The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  Charlie insisted on driving them. He’d announced that Juliet’s trip to Dorset coincided with a visit to his mother, a visit he had apparently long intended but forgotten to mention. He could drop them on his way. Leonard was almost as thrilled by the prospect of a drive in Charlie’s car, a brand new scarlet Morris Mini-Minor, as he was by the holiday itself. They left London on a hot August evening, the dusty city grey as old laundry, and arrived in Fippenny Hollow as the moon rose above the hills like a polished silver pocket watch. Juliet was glad that Charlie knew where he was going. To her every lane and hedge looked the same, a Minotaur’s maze speckled with daisies and lady’s bedstraw. They passed stone gates labelled with National Trust opening times.

  ‘The Langford Estate. Or it was before Max gave it to the Trust.’

  ‘Why did he give it away?’

  ‘Money. And running a place like that is a vocation. Or it needs to be. Max isn’t like that. All he cares about are his pictures and his stupid birds.’

  His anger exasperated Juliet, and she looked out of the window into the green darkness. Sometimes just the mention of Max’s name was enough to send Charlie into a fit of petulance. He hurled the car around the bend, forcing her to grip the seat. She glanced back to check that both children were still asleep, suddenly wishing they’d taken the train.

  They drew up beside a stone cottage and Juliet climbed out, inhaling the sickly scent of honeysuckle. Charlie roused Leonard, helping him onto the verge, where he stood blinking and unsteady beside Frieda, who clutched her cherry-red rucksack.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand with the bags,’ said Charlie.

  ‘No. Thank you. We’ll be all right,’ said Juliet, wanting him gone.

  Charlie studied her for a second and then with a shrug climbed back into the car and roared away between the funnel of hedges, leaving them on the lane, the unlit cottage gazing at them with empty eyes.

  The three of them stood among the clutter of suitcases and fishing rods and buckets, and stared. It had been a hot day, clear and cloudless, but now the August night was cool and full of stars. The sky was packed with them, clear and white and so many that it was impossible to fix on just one light without feeling giddy.

  • • •

  When the children were at last asleep in bed, Juliet slipped out of the house, the key tucked into her pocket. The cottage was half a mile from Max’s. She just wanted to see where he lived. She wouldn’t knock on the door; not tonight. Wrapping her cardigan around her shoulders she walked up the lane into the mouth of the trees. The country gloom unnerved her. Every bush and stretch of grass put forth bodiless noise: rattles and whispers and the hurry of feather or fur. The thick summer canopy swallowed the stars and the ground echoed with her footsteps. She heard something – not the scuffle of creatures in the undergrowth or the wind ruffling leaves, but music through a window. A track branched off from the lane and into the wood and it was from here that the music drifted out of the darkness. Juliet followed like Gretel tracing her breadcrumbs.

  In the green heart of the wood squatted a brick house, small and ugly. The trees and scrub had crept closer and closer, as though playing a game of grandmother’s footsteps that the red house was losing inch by inch, year by year. The strange music filtered through the trees. She leaned against the papery trunk of a birch and listened. There was a light upstairs and she waited, hoping for a glimpse of him. She was determined to persuade him to paint portraits once again. The bird paintings were magical and lucid and odd, but Juliet wanted to see that eye turn its gaze onto people. She remembered the sketch of the girl he’d drawn before the war – the mischief and flirtation held in a few pencil strokes.

  ‘Max Langford. I’m Juliet Montague and you’re going to paint me,’ she called into the night.

  • • •

  After four days, Juliet began to wonder whether she would ever meet Max at all. She knocked on the door of the house in the woods twice each day and peered among the trees in case he was sliding fox-like through the shadows. He was not. She slipped notes through the letter box asking him to call round for tea, writing that unless she heard to the contrary she would expect him. There was no reply. Juliet, Leonard and Frieda sat round the scrubbed kitchen table in the cottage, poised over boiled eggs and scones and some kind of elderly veined cheese, Juliet telling the children that their visitor surely must appear. Any minute. Any minute. The minutes came and went. He did not.

  Charlie called at the cottage every morning. He didn’t ask Juliet whether she had seen Max, for which she was grateful. He offered no advice but neither did he gloat. Leonard scrambled to the door the moment he heard Charlie’s car. He had recovered from his disappointment that Charlie was neither his father nor a spy, and accompanied him on various fishing and painting trips around the countryside. This was how, on their fifth day at Fippenny Hollow, Juliet discovered the way into the house in the wood. Charlie and Leonard returned home in time for supper, Leonard rosy-cheeked and happy, a trout in one hand and a watercolour of its slippery corpse flapping in the other. He held out both for approval.

  ‘We were painting by the Piddle. Did you know that the river is called the Piddle, so it’s not rude. And a man came by. He was walking with his dog. I wanted to paint the dog but it wouldn’t keep still. And he looked at my fish picture. The man not the dog. The dog just sniffed it. And the man said that it was really good.’ Leonard paused, waiting for Juliet to agree.

  ‘It’s a wonderful painting, darling.’

  Satisfied, Leonard continued. ‘And he said that there is a painter in the wood. A famous war artist. And he teaches people at his house on Fridays. And that I’m good enough to go. When is Friday?’

  Juliet looked at Charlie, who kept very still and would not catch her eye.

  ‘Tomorrow is Friday, darling. But I don’t think you need another teacher. Not when you’ve got Charlie.’

  Charlie stood over the stone sink with a bucket, gutting the fish with a knife, so that their scarlet and grey flecked innards slithered into the pail. Frieda sat at the table painting her fingernails pink. The exact shade of the trout gizzards, noted Leonard, wondering whether he should swipe the varnish for his next picture.

  ‘Come with me on Friday,’ said Juliet to Charlie. ‘You know I must go. But you should come too.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Come on. You were friends. You are friends. It was you who showed me his pictures in the first place.’

  She smiled, taking a fish from him. She wiped her cheek, and smeared blood across it, noticing it on her fingertips like harlot’s rouge.

  Charlie frowned. ‘What you have to appreciate, Juliet, is that he isn’t like he used to be.’ He paused as though reaching for the right words. ‘Max Langford is a war artist without a war.’

  • • •

  On Friday night Juliet crossed back into the wood. The children were asleep, or else pretending to be. She waited until eight for Charlie to appear and when he did not she set out alone up the lane before striking along the track into the trees, unable to decide whether she was relieved or disappointed that he had not come. The day had been damp and the floor of the wood smelled of loam and leaf mould, sweet and rich like a very good and complex wine – the kind Charlie’s mother served at dinner and Juliet sniffed and did not drink. This time the woods were not empty. Voices floated through the gloom; snatches of chatter and laughter. Juliet felt a pang of regret – she knew it was quite ridiculous but she’d hoped to have Max to herself. In a shopping bag she carried Leonard’s watercolours, carefully wrapped up in a tea towel. While she felt slightly ridiculous taking a child’s set of paints (complete with Tom ’n’ Jerry stickers on the tin) she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask Charlie if she could borrow his.

  Yellow lights shone through the bands of tree trunks and from a hundred yards away she could see figures gathering around the front door, silhouetted like paper dolls against the light. After a moment’s hesitation, sh
e stepped forward to join them, feeling a prickle of triumph as she finally crossed the threshold into a narrow hall, where she was instantly caught in a crush of bosoms.

  The painters were almost all women, matrons of middle age corseted in thick country tweed – the kind termed ‘sensible’ –

  and stout walking shoes. The ladies clasped paint sets and a hodgepodge of gifts: jars of piccalilli, a wheel of cheese, a milking stool, a jam jar filled with meadowsweet and willow herb. The ladies set these offerings on a plain wooden table. In the glow of an oil-lamp, the heaped table looked to Juliet like a kind of pagan altar, though to whom she was not sure.

  The house was set too deep in the woods to have mains electricity and the sills and surfaces were dotted with paraffin lamps and candles so that the air reeked softly of kerosene and wood smoke. Juliet stayed quiet, listening to the hurry of strangers’ hellos. From the outside the house was unattractive – a Victorian cottage built quickly and out of sight of the Langford mansion, the red brick pockmarked with soot, the tiled roof low and hunched – so she was unprepared for the interior to be beautiful. Charlie insisted on Max’s oddness, his disregard for convention, and she’d come to expect a hovel with curls of mouldering wallpaper, skittering insects and rotting floors. Instead the paper in the hall was hand-printed – a repeating motif of red-stencilled woodpeckers thrumming their beaks against black books for woodworm. The floors were covered with rugs, mostly skins or fleece, and where they were not hidden they gleamed with beeswax. Woodcuts and lithographs of the surrounding countryside adorned the walls – standing stones under a buttered moon, a trio of moths, an owl in the afternoon – and she longed for the other women to move aside so she could study them. The colours of the skirting boards, banister and doors were ochre, rust and dusty green – the muted colours of Max’s palette, so that Juliet felt as if she had slipped inside one of his pictures. Even the curtains had been painted by hand; she realised that the polka dots had been dabbed on with a brush and that Max had signed the bottom corner of the fabric. Through an open door she glimpsed a small, clean kitchen, the table lined with bloodied newspaper and rabbits stripped of their fur, flesh raw and red.

  The women began to shuffle forward like passengers at a bus stop and Juliet joined the end of the queue, filing through a low doorway into a sitting room. She heard a man’s voice, cool and clear as an announcer for the BBC.

  ‘Find a place to sit, ladies. We’re very full tonight.’

  The room was packed. The women perched on foldout chairs, stools and patterned sofas. Two elderly men crammed beside one other on the window seat, tight as books on an over-stuffed shelf. Every surface had been decorated – the round feet of the sofa were festooned with painted yellow claws, camels trekked along the ceiling cornicing, the round plaster mouldings forming dunes and humps. The cupboards were washed with blue, the ridges of the wood panels picked out in creamy lines. The chimney breast was formed from the ridged back of a dragon, green and gold, the fearsome toothed jaws opening into a fireplace where flames stuttered. The effect should have been overwhelming – it was a carnival of detail and colour and decorative styles, as though, unable to pick just one, Max had chosen them all – and yet the overall effect was quite beautiful. Juliet observed with interest the wry humour of the room; a giant moth flattened itself against the windowpane, and as one of the gentleman tried to brush it away she saw that it was painted onto the glass. She smiled, deciding that only an artist could foresee how it could all work together.

  She found a perch on the arm of a sofa and peered over the grey heads, impatient for a glimpse of Max. She wondered now whether she should be excited or afraid. From Charlie’s description of him, she half expected a blinking madman with wild eyes and unbrushed hair.

  ‘Hello, Juliet Montague.’

  Max stood at her elbow. She knew it was him even though he did not look remotely like a madman and his sandy-brown hair was almost tidy.

  ‘You can’t possibly work like that.’ He gestured to her precarious seat on the arm of the settee. ‘Either you want to paint properly or you don’t and you can go home.’

  Juliet was about to object to his rudeness when she realised he was laughing at her. He turned and walked away. The two rather large ladies sharing the sofa shuffled along to make space for her, and she unpacked Leonard’s easel from her bag, wishing that it wasn’t also covered with cartoon transfers. Standing beside the fireplace, arm resting on the scaled jaw of the dragon, Max cleared his throat.

  ‘I mightn’t do portraits any more but that shouldn’t stop any of you from having a go. Watercolours, oils, pencil, pastel, I don’t care. I don’t care whether it’s a likeness or not. That’s not what a portrait is. You want a perfect likeness take a damn photo.’

  A tentative voice called from the back. ‘Who shall we paint?’

  ‘Me,’ replied Max.

  • • •

  Juliet’s portrait was not going well. Knowing how poor an artist she was herself, she disliked painting and had avoided it since school. It was a relief that Max had said the likeness was not important since hers looked nothing like him, in fact it didn’t look much like anyone. She was, however, grateful for the opportunity it gave her of studying him without embarrassment. He looked to be in his late thirties and was rather too thin, his hair was light brown, here and there fading to grey and yet he seemed oddly boyish, his movements impulsive and restless. He sat in an armchair beside the fire reading a newspaper and sipping whisky and soda, ignoring the strangers filling his sitting room. He certainly wasn’t allowing the class to inconvenience his evening. Juliet wondered why he’d invited them here since he guarded his privacy so tenaciously. Perhaps the whole thing was a joke to him – an artist who found it amusing to allow in his curious neighbours and then dupe them into painting him. The room was growing hot with all the bodies and Max roused himself from his paper, ambling to the windows and throwing them wide. The sound of the woods trickled into the room. The creak and crack of the trees. The scream of a fox.

  ‘I don’t think you have much of a future as an artist,’ said Max, pausing beside Juliet and examining her picture.

  ‘No,’ she agreed.

  ‘It really doesn’t look like me in the slightest.’

  ‘You said that likeness wasn’t important.’

  ‘So I did.’

  The matrons squeezed beside her on the sofa scrutinised their own pictures, wondering if the great man was about to pass judgement on them too. From around the room there were audible sighs and huffs that their model had wandered away but no one dared to complain. Without glancing at another picture he left the room. Juliet looked about, wondering if that was the end of the lesson, but none of the other students appeared perturbed and continued to dab away. Sure enough, in a few minutes he returned with a pipe and a refreshed glass and settled back into his chair. He’d removed his jacket and the ladies beside Juliet began to mutter in exasperation. Sensing mutiny, Max spat out his pipe.

  ‘Not all subjects are easy. They fidget. Lose the clothes you’ve been painting them in. It’s a useful lesson.’

  Max proceeded to ignore them again, devoting himself to his paper and his pipe. The other students picked up brushes, some starting with fresh sheets of paper, others resolutely continuing their portraits. Juliet abandoned hers, aware that Leonard could have done much better. At the end of an hour Max rose, drained his glass and moved around the room steady as a minute hand, stopping at each easel to offer in confidential tones thoughts and criticism. He was patient and kind, finding something to like in even the rudest attempt. He crouched by Juliet’s sofa again, suggesting to her neighbour a different technique to achieve a rougher texture. The woman was buttoned parson-like into a high-collared blouse and she thanked him, eyes watery with gratitude. Juliet was intrigued by the women’s apparent adoration – he was generous without stooping to flattery but she couldn’t see what merited such devotion. He reached her side again.

  ‘You’re much n
icer to them,’ she said.

  ‘They want to learn. You don’t.’

  Juliet shrugged. ‘I don’t see the point of aspiring to mediocrity. I’ll never be any good.’

  ‘Then why try at all?’

  Max tore Juliet’s picture from the front of her watercolour pad and, screwing it up into a ball, lobbed it onto the fire where it blazed for a minute before crumbling into flakes of ash.

  ‘There. Now it’s doing some good.’

  The class watched Juliet in silence. She felt the warmth of their looks, suddenly self-conscious, a child singled out by the teacher for poor behaviour. Through the open windows the sound of church bells tolling ten drifted in amid the whisper of leaves. Max clapped his hands.

  ‘Thank you all for coming. We’ll meet again in a fortnight.’

  As the others rose, packing away brushes and easels and stuffing papers into shopping bags and satchels, Juliet didn’t move. The two lone gentlemen shuffled past, nodding thanks to Max, raising their hats to Juliet in unison. In five minutes the room was empty. The only sign that it had been busy with people were the dents in the sofa cushions, the abandoned chairs. Max showed no surprise that Juliet remained and for a moment she wondered if he hadn’t noticed. He prodded the fire with a toasting fork and spoke with his back turned.