The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel (17 page)

‘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 bet 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.

‘Not in London. In Paris during the war.’

‘We went to see it eight times,’ said Leonard happily.

‘Ten,’ said Frieda less happily.

‘Charlie and the boys couldn’t talk about anything else,’ said Juliet.

Max smiled. ‘Picasso will do that to you. He haunted me for years.’

‘Not any more?’

‘No. Now there are other ghosts, in different colours.’ He stood back from Juliet and peered down at the postcards. ‘I think something like that would suit you,’ he pointed the scissors at a nude portrait of Picasso’s teenage mistress, Marie-Thérèse, her bare breasts round as teacakes and her pale hair cropped into a fetching, asymmetric bob.

Juliet laughed. ‘Most salons use pages ripped from magazines.’

Max shrugged and turned her to face him, cocking his head to one side like a sparrow. ‘You’re like her. Full of sunshine.’

‘But wearing more clothes.’

Max shot her a smile and Juliet was suddenly aware of the children. Allowing her eyes to close, she relaxed into the warm drowsiness of the kitchen, listening to the metal rhythm of the scissors. The table was soon scattered with chunks of hair, drifting across the postcards like dandelion docks. At last Max paused, scissors held aloft. ‘Well, what do you think, Frieda, Leonard?’

The children turned to stare at Juliet. Leonard grinned and even Frieda smiled.

 • • • 

They’d been staying with Max for a week, although they only saw him at suppertime. The children slept in the sitting-room on a sofa each, tucked up with itchy horse blankets around their ears, watching the camel frieze plod around the cornicing. Juliet slept in Max’s bedroom. At first she refused but Max made it clear that he would not be in it, so she need not worry either about propriety (trying not to laugh as he said the word) or displacing him – he rarely slept at night and especially not now.

‘Who can sleep when the pink-footed geese and the wild fowl are busy on the marshes?’

Juliet found that she could, perfectly well. His bedroom was sparsely furnished and unlike the rest of the house there were little or no decorative features, only a stylised portrait of a woman in yellowish tones with a long face and heavy-lidded brown eyes. It was an ugly picture and out of place but Max explained that it had been a present from his mother so he’d kept it. The floorboards were plain unvarnished wood, and there was no rug on the floor, just a simple beech bed, large enough for one, and a single chest of drawers in the same style. The room held Max’s smell – linseed oil, paint and the leafy scent of the wood. On her first morning casting around, Juliet realised there was no mirror and she was forced to use the tiny one in her face compact to comb her newly bobbed hair and powder her nose. On the second morning she simply didn’t bother. She spent the days quite alone, the children vanishing after breakfast to hunt wild things in the woods, reappearing breathless and mud-stained for further meals. Frieda, who in London ignored her brother and seemed to be grouching inexorably towards adolescence, reverted to childishness with relief. When she returned from a morning hunting with her cheeks pancaked in mud (‘For camouflage,’ explained Leonard) she met Juliet’s eye, daring her to say something. Juliet did not, relieved to have a reprieve – however temporary – from snarling adolescence. The children neither wanted nor needed her company and Max she hardly saw at all. Sometimes he crept back mid-morning, slipping upstairs to the bedroom where he would sleep in Juliet’s sheets until supper. Other days he didn’t return to the house until dark, his clothes coated in leaf litter and snatches of hedge.

One morning Juliet woke to find the house silent. Max had not returned from his nocturnal ramblings while the children had already disappeared into the heart of the wood. She came downstairs in Max’s dressing gown, her fingers not reaching the end of his long sleeves. After making tea, she sat in the quiet of the kitchen for an hour, listening to the rustle and knock of the trees. A little later she heard the sudden scuffle of a car engine, followed by silence and footsteps. She waited for the knock at the door but after a few minutes there was nothing. Intrigued, she padded to the hall and opened the front door to find a tall, rather thin man leaving a pair of canvases propped against the wall.

‘Hello,’ she said and the man jumped, clearly startled to see a woman appear on the porch. ‘I’m Juliet. A friend of Max’s.’

‘Tom. Hopkins. Also a friend of Max,’ said the man. He studied her for a moment before reaching out and shaking her hand.

‘Is Max here? I’ve something for him.’

‘No, I’m sorry. He’s on one of his walks. I’m not sure when he’ll be back. Come inside and have some tea. I’ve made a pot.’

Tom studied her with interest. ‘All right. Help me with these.’

Together they carried the canvases into the kitchen. Not waiting for an invitation, Juliet began to unwrap them and laid them on the table. Each painting was a portrait of a young man, one lying in a buttercup field, the other sunbathing on an upturned boat. Both were naked. The brown paper wrapping lay half unfastened around them, and Juliet felt as if she had undressed them a little hastily and publicly, and resisted the urge to the draw the paper back across. She glanced over at Tom.

‘These are wonderful. I should probably know you, shouldn’t I. Are you terribly famous?’

Tom smiled at the barrage of her enthusiasm. ‘No. I am not famous. My stuff’s rather fallen out of vogue, I’m afraid.’