The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘In a mo. You go on.’

  Sylvia arched and dived into the black, swallow-like. Arms encircled her and yanked her under, as she shrieked in terror and delight. Juliet crouched and trailed her fingers across the surface, scooping up handfuls of reflected light, watching it pour from her hand.

  ‘Come on,’ said Charlie, floating on his back a few feet from Juliet. She saw that he was naked and willed herself not to look away, not to expose her dreary, middle-class discomfiture.

  ‘Come in!’

  ‘I’m fine here.’

  ‘Leave it, Charlie.’

  Jim heaved himself out of the pool, and sat beside Juliet on the edge. He reached for a cigarette, swearing softly when he instantly made it too wet to light, and disappeared to find another, returning a minute later.

  ‘You can relax,’ he said. ‘I’ve put my trousers back on.’

  Juliet winced. ‘I prefer my friends with clothes on. Does that make me a prude?’

  Jim laughed, scratching at the squat muscles on the base of his neck.

  ‘You’re a divorcée. You’re supposed to be unshockable.’

  Juliet smiled and looked away. In the water a man lifted Sylvia above his head and let her fall with a terrific splash. From over the garden wall floated the huffs and sighs of unseen cattle.

  ‘Can you please try to stay still, just for a minute, Fidget my love?’

  Juliet glanced back at Jim and realised he was poised with his sketchpad, a wedge of pencil tucked behind his ear.

  ‘All right.’

  It was very cold and she clenched her teeth to stop them chattering, but this was much better than the prospect of swimming. She watched her pale legs swinging under the surface, toes twitching like fishes. There was something restful about the shouts and slap of skin on water and beside her the scratch-scratch of Jim’s pencil. Unlike Charlie, Jim did not ask her to talk as he worked and they sat in easy silence, Juliet watching those playing in the pool, Jim watching her.

  ‘You’re still shifting about. Stay still.’

  ‘I’m trying. It’s cold.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Charlie hoisted himself half out of the water, cramming his shoulders between them, making a puddle so that Jim was forced to squirm away to avoid soaking his trousers.

  ‘What the hell, Charlie? I’m trying to draw.’

  ‘Well, don’t. It’s a fucking party.’

  Jim shoved him and Charlie ducked under, re-emerging a second later.

  Ignoring him, Jim flicked his pencil across the page with silken ease. Charlie reached out, snatching at the paper, but Jim was too fast and twisted away, swatting at him with the back of his hand. Juliet leaned back, trying to avoid the spray. Then, with a shout, Charlie grabbed her ankles and pulled her in.

  She fell without a sound, swallowed up by the dark water.

  • • •

  Juliet felt herself sink, saw her limbs claw at the water. It was so quiet. The water flooded her eyes and nose, choking her. My lungs are clean, she thought. It’s the seas and streams and rock pools that change us. A gentile steps into the mikvah waters but a Jew emerges. Pain burst in her chest as she tried to breathe and swallowed only water, burning water, scalding her insides. She kicked and grabbed at the water oozing between her fingers and toes, wrestling it for breath. Her fist thumped something, a fish, a foot. She was nothing, just a writhing mass of fear and fighting. Arms, strong, warm, folded around her and pulled her up, up and into the air, coughing and squalling, words surrendered to grunts and cries. Hands pummelled her back and she spat out water, then lay back on the cold paving, spent.

  ‘What the hell, Fidget? I’ll never get the deposit back on these bloody trousers now,’ said Jim, swaddling her in a towel.

  He crouched beside her, forehead tight with worry. Charlie lingered, hands folded across his chest, face white. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you couldn’t swim.’

  Juliet lay still, too exhausted to speak. The others in the pool had stopped their carnival, still drunk but pretending sobriety, suddenly aware of the cold.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the trousers.’

  She closed her eyes, breathing deep, unencumbered breaths. After a few minutes, she reached for her dress and pulled it on over the bathing suit, and stood, unsteady as a lush. Wet patches splotched the fabric and Juliet was glad the horrid dress was ruined. She reached out her hand to Charlie to show he was forgiven.

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Charlie continued to stare, a waxwork of himself. With great effort, he blinked. ‘Shall I take you back to the house?’

  Juliet listened to the festivities resuming in the pool. The slap and splash of laughter. On a pinnacle of hedge a barn owl perched like an umpire, his plumage tennis white. The bird made her think of Max.

  ‘No thanks. I’m quite happy,’ and realised as she said it that it was true.

  When she woke the next morning, it was to find Jim’s sketch pinned to the mirror in her room. Instead of her reflection, she saw Juliet from yesterday in her bathing suit, sitting on the edge of the pool. ‘There I am,’ she thought. ‘Always about to fall; never falling.’

  Mrs Greene couldn’t understand it. She clutched Mr Greene’s hand and ignored the plate of cherry macaroons set out on the table. She scrutinised Juliet, wondering if she already looked different. Did ambition show on the face like a mole or a glint in the eye?

  ‘So, you’re leaving the factory for good?’

  Juliet nodded. ‘If the gallery does well enough.’

  ‘But you’ve always worked for your father.’

  ‘And now I want to try something new.’

  ‘You can’t carry on as you are? A few days doing that art business, and the rest of the week with your father?’

  ‘No, Ma,’ said Juliet quietly. ‘I must do this properly or not at all.’

  Mrs Greene had never really understood her daughter. All she’d wanted was for Juliet to marry one of the nice boys who went to their shul. The nice boys had nice mothers (Mrs Greene knew them all). No one had known anything about George’s mother – that ought to have been their first warning. Once upon a time she had asked her name and George had replied ‘Evà’ and that had been an end to it. All these years later, Mrs Greene was able to concede that it was pleasant not having to share the grandchildren with another woman. She could not have borne it if they’d loved their other grandmother best. Mrs Greene was a woman destined to be a grandmother – it was her greatest role. When Frieda was born, she’d hiccuped with happiness on seeing the small, red creature lying in a crib at the foot of the hospital bed where Juliet slept, immobilised by tucked linen. Frieda had opened a bruised, blue eye and Mrs Greene, quite unable to help it, had snatched her up, folding her into her bosom saying, ‘Hello. I’m Mrs Greene. Edith. I’m your grandmother.’

  But Juliet had always pleased herself. She listened patiently and pleasantly to advice that she never took. And she sat there now, hands folded demurely on her lap, half-nibbled macaroon abandoned on a doily (why her daughter could never learn to use a plate, was another mystery to Mrs Greene).

  Mr Greene cleared his throat. ‘We could find you more things to do at the factory. Different things.’

  ‘But Dad, there aren’t different things. The factory is just fine as it is. You don’t need me.’

  ‘We’ll have to hire another secretary.’

  ‘And she’ll do the job just as well as me. The boys, the gallery. They need me. It’ll be exciting.’

  Mrs Greene harrumphed, bewildered by the appeal of excitement. The pleasure of life was in its consistency, the careful placing of one day in front of another with no unnecessary surprises. In her view the Jewish calendar was rigged specifically to avoid them – she always looked forward to lighting the candles on Friday night, waiting for the children to come round and eat their chicken and spit out the chopped liver while Juliet informed them that it was a delicacy they’d enjoy when
they were older. The year had its rhythm: first sukkout and meals out of doors, then falling leaves and apples and honey and New Year. If she wanted, she could look up in the large calendar on Mr Greene’s desk the Torah reading for any Saturday in say, 1965, and she’d know what story she’d be listening to on that morning in the future. The calendar kept life tidy, but Juliet had always been messy. As a girl with pigtails skew-whiff she’d left her puzzles out on the floor so the pieces always vanished up the Hoover, and while as an adult her hair was combed and her house clean, she wilfully refused to keep her life neat.

  ‘Everyone works at your father’s factory. Everyone.’

  ‘I always knew Juliet was different,’ said Mr Greene. ‘She never needed spectacles. The only one in the family.’

  • • •

  When Juliet had gone, leaving a small heap of crumbs on the table and tumult in her parents’ hearts, Mrs Greene brewed another pot of tea. The ritual of filling the kettle and listening to the familiar bubbling of the water was more soothing than any prayer. If Juliet had taken one of those nice boys, maybe that handsome John Nature who was always so keen on her, her life would be as neatly ordered as Mrs Greene’s immaculate hall cupboards; but even as she thought it, she knew it would never have happened. Even without a George, Juliet would find every morsel of trouble. Fancy allowing a strange man she’d met on the street to paint her picture! It was a relief she hadn’t posed naked. Already the rabbis watched her with fretful eyes, afraid that she would bring the good name of the community into disrepute. Rabbis Plotkin and Shlonsky told Mrs Greene that they could not explain what worried them about the behaviour of Juliet – she was polite and mildly spoken, her children neat and well behaved. It was just a tingle in the beard, they said, the sense that in a room full of girls in white dresses, Juliet had always worn red ribbons in her hair.

  Mrs Greene sighed. Now, starting an art gallery with that fast young man and his friends. None of them Jewish. None of them from round here. She certainly didn’t know their mothers and she suspected that even if she did, they wouldn’t get along. If Juliet hadn’t been her daughter, Mrs Greene might have considered her not quite respectable. The thought made her dizzy and she scalded herself on the tea-kettle. She dropped it in the sink with a crash, breaking a porcelain plate that had been her mother’s. What would her mother say about this business? Grandma Lipshitz who had crossed the sea because of a mistake with an apple and left her true love because Laws Cannot Be Broken. Grandma Lipshitz who despite her illness willed herself to live long enough to meet baby Leonard. Before she realised it, she was crying. Hearty, messy sobs that made her shoulders shake and her nose drip. She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and couldn’t find one, which made her cry harder still.

  Mr Greene hurried in from the living room to find his wife running water from the tap over her burned hand, tears sliding down her cheeks, fat as raindrops.

  ‘Edith. Edith. It will be all right.’

  ‘No. It won’t. We have to find George or we’re going to lose her.’

  Mr Greene gave her his handkerchief and she dabbed at her eyes. ‘Did you keep that telephone number?’

  ‘What number, Edith?’

  ‘You know. That number.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I did. Just in case.’

  Mr Greene retreated to his study, returning with a small business card which proclaimed in cursive 8-point script: ‘Gerald Jones: Private Detective.’

  Mrs Greene folded her arms across her floral bosom, and declared, ‘I don’t care where George Montague has got to. We’re going to find him.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 100

  Juliet ‘Fidget’ Greene Aged Nine and a Quarter,

  John MacLauchlan Milne, Oil on Canvas, 1937

  JULIET GRIPPED HER father’s hand through her mitten, and performed a double hop-skip every other step in order to

  keep up with his stride. The leaves crumpled most satisfactorily beneath her polished shoes and her breath mingled with the morning fog, making her wonder if the fog wasn’t coal smut after all but the breath of a million Londoners. The sun, like an elderly gentleman, made a half-hearted effort to rise and then abandoning the attempt, slipped back between smooth sheets of haze. Juliet didn’t mind. Neither pea-soup fog nor pea soup for lunch could spoil her mood because today she was going to work with her pa. It was the Christmas holidays and her mother was in bed with a cold. Juliet felt bad about the cold and tried to subdue her delight at the prospect of an entire week of going to work with her father.

  Mr Greene hurried her along, pausing only to purchase his newspaper from the stand at the corner, adding to his Financial Times a copy of Girl’s Own, which, after observing her father, Juliet tucked solemnly beneath her arm. He halted outside a furrier’s window and Juliet gazed up at the mannequins sporting leopard coats and mink hats and the fox-fur stoles with dangling paws treading the air. Mr Green lifted the latch on a hefty wooden door and the two slipped into a communal hall. A meaty stink drifted out from the furrier’s and Juliet peered with fascination at the firmly closed door leading to Fox & Bromley Furriers, curious as to whether Mr Fox had two legs or four. At the end of the dim hall a lift cage rattled and clanked, and a minute later the doors heaved open and an ancient man ushered them inside. His back was so crooked that he looked to Juliet like a jack-in-the-box stuck at the bottom of his spring.

  ‘Lucky you, Mr Greene. Got your assistant in today, I see,’ he said, slamming the cage doors. When the lift shuddered to a stop, a woman hovered outside the doors, poised to take their coats. She wore a pair of slender-stemmed (Greene’s) spectacles on a fine metal chain around her neck, her grey-blonde curls neatly cupped by a hairnet.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Greene. Miss Greene.’

  ‘And to you, Mrs Harris,’ nodded Mr Greene, allowing her to retrieve his hat.

  Mrs Harris skilfully drew Juliet away to a back office filled with another five Mrs Harrises, all smiling ladies of middle years whose English-rose complexions had faded to potpourri.

  ‘We’ve set aside a desk for you, Miss Greene.’

  Juliet attempted to affect nonchalance, and tried not to run in her eagerness to reach the desk where pencil, paper and an old typewriter had been set out for her use.

  ‘May I be part of the typing pool?’

  Aged nine, Juliet could think of few things more exciting or glamorous than the prospect of joining the ranks of the typing pool.

  Mrs Harris presented her with a short dictation to type and Juliet fed the first sheet of watermarked paper into the typewriter, wishing the week could last for ever.

  • • •

  Juliet was bored. She’d read Girl’s Own, which was full of silly stories about little girls being terribly helpful to their mothers. The typewriter ribbon kept sticking, the letters they gave her to type were frightfully dull and although she did her best to improve them, to her disgust she discovered that Mrs Harris was re-typing all her work without the enhancements she’d made. Despite her disappointment in Mrs Harris, Juliet condescended to join her for lunch at one o’clock with the other girls. As they reached the stairwell (Mrs Harris didn’t like to use the lift, complaining it gave her the willies) Juliet heard a loud male voice talking in a foreign accent. She was tremendously excited, having never met a foreigner before. Abandoning Mrs Harris, she followed the voice.

  Outside her father’s office a tall rather elderly man in a tweed jacket and sporting a suitably foreign hat was talking to her father, who stood with hands behind his back, rocking slightly on his brogues. Mr Greene adjusted the spotted handkerchief in his breast pocket, a symptom of mild disquiet.

  ‘I can’t pay full price at the minute, but I could give you a painting for the specs,’ said the foreigner.

  ‘Well. I don’t know. We do offer the odd exchange but—’

  ‘Oh yes,’ interrupted Juliet, sliding into the hall. ‘All the rabbis come here for their glasses. And nuns. Even though we’re heathens and not Catholics. None of the men
and women of God pay anything at all. Are you a man of God? I don’t think it matters much which one.’

  The two men turned to face Juliet; Mr Greene looked a trifle pale.

  ‘The wee girl is your daughter?’ asked the foreigner.

  Mr Greene managed to sigh and smile at once. ‘Yes, indeed.’

  The foreigner brightened. ‘A picture of your daughter then. A portrait. I can paint her this week while I’m waiting for my new specs.’

  Mr Greene was about to object – what would he do with a painting? – but then he considered the advantages. First, a portrait might make Mrs Greene happy and second, he didn’t really know how to keep Juliet out from under everyone’s feet for an entire week. He’d already sensed a weariness emanating from poor Mrs Harris, and a couple of the letters from the typing pool brought to him to sign had been mighty peculiar before they’d been hastily removed and re-done. A painting that kept Juliet out of everyone’s hair suddenly seemed a splendid bargain for a mere pair of spectacles.

  • • •

  Juliet loved having her portrait painted. She loved the little studio Mrs Harris set up for them in an empty office. It had no curtains or blinds on the windows and the whitewashed walls had escaped the wallpaper outbreak that had spread in a brown paisley scourge throughout the rest of the office. She loved the smell of oil paints and sat tight-lipped in the bath each night as Mrs Greene tutted and sniffed and washed and rewashed her hair, wishing she wouldn’t and that she could go to bed stinking so deliciously. Most of all she loved Mr John MacLauchlan Milne even though it transpired he was not really foreign, only Scottish. After an hour in his company she decided that was nearly as good. Mr Milne was as old as her grandfather but he had once been a cowboy in Canada. He knew rope tricks and he’d been to France and painted lobsters and Paris cafes and sailing boats in warm harbours. He even showed her on his palette the exact colour of the Mediterranean on an August night.

  Juliet perched on a tower of cushions placed on a chair and tried to keep still.