The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  ‘They have booths. With red benches.’ His voice was hushed with awe.

  ‘Come on.’ Juliet started to draw him in but Leonard stood stock-still.

  ‘No. We have to “Please wait to be seated”.’

  He pointed to a plastic sign. There was a tiled counter along one wall, and behind it a tired fry cook in whitish overalls scraped at a hotplate. On his head he wore a folded linen hat that to Leonard’s eye looked just like a paper boat, the sort Kenneth made in maths class and they sailed on the pond during break. He sighed in happiness. America truly was a magic land where restaurants stayed open all night and people wore boats on their heads. A waitress ambled over, lips smudged with scarlet even at this hour. She smiled at the children, revealing a tiny fleck of lipstick on her teeth.

  ‘How are you doing this morning? Sit wherever you like.’

  Leonard gazed around at the sea of empty booths and the tempting expanse of counter, quite unable to make up his mind. Juliet ushered them into the nearest booth, suddenly feeling very tired. The waitress hovered, waiting to take their order.

  ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘A hamburger,’ said Leonard, resolute. Cornflake Jones’s father had once gone to America on business and tried the hamburger and said it was the tastiest thing he’d ever eaten.

  ‘One hamburger. Anything to drink? A milkshake? A malt?’

  The children gazed at her blankly.

  ‘I’ll bring you two chocolate malts. You’ll love ’em,’ she grinned.

  Juliet felt more tired than ever, exhausted by the woman’s cheerfulness. She listened in a daze as the children chattered about the trip, ‘on holiday all the way from England . . . Los Angeles . . . a bus that takes four days and Frieda gets car-sick . . . it’s going to be so awful, I can’t wait.’ She watched their reflections in the glass. It was still dark outside and they were framed like a painting – the polished counter, the cook in his whites, the waitress with her slash of lipstick, and in the distance the lights pinging on halfway up the sky as the first of the morning risers started to think about a new day.

  The journey passed in a blur of truck stops and picture-book mountains and greasy coffee and teeth-brushing by the side of the road. They sat on the bus sweating into the coarse fabric seats and watched America out of the window. Juliet felt so small. Smaller than one of the garden ants scuttling from their garden nest under the pear tree to the kitchen table. She felt as if she’d sipped from the ‘Drink Me’ vial like Alice in Wonderland and had shrunk into a doll-size Juliet. As the bus travelled further west, the plains stretched empty into a blank horizon, punctured only by the odd farm and the endless straight grey road. In England the lanes curved around hedges and hills and trees – even after a tree had vanished the curl in the road remained to tell you that once an oak or an ash had been rooted there. Here no trees grew beside the road and the ground was level, ironed flatter than even Mr Greene’s best Saturday trousers. Sometimes Juliet and the children fell asleep, lulled away for hours only to wake in what looked like the same place, unable to tell from the endless sky and flat grey grass whether they had moved on at all. Days fell into night. From early evening the sky began to kindle along the horizon, slowly at first, no more than a match flicker, until it caught and fired the drifting clouds. It blazed in a too rich vermilion. If Max used such a red in a painting, Juliet would have complained that it was too much – a sickly, child’s red – but the colours here looked different. Juliet’s tweed jacket lost its texture under the bright midday sun, but her purple Liberty scarf shone, the flecks of yellow buzzing gold.

  Each evening they stopped at a restaurant beside the road. They were all the same, dusty and tired. The creased travellers filed out of the bus on stiff and unsteady limbs in order to eat and pee and climb aboard again, ready to rattle away into the darkness, heads knocking against the bus windows, sweater-

  pillows slipping.

  • • •

  Leonard lost count of how many days they’d been on the bus – was it two or three or a hundred? – or the number of times Frieda had been sick. She looked skinnier and crosser than ever and in the diners sucked Coke through a straw and scowled at him as he drank milkshake after milkshake, never worrying about it coming back up again. Sometimes he sat next to Juliet, sometimes Frieda (except when she was going to throw up) and every now and again he sat next to strangers, real-life Amer-i-cans. Leonard liked this the best. Between Louisville and Fort Smith he sat beside a travelling salesman with a briefcase full of imitation watches (that kept real time just the same) and as they shared meatloaf sandwiches with tomato ketchup Leonard listened to his history of troubles with drink and the troublesome ma-in-law who’d driven him to it, and looked at the pictures of ‘my boy Huck Junior’. Leonard wondered if his father was sitting on a bus somewhere sharing sandwiches with another kid and showing him pictures of ‘my boy Leonard’. He expected so.

  • • •

  They reached downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the afternoon on the fifth day, stumbling off the bus into fierce Californian sunshine. It was hot and airless between the buildings, the fronds of the grimy palms perfectly still. Unable to bear another bus, Juliet herded the children into a taxi that deposited them half an hour later outside a gloomy apartment building in Venice. Juliet looked over the children – Leonard in dirty trousers and wild, unbrushed hair, and Frieda her skin grey, eyes ringed with purple as she blinked in the light. Trying to ignore a gathering headache, Juliet hammered on the front door. It was answered after a few minutes by a thin man with a perfectly bald head and a fulsome, furry beard – making him look, according to Leonard, like an upside-down egg in an egg cosy. The bald man led them up several flights of stairs, the children dragging their suitcases, thump-thumping on every step. He ushered them into a small apartment on the top floor and, on handing Juliet a key, disappeared back down the stairs.

  When he had gone, Leonard and Frieda were filled with a sudden rush of energy and started rootling around the room, opening cupboards and poking at the shower and toilet partly hidden behind a mouldy plastic curtain. Leonard flung open a door and gave a cry.

  ‘This isn’t a cupboard! It’s a – garden,’ he concluded, reaching for the right word.

  Frieda and Juliet followed him outside and onto a concrete roof. A lone shrivelled pot plant balanced on the roof ledge was the closest thing to a garden, but beyond the tangle of telephone cables and the nests of electricity wires was the ocean. And it was an ocean, not a sea like at Margate or Swanage. It was huge and blue and the sand stretched away hot and white, edged in the far north by a ridge of mountains half-concealed by a bandage of mist. Juliet narrowed her eyes, searching the shore. Are you here, George? Will you let us find you?

  ‘Can we swim?’ asked Leonard, transfixed by the glittering expanse, drawn like a magpie to silver.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  • • •

  ‘We need to hire bicycles,’ Juliet called through the manager’s door. She rapped again, and he eventually emerged in a pair of orange pyjamas, a hand-rolled cigarette drooping between his fingers.

  ‘Bicycles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mickey the bald and bearded manager gaped at Juliet, ash from his cigarette littering the already filthy carpet.

  ‘What in God’s name do you want a bike for?’

  Juliet swallowed a sigh. ‘To get around.’

  Mickey threw his head back and laughed, revealing two rows of neat yellow teeth like kernels of sweetcorn. He wiped spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that no one – no one – rides a bike to get places in LA.’

  He paused, waiting for Juliet to get the joke but she merely stood quite still and waited. ‘You need a car,’ he added at last.

  ‘I can’t drive.’

  Mickey looked at Juliet for a minute and then stepped out i
nto the corridor, wafting with him a stale smell emanating from his room. ‘You have cash?’

  ‘Some,’ said Juliet, picturing the dwindling stash in the icebox upstairs.

  ‘My brother’s out of town for a few weeks and I could give you a loan of his car at a very reasonable rate.’

  ‘I think you missed the part where I said I can’t drive.’

  Mickey wafted away her objections with his cigarette. ‘It’s easy as pie. I’ll teach you a bit and then afterwards you can drive around and practise.’

  An hour later Juliet sat behind the wheel of a huge tan Plymouth, Mickey beside her and Leonard and Frieda in the back, thrilled at their mother’s audacity. This was something else not to tell Grandma.

  ‘I think you got it,’ said Mickey towards the end of the afternoon.

  Juliet made no answer, concentrating heart and soul on steering the enormous car along the road. It wallowed out into the middle like a boat caught in the tide and streets that had seemed so wide now appeared alarmingly narrow. Mickey was a surprisingly good teacher. He was patient – grinning his yellow smile as he dangled his cigarette out of the window – and he also appeared to have no concerns over the wellbeing of the car, not wincing even when Juliet grazed a row of parked cars or thudded into the kerb as she took the corner of Wilshire Boulevard. He made her practise parking and then drive them all the way up to Sunset in the traffic that at rush hour was thickening like porridge.

  ‘Here we are,’ he announced, suddenly.

  ‘Here we are?’ repeated Juliet, unaware that they were driving somewhere in particular.

  ‘Told you there isn’t nothing to driving. You can drop me here.’

  He waved at a bar with a green neon sign. Juliet pulled over without a signal, a chorus of car horns berating her. Mickey leaped out with sudden dexterity.

  ‘How will I get home?’ called Juliet.

  Mickey stared at her. ‘You got a car.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know how to get back to Venice.’

  Mickey scratched his nose. ‘Ask the kid. He probably knows.’

  With that he was gone. Juliet turned to look at Leonard on the back seat.

  ‘Do you know?’

  Both children shook their heads. The car horns rising to a crescendo, Juliet accelerated away. She tried to guess the direction of the sea, failing to distinguish the sun through the scarf of fog. In the back of the car, the children held hands. Caught in a surge of traffic, Juliet found herself propelled onto the freeway. Unaware of how to escape, she sailed along in the middle lane watching a flotsam and jetsam of cars float by her on both sides. The afternoon wore into dusk and, as the cars thinned she found herself stepping on the accelerator with an electric buzz of exhilaration. Then suddenly the city was left behind. Scrub gave way to desert and the hot dirt from the open windows battered Juliet’s skin. She smiled with pleasure. I could go anywhere. I’m not lost, I’m free. The little house in Chislehurst felt very far away. A sign loomed at the edge of the road: ‘Las Vegas 200 miles’. After the endless bus ride, that didn’t seem so very far. Everything that mattered most to her was in the car. I could vanish too, she thought. Drive and drive and drive and never come back and move here and become someone new. A great black bird watched her from the side of the road, hunched on a scrap of twisted metal, hostile and indifferent. The road rushed on, grey and endless and the first of the stars appeared in the sky beside a lemon slice of moon.

  She glanced in the mirror and saw that both children were asleep, coiled awkwardly on one another. Love pricked at her. She remembered coming home from the hospital clutching baby Frieda, terrified she’d shatter like the china babies in her dreams. George had prised her out of her hands and laid her down on their bed, and they’d both sat staring at this immaculate creature with the angry red face, at once awed and terrified. Frieda could still make her uneasy. When Frieda was six, Juliet had collected her from school and they’d sat on the bus in silence, Juliet searching for things to say, trying topic after topic, sensing her small disapproval. Leonard was different. She’d known the moment the midwife handed him to her that they’d be friends. He’d first grinned up at her at only two weeks old, even though everyone told her it was impossible. Smiling, she pulled off the freeway and parked. Opening the glove compartment she discovered a bottle of bourbon. She slid out of the car and took a swig, conscious that she drank not for pleasure but because this was a moment that needed to be marked. Alcohol seals occasions as varnish does garden benches. Even the most austere of rabbis drank at weddings. It brought them closer to God, or so they said. She tipped a circle of liquid on the ground, watching it seep into the dust and thought of Max in his green wood. And then of George.

  Cars swarmed past, throwing up grit and noise and then the road was still again. She could climb back in the car and drive on for ever, but she chose not to. She chose to go back.

  • • •

  The following day Juliet began her hunt for George. They traipsed along the walk path beside Venice Beach, past a couple of painters who had set up easels on the edge of the sand and a handful of ageing surfers struggling in the shallows, their white beards the same colour as the choppy water. While the children attempted to build a sandcastle, observed by a couple of drunks who offered them some beer-bottle tops for battlement decoration, Juliet looked up ‘Gorgeous George’s Glasses, Culver City’ in the telephone directory. Armed with an address, she wondered how to explain the visit to the children. Leonard laid his spectacles on the towel beside her and then rushed over to Frieda, knocking her into the sea. Juliet lay back on the sand listening to their shrieks. She picked up Leonard’s specs, wiping away a smear on the lens with her shirt. She hesitated, wondering if she dared. Could she be so wicked? Then, before she could talk herself out of it, she wrenched the spectacles, snapping them in two. She stared at the broken pieces, heart beating, feeling a little sick at what she had done. The children emerged from the sea and flopped back on the towel next to her, panting. Leonard groped for his specs. His eyes teared as he found them. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’ He crouched in the sand and peered through them like two monocles. ‘I can’t see,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘I’ll have to go home.’

  ‘Oh darling, we can get them mended here,’ said Juliet. ‘It was an accident, I sat on them and they snapped. I am so sorry.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek, salty with tears and seawater. ‘I know a place that’s not too far.’

  Gorgeous George’s shop was at one end of an ordinary suburban street lined with low houses and dusty palm trees and lawns mouthwash green. She opened the car door, clipping it against the kerb, and led the children towards the shop, steering the half-blind Leonard around a fire hydrant.

  Paint peeled off the doorframe and the display of spectacles in the window needed a good dust. A fly thudded against the glass. Juliet felt dizzy with nerves. She wiped moist palms down her dress and paused outside the shop, suddenly not ready to go inside. It was almost sixteen years since she’d marched into Harry’s Specs on Penge High Street determined to meet the dishy new assistant, George Montague; fourteen years since she’d married him under the chuppah and eight years since he’d kissed her goodbye on her birthday and gone to work and hadn’t come home. She glanced at the children and anxiety kindled into anger. Juliet took a breath and stepped inside ready to face George. It seemed right that they should meet again in an optician’s store.

  ‘Hi, my name is Vera. How may I help you?’

  A woman in a smart yellow summer dress shot Juliet a perfect shop assistant smile. She looked about forty with bottle-black hair and Pacific-blue eyes edged with thick lashes. She wore open-toed sandals, toes painted red like little pieces of candy. Juliet delved into her handbag and produced Leonard’s broken spectacles.

  ‘I’m afraid we had an accident. I hoped you might be able to fix them.’

  Vera took them from Juliet, placing them on t
he counter.

  ‘Let’s take a look.’ Her voice was low and beneath the Californian accent sounded a note of something European. Juliet frowned, trying to place it. ‘Sure we’ll be able to do something for you but I’m sorry to say the optician isn’t in today.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The fluttering in Juliet’s chest subsided; she wasn’t sure whether in relief or disappointment. At the edge of the store, Frieda and Leonard played dress-up with fat plastic sun-specs. Juliet swallowed, forcing her voice to remain casual.

  ‘Is this George’s store? George Montague. Sorry. George Molnár?’

  Vera looked up sharply, saying nothing for a moment, and then retrieved her shiny service smile.

  ‘Yes, the store belongs to George. Do you know him?’

  Juliet frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I think maybe, a long time ago.’

  Vera bent over the counter. ‘Are you here on vacation?’

  Juliet nodded. ‘Yes, from England.’

  ‘And the name, please? For the ticket.’

  ‘Leonard Montague.’

  There was a giggle from the corner of the shop and the display stand wobbled ominously. Frieda caught it before it fell.

  ‘Stop playing with that and come over here,’ snapped Juliet. ‘Stand here quietly until we’re finished.’

  The children slid over, Frieda leaning against the counter, still wearing a giant pair of sun-specs with orange polka-dot frames.

  ‘Can I have these?’

  Juliet glanced at the price and winced. ‘No. They’re far too expensive.’

  Vera said nothing, only stared at Frieda, her head cocked to one side, then with what appeared to be a great effort roused herself into a fresh round of sales patter.