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I said I was sorry all this had to be so rushed. It was very much Harry who wanted it done at a breakneck pace, who was desperate...
“Patrick,” Caroline said softly. “This is going to take a while and I am going to need to concentrate.”
I said I would just be upstairs, in my office. I texted Sarah—away working on a three-day wedding she couldn’t get out of, in Abu Dhabi—to say that Caroline had arrived safely, knowing that I would not get an answer immediately.
I texted Harry, to check that he was boarding his flight, letting him know about the interest the painting was generating. I started going through the mail on my desk—bill after bill after bill. I checked the time. Caroline had been in there for about ten minutes. I could have sworn it was at least an hour.
My God, those photographs. Who on earth apart from Harry and me had anything to gain from blackmail? I drank a glass of water, willing myself to calm down. Whoever had taken those photos had been in possession of them for close to three decades. Clearly, they bore Caroline and me no particular grudge, or they would have gone public with the pictures already. If her professional opinion was that this painting was genuine, there might be nothing to worry about.
What if Caroline was not convinced? The sale would still go ahead, of course. All the time, all around the world, people sold paintings over which there hung a cloud of doubt. Sometimes in the hope that the expert would change their mind, or that a later expert would be of a different opinion, or because having a painting from the school of Rubens was a lot more affordable than one from the catalogue raisonné. The difference being that the former might sell for tens of thousands, the latter for tens of millions. Tens of thousands would not even cover my expenses. The scientific analysis, the extra security, the insurance. Caroline’s flights and hotel, Harry’s. The private view. I was trying very hard not to think about my father and his Raphael. How much he had spent on that. How confident he had been that it would transform his life, all our lives.
After an hour and a half, Caroline finally emerged from the room with the painting in it. She cleared her throat. “Patrick?” she called. I was already halfway down the stairs when I saw her expression. My heart sank as she shook her head.
“It’s impossible,” she said. “There just wasn’t time for her to paint two versions of the same painting. The logistics, the practicalities, the chronology make no sense.”
She was right. Of course she was right. At some level perhaps I had always known she was right.
“It’s impossible,” she said. “But I also believe it to be genuine. That is my sincere and settled professional opinion.”
“And you’re willing to attest to that publicly?” I asked.
“It’s the truth,” she confirmed.
“And what does this mean for the painting in Tate Modern? That it’s fake?”
Caroline shook her head, shrugged. “I think things are more complicated than that. The best way to explain it is this, I think. If I were forging a letter by Juliette, and I wanted to replicate a word she used in the journal, I would copy it curve for curve, exactly, maybe even trace it. So it would be an exact match. But if she herself wrote that same word again, she wouldn’t get an exact match. You’d get something very similar, that was recognizably from the same hand, but with slight and almost unnoticeable variations.”
“And that’s what you think is going on here?” I asked.
“Well, there are also those obvious differences in the content of the painting, which we’ve both noticed, but at a brushstroke level, that’s what I think is going on, yes. I can’t explain how, but I am willing to stake my reputation on my belief that both these pictures were painted by Juliette Willoughby.”
For a moment, I did not know how to react, how to thank her. Then I took her into my arms and hugged her. After a moment’s hesitation, she hugged me back. “Patrick, there’s something else,” she said. We disentangled from each other, separated.
“Something else?”
“I’ve spotted another difference between the paintings. The strangest one yet.”
“Go on, then,” I said with a smile. “Show me.”
We headed back into the room where the painting was hanging. She beckoned me over to it.
“Have a closer look down there in that corner,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
I leaned in close. I screwed up my eyes.
“Oh my God,” I said.
There it was, on the bottom right, on the island the boat was headed to, perspective rendering it easy to miss...
“It’s a pyramid. A white pyramid on an island, just like the one at Longhurst.”
“That is Longhurst,” Caroline replied. “It’s not some mythical or symbolic stretch of water that boat is crossing. It is the actual lake at Longhurst and it is Cyril’s pyramid the boat is headed for.”
Her eyes were bright with excitement.
“But what does that mean?” I asked her.
“The drowned sister. Juliette fleeing. The same inscription as appears over the door to the east wing and the entrance to the pyramid. What I think it means, Patrick, is that these aren’t just dreams or flights of fancy. Each individual element of this version of Self-Portrait as Sphinx appears to refer directly to some real-life incident, something that happened, thinly disguised. What the painting is asking us to do is to fit them all together, in narrative sequence.”