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The man with the phone said, “One hundred and twenty-five.”
I felt Caroline shift in her seat next to me. Her grip on my hand tightened.
“What’s happening?” she asked me. “Who is that on the phone?”
Precisely the question I was asking myself. “I guess someone who saw it and liked it,” I said.
There was no reason to get paranoid, I reminded myself. There was no reason to imagine we were bidding against someone who knew what lot 76 really was. The only people we had told about the journal were Athena, Harry, and Giles at dinner, and Alice Long, of course. The only person who knew about the photograph of the painting was Alice Long. Without having seen the photograph we had seen, there was no way anyone could have identified with confidence the painting we were bidding on as Juliette Willoughby’s Self-Portrait as Sphinx.
When the bidding hit £250, I started to get twitchy. Never had I expected anyone else to show this much interest in our painting. In the whole world, Caroline and I had, between us, £1,087.96 exactly—and that was if we both emptied our bank accounts entirely.
The painting was expected to raise one to three hundred pounds, according to the catalogue. I was hopeful that the other bidder might therefore have set three hundred as their upper limit, and made a resolution to stop there. Alas, this proved to be wishful thinking. The bidding cruised straight through and past that sum without a pause. Now bidding was advancing in fifty-pound increments. Three-fifty, four hundred, four hundred fifty pounds. It was easy to forget this was real money, a third of all the money we jointly had in the world, in fact. Five hundred. Five-fifty. Six hundred.
I had seen this before at auctions, a bidding spiral, when the competitive instinct kicked in. Was that what had happened here? Not being able to see the opposing bidder, it was hard to tell. At least the pace of the escalation had slowed a little. Now each time the price went up, the man on the telephone spent a little time conferring with his client before he gave his approving nod. A hundred quid each time we were going up now. Seven hundred. Eight hundred. Nine.
A little gasp went around the room when we hit one thousand pounds. People who had been wandering around the rest of the building had begun to gather in the doorway of the auction room to watch.
Caroline’s hand was clasping mine very tightly. My stomach lurched. It seemed to take almost no time for us to reach fifteen hundred pounds. The man with the phone had begun to showboat a little now, to add little pauses before bidding with a flourish, which annoyed me, since it was not his money at stake. I kept bidding. Seventeen hundred. Eighteen. I could speak to my father, explain the situation. I was not going to let this painting go for the sake of a few hundred quid.
“Patrick,” Caroline whispered, when the bidding hit two thousand. “Patrick, what are you doing?”
Now every time the price of the painting went up—and it was doing so at leaps of two hundred fifty pounds—there was a collective intake of breath.
“I’ll sell the car,” I told her. “I’ll sell that fucking car.”
By the time the bidding had reached three and a half thousand, I had mentally sold the car, maxed out a credit card I didn’t have, extended my overdraft. If I needed more money I would go to my dad. Caroline was shaking her head now, which meant that every time the auctioneer turned to me and I nodded, he would glance at her and then back at me, as if to ask: “Are you sure?”
I was sure. We had to get it. Because if we did not get it, it would be my fault. This had been my stupid plan. Thanks to me, this painting, lost for decades, might be about to vanish once more, into someone’s private collection, and all the castles I had been building in the air—my future, Caroline’s future, our future together—were in the process of dissolving.
If I were Caroline, I did not know if I would ever be able to forgive me. That was the worst feeling of all. I was not sure I would ever be able to forgive myself.
I had often wondered what it felt like for my father to have lost that Raphael. To spend your life trying not to think about how different things could have been. To live the rest of your days with that disappointment. Clinging, as a salve, to whatever small measures of social status you could—a friendship with a Willoughby, a son in Osiris, the best table in a restaurant.
At four thousand pounds it was clear that the other bidder was not going to stop, that they would keep going until they secured the painting. I could see Caroline looking again at the catalogue, the description of the painting, the guide price, as if there might be some answers there. The auctioneer turned to me. I shook my head. It was over. It was hard to believe, after all we had been through, but we had lost our painting.
“Gone for four thousand pounds to my bidder on the phone.”
Part III
The Dilemma
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
—WALTER BENJAMIN, “THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION” (1935, TRANS. HARRY ZOHN)
Chapter 12
CAROLINE, LONDON, 2023, ONE WEEK BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
They pass in a heartbeat, the years.
In the Tate Modern gift shop, a dark-haired woman—she looked to be in her late twenties—was leafing through The Surreal Life of Juliette Willoughby. I was around her age when that book—my first and by far my most commercially successful—was published in 1998. The same year that I started my first permanent academic job, at Cambridge, that I married Patrick and he opened his gallery.
A photo of the girl I was then (young, ambitious, in love) stares out from the book’s back cover. On the front, a fluorescent sticker boasts Five Million Copies Sold Worldwide, which is pretty extraordinary for a scholarly biography of someone who—back when I wrote it—was an almost unknown female painter. I picked up a copy and it fell open at the dedication page: For my mother.
A further stack of the same hardback was piled on a table beneath a poster advertising my talk tonight, a tie-in to publicize this special twenty-fifth anniversary edition, with a revised introduction my publishers requested I write, reflecting on the book’s success. The truth was, I have never thought that I was responsible for it. I simply had the good luck to write about a woman artist at a point in history at which it felt like people finally started to care about them, an artist with a riveting life story that could be seen—depending upon the prism through which you viewed it—as a tragic romance, a family drama, a coming-of-age tale, or a parable about the ways in which female achievement is overlooked. Or all of those things at once.
Although Self-Portrait as Sphinx itself had disappeared after the auction, I still had Juliette’s journal—a remarkable historical document in its own right—to draw upon and reflect upon. And as Alice Long had wisely suggested, once you looked for Juliette, she could be glimpsed here and there—usually called Jules (Oskar’s nickname for her) or referred to as La Rousse Anglaise, the English Redhead, a quiet girl with little French—in the diaries and letters of her Paris circle.