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This was a loop we had gone around time and time again, lying in bed, neither of us able to work out a solution. The only person I could think of who might be able to help was my father, but confessing we’d pinched a painting from his best friend and longest-standing client seemed unwise at best. Nor could I think of any way of explaining what had happened without telling Dad all about the argument with Philip, and how upset Granny Violet had been—and I was pretty sure I could imagine how that would go down. Fortunately, so far, for whatever reason, Philip did not seem to have said anything about it to him either.
IT WAS ABOUT FOUR in the afternoon, already getting dark, when I got to Elm Lane. Outside number 32, Alice Long’s place, was a house clearance truck. I parked behind it. The back was open, and inside I could see furniture, tables and chairs, carefully stacked. The metal frame of a disassembled bed. The little two-person couch that Caroline and I had sat on in that first supervision.
The door of the house was open too. Down the front path, two men in overalls were carrying a small glass-topped table. I stepped aside on the pavement to let them pass. It was a bit odd that Alice Long was moving and had not mentioned it. What if we had just turned up for our supervision and there was someone else living there? Then it hit me.
“Everything alright, son?” asked one of the men in overalls, from the back of the truck.
“Sorry,” I said, pointing to the truck, pointing at the house. “Is this...? Is she...?”
“House clearance,” he told me. “Old girl passed away about a fortnight ago.”
Just after our last supervision, I thought. I assumed no one had thought to inform the university.
“What’s happening to all this stuff?” I asked.
“Going to auction, the lot of it. Ely Auction Rooms, just down the road. All profits going to some cat sanctuary, probably. Always the way.”
I knew those auction rooms well, having visited them many times with my father. I made a mental note of the name of the removal company. I felt a strange impulse to ask if they were totally sure that Alice Long was dead, that they had gotten the right house. I stared up to the open doorway, the shabby front hall, the walls empty now of the pictures that had hung there. It was a poignant sight in itself. The thought that we would never get to tell her what we had discovered at Longhurst was heartbreaking.
“The milkman raised the alarm,” the other man in overalls told me. “Noticed no one had taken the bottles in for a while, could see through the glass in the front door a couple of days’ mail piled up. Someone called the landlord, and he let the police in. In bed, she was. Peaceful, at least.”
They had positioned her desk in the back of the van and laid a thick blanket over it for protection. I stepped out of the way to let them back up the path. I could make out the silhouettes of propped-up framed pictures, armchairs, side tables.
I could hear the two men loudly discussing what they should try moving next, where it would fit in the truck, whether they would need to shuffle things around. That was when it came to me. My brilliant idea. I still do not know where it came from. Perhaps it was having witnessed similar house clearances with my father, observing at close hand his carefully honed ability to identify the one or two genuinely valuable items among a lifetime’s accumulated detritus.
What I do know is that as soon as the idea came to me I knew immediately—without hesitation—that I was going to put it into action, and that I did not have much time. I looked up and down the empty street. It was a gloomy afternoon. I walked to the car, opened the trunk, and removed the blanket from Self-Portrait as Sphinx. I gave it what I very much hoped was not going to be one last look, tucked it under my arm, and walked around to the open back of the truck. Then I hopped up into the truck and lifted up the blanket with Alice Long’s other pictures under it and squeezed it in alongside. I let the blanket drop. I hopped back out of the truck again. Without looking back, keeping my head down, I walked very quickly back to my car.
It was only after I had jumped back into the front seat of the MG, as I revved the engine to pull away and drive off, that it hit me I might just have made a terrible mistake. That I was going to have to drive back now and explain to Caroline what I had done and why I had done it. That I was either a bloody genius or a complete idiot.
JULIETTE’S JOURNAL, PARIS, 1938
The Final Entry
Monday, 17th January—I am a fool. For weeks, for months, I have been living in a fool’s bubble, thinking solely of my art, entirely embroiled in my painting. So focused on what I was creating that I never once stopped to think about the trap I was stumbling into.
Twice more I have been back, with and without Oskar, to that hospital, forcing myself again to confront that girl on her slab, still unclaimed, to sketch her, to observe her, to make sure I was getting everything right.
To brush up on my mythology, I have been ransacking the libraries of Paris, scouring the secondhand bookshops. Wrapped up for warmth in bed at night, I have frowned and yawned over The Book of the Dead, Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Budge’s Egyptian Magic—books whose spines I recognize from the shelves of my father’s library, their content familiar from his endless uninterruptible monologues, delivered to anyone in the vicinity (a five-year-old child, a mildly scandalized curate, a gardener), about Ra and Thoth and Osiris, about the ancient Egyptian conception of the afterlife and other people’s theories on the topic (which were all wrong) and his own (which were correct).
Painfully aware as I painted that this was the most complex and ambitious piece I have ever attempted and that I would only ever get one chance to get it right—and that every day brought us closer to the opening night of the exhibition.
Tonight.
All last week, Oskar and I were working on our mannequins, which artists exhibiting in the show had been asked to Surrealize. The whole week I spent listening to Oskar grunt, manhandling the thing, wrestling it this way and that. They are surprisingly heavy, mannequins. It took two of us several stops to get each one up the stairs, bumping and swearing and apologizing every time one of our puzzled neighbors stuck their head out of the door. Then we set to work, a certain competitive tension in the atmosphere. A desire to excel, to dazzle, to outdo the other artists in the show, and perhaps each other. Perhaps especially each other. Supposedly, the mannequins would be anonymous, but it was already common knowledge what Dalí had planned, what Duchamp had done. Would anyone guess which one was mine, the mannequin wrapped and wrapped again, like a mummy, like a swaddled child, the mouth crisscrossed in strips of cotton I had dyed red in the sink—badly staining the porcelain in the process?
About teatime on Saturday, just as I was standing back to admire my handiwork, I heard Oskar stamp out in his boots and the door shut behind him. Should I? I wondered. Just a peek? Oskar had hung three thin blankets on a rope across the middle of the room to prevent us from distracting each other. I crossed over and parted them. I did not immediately know how to process what I was seeing, and of course that was exactly what made Oskar a great artist, a Surrealist artist. For a moment, it felt like I was looking at a real human being, a corpse. A mutilated corpse. The sounds I had been listening to from the other side of the curtain suddenly made sense—he had been slashing the thing to pieces. Slicing at its sides. Stabbing at its chest. Right in the middle of its head was embedded the little axe we use to chop up wood for the stove. It was brutal. It was terrifying. It was brilliant.
Yesterday at the Galérie Beaux-Arts, all the artists were running around, squabbling, panicking, arranging things, overseeing the hanging of their work, bickering about the placement of their mannequins. Breton was striding around, issuing terse instructions. Other members of the organizing committee were doing the same—often in direct contradiction to the instructions Breton had just issued. Everybody looked busy, tense, preoccupied, cursing Wolfgang Paalen as he fussed over his fake pond, which covered half the floor. I had been trying not to dwell on it too much, what a huge show this would be. Two hundred and thirty-one works to hang and install before it opened, by sixty artists from fourteen countries. A phonograph recording of a woman’s high-pitched hysterical laugher played on a loop at ear-splitting volume, doing little to diminish my anxiety.
It was Breton’s idea—sprung on us at the very last moment—that my work and Oskar’s should hang together in a little side room of their own. Self-Portrait as Sphinx, just finished. Oskar’s Three Figures in a Landscape. Two pieces, painted in the same studio, meeting up like old friends, picking up an interrupted conversation, across the gallery walls. I rather liked the idea. Oskar was less keen. His vision, no doubt, had been for his great painting to occupy its own anteroom.
I had asked that the printed catalogue contain just my name and the title of the painting, with no mention of my relationship to Oskar, or the country or the city in which I lived. It had crossed my mind to ask that my name be removed from the list of exhibiting artists entirely, for the painting to be shown anonymously. It was Oskar who persuaded me I was being ridiculous. Who reminded me—his hand on my shoulder, his eyes on mine—of what I had said to him the first time we met: that I was Juliette Willoughby and I was an artist. Now was my chance to show the world, he said.
How could I resist being there on opening night, at the vernissage, to see the guests in their evening dress—three thousand of them, the newspapers said, the police eventually called to control the crowds—thrill and titter and shrink from the corridor of mannequins, the only light being that of the torches they had been provided at the entrance? To see how they would respond to Dalí’s Rainy Taxi—a real taxi parked outside the gallery, occupied by mannequins, inside which it was raining. To watch them stumble around in the gloom, dust from the coal sacks hung overhead landing on their hats, as for the first time they experienced these works, like snatched glimpses of someone else’s dream. To witness their reactions to my Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
It is not a painting I expect anyone to understand all at once.
It will take time, it will take careful attention, before the connections between the parts of the painting begin to emerge. Before you perceive that it is a single story being told. A story that is so strange, so horrifying, that it would be easier to persuade yourself that you were going mad than to accept it is really what you are seeing.