The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Let’s eat ice cream,’ she said.

  • • •

  Juliet waited until the last drip of ice cream had been licked away. They sat in the living room, Charlie on the one good chair, Juliet on the floor and Mrs Greene beside Leonard on the settee, keeping an eye out for chocolate spills on the ancient baize. Juliet felt sorry for Charlie; he had been forced into their family drama, an understudy made to perform in a strange play.

  She wondered how he felt seeing his painting in their ordinary front room. The bowl of green apples in the picture was the brightest thing in it, making the walls somehow browner, the heavy furniture heavier still. The Juliet in the portrait was poised, smiling out of reach. She liked how he saw her, and supposed that now he had encountered this dreary weekday version of her, he would paint her differently. She tried not to mind.

  ‘Leonard, darling, we shan’t be angry but you must tell us why you ran away.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he replied, indignant. ‘I went to find my father.’

  ‘Oh Leonard.’

  Juliet wanted to pull him onto her lap like she used to when he was little, let down the curtain of her hair and hide them both behind it, but the small upright figure tucked beside his grandmother on the shabby settee gazed at her with quiet dignity. Even if the others hadn’t been here, she wouldn’t have dared. She wanted to say, ‘When did you grow up? I wasn’t looking. Bring back the baby who laughs when I sing to him.’ Instead she reached for his hand, oddly grateful to find he didn’t draw away. ‘Darling, no one knows where your father is.’

  Even now, she noticed her mother wince, signalling her to shush in front of Charlie – these were private, family things not to be discussed before strangers in un-ironed shirts and none-too-clean trousers.

  ‘I thought Charlie was my dad.’

  Juliet laughed at the absurdity of it. ‘Charlie? He’s far too young. He’s a boy himself.’

  Looking from one to the other, she realised that she had somehow succeeded in hurting the feelings of both.

  ‘Why did you think Charlie was your dad?’

  Leonard said nothing and scrutinised his knees.

  ‘Why, darling? I’m so sorry I laughed. It wasn’t kind of me.’

  Leonard was quiet for a moment. He picked at a freckle of ice cream dried on his leg. ‘I know my father was a con artist. Like Charlie.’

  Juliet willed herself not to look at Charlie to see how he liked his new profession. Leonard interpreted her silence as doubt.

  ‘I know my dad’s a con artist. Margaret Taylor told me so.’

  Juliet swallowed the laughter fizzing in her throat. ‘But sweetheart, your father’s name isn’t Charlie. It’s George.’

  ‘No it isn’t. It’s a lie. I found his secret identity. I know. I know.’ Leonard curled his knees up to his chest, and started to sob.

  Juliet pulled him into her arms. If only the others would go away. They were intruders here. Leave us. It’s only we who matter. She remembered when she was pregnant with him. For three months she hadn’t told anyone she was expecting again, not even George. He had so many secrets and this was hers. She had drifted through the weeks in a pleasant daze, insulated from everything. Nothing mattered; not even the usual troubles with George. The secret warmed her. Later, when George had vanished he left behind a hole, a round scorch mark across their lives. She tried to ignore it, put one day in front of the other and ignore the saucy smiles and whisper to herself it doesn’t matter, as long as the children are all right. And now Leonard had run away on a story, his heart broken because it wasn’t true.

  Mrs Greene settled beside her, rubbing Leonard’s back as the sobs ebbed away. ‘The others are coming back. What do we tell them? We mustn’t set them talking.’

  Juliet shut her eyes. She was the snag in her mother’s respectability.

  ‘Tell them anything you like.’

  ‘Tell them I’m giving Leonard painting lessons and he couldn’t wait until the next one.’

  The two women looked at Charlie in surprise, having almost forgotten he was still there, part of all this.

  ‘Yes, all right. Tell them that,’ said Juliet.

  Through the windows of the living room, she watched the mournful parade of black hats process up the garden path. The kitchen would fill with well-meaning neighbours and acquaintances, all relieved that tragedy had been averted, downgraded to another snippet of tittle-tattle about poor Juliet and those dear kiddies.

  • • •

  In the afternoon Juliet and Charlie sprawled in the October sun. The grass was long and unkempt, sprinkled with yellow leaves. At the bottom of the garden Frieda and Leonard picked apples from a lopsided and sickly tree, pausing every now and again to hurl windfalls at each other, which smashed wetly on arms and legs.

  ‘How did he find me?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Your address label on the back of the picture.’

  ‘Quite an imagination.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘After all, I’m just a boy myself.’

  Laughing, Juliet covered her eyes with her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Anyway, isn’t it nice to be thought young?’

  Charlie did not reply. Juliet lay back, studying the diluted blue of the sky, and listened to Leonard’s shriek of glee as he discovered a worm in a windfall and lobbed it at his sister.

  ‘My mother will watch him for ever – terrified he’s inherited his father’s genes. Vanishing is in the blood, you know.’

  ‘You’re not worried he’ll do it again?’

  She turned her face away to catch the last of the autumn sunshine.

  ‘He didn’t run away. He went looking for someone.’

  But to herself she said, ‘I’m terrified. I’m terrified of going to bed and lying in the dark and remembering how it was when he was lost. I’m terrified of the other children and the awful things they say to him and to Frieda. The lies they tell them. And the truth.’

  Leonard had brought Charlie here but Juliet wished that he had not. She liked Charlie in the hush of his studio. She did not want his looks of kind concern. She wanted to seal up the memory of those afternoons, keep them crisp and safe. The cool, white world of the studio was separate from the cluttered lives of Mulberry Avenue and, like red and green on a paint palette, she didn’t want the two to meet and muddy.

  ‘I’m sorry for the worry Leonard must have caused but it’s good to see you again.’ He hesitated. ‘I could come back. Maybe next Saturday. See Leonard. Teach him some tricks.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Who says?’ Charlie snapped. ‘It would be good for him. Boy like that without a dad, needs to be around a chap from time to time.’

  Juliet sat up and took in the flush of indignation on his cheeks. ‘We’re not like you,’ she said. ‘Don’t be fooled by the electric kettle and the well-mannered children. The modern world hasn’t reached us yet. This isn’t London, it’s a village and it isn’t quaint and it isn’t charming. You can come and visit and eat strudel and everyone will be terribly kind and they are, they really truly are, but you don’t belong. Be glad you can go home to your white studio and your white walls where no one watches you.’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘You’re talking nonsense. I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying.’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ agreed Juliet. ‘That’s why you can’t come here again.’

  She saw from his face that he still did not understand, and said more gently, ‘I can’t have a man calling round here. Be my friend, Charlie. Don’t come back.’

  • • •

  The next day Juliet was unsure she had done the right thing. Leonard got into a fight at school and broke his spectacles while Frieda was sent home after cookery class for lobbing wet meringue at Margaret Taylor. Juliet spent a good part of the afternoon combing sticky egg whites out of Frieda’s hair. She knew she ought to punish both children but she didn’t have the heart. In the evening she discovered every single cop
y of Bulldog Drummond and Biggles stuffed into the wastepaper basket in Leonard’s bedroom.

  The following morning she caught the bus to work as usual. A dreariness hung in her soul as though it had been put through a whites wash with a rogue black sock and come out drab and grey. The walk from the bus stop to the factory seemed to take twice as long as usual and the piles of old fish and chip wrappings and billowing trash bothered her. Greene & Son, Spectacle Lens Grinders was situated down a tight, redbrick alley in Penge. The Victorian warehouses had mostly given way to modern shop fronts taking care of all life’s needs; the high street bookended by a shop hawking prams at the top of the parade and an undertakers at the bottom. A single row of blackened warehouses remained. Juliet was fond of the lone cobbled street, which had briefly hosted an unsuccessful fish market (Penge was not noted for its proximity to the sea) and she liked to think that the stones still reeked of cod.

  Juliet had officially joined the firm four days after her sixteenth birthday and apart from a brief respite during her marriage to George, she’d worked there ever since. Mr Greene always considered spectacles to be a blessing – not only were they his vocation but they’d also saved the lives of most of his family. Along with his three brothers, he’d been declared unfit for combat during the Great War owing to a strong astigmatism. Forty years on, the firm was filled with cousins and uncles most of whom had reassuringly poor vision (‘a blessing, a blessing’ they all knew to recite when Mr Greene repeated the results of a poor eye test). Ben Greene ground the actual lenses, Sollie made the frames, Jacob did the accounts, while Ed Lipshitz who, with a squint in his left eye surely must be considered the most blessed of all, went out on the road as salesman, sending Frieda and Leonard picture postcards from places as far-flung as Blackpool and Bournemouth.

  As Juliet slipped in the front door to the factory, she tried to be grateful but she knew it would be one of those days when she felt she’d waited through entire lifetimes between arriving at ten to nine and putting on her coat at a quarter to four. During those summer months when Charlie had been painting her, she’d spent the week in furtive anticipation of the fortnightly trips up to town on weekday afternoons. She’d felt guilty as she concocted the first lie, but as the weeks wore on, unease gave way to anticipation. The girls in the office might have pitied her bad luck with headaches and toothaches through July and August, but Juliet had hummed with happiness. Now the days rattled on, empty and identical.

  Drearily, she climbed the stairs. In her pocket she had Leonard’s broken spectacles. He’d been sent off to school tearful and in his spares. Juliet abandoned the feminine preserve of the back office and braved the hot metallic stink and machine-gun rattle of the grinding workshop. She shouted over the din, waving at her father. Mr Greene grinned with delight as though he did not see her at the factory every single day and this was a treat.

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ he said, kissing her. ‘How are the children?’

  ‘Naughty. I think Leonard’s still rather over-excited after his expedition. I’m afraid he broke his glasses.’

  She handed Mr Greene the shattered spectacles, which he examined with a physician’s interest. Usually he was severe on those who broke their spectacles, such hallowed items ought to be treated with proper deference, but she was confident that Leonard would be excused. Leonard was at long last the fabled son for ‘Greene & Son’. He was a blessing and, to his grandfather’s overwhelming joy, he was also very blessed, requiring spectacles from the age of three. ‘Ah, these things happen,’ said Mr Greene, slipping the frames into a brown envelope. ‘I’ll get one of the boys to mend them for him today.’ He smiled. ‘I remember the day I measured him for his very first pair. I helped him to see for the very first time. What a gift for a grandpa! I felt like a conjurer who’d stumbled across a genuine piece of magic.’

  Juliet, who had heard this story many times before, kissed him in thanks and retreated to the office, swapping the crash of the grinding machines for the clatter of typewriters. She glanced at the clock. It was not yet five to nine.

  • • •

  The days stretched on, endless and unremarkable. Before Charlie and the portrait, Juliet had been able to accept, if not relish, the quietness of her life. Now she itched, restless. She’d sent Charlie away – did that mean nothing would ever change?

  On Friday they went round to Mr and Mrs Greene for chicken. On Saturday Juliet let down the hem on Frieda’s school skirt, and Leonard broke the bird bath, colliding with it while chasing Frieda. For tea they had brisket. On Sunday they went for a walk. Juliet was boiling saveloys for tea when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Leonard! Frieda! Can you see who it is?’

  She heard Leonard whoop with delight and then a familiar voice in the hall. Without realising what she was doing, she unfastened her apron and tidied her hair.

  ‘Hello, Juliet,’ said Charlie, leaning round the door and peering into the kitchen. ‘I’ve got a proposal for you.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 2

  Woman Bathing,

  Jim Brownwick, Charcoal on Paper, 10 x 12in, 1959

  JULIET HAD NEVER seen a house so vast – not outside the pictures anyway, and certainly not one that people lived in.

  It looked more like a museum or a town hall, albeit one marooned in the middle of endless lawns and taut green fields. Even from a distance it emerged from the woods, the trees parting like stage curtains to reveal a curving façade of brick and a mass of bay windows, the late morning sunlight flaming from every pane so that it looked as if the house itself was ablaze. Juliet gripped her suitcase tight on her knees, and willed herself not to be impressed, not to be overawed. She turned to Charlie, who was steering the car one-handed and driving too fast.

  ‘And only your mother lives there?’

  ‘Yes. Just Mummy since Sylvia got married last year.’

  Juliet couldn’t understand how one person could live in such a house. She pictured Valerie Fussell as a pale Miss Havisham type, a lace-encrusted echo drifting from room to room, lifting dustsheets. The wind rushed at her through the open window, making her eyes water. Wanting to ask Charlie to slow down but not wanting to seem gauche, she adjusted her headscarf and attempted to smooth her hair.

  ‘Don’t worry. You look fine.’

  Juliet ignored him. She looked out of the window to where scarlet flowers trembled in the long grass and ivy slapped against a telegraph pole. Charlie swung the car sharp left along a long gravel drive lined with slender beech trees, their leaves sounding like running water in the wind. Juliet closed her eyes for a moment, feeling almost dizzy with nerves. She remembered the anxiety in her mother’s face, the sadness in her father’s as she kissed them goodbye. She tried to think of other things. At least Leonard and Frieda had only been excited and hopeful of presents.

  Charlie drew up before a set of stone steps that led to an elegant portico. Up close the house was even lovelier. Juliet felt she was glimpsing a screen beauty in the flesh, discovering that the camera had not done her justice. Charlie had told her that the house was early Queen Anne and rather grand, but he had not described the warmth of the brick in the sun, the perfect symmetry of the front and the curling balustrades in greying stone above the attic storey, or mentioned that the house was built entirely without corners.

  ‘It’s round. There aren’t any edges.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘Trust you to notice that straight away. A quirk of the architect. Obsessed with the Baroque.’

  He climbed out of the car, jogging round to open her door. Juliet allowed him to help her out and prise away her overnight bag.

  ‘What about the pictures?’ she asked, gesturing to the boot.

  ‘We can get them later.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone else touching them. They must be displayed in the right order.’

  ‘I know. I know. And don’t worry so much. This is just a pleasant weekend.’

  ‘A pleasant weekend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Juliet
snorted. Her idea of a pleasant weekend was a lazy morning in bed and a walk along the river to the Tate, then perhaps an ice cream. She wondered again if this was a mistake.

  A woman in a neat woollen dress emerged from the front door. She was rounder and older than Juliet expected and wore no make-up, not even a dab of lipstick. Seeing them both, the woman smiled, holding out her hands to Charlie, who hurried up the steps to kiss her. Juliet allowed herself to feel a trickle of relief.

  ‘Mrs Stephens, this is Juliet Montague. Juliet, Mrs Stephens.’

  Juliet’s relief evaporated. This wasn’t the dreaded Mrs Fussell.

  ‘Is Mummy in the drawing-room?’

  ‘She’s on the terrace. It’s so warm today, she’s got one of her heads.’

  Juliet noticed them exchange a momentary glance.

  ‘We’d better go and say hello.’

  He drew Juliet inside and into the largest hall she had ever seen – she suspected that her own terraced house could comfortably fit inside. It was three storeys high and a double staircase snaked down from the top floor on both sides, rejoining in a balconied landing at each level. Juliet wondered why on earth they needed two sets of stairs – perhaps one staircase was an up and the other a down. Charlie dumped her suitcase in the middle of the hall, hurrying her across a chequered tile floor. Juliet supposed they never played draughts on it. Leonard would consider that an awful waste.

  ‘I thought you said that only your mother lived here.’

  ‘That’s right but there’s the staff, of course.’

  Juliet stopped and glared at Charlie. ‘There’s no “of course”. I live with Leonard and Frieda. There’s no butler who I forgot to mention.’

  Something in Charlie’s face made her pause. ‘There’s a butler too, isn’t there?’

  Charlie reddened.