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“What a painting is worth has never been my area, I’m afraid. My part in the process is solely to reach a conclusion about whether or not it is really by Juliette,” I explained. The trouble was, we already had a Self-Portrait with Sphinx on public display in a national institution. Any minute now I was expecting a call from Tate Modern, asking me what this all meant, or from my publisher, concerned that the painting on the cover of five million books was a fake. Which would make me something of a fake, too, I supposed. And the one thing I couldn’t tell any of them—and Patrick swore he hadn’t ever so much as hinted to Harry—was that a large part of my confidence in that work’s authenticity had always come from the fact that I had originally stolen it myself, from this very house.
“But since my painting was actually found at Longhurst...” Harry looked at me expectantly.
I said nothing. I had no way of explaining how even one copy of the work had survived the fire in Paris, let alone two.
What prevented me from dismissing this new painting as something a desperate Harry had commissioned from a forger was that it was clear from the photos Patrick emailed me that his wasn’t a straightforward copy. Forgers did not introduce their own artistic flourishes into the work they were imitating, and Harry’s painting undoubtedly differed from the accepted original. The other problem was that since these were all small details we were talking about, unreadable in the murky image from the Witt Library, it was impossible to tell which of the two paintings had been photographed here in 1961.
“What I need to unpack are the differences between the works, and what that might mean,” I told Harry. “Whether they might hold some clue as to which is authentic or what the relationship between them is. As far as I can see, there are two significant differences: first, in the bottom right of both paintings, there is an image of a hooded boatman, steering a vessel across dark waters to an island.”
It was an image that vividly echoed the boat and robed figure in the papyrus I had seen in the Osiris society’s collection of Egyptiana, that ripped fragment from which the head was missing. Which was one of those odd echoes I had spent years pondering, a strange connection between Cyril’s collection of Egyptian artifacts and his daughter’s lost masterpiece.
“In the version of Self-Portrait as Sphinx on display at Tate Modern, the boatman is just a hooded figure, faceless. In this version, he has a beak.”
“A beak? Like a bird?” Harry asked.
“Like an Egyptian god,” I replied.
Indeed, as far as I could see, the two differing details in the newly discovered work amplified the painting’s Egyptian, mythological resonances, suggesting the possibility of the sort of symbolic reading that had always eluded me. What that might mean in terms of its authenticity, I could not yet be sure.
“So what’s the second difference?” asked Harry.
“The second difference is that where in the Tate version of the painting, there is just a barren landscape in the bottom left, in yours there is something written in hieroglyphics. An eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, a hawk.”
Harry asked me what it meant.
“I’m afraid I don’t read hieroglyphics, but a colleague has promised to take a look at it,” I told him.
The phrase had looked strangely familiar, though, which was one of the reasons I was here.
We were passing the turn on the staircase, near the entrance to the east wing with the heavy oak door, the very door through which I had slipped thirty years ago to find the painting. I stopped and rested one hand on Harry’s arm and pointed up at the lintel with the other. I felt a little leap in my stomach. Just as I remembered, in gilt lettering over the doorway was the same sequence of hieroglyphics: an eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, and a hawk.
“Do you see?” I asked Harry.
Harry grunted, nodded, rubbed his chin. He was clearly thinking about something.
“There’s something else you ought to see,” he said.
WHAT HARRY WANTED TO show me involved us rowing over to the island. I did have some safety concerns about this. Not to do with the boat, which looked reasonably seaworthy. Not even because this was the lake in which Lucy had drowned. Mostly because the more time he and I spent together, the more worried I was about him. He was tuning in and out of our conversation with alarming frequency, several times asking me the exact same question twice in quick succession. On our way down to the lake, he found it hard to stick to the curving path of mossy cobbles. But I could not smell alcohol on him, nor once the old wooden boat was in the water did he struggle to steer us in the right direction, or keep his oars in sync. He leaned forward, he pulled back, and over the otherwise undisturbed water we skimmed.
On the island, all that remained of what had once been a jetty were three rotten wood stumps. We pulled the boat up onto the pebbles of a little beach and placed the oars in the hull. Harry brought a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and dabbed his brow. The path was almost entirely overgrown. We picked our way down it, Harry in the lead, pausing occasionally to gently lift a thorny branch out of the way or kick at a clump of nettles. After a while we reached the pyramid. The tomb which, in a tragic twist of events, Cyril’s beloved elder daughter, Lucy, had been the first to occupy, and in which Cyril too was later laid to rest, although his wife had insisted on being buried in the consecrated Church of England cemetery in the village instead.
Harry, out of breath, stood for a minute with his hands on his thighs. Then, with a glance back at me, he pointed up at what was carved into the entrance to the tomb: an eye, a set of scales, two feathers, a different kind of eye, and a hawk.
PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, FOUR DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH
Late evening has always been my favorite time in Dubai. Sitting out on our villa’s terrace after dinner as the heat dies down, a gin and tonic in hand, a warm breeze rattling the date palms, a swallow occasionally dipping and diving and ruffling the surface of the swimming pool.
“Would you swap all this for a flat in Islington?” Sarah sometimes asks me.
“I wouldn’t swap it for a house in Mayfair,” I always reply.
The pollution. The crime. The weather. You almost forget here, opening the curtains on yet another day of sun, what rainy England is like, everyone sneezing on the tube, those November days it barely gets light at all.
It was not the weather that drew me here, though.
Sarah and I met at a dinner during Art Dubai three years ago—I spoke to the attractive Australian woman sitting next to me about the elaborate table decorations; she turned out to have designed them. We got talking. She had lived here for a decade and really sold the place to me. She was amazed—she thought I was joking—when I told her that this was my third visit and I had barely ventured beyond the art fair. I should get out into the desert, she told me. Camp under the stars. Go sailing. How long was I in town for?
I was here for a week and I ended up doing something with Sarah every day that I had never done in my life before. Scuba diving. Dune bashing. Waterskiing. She was the kind of person, she said, who believed you always had to keep trying new things. Being with her made me feel I could be that sort of person too. I was certainly sick of the man I had become, drinking too much, smoking too much, dwelling on the past.