The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘That was Hazel. She was the nanny. She actually was very pretty, but Max was not above flattering a girl if he thought it might help get her into bed. Not that they usually needed a whole lot of encouragement from what my father told me.’

  Juliet took it to the window, a spotlight of sunshine striping the paper. The unfinished girl stared back, her eyes creased against a bright afternoon long ago. Juliet studied her, trying to glimpse the artist beyond the edge of the page.

  ‘Max had the ideal portrait painter’s gift – he always drew the sitter how she wanted to be seen.’

  Juliet wondered what it would be like to have Max paint her.

  ‘Did you ask him again to come tonight? And did you give him my note?’ she asked.

  ‘We shoved it through the door,’ said Jim. ‘He weren’t there. Didn’t come to the door anyways. Them pictures was just left in the porch for us. Well, we assumed they was for us.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘Juliet, I told you he wouldn’t. He doesn’t go anywhere. He won’t see anyone he doesn’t know. He gets up. He stalks his birds. He paints them. He gets drunk. He goes to bed.’

  Charlie bent to gather up the papers and stuff them back into the portfolio case. Juliet’s fascination with Max Langford irritated him. Charlie liked – no, that wasn’t true – admired Max’s work. As a boy he’d adored him – the young and glamorous friend of his father, the former war artist, a pencil behind his ear and an inappropriate story to confide. Max had appeared indifferent as to whether anyone liked him or not – appreciative but baffled by the affection others inevitably bestowed on him. Back then Charlie had marvelled at the effortlessness with which Max painted and sketched, presuming it to be an effect of age and that when he too grew up, pictures would fall off the end of his brush with no more effort on his part than flicking paint. For Charlie it was never easy. Painting was often a great pleasure, he could imagine doing nothing else, but it remained an act of will. He found himself resenting both the continued ease with which Max seemed to work, and the fervour of Juliet’s admiration. When she had first visited the studio to consider work of his various friends and colleagues for the new gallery, she’d spent hours and often days or weeks looking through their portfolios, deciding who they should include and which pieces. Max, once again, had been a different case. She had glanced at a series of watercolours of mallards and other dabblers. ‘I want these. All of them,’ she’d said, without a second look.

  In the hall a clock chimed the half hour with an elegant tinkling of bells.

  ‘We need to finish up,’ said Charlie. ‘Everyone will be here soon. Help me with these.’

  Under Juliet’s direction, Jim and Charlie set out the final pieces. As they stood back admiring the display, Phil entered with a pretty girl on his arm. Her fine blonde hair was the exact colour of Charlie’s, her wide mouth a copy of his, and Juliet guessed her to be his elder sister.

  ‘Goodness, you’ve been busy,’ said Sylvia, lifting her cheek to be kissed by Charlie with precisely the same movement as her mother.

  ‘This must be the famous Juliet.’

  She offered her perfectly manicured hand to Juliet who shook it, conscious of her own bare nails.

  ‘I see that I picked the right moment to make my entrance,’ said Philip. He rubbed his hands together and turned to Charlie. ‘Have you rung for drinks?’

  Juliet watched as Charlie pressed a small brass button beside the light switch and, with Sylvia’s hand tucked under his arm, drifted among the pictures, pointing out something here and there with a wave of his cigarette. Unlike Jim’s hired suit, Charlie’s fitted him perfectly. Like an egg into an eggcup, she thought. It was odd to see Charlie dressed so smartly. She was used to him in his carefully faded jeans and meticulously battered shoes and at first she was puzzled: he looked wrong somehow, but then she realised that he looked right. The other Charlie, the familiar one, was the one playing dress-up. Unlike Charlie and her, Philip and Jim were always at ease. Neither of them pretended or aspired to be anything other than what they were. Philip was part of the smart set – he’d paint the odd racehorse or hunter if he needed cash – and never felt the need to conceal it. Jim was equally proud of his background. His parents managed the pier arcade at Clacton-on-Sea as well as the town’s ‘oldest and best’ chip shop. It was Jim whom Juliet envied most. He succeeded in combining ambition (no stinking of cod and grease for him) and loyalty to his roots. Juliet liked his Clacton paintings best – fat women with an ice cream dripping in one hand and a fag smouldering in the other, the sea thrashing with wagging dogs and children and pale grandparents and pregnant girls bursting forth from their swimsuits, and the pier at the end of season, unlit and deserted except for a boy having a pee beside a seagull.

  Juliet fidgeted inside her new dress. It was a nasty man-made fibre and she was too hot and the fabric clung to her legs like wet leaves. Sylvia’s lemon silk dress flared at her hip, making her already slender waist impossibly small. Juliet wondered whether such a dress would suit her – it didn’t much matter, she could never afford such a thing.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Are you ready?’ asked Charlie. ‘Everyone’s here.’

  Juliet tried to remember when she had last stood before such a crowd. Probably on her wedding day, she decided. At least then she didn’t have to speak. The boys lingered among the pictures at the back of the room. Jim winked at her but Charlie looked decidedly nervous. Only Valerie appeared perfectly calm, lolling against the Rococo pillar beside the door, her lilac gown sculpted into perfect Grecian folds. Valerie’s friends, or rather ‘Charlie’s father’s pals – all perfect bores, but rich bores, which I believe is what’s required’, lined the room clutching glasses of rapidly warming champagne. It was much too hot and Juliet considered whether she ought to have placed the paintings in the hall but no, the light here was perfect. The pictures looked right and that was what mattered. She cleared her throat, feeling sweat patches bloom beneath her arms and stain the nasty fabric. The expensive crowd waited, stared. But these weren’t the looks she was used to at home – those were a blend of pity and curiosity with a dash of condemnation. These were merely stares of frank interest – Juliet was from a species they weren’t used to and they inspected her with the same attention they would a new breed of hybrid rose. She glanced at Sylvia who looked like she’d just stepped out of a Vogue sketch, each blonde lock slicked into immaculate disarray, and then took in the perfectly brushed dinner suits of the assembled men. The only other time she’d seen grown men dressed identically were on her rare trips to shul where she watched the parade of black Homburg hats and long black coats make their way along the street – only the variations in beards told the men apart. Juliet waited as Sylvia allowed her cheek to be kissed by another lily-scented society girl, lips never quite brushing skin. Juliet sighed. There was no point pretending to be anything like them. They’d scent an impostor quick as a foxhound. She moved uneasily from foot to foot, unaware that she’d tucked one leg behind the other, heron like, as she began to talk.

  ‘I’ve not been to art college, or learned about Rembrandt and Van Dyck at the Courtauld. I have no qualifications at all, and I’m not quite sure why Charlie has asked me to do this . . .’ she paused and glanced over at Charlie who had gone rather pale, as though he too was suddenly not quite sure. ‘But when I look at a painting or a sculpture or sketch, I get a feeling in my . . .’ again Juliet hesitated, the word she wanted was kishkies, Yiddish for guts, but she decided that might be a trifle foreign for this resolutely English crowd ‘. . . a feeling in my belly that tells me, “Yes, this is the real thing.” I don’t care about fashion or fads in art because, frankly, I don’t know what’s current or what’s not. I choose work by whether it gives me that tingle deep inside. All these pictures do, and I hope when you look at them you feel it too, that deep down pulse of something turning over and wriggling in your soul.’

  The audience listened, polite and well mannered. Souls
weren’t really appropriate pre-dinner chat, but they understood Juliet wasn’t one of them and gave her the benefit of the doubt.

  Across the room, Max’s birds caught her eye like a lover, the pink geese glowing in the swell of evening light and she smiled, suddenly calmed and ready to confess to this room full of strangers.

  ‘When I was a little girl and struggling to love God, my mother took me to the National Gallery. She showed me Rousseau’s Tiger, and Monet’s Waterloo Bridge at Dawn, and told me that God was in the pictures. I looked and looked and never mind how closely I studied them, I couldn’t see God lurking among the trees or peeking out from behind a pillar. I loved the pictures for themselves. The truth is, I don’t need God any more, but I do need art.’

  Juliet’s cheeks flushed, realising as she spoke that it was true. If her parents were here they would be dismayed, her father fretful of the consequences of his daughter displeasing an angry God, her mother more concerned about the tittle-tattle of the neighbours. But now she’d started, she found she could not stop.

  ‘The Bible would have us believe that God breathes into us giving us life. When we die, that breath is exhaled and we return to dust and clay. But these paintings have the breath of life in them. Those rosy birds fly across that sky and those bathers cavort in the sea so cold, so sweet. That isn’t God, that’s Charlie and Jim and Max and Philip puffing them with life.’

  The audience watched Juliet, frowning a little at her mentioning not only the soul but now God. Yet there was something in her tone and in the space between her words that made them forgive her for such a violation of social niceties.

  ‘We’re told that everything must have a function. This is a sentiment my father applauds. He is a practical man who has no use for knick-knacks or chatchkies. He values useful objects like a walking stick or a pair of spectacles. But art does have a use. It helps us see the world more clearly. Like my father’s beloved spectacles, art sharpens our perception. We see Max’s birds or Jim’s bathers and when we look at the sea again, we understand it better.’

  Juliet sighed and chewed her lip, worried she’d said too much and not enough. Next was the part she loathed. She possessed that middle-class aversion to asking for money – it felt too close to charity to be comfortable – but it must be done.

  ‘We’re starting a gallery but we need enough money to keep us going for a year,’ she said, forcing herself to look around the room. ‘I’m not going to tell you that you’ll make your money back in two years or that you’ll double it in five. The figures say that you should, but this isn’t about money. I’m going to dowse for talent, to seek out artists who bring their work Golem-like to life, so that we are transformed as we look at it and return to the humdrum world refreshed and full of colour.’

  As Charlie listened, he glanced across his parents’ friends and knew with some relief that he had been right. He hadn’t been fooled by some misplaced infatuation. He knew that she’d tickled them; she wasn’t the sort they were used to – she was a girl not a gal. They were particularly intrigued at the idea of a woman running a gallery. The room rustled with the sound of chequebooks being opened. Charlie smiled to himself, knowing that more than one gentleman would wake the following morning and survey the stub of his chequebook with considerable surprise at his generosity.

  • • •

  Later that night, Charlie gripped Juliet’s hand and pulled her down the steps at a run and out into the darkness of the garden, the others close on their heels, a pack of joyous hounds dizzy with the exhilaration of a successful hunt. Charlie whooped with happiness, the others taking up the cry. Juliet allowed him to draw her on, faster and faster through the damp grass, the lights from the house leaking onto the lawn in yellow streaks. She remained silent. The amount of money frightened her, even though she knew it to be what they needed – it was she who had sat up in the kitchen long after the children were in bed, poring over papers and reaching back for her classroom arithmetic. Now she had a raffle ticket for change. For everything to be different so that she never had to return to Greene & Son where she could no longer tell the days apart. The boys would have other chances. They were all so young. She had a year to make the gallery a success. She stumbled on a loose pebble. ‘Wait, I’ve lost my shoe.’

  ‘Leave it. Come on.’

  ‘Come on where?’ she asked, kicking off the other shoe and running barefoot, the stones of the pathways cool and flat beneath her toes.

  ‘The pool! Let’s swim.’

  Juliet slowed, dropping Charlie’s hand.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late?’

  ‘Midnight is the only time to swim.’

  ‘Absolutely!’ called Philip, catching them and thrusting a bottle of champagne at Charlie, who finally stopped in order to swig.

  ‘I don’t have a bathing suit,’ said Juliet.

  ‘We don’t mind,’ said Charlie, alcohol making him brave.

  ‘You can borrow mine,’ said Sylvia, with a look at her brother. ‘I brought a spare.’

  Juliet tried to appear grateful. From the terrace, the sound of the party drifted down like curls of cigar smoke. A trio of moths fluttered before her, their wings white against the dark. She smelled lilac and the fragrance of mimosa, an echo of her grandmother’s perfume. Somewhere an owl cried out and somewhere another answered. They reached the line of rectangular ponds, and the men started to unbutton bow ties and unfasten starched collars. Juliet leaned back against a pyramid hedge. She hadn’t realised that the largest pond was a swimming pool but now she could see the cold metal of the steps leading down into black water. It looked just as dark and deep as the ponds beyond and she wondered if fish lurked at the bottom.

  ‘Here, have a sip. Scotch courage.’

  Jim slipped her his hipflask. In the darkness, she saw the gleam of Jim’s very white, not very straight teeth. She sniffed at the flask and then took a nip. Coughing, she thrust it back at him.

  ‘Keep that to clean your brushes.’

  Jim chuckled, ‘All right. All right.’

  ‘Jim, please don’t tell anyone, but I can’t swim.’

  Juliet rubbed at the prickles off gooseflesh creeping along her arms. Girls like her didn’t go swimming. Her mother hadn’t approved of public baths. Nasty places with verruca-encrusted floors and men who ogled. A swim in the sea was acceptable but even on the rare trips to the seaside at Bournemouth or Margate, Juliet had never learned. The deepest water she’d ever encountered was at the mikvah. The first time was before her wedding – starting with the ritual clipping of her nails, scraping out the last thought of dirt, even inside her ears and nose. Her body was a mass of nooks and creases and holes that must be clean, clean, clean. Naked and intrigued, Juliet had descended the steps into the cool waters of the mikvah itself. All the way under, water over her head. An indoor Ophelia, hair drifting like riverweed. If she drowned in the mikvah perhaps she’d go straight to heaven – but did she even believe in heaven? She’d opened her eyes, as she knew she must. Even eyes must be clean – husbands must not be tainted by a speck of menstrual blood. She didn’t say the prayers, instead reciting a few choice lines from ‘Dover Beach’ (‘The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full . . .’) until she’d finally emerged clean and holy and interested that the next time she visited she’d no longer be a virgin. Juliet tried the mikvah once or twice more in the early years of her marriage – wishing that the waters really could wash away all the problems and effect a transformation. Of course it had not worked, and it was George she wanted to send to the waters, to scrub all the secrets from his skin. He remained as far away as ever, an underwater man swimming in mysteries and hidden things. The ritual became nothing more than an occasional habit, a comfortless superstition in which she no longer believed.

  Now she looked at the pool, the water dark and deep.

  ‘You honestly can’t swim?’ asked Jim.

  Juliet shook her head.

  ‘Don’t get in then, Fidget. You can’t drown just now. It’d
ruin all our plans.’

  Juliet tried to smile. Jim unclipped his bow tie and shoved it into his pocket, discarding his jacket and starting to unbutton his cummerbund. Juliet turned away only to see Charlie and Philip stripping out of their trousers and peeling off socks. Everywhere she looked, it seemed that there were men undressing. The triangles of topiary were festooned with items of clothing, looking strangely festive. Until then she had never seen any man undress except her husband. She felt terribly provincial.

  ‘Here. This should fit you.’ Sylvia thrust a bundled bathing suit into her hands. ‘Let’s change behind that hedge.’

  Juliet followed Sylvia behind a block of yew and with a swiftness remembered from frigid school changing rooms, wriggled out of her dress and into a rather daring blue bathing suit.

  ‘There. It fits,’ said Sylvia, satisfied.

  Sylvia was dressed, or rather undressed, in an even more daring two-piece. The kind that Juliet had only ever glimpsed in second-hand fashion magazines perused at the dentist’s.

  ‘When you’re back in town, you should come and see my pictures,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Oh? How funny, Charlie never said you painted. I’d love to see. It would be nice to have a woman among all those boys.’

  Sylvia laughed and adjusted her bosom. ‘I paint a little but mostly I restore pictures. I’m at the Courtauld. You should visit. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen Rembrandt in the all-together.’

  Shivering, they padded back to the pool, skin mottled with cold. Juliet stood on the edge, toes dangling over the cool stone, and suppressed a shudder. The water churned with pounding limbs and cries and splashes raining upwards, misting her bare legs. She tried to count the number of bodies, but they were diving and rushing underwater, shouting and falling and coming up only for air and to grab bottles of champagne. Seeing the two women, a head emerged, seal-like, and bobbed to the edge.

  ‘Well? Are you coming in or not?’ demanded Charlie.

  Sylvia turned to Juliet. ‘It’ll be warmer in than out. You coming?’