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Here she broke off to stifle a sob with the palm of her hand. As she did so, I noticed a dark smear on her forearm.
“Athena, what’s that? Are you okay?”
She dabbed at it with a finger and sighed.
“I must have cut myself and not even noticed. I took a tumble coming up the steps from the lawn.”
I turned to look for a towel or a cloth to offer her. When I turned back, her face had crumpled.
“Oh God,” she said. “He was so angry. He was so drunk. I honestly think something awful might have happened.”
JULIETTE’S JOURNAL, PARIS, 1937
Fourth Entry
Wednesday, 15th December—There was a moment, just a moment, when I thought Oskar was going to be uncomplicatedly pleased about it all. Excited and happy on my behalf that André Breton—his friend, his hero, his mentor—approved of my work. That I was going to be exhibiting alongside him, our paintings hung together.
Then I saw the expression on Oskar’s face.
After Breton left, Oskar spent a long time staring at it, my Self-Portrait as Sphinx. Then he spent quite a long time staring at his own work. Then, without saying where he was going, he left.
He did not return for several hours. When he did, he went straight to bed without a word, and stayed there the rest of the afternoon.
Is it possible, I sometimes ask myself, that I have made a terrible mistake?
The thunderous rages. The weeklong silences. It has suddenly occurred to me who Oskar reminds me of when he behaves like this. My father.
Last night Oskar and I had the most serious fight we have ever had.
It all started when I had the audacity to ask him, as I cooked supper, if he would be home that night. This prompted him to throw his newspaper aside with a snarl and launch into a diatribe about how needy I was, always trying to smother him. He might be in, he said. He might be out, with his friends. He had not decided yet. “I was merely wondering whether I should put two bowls out for this soup,” I said. He peered at the saucepan, sniffed it, pulled a face. “I ate already,” he told me.
Then all evening, as I tried to paint, he kept pacing, sighing to himself, fiddling with things, standing in my light, until eventually I told him that if he wanted to go out, for God’s sake he should just go out. I wasn’t stopping him, I snapped. I didn’t care. What I couldn’t have was him moping around the place, groaning to himself. I had work to do.
Oskar did not like that. Being snapped at. Being told off.
He made some remark—as if to the air, to an unknown observer—about how full of herself she was getting, this little girl, all of a sudden. I said something about how petty and pathetic and jealous they could be, old men.
Fists clenched on the table, face taut, he stared at me. Fizzing. Fuming. For a moment, it really looked like he was thinking what it would feel like to hit me. Then he stormed out, shouting as he did so about not waiting up. On his way out, the front door slammed heavily behind him and a neighbor’s baby started to cry. I felt a little bit like crying myself. Instead, I took up my brush and started to paint.
My name is Juliette Willoughby. I’m an artist. Those were the first words I had ever spoken to Oskar. They were words which, as I painted, I repeated to myself, over and over.
I was still painting when Oskar came back, four hours later.
He said nothing. I said nothing. Instead, he came up behind me and stood there, floorboards creaking underneath the heel of his boots as he gently swayed back and forth, so close I felt his breath on my neck, could smell what he had been drinking. Which would have been irritating at the best of times but was even more so because most of the time he had been away I was battling the same section of the painting, tweaking and fiddling with and then angrily starting over on that final figure I had been struggling with for weeks: Lucy. My sister, Lucy, rising from the lake, her hair sodden, her arms outstretched.
“I know,” I told him, trying to preempt whatever he was about to say. “It’s not right, I know that.”
He gave a noncommittal humph. Oskar understands that this is not just a technical problem I am wrestling with. In our first weeks in Paris, after a nightmare had left me gasping, I told Oskar about my sister. About that day and how it haunted me. Every time I tried to paint Lucy, my hand, my brain, felt like it was flinching from the truth.
Both of us stood there for a long time, looking at my painting.
He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. He rubbed the corner of his eye with the side of a knuckle. He ran his tongue thoughtfully, audibly, over the back of his teeth.
“I think,” he said eventually, “I have an idea.”
Chapter 9
CAROLINE, LONGHURST, 1991