The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘He said his dad was an air detective. That’s not a real job. Only bloody Biggles bloody does that.’

  Frieda wrinkled her nose and gave her best impression of Juliet. ‘Don’t use that foul language or I shall have to speak with your mother.

  ‘And Leonard was only teasing, weren’t you?’

  Leonard nodded, too miserable to speak.

  ‘See? If you go poking your nose where it’s not wanted, you’ll get told a silly answer. Serves you right.’ Frieda turned on Kenneth, her voice a schoolmistress blend of triumph and indignation.

  Gratitude washed over Leonard in warm waves like bubble bath. Frieda came and stood beside him, her hand resting on his shoulder. Her thumbnail dug into the flesh of his back to demonstrate her private fury. Leonard knew he would get a clout later, but as far as the others were concerned they were united. He glanced around the sukkout and noticed with a tickle of unease that his grandfather and the men had retreated into the warmth of the house, whose yellow lights now seemed far, far away. A few of the older girls stopped their chatter, three glossy heads swivelling to focus on Frieda. The smallest of the girls studied her with clever eyes, blue as coloured glass.

  ‘Your dad’s dead?’ she asked, her voice cherry sweet.

  ‘Yes, Margaret,’ replied Frieda. ‘My dad is dead.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it’s not what I heard.’

  Leonard held his breath, wanting to know what Margaret heard; not wanting to know. He watched her pretty face, its china smile.

  ‘I heard that Juliet Montague can’t keep a man.’

  The whooping-cough laughter returned, more virulent than before, spreading through the children. Leonard felt his sister’s fingernails dig into his shoulder, leaving little half-moons even through his coat.

  ‘That’s not true.’ Frieda spoke quietly, her voice barely louder than a whisper. ‘You’re nothing but a liar.’

  Leonard frowned. He didn’t understand. Can’t keep a man. That wasn’t a secret. It was a puzzle. But he saw that Frieda knew what it meant. His sister’s face turned very white, whiter than when she’d had the flu for a fortnight and the doctor came every day.

  ‘Liar. Liar.’

  Frieda spoke the word like a curse, but Margaret set her porcelain smile and crinkled her button nose.

  ‘I’m not a liar. You are. Your father isn’t dead. He’s a thief.’

  ‘He is not.’

  ‘I know he is – I heard my dad say. Your dad owed mine fifty pound when he left. Fifty pound. He was nothing but a con artist, my dad says.’

  The hand on Leonard’s shoulder trembled and he reached up and gripped it and Frieda squeezed back, all her annoyance with him forgotten.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Frieda.

  Margaret shrugged as though the whole discussion was nothing to her. ‘If your dad was dead, your mum would have got married again. But she can’t because he isn’t dead. And I know what your mother is.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Shut up. Shutupshutupshutup—’

  ‘Aguna.’

  Leonard did not know what the word meant, but he felt Frieda start to cry, great sobs against his back, sobs that made his body rattle in time with hers.

  He couldn’t sleep. Or rather he didn’t want to sleep as when he did his dreams filled with puzzles he could not solve. Couldn’t keep a man. Thief. His father was a spy with two names. Leonard knew that was true – he had the paper to prove it.

  He slipped downstairs to the living room and sat huddled in his dressing gown before the portrait of his mother. She smiled but not at Leonard. Without blinking, he crawled backwards to the sofa but no matter how he ducked and wriggled, she would not look at him.

  Fifty pounds. My dad says. Not what I heard. Leonard knew his father wasn’t dead, so why didn’t he come home? If he did, his mother would be as happy as her picture. Shut up. Shut up. A con artist.

  Suddenly Leonard understood. He stood up and belted his dressing gown. At last he knew what he must do. He must find his father and explain that it was time to come home. And, best of all, he knew how.

  • • •

  At five minutes to seven, Juliet slipped out of bed. At seven o’clock she knocked on Leonard’s bedroom door and went inside. At three minutes past she checked the bathroom, the kitchen and then the living room where she discovered Charlie Fussell’s portrait no longer on the wall but propped against the sideboard. At six minutes past seven she asked Frieda if she had seen her brother and together they looked in the garden and the small tool shed and the cupboard in the hall and out by the dustbins. At a quarter past seven Juliet realised Leonard had vanished.

  • • •

  ‘Sweetheart, sit and have this.’

  ‘I don’t want to drink stupid tea. I want to find my son. He’s eight, Mum, eight and he’s all alone. Oh God. Oh God.’

  Juliet stayed at the kitchen window, watching for him, willing him to appear. Time buzzed in her ears.

  Mrs Greene straightened a dishtowel. Wiped a drip of tea from the table.

  ‘Your father, everyone, they’re all out looking. They’ll find him, love. It might take an hour or two, but they’ll find him and bring him home. I promise. He hasn’t vanished.’

  They both thought of his father, but neither of them spoke his name.

  Juliet paced beside the window, unable to leave it, unable to blink.

  ‘Why would Leonard run away? Why?’

  Mrs Greene tried to persuade her to sit but Juliet flicked her away, dizzy with fear. It floated before her eyes in red plumes and she couldn’t think, she was drunk with it. Her mother was talking but it was an effort to listen to the words.

  ‘We sat here when his father disappeared.’

  ‘Stop that. He isn’t a bit like . . .’ Mrs Greene shrugged, superstitious about saying George’s name aloud. ‘Leonard has just wandered off and got lost.’

  Juliet leaned against the windowsill, murmuring an incantation, ‘Let him be all right. Let him be all right. If you don’t let him be all right, I’m going to convert to bloody Christianity.’

  Unable to distinguish Juliet’s words Mrs Greene was gratified that she still turned to the Almighty in such moments – sometimes she fretted over her daughter’s soul.

  ‘He’s just taken a notion. You know Leonard.’

  ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right. I just can’t bear . . .’

  ‘I know, love. I know. Don’t even think it.’

  • • •

  Charlie Fussell was up remarkably early. Or rather he had not yet gone to bed. He’d been to a party and then drifted back to the studio early, bored by the usual crowd and the usual in-jokes, ones he’d laughed at for so long that he knew rather than felt them to be funny. And he couldn’t sleep. He sat up in the quiet dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the watercolours strung like knickers on a line across the beams. In the gloom he couldn’t make out their subjects; they were just a mass of blank wings. He wondered if the others knew he sometimes slept here. Probably. They almost certainly did the same and yet the thought of them here, stretched out on this battered couch in this room, irritated him. That stained cup, the empty window, the city’s lull before dawn – they all belonged to him, not to the others.

  If he couldn’t sleep, he might as well paint. Even after the party, he wasn’t drunk. He couldn’t bear people who painted drunk or high – it was an affectation of the amateur. An artist must have control over his brush down to the final fraction of an inch, the touch of a hair. The routine of mixing the paints, preparing his brush, priming the canvas gave him a profound, muscular pleasure. It was a process so familiar and yet he never found it dull. Instead it filled him with a wordless calm. The thought of the picture was loose and embryonic, a shadow he must reach for and pull out into the air, a handful of seaweed from water. Tonight, as sometimes happened, his brush guided him around the canvas. It was an odd picture. Not his usual style. More
abstract and only the hint of figures, and yet there was something about the colours that he liked. Was it salvageable? Charlie frowned, wishing not for the first time that he could ask Juliet. She’d know straight away:

  ‘The best thing you can do with that picture is paint over it.’

  Or: ‘Make it about the figure of the boy, the one at the front. It’s his picture.’

  He hadn’t done a portrait since Juliet’s and sometimes wished he hadn’t sold it to her. No, that wasn’t true – he liked to think of it hanging in her house. In her dining room. A pretty dining room with French colonial furniture and a vase of – what were those flowers, the ones with filaments like eyelashes? Anemones. On the dining table a glass vase filled with purple and red anemones. But that wasn’t right. Juliet wouldn’t hang a portrait of herself where others could see. It was private. She would see those days as belonging only to the two of them. Charlie smiled, pleased with his deduction. It would hang in her bedroom. Nowhere else.

  The night before, Leonard had hummed with certainty, but he found that his confidence dwindled with dawn. It was easier to be sure of things in the dark. He’d caught the milk train easily enough and even though there was no one around to punch his ticket, he left money on the counter for when the stationmaster arrived. For an awful moment he’d thought he couldn’t open the carriage door, but finally, jumping up and down, he’d managed it. He huddled in the corner of the car, staring out the window, trying to be inconspicuous and practising his story in case somebody asked. ‘I’m John. I’m going up to London on a class trip to see the dinosaurs. I like to be on time so I’m taking an early train.’ It was a dull story, which Leonard regretted, but after what’d happened yesterday with Kenneth, he’d decided to be careful. In the end no one asked. He didn’t like to think of his mother worrying about where he had gone, but everything would be all right again when he reappeared with his father.

  Leonard disembarked at Charing Cross and found a spot under a newsstand to wait. The station was empty save for a couple of tramps snoozing in the doorway to the gents’ lavatories. Leonard hugged his knees and watched the slow journey of the hands around the station clock. Not yet. Bulldog Drummond always picked the right moment, when he had the greatest chance of success. Leonard didn’t want to try to find his way in the dark and certainly not without a map. He must wait until the kiosk opened – the awning declared: ‘Confectionery, Newspapers, Tourist Map, etc.’ The minute hand moved so slowly, slower even than it did in the last lesson before lunch. Still too early. Not yet. And then the first strands of daylight blew through the station, rousing the pigeons who waddled and cooed, flapping nasty grey wings too close to his face. He reached into his pocket to check for the hundredth time that he still had the address. His fingers brushed paper. It was all neatly written out in his very best handwriting, the one he saved for thank-you letters and stories in Mrs Stanton’s class.

  At ten minutes to six, a man in fingerless gloves arrived to open the kiosk, pulling up the shutters with the raucous noise of a football clacker. Leonard stood, dusted himself off and cleared his throat.

  ‘Please, I’d like to buy a map.’

  The man peered over his counter, starting when he spotted Leonard.

  ‘Here, how old are you? Should you be out by yourself?’

  Leonard tried to stand very tall inside his shoes. ‘I’m nearly twelve. I’m just short for my age. It’s not very nice of you to make a comment.’

  The kiosk man, on the small side himself, gave a sympathetic shrug.

  ‘All right. A map? What kind of map?’

  Leonard pulled out the address from his pocket and handed it over. The man read, his lips twitching.

  ‘You need an A to Z.’

  Leonard wanted to ask if that was a type of map but in case this was the sort of thing twelve-year-olds were supposed to know, he said nothing and handed over a shilling. His purchase under his arm, he retreated to the far side of the station, wanting the kiosk man to forget all about him.

  He slid the book out of the paper bag and groaned. Another puzzle. It was a map of squiggles, much harder than any of the atlases they studied in school. There wasn’t even a proper picture of England. Leonard glanced around and realised the silent station had metamorphosed into a frantic Tuesday-morning rush – men in pinstripes wearing hats, men in blue jeans not wearing hats, women clutching handbags and briefcases and packets of sandwiches. By seven o’clock he was defeated. The map, if it really was a map, remained a worming mass of squiggles. It was time to resort to Plan B. Only he didn’t have one. And he had to find his father. He had to.

  ‘Are you all right, son?’

  Leonard looked up and, to his dismay, found himself staring at his own reflection in the spectacles of a station attendant. The attendant stooped at an uncomfortable angle so as to be at Leonard’s height and addressed him in that special tone reserved for children and the infirm.

  ‘Where’s your mother, son?’

  ‘At home.’

  Leonard glanced over his shoulder to find the kiosk man watching them. He must have alerted the stationmaster. Leonard scowled at the treachery, and turned back to the attendant.

  ‘My name is John. I’ve come up to London on a class trip to see the dinosaurs.’

  ‘And you’ve lost your teacher.’

  ‘No. I came on an early train. I didn’t want to be late.’

  The attendant studied Leonard for a moment, his face putting on that expression his grandmother sometime wore when listening to him – puzzlement, followed by mild suspicion that Leonard was giving her cheek.

  ‘I think we’ll give your mother a bell.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘All the same.’

  Leonard considered briefly the merit of making a run for it but he’d never come better than second to last in the hundred-yard dash at school, and even though the attendant didn’t look much of an athlete either, he had the benefit of longer legs.

  The stationmaster’s office was warm and smelled of toast and was stuffed fuller than Rose’s Deli – only, instead of jars of haimisher cucumbers and saveloys, it contained timetables, loudspeakers, uniform caps on pegs, a dozen telephones and a science board of blinking lights. Any other morning Leonard would have relished the experience.

  ‘Right, what’s your mother’s telephone number?’

  ‘We don’t have a telephone.’

  The attendant gave Leonard a stern look, which he met with alacrity.

  ‘You could try my father, though. He should be at work by now.’

  The man reached for a grey telephone.

  ‘Right then, what’s his number?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know that. But,’ said Leonard, sensing a squall of irritation brewing, ‘I have the address.’ He handed him the paper with the address in his very best handwriting. ‘You can look up my father with that, can’t you?’ he asked, trying to keep the shrill of desperation from his voice.

  • • •

  Juliet hadn’t moved from her spot in the kitchen window. She refused to leave it even to dress, and remained in her dressing gown and slippers. Mrs Greene tried to keep up a patter of comfort. ‘I wish I’d brought my knitting. There’s nothing like the clack of knitting needles for consolation.’

  ‘I’m going outside. I need to smoke.’

  For once Mrs Greene made no complaint, and Juliet escaped the warm confines of her sympathy. Her hands shook and it took her several attempts to strike the match, and once she’d lit her cigarette she let it burn down between her fingers. She didn’t want to smoke, she wanted quiet. Her skull brimmed with the whirring of a thousand insects, all humming and crawling across her thoughts so that she couldn’t think. Her father and the others would find him. They would. For all their delicious horror at her misfortune with George, they all came today the moment her mother called. There were no looks of wry curiosity this morning. Husbands vanishing were one thing. Children were quite another. That fear was feral. They’d a
ll marched up to the house. Even the men in their black hats and long silken curls, the ones who wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t shake her hand, were out there somewhere searching for her son. Nothing less would rouse them on a holy day but today Leonard had trumped God. God wishes it, they said, the boy must be found.

  Juliet walked to the end of the patch of garden and perched on the low wall, Leonard’s favourite spot. It was mild for autumn, the morning sun making the poplars lining the street blaze like torches. A scarlet acer leaf landed on her shoulder and she held it between her fingers, thinking that she’d always wanted hair that red. And then she saw them, at the corner where Station Road turned into Mulberry Avenue, Leonard and Charlie Fussell, hand in hand.

  • • •

  Charlie saw the crumpled figure sitting on the wall straighten the moment she noticed Leonard, a thirsty tulip springing up in water. He watched as she rushed at them, purple dressing gown flapping in the sunshine, long hair loose, Rapunzel running along a terraced street. I hardly know you, he thought. So this is where you live. Until that moment he hadn’t been able to picture it. He imagined her coming to life as she stepped into his studio, like the ballet dancer in his sister’s jewellery box that twirled round and round when he’d lifted the lid as a boy.

  ‘You horrible, awful thing,’ she said, kissing Leonard and folding him into the wings of her dressing gown.

  Charlie stayed back, trying to watch them with a painter’s detachment. Leonard submitted to his mother’s kisses with weary acceptance, meeting Charlie’s eye over the top of her head.

  ‘I couldn’t call you,’ said Charlie.

  ‘No,’ agreed Juliet, still not releasing Leonard.

  ‘Please get a telephone,’ he said, though in truth he was grateful that she did not have one as it had meant he’d had to come here.

  Leonard squirmed and she loosened her hold but would not let him go. She held out her hand to Charlie and he took it, feeling the warm dryness of her skin. ‘Thank you for bringing him back.’

  An ice-cream van tinkled past them, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ wheezing in its wake, pausing a hundred yards beyond, the tune wafting back towards them. Juliet didn’t move, and they remained frozen, an odd tableau in the suburban street. Charlie waited for her to ask the questions that surely must come. At last she stood, and not letting go of either of their hands, she turned to Charlie.