The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  Apart from the portraits, it was such an ordinary suburban house. The brown carpet had been updated from the nasty fifties mustard to an equally dubious eighties green and a dozen years ago the wallpaper had been stripped and changed to a Mulholland blue in order to better display the pictures, but Juliet had shown no interest in either moving or further re-decorating. The London gallery was bright and modern and the exhibition space re-painted every year, sometimes twice. Until her flu last year the colour changes were always overseen by Juliet – she’d insisted that the decorators redo the entire gallery when the shade of red was a single grade too dark. She was the first curator in London to reject the glare of white walls and soon the National and the Tate were asking her to consult. It puzzled him, how this determined woman with all her panache still chose to live in this cramped, indifferent house in a suburb filled with the echoes of old disapproving sighs.

  Even now, worn and grey from illness, Juliet wore high-waisted herringbone trousers, an emerald silk blouse and knotted Liberty scarf at her throat. Leonard was often asked, out of the many beautiful women he’d captured, whose style he admired the most. Over the years he’d given a variety of names – sometimes the woman he was sleeping with, sometimes the woman he wished to be sleeping with – but the truth was it was Juliet whom he most admired. And yet, he supposed she didn’t count – he’d never painted her so he wasn’t allowed to include her in his answer. The house was filled with Juliets, but none of them by him.

  When he came back downstairs she was sitting at the kitchen table perfectly still, hands folded in her lap, staring into nothing like a heron poised by a goldfish pond. Her calm unnerved him. She was a woman always in motion, and this recent quiet irked him. Resolved, Leonard took a breath and reached up to clean his glasses, a boyhood habit that still caught him even though he’d worn contacts for years.

  ‘I’m sending a taxi to collect you tomorrow at nine. It’s taking you to the studio. I’m going to paint you.’

  • • •

  ‘Another tea?’

  Juliet shook her head. She could tell Leonard was nervous and she was relieved as she had the same tingling, half-fearful excitement herself. She so wanted to like the picture. Most of the time with the others she was only curious to discover how they saw her. Their versions rarely coincided with how she imagined herself but it was always interesting, if sometimes disconcerting. With Leonard it was different. Few mothers have the opportunity to discover how their sons really see them. She knew Leonard loved her – that he couldn’t help. But did he like her? She watched as he fumbled with his brushes, set out jars of water, mixed and remixed paints and then finally reached for a pencil. She presumed he wasn’t always this unsure how to begin and decided to be pleased by his fluster. She wondered if he wanted her to talk as he worked, some did, some didn’t, and with a pang she realised that this was yet another thing about her son that she did not know. It was strange how unfamiliar one’s children become. When she thought about Leonard she pictured the small and earnest bespectacled boy of ten, not this man in the expensive sweater with creases around his eyes. Though she was pleased to observe that the creases went in the right direction – Juliet made it a point to like people whose lines curved up from smiling rather than down.

  Leonard gave a tiny sigh and set down his pencil. It was useless trying to force it. The picture would come if he relaxed and thought of other things.

  ‘Let’s just talk for a while.’

  ‘Whatever you like, darling.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever leave Chislehurst? You must have made enough money over the years.’

  Juliet gave a tiny smile. ‘Yes, I did. First I bought out the investors and partners. That took some time. And afterwards, well, despite everything I’m still the girl from the shtetl in the suburbs. It was easier not to fit in at home than anywhere else.’

  Leonard studied her for a moment in silence before asking, ‘How many portraits do you have now in your collection?’

  Juliet frowned, trying to think. ‘I believe nearly a hundred.’

  ‘Why haven’t you shown them? You must have been asked.’

  ‘They’re painted just for me. No one else.’ She reached for a biscuit set out on a low table.

  ‘But I’m sure people would like to see them. You always took us to galleries. Said the best paintings must be shared.’

  Juliet re-crossed her legs, brushing crumbs from her trousers. ‘You can have an exhibition after I’m gone. Write a proper catalogue and a pompous foreword. You know the sort of thing . . . “For fifty years Wednesday’s Gallery and its iconoclastic curator, owner and navigator, Juliet Montague, have been part of the fabric of Bayswater. She chartered the gallery from the early sixties through the perils of Pop Art and abstraction, remaining resolute in her passion for figurative painting . . .” I’ll have an exhibition instead of a funeral. But you’re not to do it till then.’

  She waggled a finger at Leonard, who forced a smile.

  ‘Tell me about the first time you were painted,’ said Leonard pulling out a sketchbook and a stump of charcoal.

  Juliet smiled and stretched. ‘Ah. Well. I was nine years old and it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. But I found it frightfully hard to keep still. To help distract me, Mr Milne told me stories of the Mediterranean and it sounded impossibly hot and blue, like something from the Arabian Nights. Each evening I’d go home to Victoria Avenue and spend hours in your grandmother’s linen cupboard. It held the ancient boiler and was the hottest room in the house, so I’d tangle myself in her sheets trying to imagine Spanish heat. He told me about catching lobsters and eating them with gulps of white wine in the sunshine and in the company of beautiful women. I always think of my old friend John MacLauchlan Milne whenever I eat lobster. You have to understand the littleness of my life until then, Leonard. London was a worn-out grey. Exhausted. There was no colour left after the war – they rationed it all away. And then this old Scotsman came into the Greene & Son workshop to barter for a pair of spectacles and I discovered that the whole world wasn’t like this, that there was something else. He painted me and he painted a window for me.’

  ‘But you never wanted to be a painter?’

  Juliet laughed. ‘Never. I don’t have the talent. But it’s more than that. I’m terribly nosy, darling. I like to know how other people see the world. Is your blue sky different, bluer than mine? That’s how I know that I love a picture, when I love how the artist sees the world. I return to my weekday morning quite refreshed, seeing a little better and right into the heart of things. I think, ah, so that’s a sunflower. I never quite understood before.’

  As she spoke, Leonard quietly set down his pencil and drew out his brushes and started to paint. He didn’t paint his mother but the window over her left shoulder. In it appeared a Mediterranean afternoon, sunlight casting short, hot shadows against a harbour wall where at a table covered in a scarlet-chequered cloth a man ate lobster with a girl. Beside them, a child swaddled herself in sheets like a toga. A pair of spectacles rested on the ground, and reflected in the lenses was a fat yellow sunflower.

  The portrait was supposed to take a week, perhaps two. Leonard had never spent more than a month on a picture before, but then one month stretched into two and then three and then a year had passed and still it wasn’t finished. More and more scenes appeared outside the window in the painting – a pair of naked young men dived into a black swimming pool, white moths flapping against the dark. At the end of each month Leonard’s assistant helped him make the canvas bigger, strapping another one beside it, then another, until soon the painting was the size of the studio wall. And still he had not started to paint Juliet herself. Her life crowded about her but he left her as a white space in the centre of the picture.

  • • •

  Today, today I’ll paint her. Leonard knows that he says this every morning, but this morning he means it. The taxi brings her at nine-thirty and they make tea together and then
he listens as she talks. She tells him about a lost fur coat and a pair of sapphire earrings, blue as the Aegean and lost too. He studies her face, the soft creases, the lived-in skin, tiny blue veins cross-hatching her cheeks, the eyes still sharp and green, and picks up his brush and paints. The morning ticks, ticks, ticks and at last he sets down his brush and Juliet yawns and declares ‘luncheon’ and he looks back at the portrait and sees the earrings, so blue, and the back of a young woman in a fur coat with a pawn ticket pinned to the sleeve and a flock of pink-footed geese crossing a fat Dorset moon and he realises that there is still an empty white space at the centre of his portrait. After lunch, says Leonard to himself, I’ll paint her after lunch.

  • • •

  They returned to the studio, pleasantly warm after sharing a bottle of Chianti. Juliet settled in her chair and waited, in no apparent hurry to begin. Soft sunlight trickled through the windows and caught the down on her cheek. Leonard considered her for a moment and then instead of reaching for his brush opened a drawer in his desk and handed her a worn sketchpad.

  ‘Do you remember this? Tibor gave it to me that summer in California.’

  Juliet frowned. ‘Yes. I think I do.’

  She opened the front page to discover the newspaper photograph of George Montague cut from the Jewish Forward’s ‘Gallery of Vanished Husbands’ glued to the inside cover. Underneath it there was written in a neat childish hand ‘My Father. George Montague. OR sometimes Molnár.’ She turned to the next page and saw a sketch of a man clearly intended to be a copy of the photograph. It was crude and the lines wobbly but the similarity was there. On the following page was another drawing, another George. She turned again and again – different Georges stared out at her. Some smiled, others were more serious. One wore spectacles. As she neared the end of the book, the portraits became more sophisticated. Here was George in oils, there in the style of a Georgian miniature.

  ‘Are any of them like him?’ asked Leonard quietly.

  Juliet set down the book on her knee and returned to the beginning, turning the leaves slowly, studying each George one by one.

  ‘Each has a little piece of him. None of them has him entirely, but taken altogether, you could find him.’

  • • •

  The following morning marked the first day of real summer. The curtains were open and a cabbage white butterfly flitted in through the open window, wafting on a wave of sunshine. Outside the street hummed with the bustle of school mornings, the knock of lunch boxes and a smell of dew-damp grass. A hose creaked and hummed. A car reversed into a dustbin with a metallic clatter. The taxi would be here in half an hour but Juliet was tired and decided to lie in bed just a few moments longer and listen to the morning. She fumbled in her bedside table and drew out a letter, worn along the folds from re-reading.

  Brooklyn, January 2005

  Dearest Juliet,

  I almost didn’t write this letter at all. I was going to ask my attorney to send you a note with the painting but then I decided that was a coward’s way out and I’ve been a coward for goodness knows long enough. I’m sure you hated my guts for a long time and, my God, I deserved it and more but now, well, time softens and slackens all things. I thought of you and the kiddies a great deal. At first it was a pain that nothing could take away. Not booze, not sex, not even a game of chess or a big, big win. Nothing. But truth is, give it long enough and everything fades in the end.

  You’re all stuck in my mind the way you were the morning I left. I’m probably a grandpa but I think to myself – how can that be true when my serious-faced girl and my little boy aren’t much more than babies. But, my God, they were babies half a century ago.

  You knew that I was married in Hungary before the war. I never told you but somehow I believed you knew or suspected enough of the truth. Though maybe I was just kidding myself about that too. I thought they were dead, all of them – Vera and the children. When I married you, I believed they’d all gone. I truly thought I was a widower. It wasn’t a lie then because I didn’t know and you can’t lie if you think it’s true, can you?

  Perhaps this will make you despise me all over again, but really, what do I have to lose – I can’t regret marrying you, Juliet. Not then and not now. And aren’t you the least bit glad because we were happy for a while, weren’t we?

  I’d heard rumours before that some of my family were alive but I didn’t believe it. That’s how a man goes mad. Hankering after shadows and I had, we had, a good thing here. I ignored the whispers and I didn’t go looking, I swear. Then one day, about five years after we were married, an old friend arrived from California. I hadn’t seen him since before the war, and in truth I never really thought about him. If you’d asked me about him, I would have told you that he was probably dead. But then he walked into the cafe and he leads me to the bar and he asks for glasses of schnapps and he tells me Vera and Jerry are alive. Just those two. Not the others. I tell him he’s a liar. And he’s calm and he drinks his schnapps and he lets me shout, and then quietly he says, ‘I know because I’ve seen them. They’re in California,’ and he hands me an address on a scrap of paper. What could I do? I have to go to them and I can’t leave. I must choose between families. If you can, spare a snifter of pity for a dead man. What I did to you was a terrible thing and I know that, but at least you had no choice. I lived with mine for fifty years, more or less. Nothing I did before or since could make up for it. I tried to forget them at first. Tried to throw out the address. Tried to be happy with you and Frieda and our new boy. But when I watched Leonard I saw Jerry. He was starting to crawl when I saw him last and I’d spent so long thinking he’d gone that I’d given up on grieving. But he was alive and I had his address in California and I had to go find him.

  Things weren’t so good for me in London and I loved you but I knew you’d come through in the end. You’re one of those girls, Juliet; you manage. And I was right. Look what you’ve done for yourself. The gallery. The kids. Quite a name you’ve made. I’ve followed you. Scraps in newspapers. Bits of gossip from those passing through. It’s funny what you pick up when you’re always listening. I heard that you came looking for me and found Vera. I always imagined the two of you would get along. She and I never did. I thought, I left Juliet for this woman, the least I can do is stick with her, but I couldn’t do it. I was a better man with you. Over the years, the good bits have been chipped away until only the weak and rotten bits are left. But, ah, I wished I had seen you when you came looking for me. Well, I like to tell myself it was me you came to find, but I guess I’ve always known it was the picture you wanted. Did you ever forgive me for that? No, I’m sure you didn’t. Everything else, perhaps, but not that.

  The morning I left, I meant to just go. Take nothing. Not a photograph of you or Leonard or Frieda. If I was leaving there was no point tormenting myself, so I thought. But then there was the picture. You. On the wall in that awful brown living-room watching me getting ready to go. Neither approving nor reproachful, just watching, waiting to see what would happen next. And I don’t even remember doing it, but I couldn’t leave you behind. I slid your picture out of the frame. That other stuff pinned to the back, the money and the like, I didn’t even notice was there till later, though I won’t lie – it was handy in a tight spot. But it was the picture I took. I had to have you with me. And you have been for all these years. Some adventures we’ve had, you and I, and more than one man, more than twenty offered to buy you and there were times that I was tempted but no matter how tight things got, I couldn’t do it. I don’t have much now to leave, but I do have the picture and she’s not mine to give away.

  George Montague

  Juliet re-folded the letter and lay back against the pillows. The portrait had been reframed and now hung opposite her bed, and the two Juliets, one nine, one seventy-eight, watched one another. George hadn’t said sorry. She’d read the letter several times when it first arrived just to check. Sometimes she almost thought he had, but he hadn’t, not once. B
ut then if he hadn’t gone, if he hadn’t stolen the painting, her other life would never have happened. She would have lived quietly in this house and one day surrendered and learned how to make strudel and knishes and joined some committee to help with the shul flowers and lived through her children and then her grandchildren and her solace would be snippets of gossip and news.

  ‘I’m not grateful to you, George,’ she said aloud, not wanting him to misunderstand this realisation. ‘You were a shit. And I spent a lifetime keeping secrets because of you, and so did your children. That, as well as the painting, I can’t forgive.’

  A breeze fluttered the curtain and outside a song thrush began to sing.

  ‘The thing is, George, you didn’t marry me. It was only pretend. Vera was your wife, not me. I’m not your widow, living or dead, I never was. It doesn’t matter to me. Not now. But it will to others.’

  Juliet thought of her respectable daughter, so concerned with the world’s good opinion.

  ‘You made our children illegitimate, mamzerim. The rabbis say that the stain will last seven generations and I don’t think poor Frieda would like that at all. I shouldn’t imagine Leonard would be too fussed, but all the same. The easiest secrets to keep are the ones you know nothing about.’

  She reached into her bedside table and fumbled among the spectacle cases and packets of tissues for a small silver cigarette lighter, engraved in curling letters with Max Langford, War Artiste Extraordinaire, from your pals. It was nearly out of paraffin and she had to flick it three times before the flint caught. Doing her best not to singe her fingers, she let George’s letter burn, fragments of paper falling onto the counterpane in a flurry of grey snow. It made rather a mess and she supposed that later she ought to wash the sheets but now she was so very tired. She threw back the covers, scattering ash. ‘Really I must get up. I’d very much like to see Leonard’s portrait.’ Until now she’d avoided looking at it, declaring at the end of each day, ‘I’ll wait until it’s finished, darling. I’m sure it’s wonderful.’ Both of them were equally and privately anxious that she like it and quietly relieved that the moment was delayed. But, Juliet decided, it was getting quite absurd – this morning she would look at the painting.