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Caroline was clearly unsure if she was being teased. She was not. Austen Willoughby had inherited Longhurst Hall when his brother Cyril died, and the place was still full of his paintings. Thoughtful spaniels. Plucky terriers. Noble setters. It was the expressions in the eyes of the dogs he painted for which he was most celebrated, his ability to capture an individual canine’s character. As far as I could tell, both Harry and his father were entirely sincere in their admiration for his work. As far as it suited him, so was my dad.
No doubt the fact it still sold well helped. One of my strongest memories from childhood visits to Longhurst was leaving in our car with one of Austen’s bubble-wrapped paintings in my lap, something my father was selling on Philip’s behalf. Since there were many collectors around the world and a seemingly endless supply at the house—extraordinarily formulaic, absolutely consistent in style—it was a steady source of commission for my father and much-needed income for Philip. Even as a child I had a sense of how much it cost to keep a country pile like that going, the never-ending nature of the task.
“If you’d like to see them, do drop in sometime,” Harry was telling Giles. “Similarly, Caroline, if ever you’d like to visit the house where Juliette grew up, we’d be delighted to have you. In fact, it’s my birthday party next weekend. You should come. You should both come. The whole family will be there, Caroline—maybe someone will remember Juliette. Patrick can give you a lift.”
“Absolutely, I’d love to,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly, obviously delighted. Giles said the same.
“Is that really alright about the lift?” she asked me.
“Of course,” I said, very pleased by this development, in fact.
Giles and Harry were already discussing trains and timing.
“I can’t wait to see Alice Long’s reaction when you tell her about the journal,” I said to Caroline, perhaps just a little jealous of her discovery, in no doubt who was going to be the star of our next supervision. “Is there anything in there about the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition that might be helpful for my project?”
“There might be, but I haven’t gotten to it yet,” Caroline said. “It’s been slow going—it’s her handwriting that’s the problem. There are five long entries, and I have only managed to get through two of them. I am starting to speed up a bit—I can distinguish her e’s and her l’s now, most of the time—but it’s not something you can skim.”
Her expression darkened. She leaned in closer to me, our shoulders almost touching. I could smell her perfume.
“There is one thing in what I have read so far that I can’t get out of my head,” she said, her voice lowered. “Juliette writes about how Oskar’s wife used to follow them, harass them. She sounds genuinely worried about what Maria might be capable of. And what with the fire...”
She paused, watching my face as this sunk in.
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” said Caroline, “but there is something nagging at me, about the night Juliette and Oskar died. The knocking?”
I gave her a puzzled look.
“In his biography of Oskar Erlich, Walter Loftus mentions that someone knocked on the concierge’s door and woke him up, which was how he saw the apartment was on fire, which meant he could raise the alarm, get the other residents out.”
Her eyes were shining in the candlelight as she waited for the penny to drop.
“You’re saying you aren’t convinced the fire was an accident, and Oskar’s wife might have been the one who started it?”
“I think it’s a possibility. Juliette seemed to think Maria might be capable of something like that. Which also makes me wonder if Juliette sent her journal to Longhurst just in case something happened.”
Caroline fell briefly, thoughtfully, silent. I followed her gaze. It was resting on Harry’s signet ring, which he was absentmindedly fiddling with. “I’m also hoping the journal might explain why Juliette painted herself as a Sphinx, and how that’s linked to her father’s interest in Egyptology.”
Athena appeared with plates piled high with meze, muttering something about not wanting them to get cold as she topped up our glasses. There was still no sign of Freddie. As the evening wore on, Athena spent ever longer periods in the kitchen, and each time she returned I expected her to bring the next course, but instead she arrived with more wine. No one seemed to know if we were waiting for Freddie, nor could we work out quite why we were there. Caroline had been invited the night before. Giles revealed that he had only been asked that afternoon.
By the time Athena served the mains, there were eight empty wine bottles and it was nearly midnight. I retain a vague impression of lamb. The dessert was cold. Ice cream, I think? There was brandy afterward, I’m fairly certain. Still no Freddie. By tacit consensus, his absence went unremarked upon.
Caroline asked how my dissertation was going, and I told her—with a bit of a grimace—that I was planning to drive down to London the next day to visit the Witt. I was not much looking forward to slogging through the archives on my dad’s behalf, especially not with the hangover I was expecting.
As we were all leaving at around one a.m., Athena gave me a very firm hug and whispered something in my ear I did not catch. Harry and Giles wobbled off on their bikes, and I offered to walk Caroline back to her college.
It was a bright, cloudless night, everything sharply silvered, a hint of frost in the air. Both quite drunk, we found it difficult to stay two abreast on the pavement without bumping into each other. We brushed hands a few times and every time we did so, I felt an electric shock of hope. Then somehow I found her hand warm in mine.
We reached her college. Without saying anything, we kept walking. By now I could feel a distinct tingle in the base of my spine. The moon was full, the shadows long on the empty street in front of Trinity. From somewhere nearby came a peal of laughter. Caroline squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers back. We both looked up at the same time and locked glances momentarily and smiled. It felt a lot like the night we first met.
As we neared my college, I had mentally started to compose a casual invitation upstairs for a nightcap when suddenly she stopped. Still holding my hand, without breaking eye contact, she took a couple of steps backward, pulling me into a doorway, half disappearing into the shadows. Our faces were now so close we were practically kissing already. Then we were kissing, and her hands were on my shoulders. One of my hands was on the small of her back. Her legs were pressing against mine.
Then Caroline pulled away from me, ran her hands through her hair, and gave me a slightly sheepish smile. “Patrick,” she said. “Let’s go to your room.”
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
“Well that was... unexpected,” Patrick said, as we lay there in the dark, my head on his chest, sheets tangled at our feet.
I laughed, reaching around on the floor for a blanket to cover myself. “For everyone apart from Athena, I think.”