The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  Sylvia was the only woman artist included in the exhibition. Juliet was determined to discover more for the next, but it had taken some persuasion for Sylvia to agree to show. It was true that her style was enigmatic. She spent so much time restoring paintings by other artists that she absorbed a little of their style. Juliet supposed it was like listening to Beethoven on a loop and then being unable to get a chord sequence or a melody out of one’s head.

  Juliet allowed herself to be paraded before the collectors and critics, smiling until her lips were sore. With a smile and a laugh from Sylvia they sold one of Max’s paintings, which turned out to be the only one to sell during the entire run. Whenever she started to feel nervous, Sylvia thrust another glass of wine into her hand, hissing like the rabbit from Alice, ‘Drink, drink!’ For once, Juliet did as she was told – finding talent wasn’t enough: unless she wanted to return to typing letters at Greene & Son, she must learn to sell, sell, sell.

  ‘Darling, it’s going terribly well.’

  Juliet looked round to see her parents hovering beside her. She kissed them both, feeling the sheen of sweat beneath the layers of powder on her mother’s cheek.

  ‘Are the uncles coming too?’

  Mrs Greene started to rummage in her cavernous handbag.

  ‘It’s just us, I’m afraid, sweetheart.’

  ‘Not even Uncle Ed?’ asked Juliet, with a frown. Ed, the factory’s salesman, had always been her favourite.

  Mr Greene scrutinised a drawing over Juliet’s left shoulder and Mrs Greene dabbed the shine from her nose with a starched handkerchief.

  ‘He’s selling specs in Bournemouth. He couldn’t get back in time.’

  At once Juliet understood. Her parents had never passed on the invitations to the rest of the family. They might be trying to tolerate this change in their daughter but they would not advertise it to the others.

  ‘We’d like to buy a painting.’

  Their flushed, good-natured faces displayed all the unease she felt and she tried to ignore a tingle of irritation.

  ‘There’s no need.’

  Mr Greene frowned and clutched his wife’s hand a little tighter.

  ‘But we’d like to.’

  Juliet wanted to be grateful but she felt like Leonard at his school craft fair when she’d been the only one to buy one of his toilet-roll telescopes. She knew her parents didn’t like the pictures. Mr Greene valued objects with a purpose like spectacles or table lamps and while her mother was more flexible, Juliet knew her taste (Renoir, Monet, perhaps a little bit of Gainsborough for the splendid hats) and the paintings at Wednesday’s did not fit. Mr and Mrs Greene were both simultaneously generous and careful with money. They’d give Juliet a handsome birthday cheque and pay her properly for her work at Greene & Son, but on lending her seven pence to buy some milk when Juliet was short of change, Mrs Greene expected the loan repaid. She took scrupulous pleasure in saving Greenshield stamps and the grocer’s penny-off vouchers at the back of the paper, but thought nothing of lavishing gifts on her grandchildren. Money must be spent on good quality chicken (‘You get what you pay for!’) but meals out were a wanton extravagance (‘It’s a sin when there’s food at home’). So Juliet knew that the decision to purchase a painting was not born out of a newly discovered passion for art but the desire to demonstrate their support, if not approval, of their only daughter.

  ‘Which picture do you like?’ she asked.

  ‘We thought that one might be best,’ said Mrs Greene pointing to one of Jim’s pictures of the Clacton seaside. Fat ladies in flounced swimming costumes swarmed among seagulls and ice creams dripped onto dimpled thighs.

  ‘Why do you like that one?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Greene paused for a moment to consider. ‘Well, I suppose, it’s very small.’

  Juliet sighed in exasperation. ‘Do you even like it?’

  Mrs Greene prickled. ‘I thought that those large women in their silly frills would remind me not to have that second slice of cake.’

  Mr Greene chuckled, glad that painting could have a useful purpose after all. Juliet wanted to tell them to stop being kind, that she didn’t need their help and that this wasn’t a school craft fair and she wasn’t twelve and that paintings should be bought because they fill you with delight, not to provide encouragement for a diet, but a weariness overtook her.

  ‘I’ll go and mark it as sold,’ she said.

  • • •

  A perm drove Juliet to leave London for the Christmas holidays. It seemed that everyone was getting one. The party had been full of bouffant hairstyles, all as perfectly leavened as a tray of golden challah loaves. When Juliet reflected on her unease among the guests, she concluded that much of it could be put down to the lack of a perm. If only her hair had more volume then she too might possess the smiling confidence of a Valerie or a Sylvia. She booked herself into the salon on the high street one Saturday morning and looked forward to a transformation both physical and existential. The mikvah had disappointed her but she had faith in this secular ritual. Mrs Greene wished that the appointment had not been made on the Sabbath, but – now resigned to her daughter’s multitude of blasphemies – she requested only that Leonard be left with her. She recognised that in a battle between sermon and salon Frieda would not hesitate in her choice, but Mrs Greene still held out hope for the boy’s soul.

  While Juliet crouched with her head dangling over the sink, soap suds stinging her eyes, Frieda complained at the unfairness of a world that denied her having a perm as well. The girl maintained her stream of complaints while a thin-lipped woman with nicotine-stained fingers tugged Juliet’s hair into rollers, then sat her under a dryer that singed her scalp. Frieda only stopped complaining when the rollers were finally removed, the combing out of the hair was finished and Juliet was enthroned before a mirror, with another angled behind so she could inspect the mysteries of the back. Then Frieda took one long look at her mother and announced, ‘Thank God I didn’t get one of those.’ The perm transformed lucky women into chic sophisticates but Juliet was not one of them. Like the mikvah, the perm had failed to achieve metamorphosis.

  There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t stay at home until it subsided as there was too much work at the gallery preparing for the next show and, she decided, the distraction would be a good thing – it would prevent her from sitting on the loo in front of the bathroom mirror and succumbing to tears. She did her best to hide it under a hat but the hat wouldn’t fit over the wobbling tower of hair. Trying to convince herself that it wasn’t all that bad, she took Frieda to her mother’s. Mrs Greene opened the door, looked Juliet up and down and declared, ‘You broke the holy laws for this unholy mess?’

  Hurrying through Bayswater to Wednesday’s in the darkness of the December afternoon, Juliet avoided eye contact with passers-by, silently telling herself that heads were not turning owl-like to stare. She hesitated outside the gallery, key poised in the lock. The boys would be kind. They would make her tea and reassure her that the hair was perfectly fine and it just seemed out of place in Chislehurst. This was a London hairstyle, part of a new life, and no wonder it didn’t fit in the old. She pushed open the door and found to her surprise that the boys were not alone – it took her a moment to find them in the rows of strangers filling the gallery. The electric lights had been left off and the room was lit instead by the glow from dozens of candles. No one noticed her come in and she leaned against the door examining the clusters of people sitting on the floor and perched on foldout chairs, all clutching an array of sketchbooks and notepads. Some scratched away with pencils or charcoal; here and there she noticed the flicker of a watercolour brush. A makeshift platform had been set up at the back of the studio and enthroned there, on the fat and ancient armchair, were a young man and woman both perfectly naked, the candlelight spilling shadows on their bare skin. The woman looked little more than a teenager, she had pale blonde hair (though not everywhere, Juliet couldn’t help but notice) and an ado
lescent thinness. She leaned against the man, her cheek flattened against his shoulder.

  Juliet must have made some noise as all at once the heads swivelled to stare at her, and the girl on the platform shrieked and started to shout for a dressing gown. Juliet pinked with irritation. The girl had been naked before the crowd without displaying any sign of unease so Juliet couldn’t see what difference her presence made. The atmosphere created by the candles vanished in an instant as someone switched on the too-bright overhead lights. As the shrieking girl jammed her arms into the wrong sleeves of a dressing gown, Juliet grimaced. She felt like a boarding-school matron who’d stumbled into a dorm-room feast. The boy, however, made no attempt to conceal his nakedness and stood, hand on angular hip, gazing down at her.

  ‘Jim, Charlie, who’s that?’ he demanded, his voice shrill and imperious.

  Charlie emerged from the crowd, having the grace to look sheepish. He turned to Juliet. ‘We didn’t think you were coming in this afternoon – my God, what on earth happened to your hair?’

  Juliet raised a hand to stroke the unfamiliar volume on top of her head. It felt strange, not really part of her at all.

  ‘It’s a perm. Everyone is getting them,’ she said stiffly, daring him to say anything else. ‘And my hair is hardly the point. Who are all these people?’

  Jim and Philip slipped out from among the strangers and hustled Juliet into the cramped kitchenette at the back of the studio. The boys fussed, boiling the kettle for instant coffee and looking by turns defiant and embarrassed.

  ‘It’s a life-drawing class,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I gathered that,’ said Juliet. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  It was Jim’s turn to look uneasy. ‘We thought you wouldn’t like it. The naked people strolling about.’

  Juliet clutched her teacup, feeling more like a maiden aunt than ever.

  ‘Charlie and I started it,’ said Philip, not meeting her eye. ‘We found that most pretty girls we chatted up in bars would suddenly agree to take their clothes off when we told them we were artists. Well, that and half a crown.’

  ‘It’s how we found Marjorie,’ added Charlie, nodding towards the blonde in the dressing gown. ‘Though she’s not terribly good. Can’t hold a pose for more than thirty seconds.’

  ‘I got bored drawing girls,’ said Jim. ‘Thought it was about time we had some blokes, young good-looking ones. I’d had enough of drawing old fat men at college. And then the kids at the Royal found out about our class and asked if they could come. Then the ones from the Slade. And now, it seems everyone is here.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Juliet. ‘Do you charge?’

  ‘A shilling a pop,’ said Charlie, producing from under the sink a tin rattling with change. ‘We were going to tell you. Eventually.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Philip. ‘All the dosh is in there. We hardly spent any of it on fags.’

  Looking at the three abashed faces, Juliet felt more tired than cross. She supposed they all thought she was square because she didn’t talk about sex, sex, sex. Maybe she was frigid – it had been so long since George that perhaps she’d caught it through enforced celibacy. Celibate. Such an ugly smug word. Everyone else was busy doing it. The boys declared that they did it all the time, with girls, with boys, with themselves and had absolutely no qualms in discussing sex endlessly in her presence. And now the studio was chock-full of young people eyeing each other up, wondering who to pick to do it with later. Even the Chislehurst crowd did it from time to time. They might not talk about it, but she suspected that Mr and Mrs Nature found time between lokshen puddings to do it. After all everyone did it. Except her.

  Marjorie couldn’t be persuaded out of her clothes a second time, not even for another half a crown, and the class finished early. Later that evening as Juliet sat on the train returning her to the suburbs, she studied the pale face in the glass staring back at her. I don’t fit in anywhere any more. She might spend her days in the gallery with Charlie and Philip and Jim but she wasn’t like them. The boys couldn’t understand that the few years separating them from her held a century of difference. Juliet had begun her life in the tradition of her grandparents and been taken to the temple to be named at eight days old, an event which marked the beginning of a life of feasting and fasting among the same few dozen faces. Her existence had been as regular as the hole in a Brick Lane bagel. Grandma Lipshitz would have recognised the impulse that made a girl of seventeen marry the first slightly interesting man to come into her village (despite the village being Chislehurst rather than a Russian shtetl). Even George vanishing was nothing new and there had been thousands of aguna drifting through the centuries before Juliet. The trouble was that Juliet had been an aguna for so long it was now difficult to accept that she could become something else.

  Outwardly her life was quite changed. She met Sylvia for lunch at cafes in Bayswater, and haggled with framers and printers and sent an invitation for a private view to the man at The Times, but each afternoon she declined the offer of drinks or a party and took the train back to the quiet of the suburbs. Each night she kissed the children and went to bed alone. Sometimes she wondered if loneliness had a smell to it like damp. Sylvia offered to set her up on blind dates with wealthy chums, which Juliet declined, knowing she’d never fit in with the county set. Mrs Greene sighed and tutted, as she pored over the marriage notices in the newspaper, muttering to Juliet, ‘One day we’ll get you in here again, with a nice chap, a decent sort,’ convinced despite everything that what Juliet needed was a new and improved husband. Juliet said nothing, clattering plates in the sink to block out her mother’s chatter. Taking a lover was appealing, but she did not want a husband, old or new.

  • • •

  A week later the school Christmas holidays began. Ignoring her parents’ protests and not informing Charlie or the boys at all, Juliet packed bags for herself and the children and they boarded a train out of London. She sat in the corner of the carriage, pleasantly warm under a pile of coats, paying no attention to Frieda’s complaints and only half listening to Leonard’s enthusings. After an hour both children fell asleep, lulled by the steady motion. As the grey city gave way to open green, Juliet smiled and allowed herself to close her eyes. Waking at the right stop by sheer good luck, she bundled children and luggage onto an unlit and silent station platform. They climbed into a lone taxi, an ancient and rickety Singer saloon, which at half past eight deposited them at the end of a tree-lined track. The gloom was so thick it pressed against them and stuck in their eyes so that when they blinked they still couldn’t see anything but black. Undaunted, Juliet led both children into the darkness, through the bare trees pointing the way with bony fingers and up to the cottage. A yellow light glowed from an upstairs window. Leonard leaned into Juliet, shivering in the cold as she knocked on the door, first rapping politely with gloved knuckles and then hammering with her fist. For several minutes there was no reply. Frieda started to complain. ‘No one’s even here. We’re all going to die.’

  Then the door opened and Max stood in the hallway.

  ‘Hello,’ said Juliet. ‘We were passing. We’ve come for tea.’

  • • •

  Max asked no questions. He didn’t ask why they’d come, merely remarking it was rather late for tea and that they might prefer supper. As he boiled eggs and cut thick slices of bread he did not enquire how long they were intending to stay or wonder what had brought them to his cottage on a winter’s night. Juliet was unsure whether he refrained out of politeness or lack of interest. Either way she was glad, as she was not quite sure what to tell him. He did, however, comment on the perm. Almost as soon as they were settled around the kitchen table eating bread and honey, he took a wooden spoon and poked it into the basket of her hair. She squirmed away.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I wanted to know if it’s a wig. It’s very strange.’

  Frieda grinned. ‘It was supposed to be a perm. It doesn’t look like that on most women. I b
et it would have been okay on me, if I’d been allowed.’

  Max nodded and turned to Juliet. ‘You can’t keep it. Not here. It’ll frighten the birds.’

  He pointed to the kitchen ceiling where a newly frescoed flock of swifts flitted under the eaves and along the walls. Juliet bristled, irritated that her hair was such a source of general amusement.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do. I just have to wait until it grows out. If I fiddle with it, it gets worse.’

  Max produced a bottle of sloe gin and slid it across the table to her.

  ‘Have a drink of that. Then dunk your hair in the sink and I’ll cut it all off.’

  Juliet was about to object but then she shrugged, pouring herself a measure of purple gin. ‘I suppose it can only be an improvement.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed both children, perfectly delighted. It was nearly ten but since Juliet hadn’t noticed, they said nothing to draw her attention to the fact.

  Knocking back the gin, Juliet retreated to the sink and, leaning over the basin, sloshed water over her head. It smelled softly of peat and ran rusty red through her fingers. As she straightened, Max wrapped a faded and ancient tea towel around her shoulders and steered her into one of the kitchen chairs.

  ‘Sit.’

  He produced a comb and started to draw it through her hair, warm fingers tickling at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes, soothed by the steady snip-snip of his scissors. His hands smelled faintly of turpentine. The boys had all now switched over to acrylic but there was something familiar and comforting about the scent of oil paint and turps on Max’s skin. She fidgeted in her seat, unable to sit easily while he touched her. Wanting a distraction, she fumbled for her handbag and pulled out a pile of postcards from the summer’s Picasso exhibition at the Tate, fanning them across the kitchen table.

  ‘I thought you might like these. Since you couldn’t see the actual paintings.’

  Max paused mid snip to glance at the postcards. ‘I did see them.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Juliet recoiling, hurt that he’d come up to town for Picasso but not for her.