The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  In the middle of the afternoon Max came inside humming, his trousers spattered with paint. He insisted that they have a picnic lunch – the fact it was after three o’clock didn’t concern him – and he marched her through the wood to the edge of the great house. They sat on a felled oak, eating egg sandwiches and strong cured sausage as they watched tourists meander through the gardens of Max’s ancestral home.

  ‘We don’t usually come this way,’ said Juliet.

  ‘No,’ agreed Max, through a mouthful of apple. ‘But I fancied seeing the place again. Sudden attack of nostalgia. I suppose I avoid it in general. I don’t mean to but it is quite odd watching strangers traipse through my mother’s rose garden with their guidebooks in search of cream teas.’

  ‘I wish I could have met your mother,’ said Juliet.

  Max laughed. ‘I’m awfully glad you didn’t. She wouldn’t have liked you – a Jew with a missing husband and worst of all ambition. Definitely not her sort.’

  Juliet frowned, wondering whether she ought to be hurt, until Max put his arm around her, pulling her close and kissing her.

  ‘I like you. You’re my sort,’ he said.

  Juliet smiled – coming from him this was a Shakespearean declaration of devotion. Above a kestrel circled, his cry echoing into the fading afternoon. She closed her eyes and listened. The conversation about the wedding and the gallery could wait another day.

  • • •

  The letter arrived the following morning, while Juliet was sleeping. When she traipsed downstairs Max was sitting at the table, the letter already in his hands. He held it out to her.

  ‘Read it. It’s from Tom.’

  Something in his voice made her obey. She sat and started to read, ‘Dearest Max—’

  ‘Aloud.’

  She began again. ‘Dearest Max, I’m an anachronism like that monstrous house you grew up in. All those painters, the big ones like Warhol, the tiddlers like Charlie Fussell and the ones in-between like Jim Brownwick, are all searching for something modern, something new. And the truth is: I Just Don’t Get It. Their stuff babbles at me and I put on a jacket and I go to their wretched shows and I sip warm white wine and I look and I look at the pictures and prints and reliefs and try to see what they all see but I can’t. Instead I look at them with their happier lives and see there is no room for me and my work. No one is interested. They don’t think I have anything to say. And perhaps I don’t. I’ve only ever had one idea – the human figure in a landscape. And it’s been enough for me to paint for a lifetime. But I’m done. I’m tired of being an irrelevance. I’m sick again and this time I can’t face it. The pills have been swallowed and now there’s nothing to do but wait.’

  Juliet broke off with a cry. ‘Is this real? We must do something.’

  Max shook his head. ‘What can we do? Look at the date – he wrote it two days ago. Finish it. Please.’

  ‘I can’t. I won’t. You read it.’

  She shoved the letter at him but Max gently placed it back in her hand.

  ‘Please. I can’t face it alone.’

  He drew her onto his knee and he wrapped his arms around her middle. She took a breath.

  ‘I don’t feel anything yet. Dying feels much like living.’

  She stopped and Max motioned for her to continue.

  ‘There’s nothing else.’

  She showed him the paper. The words trembled and slanted like falling trees, tapering away into squiggles, then oblivion and the empty page. There was no signature or hurried sign off – there was nothing at all. Juliet pictured Tom’s final morning. She saw him climbing out of bed, shaving and dressing properly in one of his aged but immaculate suits – he always looked as if he had just stepped out of a gentleman’s outfitters from twenty years back. She pictured him brewing his cup of Fortnum’s tea, setting out his fountain pen and watermarked stationery, looking out of the window at the pleasant spring morning swelling over Primrose Hill, before swallowing his pills and writing his letter while he waited to die. The letter would always be in the present tense. The moment before death preserved like a blow about to fall. She glanced round at Max and saw that he was crying too, round tears streaming down his cheeks. She reached out to brush them away but he stayed her hand, kissing her fingers.

  ‘No. We should cry. Who else does Tom have to weep for him but us?’

  • • •

  Tom’s housekeeper had found the body, the letter beside it, envelope neatly addressed and stamped. Knowing him as she did, she ignored the proper protocol and posted the letter before telephoning the police. There was to be no funeral. He had no relatives. Max remembered that there had been a boyfriend some years before, but he couldn’t recall his name, let alone his address. The afternoon after the letter’s arrival, they took the parcel out into the wood and unwrapped it. Max was well on the way to being drunk. He’d not eaten since the morning and had worked his way through a grimy and ancient bottle of spirits he’d produced from the back of the shed. He pulled a knife from his pocket and slit the string from around the parcel. With something like tenderness he drew back the brown paper, unwrapping the painting like a baby from its bath towel. He shook it free and held it up under the trees.

  The painting was of a beautiful sandy-haired boy lazing on a pinstriped lawn. In the background stood an ugly, sandstone manor, softened by a splash of rosebushes. The boy was naked. Every strand of hair was lovingly painted in gold or russet or blond, the bleached furze along his arm catching the light. His knees splayed to the side, penis curled against his leg. Unlike Tom’s other paintings, in this one the boy looked directly at the viewer, his eyes blue and his smile arch.

  ‘Oh,’ said Juliet. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

  She remembered that Tom had once told her that in his youth Max tempted girls and boys alike, and even now she experienced an adolescent flutter in her belly. Here was Dorian Gray unmarked by age, his skin flushed with sunshine.

  Max swallowed hard, unable to speak for a moment. ‘Yes, this was me, aged eighteen, at art school. Before the war.’

  He shoved the painting at Juliet and turned back to the house. She heard the door slam. Gathering up the discarded paper, she followed him, picture tucked under her arm. He waited for her in the kitchen, glowering over a mug of something foul-smelling and black.

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  Juliet sensed the world grow quiet, the birds’ singing muffled and the creak of the trees silenced. Dizzy, she leaned back against the kitchen cabinet, managing not to drop the painting as she laid it on the table. She felt rather than heard Max speaking, and it took her a full minute to realise he was talking about leaving the gallery rather than her. She felt a brief pulse of relief and then sadness balled in a lump at the back of her throat.

  ‘This is their fault,’ Max was saying. ‘Charlie Fussell and his stooges. They drove Tom to this.’

  Juliet clenched the wood of the countertop, watching as he circled the table, oddly articulate through his alcohol-fuelled rage.

  ‘They’re not painters. They’re unthinking mirrors, as reflective as bloody tinfoil. An artist must think and feel and respond. They believe that they paint the times, but they don’t. It’s nothing but surface art. Sometimes what they do is pretty for a poster and other times it’s ugly for the sake of ugliness. They’ve confused monstrosity with profundity. Unless you’re a thinking painter you’re just a maker of knick-knacks. That’s all they are – knick-knackers.’

  He paused, leaning over the back of a chair and downing the rest of the liquid in his mug.

  ‘And then there’s Tom who was quiet and thoughtful and principled and melancholy and they killed him. I won’t see or speak to any of them again. And I won’t have my pictures shown with them. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but what is a man if he allows his principles to be painted over? I can’t and I won’t.’

  Juliet nodded, his fury making her dumb.

  ‘I’ve spoken to a dealer in Blandford, Kitty West. I like being sho
wn by a woman,’ he added. ‘You can pass along any unsold pictures of mine to her.’

  Juliet thought of all of his paintings stashed in the gallery, familiar to her as her own reflection – they were her friends, her talismans. Sometimes after a long day she opened the door to the cupboard just to glimpse that window into the sky – as long as she looked she wasn’t in London any more but in Dorset, looking at greylag geese through Max’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Juliet, voice firm. ‘She can take the new work but those pictures are mine.’

  ‘Yours to sell. Not yours.’

  ‘I love those pictures. I won’t give them up.’

  ‘Is that why you haven’t sold them then? Hoarding them to yourself.’

  Juliet stared at the furious stranger, his eyes black with drink. She swallowed, retreating from his fury, blood buzzing in her veins.

  ‘You know that isn’t true. But if you want the old pieces back then you’ll have to come to London and fetch them.’

  Max stared at her but she met his eye, both of them knowing that he’d never come up to town and her beloved pictures were quite safe.

  Juliet went upstairs, shoved her clothes into her suitcase and caught the next train back to London. Sitting in the carriage, she resented the impossible prettiness of the countryside. The perfect green of the water meadows and the blue haze beneath the trees of the bluebell woods flashing by only annoyed her. She wanted drizzle and grey skies. She drew her coat around her and allowed herself to cry, messy sobs that dribbled down her chin until an old lady in a tea-cosy hat leaned forward to offer her a tissue. She wondered whether it was she who’d left Max or if it was he who’d broken things off with her. It didn’t much matter. She must do her best not to miss him. At least she wouldn’t have to tell him that Frieda refused to invite him to the wedding. With another sob, she realised that Charlie was probably right and he wouldn’t even care. Loneliness curled around her, thick as smoke. For the first time in many years she thought of George.

  • • •

  Mrs Greene yielded over the flowers. Frieda wanted to hire one of those fancy florists in the high street and, believing that a bride ought to be pandered to in almost all instances, Mrs Greene agreed. She supervised Mr Greene’s writing of the cheque even though it pained her, knowing as she did that there were a dozen pretty plastic vases all nice and new in the synagogue cupboard and a multitude of flowers in the garden. But she drew the line at the cake. There she was immovable. Shop cake was worse than inadequate: it was slovenly and no daughter, granddaughter even, would eat it at her own wedding. She was willing to try to copy those nasty colours in the window displays that Frieda admired so much and bought bottles of green, blue and yellow food colouring from the Co-op and experimented in a variety of garish sponges.

  Mr Greene soon tired of being forced to taste crimson cake glued onto a chocolate base with sickly yellow butter icing and on finding his comfortable front room vanished beneath a snowstorm of nylon white bridal magazines, he retreated to Juliet’s house. There at least the wedding chatter was limited to meal times and the kitchen mercifully free of sticky bottles of food dye bleeding onto every surface. There was, however, another problem. He’d escaped the frantic joy of his wife and granddaughter but as he watched Juliet over the top of his Daily Mail, Mr Greene realised that she was unhappy. Fatherly tact prevented him from enquiring as to the cause, so he said nothing. Instead he allowed her to make him cups of tea but ensured that he washed up his cup himself in a tiny, and unnoticed, act of sympathy.

  Lining the stairs of the small house was a series of Juliets. Charlie Fussell had started it, and now every artist with whom Juliet worked seemed to have painted her at some time or another. At first Mr Greene had found his daughter’s penchant for having her portrait painted a very odd thing, something a little close to pride, and he worried that it might irk his jealous and cantankerous God, but Juliet remained un-smoted and, over the years, he’d decided it was a rather intriguing thing to do. Most people’s daughters only provided them with grandchildren and latkes and tsorros, but Juliet wasn’t like other daughters. There were no latkes, or only soggy burned ones, but there was something else. She was interesting. Mr Greene appreciated that most of his friends were a little dull. He liked them very much and understood he wasn’t an exciting man himself, preferring ease and quiet over adventure, but he admired his daughter’s spirit. Each of the portraits caught a little piece of her. None was the whole person, but walking swiftly up or down the stairs he passed through a crowd of Juliets. He liked some, was indifferent to others and detested one or two. It was a strange sensation to suddenly have so many daughters – it quite exhausted him. Surreptitiously he watched the flesh and blood Juliet potchki about in the kitchen, and he was overwhelmed with the need to tell her that she was the one he loved best. His hand shook and he wanted to tell her that whatever sadness was making her rub her swollen and sleepless lids, it too would pass and all would be well in the end. Sensing his gaze, she turned.

  ‘Shall I make a pot of tea, Dad?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you very much. I’ll wash the cups.’

  • • •

  In order to escape Mrs Greene and Frieda’s ecstatic wedding preparations, Juliet took Leonard to see the end of year show at the Royal College. Artists telephoned Wednesday’s every day, trying to arrange a meeting in the hope Juliet would agree to represent them, or else they arrived at the gallery without an appointment and clutching portfolios. She examined everything with careful interest, new artists and established alike. What Juliet liked most was to find new talent among the students and then track them for a year or two – to ensure they had the necessary tenacity – and then try a few pieces in an exhibition. The only ones she politely and immediately rejected were the ones she took to calling the ‘bottom-patters’. These were usually older and privileged chaps who, intrigued to find a woman running a gallery, were quite unable to resist the odd indulgent pat of her behind.

  The brief spell of summer sunshine had retreated into English drizzle; the sky was a faded grey. The whole city reeked of damp, like socks that wouldn’t dry out. Leonard was quiet on the train into town, scarcely speaking and barely responding to Juliet. She’d made no comment, hoping that this wasn’t a sudden surge of adolescent irritability. Usually Leonard was so even tempered. She decided it was probably just the weather.

  The students’ private view had been the night before but Juliet always preferred the stillness the day after the opening. She liked to look around as the cleaners swept up the stray peanuts and paper napkins and debris of other trash. She paused for a moment in the hush of the hall, listening to the scratch and scuffle of the mops, and then with a practised eye glanced around the room before making her selection. She wondered which of the artists would be lucky and which ones would be nibbling vol-au-vents at drinks parties in twenty years’ time saying, ‘Actually I went to art school.’ Then she thought of Tom and his letter and forced herself to look at a mediocre landscape. She mustn’t think of it; she mustn’t.

  ‘Come and tell me what you make of this one,’ she called to Leonard, poised before a self-portrait of a young woman emerging from the shower, face thin and pale in the steam of the bathroom mirror.

  Leonard hunched in a corner, hands in his pockets, hardly looking at the pictures. He shuffled over, standing obediently in front of the painting.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Juliet. ‘Do you get that tingle? Or nothing. You have to sense it in your kishkies.’

  Leonard sighed, wondering why the only time his mother ever used her smattering of Yiddish was when talking about art. He didn’t care about this picture or any of them. Charlie had promised him that she’d understand, or at the very least be sympathetic. Leonard wasn’t so sure. But in the end the words toppled out.

  ‘I’m leaving school. I’m not doing my A-levels, I’m going to art college.’

  Juliet turned to face her son, exhibition quite forgotten.

  ‘You can’
t.’

  Leonard frowned, anger pinking his cheeks in two round dabs. ‘What do you mean, “I can’t”?’

  Juliet swallowed, forced herself to smile. ‘I mean you should wait. There’s plenty of time for art school. But you need A-levels too. Things don’t always work out quite as you hope.’

  Leonard shook his head and moved away from her. Hurt prickled inside him.

  ‘You don’t believe I can do it. You don’t think I’m any good. You’ll schlep up here and spend hours gazing at these frankly ordinary pictures and no, I don’t like this stupid portrait, the colours are far too blue and that brush work is careless and the skinny girl has nothing behind her eyes. It’s self-indulgent trash. But you ask me to stand here and study it when you don’t even notice my stuff.’

  To his disgust, he realised he was crying. Juliet stepped forward, ready to comfort him, but he shook her away.

  ‘No. Leave me alone. I want to paint. You understand that in other people but not in me.’

  He wiped his tears on his sleeve but to his humiliation they would not stop, and the more they fell, the angrier he grew.

  Juliet stared at this furious young man who was her son and knew he was lost. She’d always hoped that he’d learn to want something else, but it was no good. She wanted to tell him that she was frightened and that for every Hockney or Warhol or Jim Brownwick there was a Max Langford or a Tom Hopkins. In the end it was more luck than talent. Talent hadn’t helped Max. Or Tom. She wanted to explain to Leonard that indifference and failure can drive a man to write a letter to his oldest friend as he sits in the sunshine and pops tablets and waits.

  Leonard shook his head, eyes big with disappointment. ‘You’ve really nothing to say?’

  He gave a shrug and shoving his hands back into his pockets slouched towards the door. Juliet hurried after him, only now conscious that she had not spoken aloud.