The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Come.’

  He took her arm and steered her through the throng to the back of the gallery. It was hot and the air stale and Juliet felt a channel of perspiration tickle the length of her spine. Max seemed to collide with everyone, and Juliet issued a litany of mumbled apologies.

  ‘Why’d she invite so many damned people?’ complained Max, making no effort to keep his voice down.

  ‘The more people there are the better chance that someone will buy one of your pictures.’

  Max snorted. ‘Well, that doesn’t seem likely. If you couldn’t sell them.’

  Juliet faltered, taken aback by this change of heart. Max sighed, ‘I know I was awful. Just awful.’

  Juliet swallowed, unwilling to talk, inhaling the choking hotness of the room and aware of the strangers pressing against them on every side.

  ‘And I am sorry.’ Max stared at the floor, a school-boyish gesture in a middle-aged man. ‘But I still can’t come back to what is it? Tuesday’s?’

  Juliet tried not to mind that after nearly a decade he still didn’t know the name of the gallery.

  ‘There’s just one picture. And you won’t want me when you see it,’ he said.

  Juliet was about to argue when the crowd slid aside for a moment and she saw the painting, and found herself quite unable to speak. It was her portrait. Not as a bird or metamorphosed into any creature but as herself, Juliet Montague. He’d painted her in his bed at the moment of waking; she glanced up at him from the tumble of sheets, shoulders bare and freckled, green eyes fat with sleep, only half aware of the watcher. As she looked at the painting, Juliet understood for the first time that Max loved her.

  He’s painted me. Every piece of me. Here I am.

  He’d never told her that he’d loved her and she couldn’t bring herself to ask if he did in case she hadn’t liked the answer. Sometimes she suspected that he thought of her as a habit – something he enjoyed but could always give up should it be required. Seeing the portrait she knew this was not true. She was necessary to Max. The awfulness of the wedding, the gossips who whispered her name, the good folk who hadn’t seen her for years except as a cipher for bad luck and a warning to daughters – none of it mattered. Juliet Montague was invisible to them but not to him. She found that she was crying.

  ‘Have you noticed the title?’ asked Max gently.

  Juliet wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and read, ‘The Last Time I Saw Her.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m afraid,’ said Max in a low voice. ‘I’m going blind. There’s the shape of you,’ he reached out and brushed the space around her cheek, ‘but your mouth has gone, and your nose. I’m a figurative painter, and now I can only see in bloody abstract.’

  ‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘There. That’s it. What I was afraid of. I don’t want pity. Not from you.’

  ‘It isn’t pity. It’s sympathy. I’m sad for you. I’m allowed to be sad.’

  He frowned. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘You don’t know how I’m looking at you. There’s a big hole around my face,’ said Juliet, doing her best to keep her voice light.

  Max harrumphed. ‘Let’s go to the pub. I’ve had enough of here. Too many bloody people.’

  ‘All right,’ said Juliet, allowing herself to be led away but staring over her shoulder at her portrait, feeling it pull at her like a lover standing on a station platform. She noticed with dread a little red round ‘sold’ dot on the frame.

  They sat in the garden of the Greyhound listening to the rustle of the River Stour at the edge of the water meadows beyond.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t know how,’ said Max draining his first pint then clasping his second. ‘I know that you love my paintings. I know that look you get when I show them to you. It’s greedy. Ugly and most unfeminine. I didn’t want that look to disappear. I’m a painter who can’t paint. I was always a fairly useless creature – but now . . .’

  He laughed. She reached out for his hand and then withdrew again before she had touched him, not wanting to be accused of pity. She supposed she was allowed the facts.

  ‘When did it start?’

  ‘A few years ago I first began to notice a weak spot in my left eye. A bit of blurred vision. It was always worse after painting in bright sunlight. I thought it was lack of sleep. Too much booze. The usual. For a while I thought it might have been caused by a nasty bout of malaria I had in Egypt back in the war. Then last year it got much worse.’

  ‘Did you see a doctor?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Max shrugged. ‘Chronic and progressive eye disease. They did lots of tests and told me to go up to Harley Street and visit a specialist. But when I pressed, they all agreed that all he would tell me was that I wasn’t blind yet, but I would be soon.’

  Juliet was glad that he couldn’t see her face, and held her breath so he couldn’t tell that she was trying not to cry. ‘And now? What can you see?’

  Max finished the second pint. ‘Now the weak spot has grown to an empty hole in the centre of my vision. Painting is a torment. I peer around the subject – if I try to focus on the thing itself I can’t see it all. I can only see you now by not looking. I have to catch you at the edge of my vision.’

  ‘How on earth did you paint that portrait of me?’

  Max grinned. ‘Months and months. I’ve never spent so long on any painting. Never will again. It’s my last. So it had to be of you.’

  He turned and looked at her with those too blue eyes and Juliet could almost not believe that he couldn’t see her. They weren’t bloodshot or yellowed but white and clear and useless.

  They sat for the rest of the evening in the garden of the pub, listening to the twittering of the house martins as they zoomed low over the Stour and the sighs of the cattle drifting amid the long grass. The orange sun sank into a coal fire of clouds and transformed a pair of dawdling swans from white into gold but Juliet observed them in silence. She told Max instead about the wedding and he laughed over the hat incident, snorting beer from his nose. Then she confessed how she worried that she’d lost both children – Frieda to a dreary husband and a dull life of chores and the raising of children and baking of endless loaves of challah.

  ‘And Leonard? Why is Leonard lost?’ asked Max.

  ‘He wants to paint.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Max, understanding. ‘That was always the case with him. There was nothing you could do. It’s an affliction. Like alcoholism. Or good looks.’

  Juliet smiled and realised he was flirting with her. She understood that Max assumed that she would return with him to the cottage in the woods and everything would be almost as before. She closed her eyes and thought of the portrait.

  ‘It’s yours, you know,’ said Max. ‘The painting. I gave it to Kitty to sell in a fit of pique and then I told her I wanted it back but she wouldn’t give it to me. She said if I really wanted it, I’d have to buy it like anybody else. So I did. Fifty sodding guineas it cost me. She charged me every penny of her commission.’

  Juliet leaned over and kissed him. He smelled of alcohol and the wood.

  ‘The children will come back,’ said Max. ‘Give them time. Count it in portraits. In one, two, three, four or ten Juliets they will come back to you.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 75

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  Max Langford, Clay and Wire Mesh, 1982

  ‘PLEASE DON’T TELL your grandmother.’

  Frieda looked at Juliet in surprise. ‘That’s all you have to say? Not “You must think of the children” or “I never liked him”?’

  Juliet poured Frieda another cup of coffee, wondering if she ought to be offering her a glass of something stronger but the only liquor in the house was an ancient bottle of schnapps she’d won in a raffle. ‘You always think about the children and you already know I don’t like him. He’s too dull for you.’ Juliet sighed. ‘I alw
ays hoped that if you stayed married that at least you’d find an exotic lover.’

  Frieda laughed. In her thirties she’d discovered that having an eccentric mother wasn’t quite the curse it had seemed when she was in her teens. ‘I did sleep with a Frenchman when I went to Paris.’

  Juliet smiled and helped herself to another chocolate biscuit. ‘I’m glad. I hope he was handsome.’

  Frieda sighed. ‘Not really. He was a little fat and starting to go bald. But he was nice.’

  Juliet rolled her eyes. ‘Never mind nice for once. Your husband is nice. For now you need selfish and frivolous and fun – you remember the Gainsborough portraits of the Regency rakes I used to take you to visit at the National? You need the modern equivalent of one of those.’

  ‘You want me to sleep with a man in red velvet trousers?’

  ‘If that’s what he happens to be wearing, then yes. I want you to have some fun. Go out with a man who’s a bit of a dish and who’ll break your heart. It’ll do you good, you know. A dash of heartbreak.’

  ‘And don’t tell Grandma.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The women lapsed into silence, both considering Mrs Greene, who like a sturdy apple tree had suddenly gone from being in her prime to being hollow and thin, frail against the wind. She still wore coral lipstick every day and brewed eight-hour chicken soup on a Friday night, but this feat meant that the rest of the weekend was spent napping in the chair by the electric fire. Juliet had once suggested that the nap might be more restful upstairs in the new bed she’d persuaded her parents to purchase, but Mrs Greene fixed her daughter with a look of disgust declaring, ‘Only babies, women during their confinement and old people take to their beds in the afternoon.’ Juliet said nothing more, glad that her mother still had her vanity and pride. The young doctor’s diagnosis had not been good and he was banal in his sympathies: ‘It’s a shame, but your mother’s had a good life and a full one, and it comes to us all in the end.’ Juliet and Mr Greene had decided not to tell her. They expected that she knew without it being said and the truth was she’d rallied over the last few months – there was less forgetting at the grocer’s and she’d been making an effort to eat a bit more herself as well as urge cakes and latkes on her great-grandchildren. The colour in her cheeks wasn’t just rouge from Woolworths.

  • • •

  Mr Greene dared to hope. As the years passed he’d learned to put more faith in his God – touchy and cankerous as he was, the aged ruffian and he were old pals and, frankly, Jehovah owed him one. He prayed at home every day, pretending he was singing in the shower when really he was wearing his yarmulke instead of a shower-cap and his tallis instead of a towel. God didn’t mind his nakedness – they were old men together and he pictured God much like himself – a bit of a paunch, inconveniently old, struggling to pee. Mr Greene put down the improvement in his wife to these acts of bathroom devotion, although he did not mention this to anyone. His daughter and granddaughter would give him that look of fond indulgence, as if he was a doolally old fool who mustn’t be contradicted. He preferred to say nothing. What did it matter? He didn’t need to be right; he just needed his Edie to be all right.

  Juliet and Frieda did suspect other reasons for the change. Without having discussed it, they were both quite certain that Mrs Greene was waiting for her great-grandson’s bar mitzvah. She took tremendous pleasure in Frieda’s respectability and her marriage into the Cohens. Whenever her friends enquired after Juliet with one of those looks, Mrs Greene liked to reply, ‘She’s perfectly well, and so is my granddaughter, you know, Frieda Cohen,’ as though the blot from one generation had been washed away by the respectability of the next like an intergenerational stain remover. The bar mitzvah was to be the culmination of it all. Paul Cohen, thirteen, acne ridden and so shy he’d taken to hiding in his bedroom during his own birthday parties, was to recite the Torah before three hundred people, give a witty and devastating speech during a four-course luncheon and be the pride of two families and three generations of assorted Greenes, Montagues and Cohens. Privately Juliet wondered whether her grandson would be the next in his family to vanish.

  ‘How are Paul and Jenny managing?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘We haven’t told them yet. It didn’t seem fair. Not until after the bar mitzvah. Paul has enough to worry about and we couldn’t tell Jenny without telling him. You know she can’t keep a secret.’

  Juliet sipped her tea and thought about her granddaughter, eleven-year-old Jenny, and decided that concealing the divorce of one’s parents wasn’t something that a child should be asked to do. But she supposed that it was she who had taught Frieda that children must keep secrets.

  • • •

  Frieda gave Juliet an invitation for Max to come to the bar mitzvah. They both knew it was a safe offer – he would never come – but Juliet appreciated the gesture nonetheless. She wanted to take Paul with her to the cottage for a rest before the big event, to meet Max. It had been unconscionable before Frieda had told her that she was going to leave Dov. Juliet had never even mentioned Max in front of the children. She wondered if they knew about him anyway, but she supposed not. Grandchildren rarely suspected grandmothers of having illicit lovers. But Frieda still wouldn’t let Paul go, she was only starting to escape the yoke of respectability and couldn’t let her mother take him, not yet. ‘Perhaps later,’ she’d said.

  ‘After the bar mitzvah?’ Juliet had asked.

  ‘Yes, after the bar mitzvah,’ Frieda had answered with some relief. Juliet had said nothing more, only considered the watershed that this great event represented in all their lives.

  • • •

  Max was not disappointed that the boy hadn’t come.

  ‘Why would you bring him here?’ he asked, genuinely perplexed. ‘I’ve never liked children.’

  ‘You liked mine,’ said Juliet.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did. Especially Leonard. You must bring him again. I should like to see Leonard.’

  ‘Leonard is in his thirties. If you want him to come and visit then you must ask him yourself.’

  Juliet sighed. It was as though for Max people remained stuck at the age they were when he’d lost his sight. Leonard would forever be a promising adolescent and Max always appeared surprised when Juliet read aloud a review or a snippet about him in the press, jolted that the boy had grown up. Everyone and everything changed but Max and the wood at Fippenny Hollow, which altered only with the seasons. The hawthorn and blackthorn bushes bloomed and withered, put out green leaves, lost them and then dangled with scarlet thorn apples or black sloes, which Max gathered up, shoved into foul-smelling bottles and drowned in cheap gin. The rhythm of his life was steady, measured out by sun and snow and the time it took to brew plum wine or for bread to rise. In the last few years he had become almost totally blind, able only to glimpse shadows, all colours lost to him.

  Juliet sat in the kitchen, the windows thrown open to the wood, and chattered as Max cooked. He moved as quickly and easily with the knife as ever, never seeming to cut his finger or scald himself as he put a match to the stove. He peeled the skin from a rabbit, slitting the stomach and then slowly pulling off the fur which he placed on the table, raw and bloody, an empty rabbit sleeping-bag. Juliet shuddered and thought again that she really wasn’t country girl – things that wriggled and slithered appalled her. However, she knew that as soon as the stew started to bubble and the kitchen fill with the scent of herbs and wine and cooking she’d be hungry and ready to eat.

  ‘Leonard has a new show. It’s up north but I shall try to go. Things are very busy with the bar mitzvah preparations and my mother is still so frail, so I might not manage it,’ said Juliet.

  They both understood that this was a lie. No matter what happened, Juliet would be there. Leonard always ensured that she received an invitation to the show. She wished he’d exhibit at Wednesday’s but she was afraid to ask him in case he refused – Leonard had never suggested including so much as a sketch in the summer
exhibition. In fact, he’d not asked her opinion on anything he’d produced since the day he’d left home. He hadn’t asked for her help and, unwilling to interfere or face being rebuffed, she had not known how to offer it. No, that wasn’t quite true – she’d written to a dealer friend in New York a few years after Leonard had left college, asking him to look at a few pieces, and he’d responded with great enthusiasm and he’d sold Leonard ever since. It was a strange sensation during her sporadic trips to New York to view her son’s pictures on the vast white walls, as a stranger might. Once the dealer had even forgotten that Leonard was her son, and she listened politely to his spiel as he described the young British artist and his use of colour and collage while she studied the pieces on the walls, relieved that even without the labels she could pick Leonard’s out of the crowd, like distant cousins who still sported the family nose.

  The following morning Max surprised her by asking her to come with him to the painting shed. She traipsed behind him, trying to swallow the waves of melancholy that rose in her throat. Max had kept to his word and his portrait of Juliet had been his last. Every now and again he discovered an old picture in the back of a cupboard or beneath the eaves and gave it to Juliet. He had no use for pictures he couldn’t see. Relieved of the burden of selling them, Juliet hoarded them all in the Chislehurst house, stashing them in her bedroom closet. She was greedy for Max’s paintings and did not want to share them.

  Max ushered her inside the shed. It still smelled of linseed, it had seeped into the woodwork and she experienced a pang of nostalgia, sharp and clear. Early sunshine spilled into the room bright as egg yolk.

  ‘I’m not painting,’ he said.