The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Well then, Mrs Montague, it would seem I owe you a portrait.’

  ‘Can we watch?’ asked Leonard.

  Usually Juliet believed portrait painting to be an intimate thing between artist and sitter, and yet on that afternoon in the warm kitchen circled by the yellow wood, the laughter joined them all.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘It’s up to Max.’

  Max disappeared to fetch his paints. He returned with a small easel and a set of watercolours.

  ‘The only rule is no looking till it’s finished. Agreed?’

  The children nodded.

  • • •

  Max sat very still. He scrutinised Juliet without moving to pick up either a pencil or a brush. Dark eyes. Strong brows, feathered like down on a blackbird chick. He had heard her knock for him twice each day, and he’d listened to the sound of her on the other side of the door. Later from the window he’d seen her winding through the wood in her blue shorts and sandals. The shorts were nice. There weren’t many women passing through his woods in nice short shorts showing a pair of healthy well-walked legs. The girl looked just like her. It was rather unnerving – mother and daughter were like Russian dolls, a big one and a littler one. He observed the slope of Juliet’s forehead, the creep of hair. He didn’t do portraits any more. Too dangerous. Then he was angry with himself. He wouldn’t do it and they should all leave and then the light from the window caught her cheek and the highlight at her throat and he realised that to capture that might be something.

  He worked quickly, stirring the peaty water with paint in a porcelain dish. It was nearly fifteen years since he’d last painted a person. That had been in France right at the end of the war. The countryside around the Bocage looked so like Dorset it was cruel, but there were guns amid the hedgerows. The combed wheat fields and huffing cattle had made it seem as if it was England herself being gutted. Afterwards it had been a relief to arrive back home and find her only partly broken. There had still been fields of corn and millponds and sticklebacks and apple orchards. The newer forests had been cut and burned but his snatch of woodland remained. The smell had not changed. The delicious rot of the forest floor.

  And so he painted England again and again, a beetle, an elm, a mallard, the brave and wild pink-footed geese, oh the geese, but not people. Never people. Now he has promised to paint Juliet, but he will have to trick fate so she won’t be taken.

  • • •

  They’d been sitting in the kitchen for hours. Charlie had disappeared for a walk and a cigarette while the children snuck off to play caravans and nomads under the camel frieze, but now they had all come back, wondering if the picture was finished. Max’s brush moved more slowly, no longer sweeping the page but dabbing it, then he set down his brush and scrubbed at the still-wet paper with a sponge, making a shuffling noise like bedroom slippers on carpet. He stopped, leaned back in his chair and stretched.

  ‘Can we see?’

  Leonard and Frieda crowded Max. He shooed them away.

  ‘Go. Sit.’

  They went. They sat. Charlie lolled against the kitchen counter. Max turned around the paper so that they could all look at once. And there she was. Juliet as a bird. A woman with the outstretched wings of a greylag goose, her feathers spread like fingers, wings and belly the exact shade of Juliet’s brown hair, her eyes the same freckled green. Her mouth open in a cry and her neck long and slender, part woman, part goose.

  Max looked at Juliet and smiled, his eyes bright.

  ‘It’s all right. I painted you, but I’ve kept you safe.’

  CATALOGUE ITEM 4

  Juliet in Motion,

  Philip Murray, Acrylic on Canvas, 30 x 25in, 1960

  EACH MORNING NOW, after Juliet had walked the children to school, instead of turning left to take the bus to Greene & Son, she turned right and hurried to the station to catch her London train. Everything, it seemed, was summed up in that turn – right instead of left. She found herself playing games – compulsively touching for luck the mulberry trees that lined the road, whispering ‘Please let the gallery be a success, please.’ The thought of returning to the spectacle factory made her belly turn over like a tombola. Over Friday night chicken, she did her best to ignore her parents’ looks of wounded puzzlement and smile at her father’s attempts at reassurance; ‘Never mind, my love, if it doesn’t work out, there’ll always be a place for you at the factory.’ Opening the door to the gallery each morning was the closest Juliet had come in years to offering up a prayer in gratitude. She’d presumed she would be living out the rest of her life in a black and white illustration, only to discover that she’d stepped into a version hand-tinted with colour.

  Wednesday’s Gallery was situated along a rubbish-strewn mews off the Bayswater Road, and named for the day Juliet discovered Charlie on that April afternoon more than two years earlier. The building itself had once been a coach house and Juliet liked to think that it still stank softly of horses (which was pleasanter than acknowledging the smell probably came from the dozens of dead and fermenting pigeons they discovered on moving in.) The gallery’s conversion was entirely overseen by Juliet. The front part of the building was dedicated to the exhibition space while the room beyond was a studio, although no wall separated the two spaces. Deciding to experiment with something new to the London scene, Juliet insisted that they leave it open so that visitors to the gallery could glimpse the painters and their pictures-in-progress. In truth it wasn’t for visitors’ benefit but for Juliet’s – she loved to watch the boys paint or even just to hear the clatter of paint tubes as she busied about mundane things. She liked knowing that beside her the pictures were growing, pushing up through the boys’ imaginations and emerging onto the canvas like spring shoots. It meant she was there to share in the excitement when Jim’s package arrived. Rushing from the train as usual, she hurried into the gallery to find Charlie, Jim and Philip crowding around a small wooden packing crate, its lid prised open and sawdust innards spilling across the floor. Inside were a dozen white tins, snug as new-laid eggs. The three men gazed at them happily, none moving to pick one up.

  ‘Acrylics,’ said Jim.

  Seeing Juliet didn’t understand, he opened a few of the tins, laying them out along the bench. He dabbed a brush into a blue pot and smeared it across an empty canvas. Then yellow. Then red. The colours were so bright that the lines seemed to hum.

  ‘Where are they from?’ asked Juliet.

  ‘America.’

  They all stared at the stripes, thinking that this brave new paint must be like the country itself: the colours in the new world bolder and brighter than those of the old. That afternoon Jim started his painting of Juliet beside the swimming pool. He asked to borrow from her the sketch he’d drawn that night and pinned it above the canvas. Jim liked to work to music, Charlie did not, but this time Jim won and the afternoon filled with the growl of Ray Charles on the record player. Jim worked quickly and while Juliet watched around the edges of phone calls and press releases and discussions with the new framer, water seeped across the canvas, wet and blue. When she went home that evening he was still working and she didn’t want to leave the studio, feeling as if she was quitting the cinema at the most exciting part of the film.

  The following day was a Saturday and Frieda and Leonard came with her to the gallery. At first Juliet had been unable to convince her mother that it would be best for the children to break the Sabbath and come up to town with her, and Mrs Greene remained resolute that Saturdays were holy days set aside for God, boredom and chicken. But when she realised her protests were futile, Mrs Greene had eventually given up both scolding and sighs and devoted herself instead to making decent sandwiches so that her daughter did not resort to purchasing non-kosher snacks for the children from the stall at Charing Cross. Mrs Greene suffered collywobbles at the prospect of such a lack of religious hygiene.

  Juliet was relieved that the trip up to town had not yet ceased to be an adventure for Leonard and Frieda. They arri
ved at Wednesday’s in cheerful spirits, sandwiches and homework churned together in leather satchels. The doors were thrown open to catch the cool breakfast sunlight, and the melancholy tones of James Brown drifted out into the alley. All three men were already in the studio, Charlie and Philip standing quietly beside Jim who worked on with precise movements, layering more and more American paint onto the canvas. He’d clearly been busy all night and the debris of thirty hours of continuous labour lay scattered about him: discarded brushes, tins of acrylic, a jar of muddied water. A pile of fish and chip papers reeked in the corner. Jim himself stood brush in hand, unshaven and red eyed, surrounded by a constellation of empty coffee cups. Juliet and the children joined the others and waited together in silence, watching Jim work. The girl had appeared in the picture overnight, the dark fabric of her bathing suit skimming the pale skin of her bottom.

  Juliet was used to watching Charlie work with oils, marking up the canvas and then adding slow layers of paint that took weeks to dry. The oil paintings were works in constant motion – a mistake could be corrected days later and the image emerged slowly onto the canvas, like the way the sun bleached the yellow wallpaper in the living-room at home, until only the bright disc behind the mantelpiece clock was left untouched. The acrylics were different. It wasn’t just the vibrancy of the colours but the speed with which they dried. The picture grew before their eyes, pushing across the vast canvas in shades of blue and grey and egg yolk yellow.

  ‘Who is she?’ Frieda asked, pointing to the girl in the bathing suit who was becoming more solid with every brush stroke.

  Jim started to answer, but just as he did so he caught Juliet’s eye. She gave a tiny shake of her head. He corrected himself.

  ‘Just an imaginary girl. A picture person.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frieda. Losing interest, she withdrew to a paint-splashed armchair with the latest issue of Jackie. The others remained a few moments, sensing that this vast canvas was something special – the Marilyn Monroe in a room full of ordinary blondes.

  ‘I’m going to rearrange the hanging order,’ said Juliet. ‘It needs space around it.’

  For once Charlie and Philip made no objection. Forcing herself to break away, Juliet retreated to her desk and started to shuffle through some sketches, all of which looked thin and dull alongside the rush of American blue on the other side of the studio. She smiled as Leonard took up his usual spot beside Charlie at the small easel Charlie had knocked together as a birthday present. Leonard liked to paint on Saturday afternoons, flicking globs of paint at large sheets of white paper, so that spots of colour sprayed the concrete floor around him and made her think of a short and bespectacled Jackson Pollock. Leonard insisted on doing his homework at the easel, explaining to Juliet that fractions were much more satisfactory when propped sideways.

  She tried to concentrate on finishing the exhibition catalogue and not look at Jim’s picture, but she could feel it on the other side of the room, already filling the gallery with its presence. As she typed, she realised that Jim’s picture titles were twice as long as the other artists’, necessitating twice as much space on the page so that her eye was always drawn to his name. She suspected this was deliberate – Jim was almost as good a self-promoter as he was a painter. Philip set a cup of coffee in front of her and she looked up, murmuring her thanks.

  ‘It is you in the painting, isn’t it?’ he asked, his voice low so that the children wouldn’t overhear.

  Juliet nodded, glancing towards Frieda and Leonard. ‘I don’t want them to know. They might tell their grandmother and she’d be terribly upset about the bathing suit.’

  Philip suppressed a smile. ‘Well, I shan’t breathe a word.’

  Juliet turned back to her typewriter but Philip lingered beside the desk. He examined his grimy fingernails with studied nonchalance and cleared his throat. ‘Since Charlie, Max and Jim have all painted you, I thought perhaps I should too.’

  Juliet glanced up at him. Of the three painters, he was the one she knew the least. If she was honest, even though he was nearly ten years younger than her, Juliet was a little afraid of him. He sauntered through life with that boarding-school swagger, born of therapeutic beatings and cold baths. While he dressed in the young artist’s uniform of jeans and shirts, the denim was imported from America and the silk shirts purchased from Italian menswear emporiums with names Juliet could not pronounce. He was a modern dandy who smoked exclusive Jermyn Street cigarettes and spoke in an upper-class drawl without ever seeming to move his lips. Juliet was forced to lean forward to make him out, and consequently felt like a schoolgirl hanging on her teacher’s every word. His paintings were accomplished and witty, though sometimes she wondered whether she was quite in on the joke. He was an excellent portraitist, specialising in both the horsy wives of his parents’ wealthy friends as well as the horses themselves. Juliet excluded both types of horsy portraits from the exhibition on grounds of taste but Philip took it with characteristic good humour, wafting a cigarette and saying out of the side of mouth, ‘Quite understandable, my dear. I only paint ’em for the cash. I quite agree they’re total nonsense.’

  Juliet studied him now, unsure if he was teasing but he stared back at her with pale blue eyes.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t have time to pose. If you want it in the exhibition, you’ll have to manage while I’m working.’

  Juliet was uncertain whether she wanted to be subjected to Philip’s scrutiny. She was curious to find out how he saw her. She suspected that in his eyes she was dowdy and suburban, but she liked the idea that Max and all the boys would have painted her. She couldn’t help thinking of Max separately from the others. While Charlie’s portrait hung in the living-room of the Chislehurst house, she’d placed Max’s in her own room beside her bed so that it was the first thing she saw on waking in the morning. It uplifted her – Juliet with wings soaring into the sky. She hadn’t shown the picture to her parents and somehow by silent accord the children had not mentioned it either. Her life was so different now and yet the small terraced house remained exactly the same. The chipped paint on the front door. The unkempt garden, the reproduction wedding-present furniture in gloomy wood. Everything about the house was the same except for the three portraits.

  Juliet returned to the catalogue and tried to ignore the grey flicker of Philip’s stub of charcoal across the page and the sensation of being watched. Her nose tickled but she wouldn’t scratch it and, distracted, she mistyped a word. It was odd knowing that in this room two men were working on her portrait. She wondered briefly if this qualified her as a muse, but concluded with regret that she was merely a familiar object, like a vase of flowers or the umbrella stand in the corner. All three of the boys had painted that too.

  • • •

  Frieda padded across the room and removed James Brown, replacing him with the latest Cliff Richard LP. Frieda now apportioned her pocket money scrupulously between music and sweets.

  ‘Turn that drivel off,’ called Philip, and Frieda giggled.

  ‘I won’t,’ she answered.

  Philip put down his sketchpad and stalked across to the record player, rifling through a stash of vinyl propped against the wall.

  ‘I bought this last week. Thought you’d like it,’ he said removing Cliff and dumping it unceremoniously on Frieda’s lap.

  He pulled another record from its sleeve. ‘Eddie Cochrane. Girls your age are going wild for him in America.’

  Frieda grinned. That was the magic word. America. Every Saturday Frieda would try and put some Cliff on the turntable and Philip would produce something else that she must listen to instead. He knew more about music than anyone she had ever met. At nearly thirteen, Frieda decided it was high time that she developed a crush on somebody but her circle was sorely lacking in candidates. At school there were only girls. The Yiddishy boys from her street either had acne on their necks, nasty little wispy moustaches that made her think of spiders’ legs or else they were too short
and too concerned about getting into trouble . When Leonard’s illegal Frisbee ended up on the synagogue roof on Yom Kippur it was Frieda and not one of the boys who clambered up to retrieve it, and it was she who’d received ‘sermon number twelve: on disappointment’ from Rabbi Plotkin. All her school friends were in love with somebody – pals of their older brothers and boys with slick hair who they’d ‘just got chatting to’ on the bus or else they mooned over posters of Tony Curtis on their bedroom walls. Frieda chewed on a stalk of liquorice and studied Philip. He had nice hair (golden blond with just the right amount of wave – not too girlish, not too flat) and his clothes always looked good. No one else’s looked like that, not even Charlie’s. At the thought of Charlie, Frieda grimaced. Charlie was no use – she’d never have a crush on him, not in a million years. He belonged to Leonard. And to her mother.

  Philip stood beside her, lounging against the wall, eyes half closed as he listened to Eddie Cochrane croon ‘Summertime Blues’.

  ‘He died in April. He was only twenty-one. Younger than me.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ said Frieda, who wasn’t really listening, but thinking that if she reached out with her fingertips she could brush the smooth skin on the back of Philip’s hand. There was a black smudge of charcoal on his thumb.

  ‘Will you take me to a concert?’ she asked, as she did every Saturday.

  ‘When you’re sixteen. If your mother agrees,’ replied Philip as he did every Saturday.

  Frieda rolled her eyes. If your mother agrees. It always came back to her. Frieda slid down the wall to the floor, crossing her legs school-assembly style, and pretended to study the album cover and ignore Philip. She tried not to notice as he pulled his chair closer to Juliet and picked up his sketchbook again. Eddie Cochrane stopped singing and she could hear the rustle and scuffle of Philip’s charcoal flicking across the paper over the static hiss of the record player.