The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel

by Solomons, Natasha

  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. But 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.

  ‘It ought to be my last portrait. The final piece in the collection. It’s only fitting. Once Leonard’s quite finished, I’ll tell him.’

  She yawned and slid back against the pillows. The street was quiet now, the half hour of stillness before the fleet of cars returned from the school run. There was only the chatter of the birds and the rustle of the larch tree. She could almost imagine that she was lying in a cottage bedroom listening to the sighs of a dark wood. Juliet closed her eyes. There was still time for a few moments’ sleep before the honk of the taxi.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  © Ross Collins

  Before my husband David and I got married, we upheld a long-standing Jewish tradition and visited the grave of his grandmother Rosie and invited her to our wedding. One dreich afternoon we went to the cemetery in Glasgow on one of those bone-damp December days when rain surrenders to dusk shortly after lunch. The idea was that Rosie would then join us in spirit under the chuppah. No one wants to risk offending a Jewish grandmother.

  Rosie was particularly special. In 1948 her husband disappeared. He left her with no money and two small children, but Rosie was
determined to provide a better life for her family – no mean feat for a single mother in the Gorbals. She started a popular hair salon, Rosie’s, and her son was the first in the family to go to university.

  But Rosie and her husband never divorced and she remained an aguna until his death. On the day he died, Rosie’s daughter-in-law, Maureen, called round to pick her up and take her to work. She discovered Rosie sitting at the kitchen table in her hat and coat drinking a small glass of sherry at half past nine in the morning. Maureen suggested that perhaps Rosie ought to take the day off work – an almost unheard of event. Rosie agreed that it would be best. Despite all he had done, the knowledge of his passing still perturbed her.

  Suffering from cancer, she’d stayed alive through sheer force of will in order to witness David’s bar mitzvah. While I never met Rosie, the stories itched away at me, and I decided to write about a woman inspired by her. Juliet Montague is a fictional creation, but I hope she possesses a dash of Rosie Solomons.

  FAMILY ALBUM

  Margot Landau (later Shields),

  Emil W. Herz, Oil on Canvas, 1921

  This portrait is of my grandmother when she was nine years old. It was painted in Berlin, where she grew up, by an uncle who was a struggling artist. When he got into difficulties the family would commission a painting. I loved this portrait when I was young—and the fact that my grandmother was a child in the painting. After she died my grandfather remarried, but his second wife was terribly jealous of her and this portrait arrived at our house in the middle of the night for safekeeping.

  Untitled,

  Tibor Jankay, Oil on Canvas, 1979

  The painting is a full-size sketch for a more elaborately coloured piece. The shading was achieved by a special technique with a lithography press using pieces of scrap industrial metal and paint. The figures are done by traditional brush technique. The theme of embracing lovers surrounded by nature (birds, flowers) is one that runs through Jankay’s work. This painting is reproduced with the kind permission of Jeff Rona, the nephew of Jankay, who told me stories about his uncle and allowed me to incorporate them within the novel.

  Carol, Joanna and Natasha,

  Sue Ryder, Oil on Canvas, 1997

  This portrait is of my sister, my mother and me. My sister is on night duty as a junior doctor and isn’t thrilled about having her portrait painted. My mother is trying to keep the peace. I’m seventeen and determined to wear a very short skirt—my father persuaded the painter to add an extra couple of inches, and you can still see the line. He failed to get me to lower my hemlines in real life, but managed it on canvas.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my editors Tara Singh and Pamela Dorman for their patience and enthusiasm and to the fantastic team at Plume for championing my books – I know how lucky I am to have you. And thank you to the amazing independent booksellers who pressed The House at Tyneford into the hands of readers – I’m so grateful to you all. As ever, a big thank-you to agent Stan for his enthusiasm and good humour in the face of authorial neediness.

  Heartfelt gratitude to my expert readers: painter Charlie Baird, Kelly Ross of my favourite bijoux gallery, the Art Stable in Child Okeford, and Leah Lipsey. Any remaining errors are entirely my own.

  Huge thanks to Jeff Rona (again) for telling me the stories of his uncle, Tibor Jankay, and permitting me to fictionalise him here. I’m indebted to Bluma Goldstein and her book on the plight of the aguna, Enforced Marginality: Jewish Narratives on Abandoned Wives, which first introduced me to the ‘Gallery of Vanished Husbands.’

  Last thanks go to my collaborator, co-conspirator, and co-

  parent, David. I couldn’t do any of this without you.

  Turn the page for a sneak peak at

  The House at Tyneford

  by

  Natasha Solomons

  On sale now.

  Chapter One

  General Observations on Quadrupeds

  When I close my eyes I see Tyneford House. In the darkness as I lay down to sleep, I see the Purbeck stone frontage in the glow of late afternoon. The sunlight glints off the upper windows, and the air is heavy with the scents of magnolia and salt. Ivy clings to the porch archway, and a magpie pecks at the lichen coating a limestone roof tile. Smoke seeps from one of the great chimneystacks, and the leaves on the unfelled lime avenue are May green and cast mottled patterns on the driveway. There are no weeds yet tearing through the lavender and thyme borders, and the lawn is velvet cropped and rolled in verdant stripes. No bullet holes pockmark the ancient garden wall and the drawing room windows are thrown open, the glass not shattered by shellfire. I see the house as it was then, on that first afternoon.

  Everyone is just out of sight. I can hear the ring of the drinks tray being prepared; on the terrace a bowl of pink camellias rests on the table. And in the bay, the fishing boats bounce upon the tide, nets cast wide, the slap of water against wood. We have not yet been exiled. The cottages do not lie in pebbled ruins across the strand, with hazel and blackthorn growing through the flagstones of the village houses. We have not surrendered Tyneford to guns and tanks and birds and ghosts.

  I find I forget more and more nowadays. Nothing very important, as yet. I was talking to somebody just now on the telephone, and as soon as I had replaced the receiver I realised I’d forgotten who it was and what we said. I shall probably remember later when I’m lying in the bath. I’ve forgotten other things too: the names of the birds are no longer on the tip of my tongue and I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember where I planted the daffodil bulbs for spring. And yet, as the years wash everything else away, Tyneford remains—a smooth pebble of a memory. Tyneford. Tyneford. As though if I say the name enough, I can go back again. Those summers were long and blue and hot. I remember it all, or think I do. It doesn’t seem long ago to me. I have replayed each moment so often in my mind that I hear my own voice in every part. Now, as I write them, they appear fixed, absolute. On the page we live again, young and unknowing, everything yet to happen.

  When I received the letter that brought me to Tyneford, I knew nothing about England, except that I wouldn’t like it. That morning I perched on my usual spot beside the draining board in the kitchen as Hildegard bustled around, flour up to her elbows and one eyebrow snowy white. I laughed and she flicked her tea towel at me, knocking the crust out of my hand and onto the floor.

  “Gut. Bit less bread and butter won’t do you any harm.”

  I scowled and flicked crumbs onto the linoleum. I wished I could be more like my mother, Anna. Worry had made Anna even thinner. Her eyes were huge against her pale skin, so that she looked more than ever like the operatic heroines she played. When she married my father, Anna was already a star—a black-eyed beauty with a voice like cherries and chocolate. She was the real thing; when she opened her mouth and began to sing, time paused just a little and everyone listened, bathing in the sound, unsure if what they heard was real or some perfect imagining. When the trouble began, letters started to arrive from Venice and Paris, from tenors and conductors. There was even one from a double bass. They were all the same: Darling Anna, leave Vienna and come to Paris/London/New York and I shall keep you safe . . . Of course she would not leave without my father. Or me. Or Margot. I would have gone in a flash, packed my ball gowns (if I’d had any) and escaped to sip champagne in the Champs Elysées. But no letters came for me. Not even a note from a second violin. So I ate bread rolls with butter, while Hildegard sewed little pieces of elastic into my waistbands.

  “Come.” Hildegard chivvied me off the counter and steered me into the middle of the kitchen, where a large book dusted with flour rested on the table. “You must practise. What shall we make?”

  Anna had picked it up at a secondhand bookstore and presented it to me with a flush of pride. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management—a whole kilo of book to teach me how to cook and clean and behave. This was to be my unglamorous fate.

  C
hewing on my plait, I prodded the tome so that it fell open at the index. “‘General Observations on Quadrupeds . . . Mock Turtle Soup . . . Eel Pie.’”I shuddered. “Here.” I pointed to an entry halfway down the page. “Goose. I should know how to cook goose. I said I knew.”

  A month previously, Anna had walked with me to the telegraph offices so that I could wire a “Refugee Advertisement” to the London Times. I’d dragged my feet along the pavement, kicking at the wet piles of blossoms littering the ground.

  “I don’t want to go to England. I’ll come to America with you and Papa.”

  My parents hoped to escape to New York, where the Metropolitan Opera would help them with a visa, if only Anna would sing.

  Anna picked up her pace. “And you will come. But we cannot get an American visa for you now.”

  She stopped in the middle of the street and took my face in her hands. “I promise you that before I even take a peek at the shoes in Bergdorf Goodmans, I will see a lawyer about bringing you to New York.”

  “Before you see the shoes at Bergdorf’s?”

  “I promise.”

  Anna had tiny feet and a massive appetite for shoes. Music may have been her first love, but shoes were definitely her second. Her wardrobe was lined with row upon row of dainty high heels in pink, grey, patent leather, calfskin and suede. She made fun of herself to mollify me.