited, in no apparent hurry to begin. Soft sunlight trickled through the windows and caught the down on her cheek. Leonard considered her for a moment and then instead of reaching for his brush opened a drawer in his desk and handed her a worn sketchpad.

  ‘Do you rememb
er this? Tibor gave it to me that summer in California.’

  Juliet frowned. ‘Yes. I think I do.’

  She opened the front page to discover the newspaper photograph of George Montague cut from the Jewish Forward’s ‘Gallery of Vanished Husbands’ glued to the inside cover. Underneath it there was written in a neat childish hand ‘My Father. George Montague. OR sometimes Molnár.’ She turned to the next page and saw a sketch of a man clearly intended to be a copy of the photograph. It was crude and the lines wobbly but the similarity was there. On the following page was another drawing, another George. She turned again and again – different Georges stared out at her. Some smiled, others were more serious. One wore spectacles. As she neared the end of the book, the portraits became more sophisticated. Here was George in oils, there in the style of a Georgian miniature.

  ‘Are any of them like him?’ asked Leonard quietly.

  Juliet set down the book on her knee and returned to the beginning, turning the leaves slowly, studying each George one by one.

  ‘Each has a little piece of him. None of them has him entirely, but taken altogether, you could find him.’

  • • •

  The following morning marked the first day of real summer. The curtains were open and a cabbage white butterfly flitted in through the open window, wafting on a wave of sunshine. Outside the street hummed with the bustle of school mornings, the knock of lunch boxes and a smell of dew-damp grass. A hose creaked and hummed. A car reversed into a dustbin with a metallic clatter. The taxi would be here in half an hour but Juliet was tired and decided to lie in bed just a few moments longer and listen to the morning. She fumbled in her bedside table and drew out a letter, worn along the folds from re-reading.

  Brooklyn, January 2005

  Dearest Juliet,

  I almost didn’t write this letter at all. I was going to ask my attorney to send you a note with the painting but then I decided that was a coward’s way out and I’ve been a coward for goodness knows long enough. I’m sure you hated my guts for a long time and, my God, I deserved it and more but now, well, time softens and slackens all things. I thought of you and the kiddies a great deal. At first it was a pain that nothing could take away. Not booze, not sex, not even a game of chess or a big, big win. Nothing. But truth is, give it long enough and everything fades in the end.