That Summer: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  Julia hadn’t reckoned with the Nicholas factor. Because that was clearly what this was about. Not a sudden desire to rekindle cousinly ties. Natalie was trying to impress Nicholas—with what? A musty old house that had belonged to a great-aunt Natalie didn’t even like? Her dubiously ancient ancestry? Either way, it wasn’t working. Julia would have felt sorry for Natalie if it weren’t all so damned annoying.

  Oh, well. On the plus side, Julia was getting free labor out of it.

  That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Julia told herself stridently as she let herself into the room next door. To clean up and get out?

  Somehow, that didn’t sound as attractive a prospect as it had a week ago.

  Julia set her coffee cup down on a dusty desk. She hadn’t been through here yet. Like the drawing room, this room had the musty smell of long disuse. The walls must once have been a pale blue—or maybe lilac?—but had faded over time to a gentle bluish gray, punctuated with woodwork that had been white a very long time ago, before the grime began to accumulate and the paint peel. There were two tall white bookshelves against one wall, one on either side of a narrow window looking out on to an alley, each crammed with a collection of tattered paperbacks and untidy piles of papers. There was a narrow bed, with a white metal bedstead, a chest of drawers, and, making up for the lack of a closet, a massive wardrobe, the heavy mahogany incongruous against the rest of the cheap, white-painted 1960s-era furniture. The wardrobe looked as though it had been there for a very long time; no one would want to try to navigate that monster out through the door.

  It was a smallish room, but that was more than made up for by the view from the two windows on the far wall. The windows looked out over the garden, all the way down to the neglected orchard that bounded the fence on the far end of the property. Even now, unweeded, neglected, the garden looked like a scene out of a fairy tale: the peeling peaked roof of the summerhouse, surrounded by a tangle of wild roses, overgrown paths of yew hedges, dotted with rusted iron benches. Forty years ago, with the summerhouse freshly painted, with water in the birdbath and bright blossoms in the overgrown flower beds, it must have been glorious.

  There was a small painting hanging between the two windows, a watercolor. It was the same view but in spring, the trees a mass of white blossoms, the sky a perfect, celestial blue. Julia didn’t need to look at the signature at the bottom to guess who must have painted it.

  Her mother had been in art school when Julia’s father met her.

  It was one of the few things Julia knew about them. It was why her father had looked so grimly pained when Julia had majored in art history, why she knew, without ever discussing it, that it would cut him to the bone if she followed through and went for her PhD.

  Julia turned slowly in a circle, taking in the details of the room, the sketchbooks on the shelves, the slightly grimy Princess phone. There was no doubt about it; this must have been her mother’s room. Forty years ago, in another world, her mother might have sprawled on that bed, phone cord stretched across the room, speaking in hushed tones to Julia’s father, muffling her laughter so Aunt Regina wouldn’t hear.

  At least, Julia assumed her mother and father must have laughed together. Once.

  From far away, Julia seemed to hear her father’s voice, raised in anger; a female voice, answering back; the slamming of a door. She could feel the prickle of a carpet beneath her bare knees. She was crouched under something, a table, listening to her parents arguing.

  Where in the hell had that come from?

  Julia’s hand was on the knob of the door before she realized that she had retreated, step by step, ready to duck out and shut the door. She laughed shakily. Great. Metaphor made action. Her English professors in college would have loved that. Shut the door and shut the door. Just like she had been shutting the door all these years.

  Julia’s knuckles were white against the old brass doorknob. This was insane. Insane. What was she so afraid of? What was she was so afraid of remembering?

  Maybe she was just afraid she would miss her. Her mother.

  The answer came unbidden. It was so much easier to pretend her mother had never been, that Julia had always lived in an apartment in New York with her father, easier not to remember anything warm or tender, because warm or tender would hurt and it was easier just to be angry, to be angry at her mother for leaving them. Somehow, despite the fact that it had been an accident—the word “accident” had been emphasized over and over again—Julia had never been able to shake the conviction that it had been a willful desertion. Her mother had left her, had left them.

  Maybe it was her father’s refusal to talk about it that had cemented the idea, his tight-lipped pain when her mother’s name was mentioned. It wasn’t just grief; there was anger there, too. Small as she was, Julia had gotten the message. Mummy was to blame for leaving and the only way to deal with it was to shut her out entirely, to pretend she had never been.

  Julia leaned back against the door, feeling the sweat prickling through her tank top. She’d done a pretty thorough job of it, hadn’t she? She’d blotted out every memory of their life in England. But for that one old picture, she wouldn’t even remember her mother’s face.

  Maybe it was time to start remembering.

  Maybe. Later. Julia took a slug of her cold coffee, trying to ignore the way her hands were trembling. One step at a time. Not running out of her mother’s room and slamming the door would be a good start. It wasn’t precisely heroic, but it was a beginning.

  Julia yanked the elastic up on her ponytail and decided to tackle the wardrobe first. It was less personal than the bookshelves, the desk, the bureau. Baby steps, she reminded herself, and tugged open the door to the wardrobe. It took a fair bit of tugging. It wasn’t the catch; it was the wood itself, warped with damp and age. There were drawers all up and down one half, but the other half of the wardrobe was one big rectangle, with a bar across the top for hanging clothes, sweaters and pants piled on the bottom.

  The clothes in the wardrobe were her mother’s, decades old, with the musty smell of old wool. Turtleneck sweaters, plaid skirts with high waists, minidresses and maxi-dresses. Slowly, Julia began transferring them from the wardrobe to the bed.

  It seemed like an awful lot of clothes to leave behind at the premarital home, but Julia recognized that her own perceptions might be skewed. Just because she had cleared out entirely when she left for college, when Helen and Julia’s father bought the new apartment, didn’t mean that everyone did. She had friends who still had full closets at home, a good decade after college. And her mother had been fairly young when she married Julia’s father, a good decade younger than Julia was now. Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Something like that. Her father could tell her, but Julia didn’t want to ask.

  Where had they lived when she was little? Not here, she assumed. This was a teenager’s room—and besides, Julia couldn’t imagine her father submitting to being a kept man in the spousal familial home.

  “A garden flat.” The phrase came out of nowhere. She could hear it, someone saying it, with a little laugh as though it were a joke, one of those adult jokes she didn’t quite understand. Beige walls and glass sliding doors and a concrete patio with a wire table and chairs. There was a cat, too. Their cat? A neighbor’s cat?

  She could see its tail disappearing between two potted plants, just out of her eager grasp. Mummy, kitty!

  The image disappeared with a pop, leaving Julia blinking at the pasteboard back of the wardrobe.

  It had seemed so real, that child’s-eye view, but that didn’t mean anything at all. It was too easy to manufacture memories, to stitch together bits of books and stories and convince herself that they were real. Only the solid, the physical, held any true security. The scratchy wool of her mother’s old skirts, that was real. So was the heavy wood of the wardrobe, although the back didn’t look quite so solid as the front.

  Julia leaned forward, into the now empty wardrobe. The back wall was a totally different color, a
discolored beige rather than a rich mahogany. When she poked it, the whole panel shifted. Whoa. Instinctively Julia snatched her hand back. If the wardrobe was going to collapse on her.…

  But that wasn’t part of the wardrobe. That wasn’t even wood. Cautiously, Julia stuck her head back in, feeling around the edges of the panel. It was some kind of heavy cardboard, or something similar, cut to fit the dimensions of the back of the wardrobe.

  Tentatively, Julia jiggled the pasteboard panel. When tentative didn’t work, she gave it a good yank. Whoever it was had stuck the false back in good and hard. The panel popped free, Julia staggered back, and something plopped heavily into the cavity of the wardrobe, raising a heavy cloud of dust.

  Coughing, Julia went to investigate. It was a rectangular parcel, wrapped in layers and layers of linen, linen yellowed by age. With difficulty, Julia extracted the bundle from the wardrobe. It was nearly as wide as the wardrobe itself, made even wider by the layers of padding. Whoever had constructed the hiding place had fixed it to fit the dimensions of this parcel.

  Slowly, Julia began unwrapping the layers. The linen smelled faintly of lavender, the fabric strange to the touch, not at all like the synthetics to which she was accustomed. Julia felt a prickle of excitement. This wasn’t her mother’s, whatever it was. This had to be older, far older. These sheets had never seen a factory. They had been hemmed by hand, the stitches small and neat—amazingly small and neat—but without the perfect sameness of machine stitching.

  It was too ridiculously Nancy Drew.

  “The Mystery of the Old Wardrobe,” Julia murmured to herself, but her hands were quick to strip the old sheets, only to encounter a layer of plain brown paper wrapping tied in twine. Tied in twine because there had been no tape?

  She was going to be really disappointed when it turned out to be an old pile of magazines or someone’s large cutting board. It was the right size and shape for a cutting board, but not quite heavy enough.

  The knots in the twine had hardened to glue-like consistency with time. Julia gave up on trying to untie them and wiggled the cords off along the sides, feeling like a child trying to get at a prissily wrapped Christmas present. Finally, the brown wrappings fell away.

  It was a painting. Not a copy or a print, but a genuine oil painting, stretched out over matting but unframed. Julia lowered it onto the bed with an ungraceful thump. Freed from its wrappings, the colors glowed amazingly bright, the brushwork as fresh as though it had been painted yesterday.

  And she was looking at it upside down.

  Julie turned it right side up, scooping old sweaters and skirts ignominiously out of the way. She knelt before the bed, entirely entranced. It wasn’t a portrait, or a landscape, or someone’s beloved pug dogs. It was a story scene, knights and maidens and feasting. At the center, the king dined at the high table. Julia cleverly deduced his position from both his seat at the center of the table and the rather conspicuous circlet on his brow. He was surrounded by fawning courtiers, all leaning towards him.

  In the foreground, however, a man and a woman stood in a window embrasure, the only ones not paying attention to their monarch. Their focus was fixed on each other, their eyes yearning, while their hands were locked around a golden goblet they held between them. Although they were off to the side and the king’s trestle table in the center, the artist had worked it cleverly so that the attention was immediately drawn to the clandestine couple—including the king’s. His goblet was raised in a toast, but his eyes had slid sideways. He was watching the man and woman and didn’t like what he saw.

  It was all pure Pre-Raphaelite, the stained-glass windows, the pennants flaring from the beams, the colorful doublets of the courtiers. The lady wore a long gown with a dropped waist in a rich sapphire blue. Her hair wasn’t the usual Pre-Raphaelite red but a dark, dark brown, nearly black. It fell unbound to her waist, held only by the golden circlet at her brow.

  There was something very familiar about the woman.

  “Julia?”

  She caught at the edge of the bed as someone called her name. How long had she been kneeling here? Her knees had gone numb and her neck was stiff.

  “Julia?” It was Andrew, popping his head around the door. “I thought you might want to see— What’s that?”

  Julia lurched to her feet, fighting the urge to step in front of the painting, to hide her discovery.

  Like Gollum with his Precious, she thought in disgust, and stepped aside. “I found this in the back of that wardrobe. Pretty neat, no?”

  Andrew’s eyes widened as he started at the canvas on the bed. “I’m no judge of art, but whatever that is—it looks real.” He grinned at her, his open face lighting up. “Maybe you’ve found that Rubens.”

  Julia put out a hand to stop him. “I’m sure it’s not—”

  But Andrew was already shouting down the stairs. “Nick? Nick! Come up here! You’ll want to see this.”

  “It might be a copy of something,” said Julia hesitantly.

  But it wasn’t; she was sure of it. Copies didn’t look like that. They didn’t have that firmness of brushstroke. They didn’t glow with life.

  Julia heard the click-clack of Natalie’s heels on the stairs.

  “What is it?” Natalie asked her brother grumpily just as Nicholas came up behind her, bracing one hand against the doorjamb.

  “This had better be good,” he said. “You’ve taken me away from a cow creamer for this.”

  “This,” said Andrew, and pointed at the painting on the bed.

  For a moment, everyone in the room just stood and stared. And then—

  “That isn’t a Rubens,” said Nicholas.

  EIGHT

  Herne Hill, 2009

  “No shit, Sherlock,” said Julia.

  “It is a painting,” said Andrew helpfully.

  “Brilliantly spotted,” drawled Nicholas.

  Julia gave him a look. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Pre-Raphaelite,” she said. “It’s got the right … feel to it.”

  Maybe if she’d stuck with art history she’d have the technical terminology to elaborate on just what those details were that made her so sure. It was something about the colors, about the subject matter, the quality of the light. She hadn’t taken any classes on the Pre-Raphaelites back in college—they were considered vaguely déclassé by the art historical establishment at Yale when she was there—but they’d been standard dorm room decoration. In her own room she’d had Dicksee’s Belle Dame sans Merci, Millais’s Ophelia, and Waterhouse’s My Sweet Rose, all courtesy of the poster collection at the Yale Co-op.

  But those had been prints. This was the real thing.

  “You’re right,” said Nicholas, surprising her. “Is there a signature?”

  Their heads narrowly escaped collision as they both leaned over the painting at the same time. Julia’s arm brushed Nicholas’s, damp with sweat in the un-air-conditioned room. Andrew had been wrong; there wasn’t any pong about Nicholas. He smelled of soap and laundry detergent and the slightly musty odor of old books.

  “Well?” said Natalie impatiently from behind them.

  Julia’s eyes met Nicholas’s. They were blue, but not a pedestrian, workaday sort of blue; his eyes were like stained glass limned in sunlight, the blue tinged a translucent green.

  “PRB.” Julia’s voice was breathless. Three little letters, such a small thing to make the hair on her arms prickle like that, to send a chill down her spine. Julia used the edge of the bed to lever herself back up to a standing position. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? On the bottom right. The initials PRB.”

  “Who’s PRB?” asked Natalie.

  “Not who, what,” said Julia before Nicholas could. “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were a group of painters in the mid-nineteenth century. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But they painted beautiful things.”

  “Postcard art,” said Nicholas, rising to his feet. Standing, he was considerably taller than she was, placing her eyes somewh
ere on a level with the top button of his shirt.

  Julia refused to be loomed over. “Tell that to the Met,” she retorted.

  “Or the Tate,” said Nicholas blandly, and she realized he’d been deliberately winding her up. To Natalie he said, “The art community is always suspicious of anything that’s too popular with the masses.”

  “Is there a name, or just those initials?” asked Natalie, placing a proprietary hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Julia took a step back, feeling, strangely, chastened. “Do we know who painted it?”

  “I’m not seeing a signature,” said Andrew, hunkering down by the painting. “Not that it means there isn’t one,” he added hastily.

  “Even if there isn’t one,” Nick said slowly, “I think we can narrow it down. If I’m right.”

  “How?” asked Julia.

  His eyes met hers, the glint in them belying his reserved tone. “It was a small movement. It wasn’t just anyone who used the initials PRB. It was only members of the original brotherhood and only at the very beginning of the movement. They dropped the use of the initials—I don’t remember exactly when. Within the first few years. Early enough.”

  That would be easy enough to find out; she could Google it once they were gone. Julia’s head swam with possibilities. The idea that this painting, sitting here on the bed, might be a genuine Pre-Raphaelite, that it might not have been seen since it was first painted … Someone, 150-odd years ago, had dipped his brush into paint and produced that.

  The mind boggled.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited,” Nicholas warned her. “There were a few of those early Pre-Raphaelites who were non-starters. They weren’t all Rossetti and Millais.”

  Julia ignored that. “So you think it’s real,” she said. “I mean, a real Pre-Raphaelite, not just a copy or an imitation.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know or don’t want to say?”