The Gallery of Vanished Husbands

by Natasha Solomons

  ‘Fine,’ said Juliet, knowing when to surrender. ‘Where’s your telephone?’

  The others waited in the hall for her to come back, listening to the rattling percussion of the builders removing the scaffolding outside. Juliet returned after a few minutes.

  ‘You’re in luck. He’ll come. He’s off to visit Max and you’re on the way. He wants a hundred pounds. I told him I thought that would be all right.’

  Allan beamed. ‘Yes, yes. And we’ll see if we can’t persuade him to stay.’

  Sylvia, quite accustomed to grand country houses, snuck back outside to sleep in the sunshine. Charlie was irritated that Juliet had not suggested him to paint the mural and retreated to the kitchen to hunt for a bottle of wine. So it was only the Montague family who accompanied Allan on the tour of the rest of the house. As Allan explained his plans to Juliet, Frieda stalked around in ecstasy, waiting for a Rigby or a Shadow or a Kink to spring through every doorway. She pored over each room in dreamy excitement, as thrilled by the muddy wellingtons in the boot room (‘One of these might have touched the foot of Matt Rigby!’) as the signed photos of Allan with the stars themselves.

  ‘It’s all a bit forlorn now,’ said Allan, ‘but give it six months and the place will be spiffy again. Had to do the outside first. Patch the roof. Mend the floors. All the boring bits. We’re only getting to the fun stuff now.’

  The reception rooms were mostly devoid of traditional furniture and were instead stuffed with beanbags, piles of blankets and the odd Lilo. However, every room did seem to have a fully stocked drinks trolley. Juliet noted that Allan was not letting the fact that his house was only half restored, undecorated and unfurnished get in the way of regular parties. In a pretty, sun-filled sitting-room there was a heap of patterned fabric lying in a crumpled heap, but on second glance Juliet realised it was a girl and a boy fast asleep in one another’s arms. Allan appeared not even to notice them. Juliet glanced at her children, wondering whether she’d made a mistake in bringing them here. This wasn’t really the sort of country house where they’d get cream teas and croquet on the lawn. Leonard studied the couple with some interest and nudged Frieda.

  ‘Why don’t you both go outside for a bit?’ suggested Juliet.

  ‘Or, you can go choose yourselves a room to sleep in,’ said Allan. ‘There’s plenty of ’em. Go anywhere you like that isn’t taken.’ He gestured vaguely at the first floor and the children disappeared in a flash before Juliet could object. She listened to the clatter of footsteps on the staircase and turned back to Allan.

  ‘They won’t find any guests . . .’ she reached for the right word. ‘Any busy guests, will they?’

  Allan frowned, puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t think so. People come here to relax.’

  ‘Right,’ said Juliet, not reassured.

  ‘There’ll be more people coming later. We’re going to have a little housewarming.’

  Juliet felt a nudge of apprehension and pondered whether she ought to marshal Leonard and Frieda into the car and demand that Sylvia drive them to the nearest station.

  ‘The lads should be along in a bit,’ said Allan with a touch of pride. ‘They always enjoy a party.’

  Juliet sighed. That was it. They had to stay. She couldn’t possibly bring Frieda along on the promise of meeting the Rigbys and then whisk her away before they appeared.

  Juliet followed Allan into a vast, modern kitchen. It was the only room in the house that had been finished. There was a large and gleaming range, a splendid refrigerator and a long table with a dozen chairs. French doors were flung open to the garden and filled the room with the warble of goldfinches and squabbling starlings. The countertops had been scrubbed spotless and hanging above one was a spice rack as well stocked as a county library. The room smelled gently of the sweet scent of proving dough. Beside the range lay racks of cooling pastries: rugelach, poppy-seed biscuits, honey cakes and miniature strudels, the pastry just the right shade of wheaten gold. A chocolate cake with treacle-black icing squatted on the table brooding over an array of fairy-cakes and brownies, all decorated with a constellation of Smarties. Allan lifted a tea towel from over a large basin and peered underneath, sniffing at it with a proprietorial air.

  ‘Brioche,’ he announced.

  ‘You made all of these?’ asked Juliet waving at the cornucopia of cakes. The kitchen was better stocked than most patisserie windows.

  ‘Of course,’ said Allan. ‘My dad’s a baker by trade. I was supposed to follow him into the family business. In fact, I did for a year or two. The longest years of my life,’ he added grimly, sitting down at the table.

  He slid a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits across the table to Juliet.

  ‘Well, you have a gift,’ she said nibbling at a hamantaschen. ‘I can’t cook at all. The family recipes all stop with me. I’m a tremendous disappointment to my mother.’ Her tone was light, but somehow her voice faltered at the end. ‘I was supposed to work in the family business too,’ she added.

  ‘I ran off to London and tried to become an actor just to escape it.’

  ‘Were you any good?’

  ‘No. Dreadful. And I got arrested for importuning men outside a public lavatory.’

  Juliet stared at him for a moment – taken aback at the casual manner in which he confided his humiliation. Allan smiled at her surprise, and then gave a small sigh.

  ‘It was pretty awful at the time. I slunk back home to the shop and baked currant buns in penance for a year.’

  Juliet laughed. ‘I think my mother would forgive all my transgressions if I could produce such elegant hamantaschen, even once.’

  Charlie slid into the kitchen, unnoticed at first. He lingered in the doorway and watched the easy confidence between the other two. Sometimes he felt it was always like this. He introduced people to Juliet and she laughed with them in a way she never did with him. At first he told himself it was because she fancied him – one was never at ease with the object of one’s desire, every schoolboy knows that. He had waited for her to leave Max, to realise he was a stunted man, spoiled by war, and turn to him. But she didn’t – not even after Max abandoned her on the trip to America. And as the years ticked by, steady as a pocket watch, he realised hope had made him foolish. He watched her and wished, but that was all. She saved her share of the gallery’s profits, choosing not to buy a larger house or luxuries, instead, year by year she’d paid back the investors in the gallery, buying them out one by one, but Charlie had resisted. He had only a little stake compared to hers, but he’d held onto it, hoping in this at least they were partners.

  Allan spotted him in the corner and hailed him with great delight.

  ‘Ah, there you are, sir. Come sit. We’re comparing the ways in which we’ve disappointed our families. It’s a great gag.’

  Charlie glanced at Juliet and saw that she looked sad, sadder than he’d ever seen her, and at that moment he understood. She and Allan were different from him – perhaps that’s why he hadn’t told her that Allan was Jewish. He hadn’t wanted her to know that they were in the least bit alike. Instead he’d made a thing out of Allan being queer – he knew it made Juliet uneasy in spite of herself. But it didn’t matter in the end. Here they were colluding together across the kitchen table like a pair of old gossips. Charlie remembered Allan at school: the odd one out, the small, sickly Jewish boy. The queer and the Yid. He’d befriended him. He’d seen that he was funny and a little wild and allowed Allan to sniff around the edges of the smart set. The thing was, Charlie realised, the magic circle now belonged to Juliet and Allan and they could not admit him to it. You don’t want me, he realised, looking at her. You never did.

  Juliet caught his eye and smiled, pushing the plate of biscuits towards him.

  ‘Here, try a hamantaschen. I used to adore them when I was small and Allan’s are every bit as good as my grandmother’s.’

  Charlie took one and bit into it, the summer taste of apricot and sugar dissolving on his tongue. He swallowed, unhap
piness and sweetness choking him.

  • • •

  In the afternoon everyone disappeared to rest before the party. The garden sweated in the sunshine, the flowers drooping like old men in the heat, and the various guests sought spots in the shade or retreated into the cool of the house. It had fifty rooms, but only a few of them were furnished. Frieda and Leonard had each selected a bedroom but neither contained an actual bed. Leonard’s had a mattress with a clean sheet and he decided he was lucky after inspecting Frieda’s larger room, which was entirely bare except for a pair of vast picture windows and a heap of bath towels.

  Leonard padded over to the window and stared out at the view stretching cloudless and blue out across the hills of the chase, the banks tickled with buttercups and sprays of daisies. He wanted to paint it. It was a familiar urge that had been building in him like a pressure behind the eyes. Ever since America he’d been drawing. He’d filled several sketchpads with a catalogue of portraits of his father – it was a habit now – but he also tried to capture other things. The back of the hill looked to him like a lumbering bull, asleep on its side, the curl of woodland a pair of fierce horns. His fingers itched in his pocket. How would he mix that blue? He sighed, remembering the Latin test on Monday he ought to be swotting for. To his grandparents’ delight he’d passed the exam for the prestigious grammar school at the end of the road, and since his entry there at the age of eleven Friday nights had consisted of discussions about where he might choose to go to university. Of course the only real choice was between Oxford and Cambridge. He would be the first member of the family to go to university and the day he went up would be the day the Greene / Montague family pride was restored. On this matter, at least, his mother and his grandparents were united.

  ‘Do you think there’s anything for tea?’

  Leonard was constitutionally unable to work on an empty stomach. Frieda shrugged, less concerned than her brother about the strict punctuality of meals.

  ‘I bet this is where Matt Rigby sleeps when he’s here,’ she said.

  Leonard doubted it, expecting that even pop stars preferred to sleep in beds rather than on a pile of bath towels. He stared out of the window but the Latin test pricked at him. ‘I should probably do some revision.’

  Frieda shook her head in disgust. ‘You’re about to meet the most brilliant musician in the world, and all you can think about is homework. It’s bizarre.’

  Leonard said nothing. ‘Bizarre’ was one of Frieda’s current words. It was used to describe everything and everyone she viewed with suspicion – from Mrs Kempton’s geography lessons (‘So bizarre!’), to Leonard’s choice in trousers (‘Just bizarre!’) and most things to do with their mother (‘Beyond bizarre!’) In this instance it was also inaccurate. Leonard did not really want to think about homework. The thought of it rubbed him like a blister when all he wanted to do was paint.

  • • •

  At six o’clock the doorbell rang. It took everyone by surprise, most of all Allan who hadn’t realised that he had a doorbell, let alone one that worked. The folk he invited usually just wandered into the house, not bothering with such niceties. Consequently no one answered it and the bell continued to ring. Leonard gave in first. He’d been meandering from room to room, searching guiltily and half-heartedly for a place to study, and seeing no sign of movement from anywhere else opened the door himself, anticipating one of the dishevelled musicians from one of Frieda’s LPs to amble inside.

  ‘Hello,’ said Tom Hopkins. ‘Your mother summoned me.’

  Leonard grinned. ‘Yes. She does that.’

  He stood back to allow Tom into the hallway. Tom picked his way across the partially lifted floorboards and set down his small leather bag and glanced about with distaste.

  ‘Seems more in need of a carpenter than a mural painter.’

  Leonard shrugged.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Tom. ‘I suppose I should find your mother and receive my instructions. Do you know where she is?’

  Leonard wandered over to one of the large picture windows overlooking the lawns, and saw on the grass a series of striped deckchairs like half a dozen sweetshop bags. The afternoon was ripening into a rosy evening and the light glowed on the figures in the chairs. Juliet lazed on the first, her feet bare and hair swept back beneath a red scarf that dangled down like the scarlet braids of a Lady Godiva. Charlie sprawled on another, scowling in his sleep. Allan sat perfectly upright on a blue-striped one, his trousers falling into immaculate creases, a copy of The Times in one hand, a small cigar in the other, the ash tumbling into an obedient pyramid. Above, darts of wagtails shot across the sky, high enough it seemed to pierce the scraps of cloud.

  ‘Shall I go and wake her for you?’ asked Leonard.

  ‘No,’ said Tom with a chuckle. ‘I think we’ve found our subject.’

  ‘Can I paint some of it?’asked Leonard.

  ‘Are you any good?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leonard.

  Tom smiled at his youthful confidence. ‘Let’s see, shall we,’ he said, handing him a brush.

  Leonard took it, pushing away all thoughts of Latin verbs.

  Tom hesitated, brush aloft. ‘Ought we to go and check that your mother approves the plan?’

  Leonard shook his head. ‘I’ve only been here an afternoon and no one will mind. It’s chaos. I say we just get on with it.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘And I suppose if Mr Gold doesn’t like it, he can always paint over it.’

  Tom and Leonard worked quickly, first preparing the surface with a warm wash of colour and then as it dried, each chose a wall and started to paint. Tom began with the figure of Juliet, her crimson scarf a flame in the afternoon sunlight. On the opposite wall Leonard sketched the broad back of the hill, feeling his shoulders relax and sink as he worked, as though he was soaking in a hot, hot bath. Slowly the grass appeared in a green shadow creeping across the ridgeway, then the darkness of the woods and the cleft of the chalk path, a rib of bone through the middle. The birds circled, eyes yellow.

  ‘I like it,’ said Charlie’s voice from behind him.

  Leonard grunted in thanks, but did not turn around.

  ‘What are you dilly-dallying for?’ said Tom. ‘Pick up a brush.’

  Charlie frowned. ‘Oh no. I can’t do that. Juliet wanted you to do it.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, man. Stop whining,’ snapped Tom. ‘Take the wall behind the fireplace.’

  Charlie obeyed.

  • • •

  The other guests and revellers arrived in trickles. They wandered through the front door – left open to air the paint fumes – and most of them ventured no further than the hallway. Eventually someone decided it would be useful if the remaining floorboards were replaced and the house was briefly filled with hammering. Next beanbags and blankets were spread across the floor and stairs, and everyone sat and watched and smoked. As evening slid into dusk, candles appeared and the painters worked on, their shadow brushes huge against the walls.

  Juliet and Frieda sat together on the stairs. The house was filling with smoke from cigarettes and joints and the fizz of burning tea lights so that the three painters appeared to be working in a mist. Juliet watched the painting unfurl across the walls, the three friezes stretching out towards one another. The moment they met would be something, a joining of the world.

  Frieda scrutinised the door, waiting for the moment when the Rigbys would appear. For a while her heart rushed and thudded – every new person who emerged through the gloom might be Matt Rigby – and then it slowed. Disappointment seemed inevitable. They would never come. She had nicked herself shaving her legs with Leonard’s stupid Woolworth’s razor for no reason. She ought to have worn her thick brown tights and frumpy dress to irritate her mother after all. Angrily she wiped the rosy lipstick from her mouth.

  • • •

  Joints slid from reveller to reveller but Juliet and Frieda passed them straight on, never venturing a puff. Vague disquiet tickled at Juliet –
this wasn’t a place for kids – but somehow she couldn’t draw herself away from the paintings emerging on the walls. And besides, she told herself, the partygoers now arriving looked no older than Frieda. She swallowed the voice that wondered about the parents of those other kids.

  Tom, Charlie and Leonard moved quickly now, their movements quite distinct, like three conductors of a Mozart concerto; same notes on the page, different sound. Tom remained in his shirt and tie, quiet, methodical – his brush gliding across the wall in confident, easy strokes. He was painting Juliet’s face and to her amusement she looked boyish – an Orlando lost in Arden, snoozing in the forest, hand open in sleep, a lily in her palm. In contrast to Tom’s calm precision, Charlie had stripped to the waist and he sweated as he painted, perspiration streaming down his back. On the wall above the fireplace he’d illustrated Ashcombe Manor itself, her seven chimneys smoking, the driveway filled with workmen, builders toppling across scaffolding, every window blazing but empty.

  ‘Come on,’ he called, turning to the crowd, brush in one hand, beer in the other. ‘Who’s going to be the first to choose a window and paint themselves in?’

  Allan leaped to his feet, eyes bright and black. ‘It has to be me,’ he said. ‘I am the pie-maker.’

  He snatched a brush from Charlie and started to draw a man peering out from behind the front door. The figure was toppling forward, a mop of dark hair perched on his head, a tray of cakes floating above one hand, the other beckoning the viewer inside.

  Charlie laughed. ‘It’s not half bad. Who’s next?’

  As people surged forward, eagerly grabbing brushes and daubing crude versions of themselves on the wall, Leonard drew a tiny figure in an attic window. No one realised that rather than a self-portrait he’d painted the face of George Montague. When he’d finished, he resumed working on his own mural on the far side of the hall. The crowd jostled around Charlie, baying with joy.