The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘For God’s sake, Charlie. You could have warned me. A bit grand you said, but nothing over the top. Do I even have the right clothes?’

  Charlie reached for her hand, wanting to placate her.

  ‘It’s fine. Just a pl—’

  ‘Pleasant weekend. Yes. You said.’

  She snatched her hand away from him, folding it behind her back, anxiety making her irritable.

  Juliet could not know that Charlie was as uneasy as she. He wished that he didn’t have to bring her here. Other girls had been impressed as he walked them over the house, leaning into him as he’d pointed out the portrait of Uncle Frederick in his lace ruff, the girls tittering and nudging him at the likeness. Beside the surprisingly cheeky seventeenth-century picture of Andromeda chained to her rock, a rosy nipple peeping from her nightgown, Charlie often tried for a nuzzle and a kiss. But he’d made certain to bring such girls here on weekends when Mummy was up in town.

  Juliet glanced up at the galleried landings above, wanting to find them overly ornate, but inside the house was as elegant as out. The wood of the great staircase was solid English oak honeyed by a rich patina of years, while light poured from the endless bay windows, spilling onto the hall tiles. On a gilt table rested an arrangement of white gardenias, cabbage roses and enormous hothouse lilies, yellow pollen dusting the marble top and the scent of gardenias filling the hall and rising upward like steam. The flowers were arranged in precise disarray and, Juliet decided, needed only someone to paint them.

  Charlie led her through a south-facing sitting room, the curtains drawn to protect a crowd of paintings, all warring with the gold and white Rococo walls. She lingered, wanting to look, but Charlie pulled her out onto a stone loggia and down to a terrace below. There, a woman was sprawled artfully on a deckchair, the careful angle of her arm and the golden spread of her hair suggesting to Juliet that she had lain there a while, waiting to be discovered.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Charlie, leaning over the deckchair and obediently placing a kiss on the proffered cheek.

  Juliet was aware of him gesturing at her to come over but she remained at the edge of the terrace, staring out over a low limestone balustrade framing the garden, a paradise materialising in the middle of a hidden coomb. Close-cropped lawn gave way to meadow grass speckled with ox-eye daisies, camomile and flowering clover, which sloped down to formal gardens nestled at the bottom of a sleepy valley; a perfect marriage of English country garden and Italianate splendour. Naiads peeked out from behind clumps of buttery primula, while fingers of creeping ivy and twists of forget-me-nots softened the geometric topiary cut from dark green box hedge. An old wall in the same rosy brick as the house ran along the side farthest from Juliet, clematis, honeysuckle and wisteria clambering over it in a pruned tumble. Presiding over the top of the garden was an orangery reached by a sandstone staircase made wild and romantic by violets sprouting between its treads. From the terrace, she marvelled at the lower gardens. These revealed a series of rectangular pools lined with a parade of yew hedges clipped into perfect spheres. In the centre rested a round green pool, a surprisingly virile faun bathing in the waters, the fountain trickling from an urn in his arms. The air was thick with the smell of cut grass and roses unfurling in the sun.

  ‘Why haven’t you painted this?’ asked Juliet, turning to Charlie. ‘You grew up here. You’ve seen this, but you’ve never shown me a single picture of it.’

  Anger fluttered at her throat, making her voice stick. Monet dreamed of a garden such as this, planting flowers so he could repaint them in oils.

  Charlie was saved from answering by his mother rising like Aphrodite from her deckchair. She sailed across the terrace in her silk robe, her feet bare, toes perfectly varnished in red, like little wild strawberries.

  ‘Hello, darling, you must be Juliet. I’m Valerie. Charles’s mother. Don’t say anything. I know. I was married frightfully young.’

  Juliet hadn’t been about to say anything. She thought Valerie looked exactly the right sort of age to be Charlie’s mother. She guessed her to be a few years younger than her own mother and a good few bagels lighter.

  ‘It’s so kind of you to have me to stay.’

  As Valerie offered up a cheek to be kissed, Juliet observed the slight lines around her eyes and mouth, covered with a thick layer of face powder. The scarlet band sweeping back Valerie’s blonde hair tightened the skin on her forehead. Valerie pawed it with a thin hand.

  ‘We’ve been dying to meet you. Juliet this and Juliet that. If I wasn’t his mother, I’d be desperately jealous.’

  Juliet understood that Valerie lived in a world of superlatives where one felt things frightfully, desperately and people were always dying for things.

  ‘Darling, do you have a cigarette? And, tell Stevie to send down lunch, I’m simply famished.’

  The three of them huddled at one end of the big terrace table, picking at an elaborate salad made from exotic leaves Juliet did not recognise. Valerie curled up in the only scrap of shade, while Juliet and Charlie sat in the sun, Juliet feeling her neck beginning to burn. Valerie did not appear to eat; if this was all she ate when famished, Juliet wondered what she managed when she was merely hungry. She smoked continually over the other two, something that Juliet thought to be the height of bad manners, but she rather suspected that, at a certain social elevation, manners were deemed bourgeois.

  ‘I must say, you have the most beautiful skin. Luminous. What cream do you use? Please don’t tell me that you’re one of those dreadful soap and a splash of water people because it’s fine when you’re young and you are still young-ish. You’re only—?’

  ‘I’m thirty-one.’

  ‘Thirty-one! Well, then, there is no excuse. You must have a proper regimen.’

  Valerie drew breath by pulling on her cigarette. Neither Juliet nor Charlie filled the pause in conversation.

  ‘And this—’ apparently searching for words, Valerie swirled her cigarette, ‘this fabulous scheme. Have you done anything like it before?’

  As Juliet started to describe her years at Greene & Son, she realised that this pleasant luncheon in the garden was in fact an interview, and Valerie’s apparently vacuous patter a way of prising information from her.

  ‘But you never worked five days a week for your father, surely? Daddies don’t like their daughters to work too hard.’ Valerie gave a girlish giggle, but Juliet was no longer fooled. She knew that the guileless blue eyes behind the large sunglasses scrutinised her with the focus of a predatory fox.

  ‘My father is very kind and understanding. After all, he’s allowed me a day off every week to concentrate on our plans for the gallery. But I have to work. I have two children.’

  Either Charlie hadn’t told her, or Valerie took pleasure in her ability as an actress. Her mouth quivered in shock, and she pushed her sunglasses up her head, in order to better display her astonishment.

  ‘Oh! Charles is such a naughty thing. If he’d told me, I would have asked your husband down too. I suppose he’s having a dreary weekend with the little ones.’

  Juliet found herself forced to confess her situation, which she was almost certain Valerie already knew.

  ‘The children’s father and I are no longer together.’

  Valerie clapped her hands in delight. ‘Divorced? Or were you never married at all? I know you artistic types. How thoroughly modern.’

  ‘I was married. I am not divorced.’

  ‘Mummy,’ said Charlie, his tone sharp.

  ‘What?’ Valerie simpered. ‘I’m just getting to know your friend. Are you going to get divorced?’

  Juliet’s pulse fluttered like a cornered butterfly.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Charlie, tossing down his napkin like a gauntlet. ‘For God’s sake, leave her alone.’

  ‘Sit down, Charles. You know I can’t bear a scene.’

  ‘Be nice,’ said Charlie, sitting. ‘Or else we shall go, and that will entirely ruin your seating plan for dinner.’


  ‘See how cruel he is to his poor old mother?’ said Valerie, appealing to Juliet. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, my dear. It was much easier for me; Charles’s father simply died. Oh don’t put on that awful face, darling. I know you liked him. But really, the man was a dreadful bore. He liked his garden more than he liked me.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the gallery,’ said Charlie. ‘We’ve all agreed Juliet must run it. It has to be her.’

  ‘No one talks business over lunch.’

  ‘Then I’ll ring for coffee,’ said Charlie.

  • • •

  ‘A pleasant weekend?’ said Juliet, turning to him once they were finally released. She looked as if she was about to swat him, but then suddenly she laughed.

  Charlie crumpled in relief, so grateful that he wanted nothing more than to hold her as she laughed, but he didn’t dare. He’d never touched Juliet beyond the oddly formal handshake when they said hello. Once or twice he’d tried to rest a casual hand on her shoulder, but she’d looked at him in surprise and he’d drawn back, hurt and faintly embarrassed, a schoolboy caught in his first crush. She came up to the studio every weekend when they worked on plans together for the new gallery but he still felt as though she lived at a distance from him. The only time he was ever allowed to touch her was when she modelled for him. If she agreed to let him sketch her while she studied the accounts or sipped her tea, then she did not object when he altered the shape of her arm, or with shaking fingers – how he hoped she could not tell – smoothed away her hair so he could see her face. He found that he asked to draw her when he knew her position was wrong, and he would be compelled to move her.

  ‘Oh. I think perhaps you’d best never marry,’ she said between hiccups of laughter. ‘It really wouldn’t be fair.’

  Charlie, who had begun to laugh with her, stopped.

  ‘Don’t look so fierce, Charlie. I’ve met your mother, God help me. Now I’d like to meet your father.’

  • • •

  Mr Fussell’s portrait hung in a bright drawing-room cum study overlooking the garden. The walls were painted butterscotch yellow, the plasterwork icing white. Even the sofas and armchairs were covered in a pale caramel candy stripe reminiscent of sweetshop paper bags. Juliet felt like Gretel grown up, although rather than a gingerbread house this room was an Antonin Carême confection. There were matching white bookcases with carved roses that looked as if they were made of sugar rather than wood. When Juliet read the titles of the books, she realised every one was a gardening manual.

  ‘My father’s lair. See, it has the best view of the garden.’

  The bay windows framed the ponds and lawns in such perfect proportions that outside looked more like a work by Fragonard than real life.

  ‘My mother doesn’t come in here much. That’s why the painting’s here. She was always telling Daddy to bugger off to his study and stay there.’

  Juliet blinked. She still wasn’t used to the way Charlie swore, casually using ‘bugger’, ‘damnation’ and ‘bollocks’ as condiments to sprinkle over his conversation. She was not offended, simply aware that he lacked her middle-class aversion to bad language. In thirty-odd years she had never heard her father swear and her mother only once – on the day she finally accepted that George was not coming back.

  Juliet studied the portrait in the trim gilt frame. It was of a balding, middle-aged man, thin-lipped and with pouches beneath his eyes. He looked neither happy nor sad, kind nor cruel. She backed away and regarded him again from a distance. The man remained flat and cold; his face empty.

  ‘It’s nothing like him,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Why didn’t you paint him?’

  ‘I was going to. But then he died. And I was only fifteen. I’m not sure that mine would have been much better.’

  ‘You should take it down. One day you’ll forget exactly what he looked like so you’ll look at this to remember and then eventually you’ll see this blank man instead of him.’

  Juliet perched on an overstuffed sofa, pretending to be at ease, and glanced around the room again.

  ‘The light’s good. I think we should hang the paintings in here.’

  ‘Mummy won’t like it. Yes. We absolutely should.’

  Juliet wished she drank. Then she might feel less nervous. After tea she and Charlie had arranged all the pictures they’d brought and all in the right order, poised on easels around the room. Juliet had written out neat labels for each one. The light was perfect – late afternoon sun drifting across the lawns and turning the walls the colour of crème caramel. The evening wasn’t simply about the pictures though: it was about her. She fidgeted inside her special-occasion frock, a sleeveless blue dress cut just below the knee. Charlie had told her to bring a ‘cocktail dress’ but Juliet had never had a cocktail and was unaware that drinking them required a particular outfit. She’d gone to Minnie’s on the high street and the girl there assured her that this dress was just the thing; now, standing here, Juliet had her doubts.

  ‘You look the business, love. Not as good as me. But you know, you did what you could.’

  Juliet turned, smiling, to face a man of about twenty-five with hair conker-brown and as tightly curled as wood shavings. He preened in a dinner jacket slightly too large for his pickpocket build.

  ‘I feel like a Teddy Boy. But a fucking handsome one. Let’s blow this place and go somewhere good, Fidget, my love.’

  As he spoke, Jim slipped an arm about her shoulders and walked her around the pictures.

  ‘You done good.’

  ‘You like the new frames? I know you didn’t want to . . .’

  ‘No. You was right and all. I just didn’t see it before. Jesus. It does something to them blues.’

  ‘I like the light in here. It should be good for another couple of hours. Is everyone here? Do you have the other pictures?’

  ‘Course. Me and Phil brought the lot. Max did two new ones special. Well. Probably not special. But he did two new ones anyways. Here.’

  Jim heaved up a pair of canvases wrapped in brown paper that he’d stacked against the wall and placed them onto the large desk. Juliet prickled with excitement as she fumbled in the desk for scissors. The other artists – Charlie, Jim, and Philip – she knew. They shared the Fitzrovia studio and one by one Juliet had been allowed to meet them, Jim confiding that Charlie had wanted to keep her to himself for as long as he could. But Max she had never met. He’d been a friend of Charlie’s father, lending a voice to Charlie’s cause when he’d rejected Cambridge for the Royal College. It was Max who’d persuaded Valerie to pay for the rent on the studio and allow her son a generous allowance. So perhaps it was gratitude that had made Charlie bring a selection of Max’s paintings to the studio for Juliet to consider for the gallery. Max didn’t like strangers and he never came to London, not any more. She wondered what he looked like. Despite having seen so many of his paintings, somehow she could never picture him.

  ‘What is it about that fellow? Always his stuff you get gooey over. Enough to make a chap jealous.’

  ‘Come on, Jim. You know I’ll always be your girl.’

  Juliet blew him a stage kiss, at ease with him in a way she never was with Charlie.

  ‘Always. You and me, we got to stick together, doll.’ He surveyed Juliet’s display for a second time, nodding his approval. ‘Give me a tick and I’ll get the last pictures from the car.’

  He went out whistling; if he felt overawed by his surroundings, he wasn’t going to show it. Juliet wished she were as relaxed or as accomplished an actor. She sliced through the layers of string and paper swaddling Max’s pictures, relieved Jim had left her alone to open them. She lifted out the larger canvas and leaned it against the bookcase, taking a few steps back before turning to look.

  A flock of greylag geese swept across an empty moor, but the colours were all inverted. The geese were pink so that at first glance they looked almost like flamingos; the dark moor wasn’t brown but red and purple, while black stars fastened ont
o a grassy sky. The paint was so thick in places that Juliet wondered if Max had given up on using brushes altogether and used his fingers to ply the canvas. Despite its oddness, the painting did not seem abstract or showy; instead she wanted to smile and say, ‘Ah yes, of course geese look like this. How silly of me to think they could be any other way.’

  She unpacked the second, smaller, painting and set it down beside the geese. A robin. This time the colours were true to life but the robin’s eye wasn’t the black bead of a bird but the eye of a girl, big and blue with tremulous lashes. And again, Juliet knew that he had captured something about the bird, something true that she had not known until then. She thought of the little garden robin that Leonard and Frieda sometimes fed, and how it beseeched the children with its sad eyes. Was it a painting of a feathered girl trapped like Papagena or just a greedy garden bird?

  Jim and Charlie returned and came to stand beside Juliet.

  ‘Right, what’s our boy done this time? Always with the birds,’ said Jim, shaking his head. ‘I like it. But Jesus, why not a cat or a fox or a bloody hippopotamus, just for a bit of variety?’

  ‘He used to paint other things,’ said Charlie. ‘It was only after the war that he started with the birds. In fact I’ve got a couple of early ones around here somewhere.’

  ‘Show me,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Now? Do we really have time?’

  ‘Please. I want to see.’

  Juliet’s fingers tingled and she ignored the pictures waiting to be propped onto easels. Charlie shrugged and stooped to rummage through a large cupboard. In a minute he straightened and pulled out a large portfolio, placing it on the floor.

  ‘A few of the things in here are Max’s. He left them when he stayed here during the war. Apparently I trailed about after him while he got drunk and flirted with my nanny. According to my father he was very good at playing the artiste back then, especially when there were girls around. Ah – here we go.’

  He drew out a sheet of watercolour paper and handed Juliet a pastel of a young, bosomy girl with a trace of a smile, mischievous and tender.