KDBookOnline
Share Us
“Overpainted on this canvas?” I am pointing at the Self-Portrait as Sphinx from Tate Modern. He nods.
“Expertly done, wasn’t it? With paint of exactly the same composition. Then a thick coat of varnish was applied to the entire thing so as to make it essentially invisible. This wasn’t caught when I loaned the painting to Tate Modern twenty-five years ago, but blacklight is much more sophisticated now, so we can see that both paintings were originally identical in composition.”
“So someone carefully concealed four significant elements in the one I found at Longhurst?” I ask
Dave nods. Something occurs to me that I suspect he has figured out already.
“The brushstrokes on the overpainting,” I say. “Have you run those through your program? Did you get a match?”
He nods. “A very definitive one, from a large dataset, because the painter was extremely prolific: Austen Willoughby. What I want to know,” says Dave White, “is why he did it.”
It feels like a lot of synapses are firing inside my skull all at once. I could never make sense of Self-Portrait as Sphinx because vital pieces of the puzzle were missing, pieces that the Willoughbys wanted to hide.
“I will work it out,” I said to Dave, who seems to be genuinely holding his breath in anticipation. “And then I will tell you. But I need you to help me get Patrick out of prison first.”
Dave doesn’t say anything for a while. Then he crosses the room to stand beside me, silently inspecting both paintings before turning to me and nodding. “Just tell me what you need.”
“I need to know who Athena’s client was. They were clearly serious about getting their hands on that painting. Perhaps they were angry enough, when they didn’t, to pay Harry a visit.”
ALICE LONG, CAMBRIDGE, 1938–1940
After the Telegraph printed my photographs of Oskar, someone from Life magazine phoned the hostel and left a message for Alice Long at the front desk. They asked if I had any other pictures of the Surrealists and if I might stop by their offices if so.
Then a week after those photos were published in Life, the picture editor of the London News contacted me, asking to meet. “I may have an assignment for you,” he said after we had talked about my work for a while. “Ever been to Poplar?”
The next day I was on a train to photograph a beauty contest. Two days after that it was Enfield, for a town hall opening. And both times I must have done something right, because there was another commission, and then another, and another.
I took a room in a boardinghouse in Hackney, not a fashionable part of town, never really leaving home unless it was to work, keeping myself to myself save for the evenings I sat in companionable silence with the other boarders listening to the wireless, obsessed like everyone else with what was happening in Czechoslovakia, in Albania, then eventually in Poland.
It was only when I could afford my own place, a pokey little one-bedroom flat above a shop in Clapton, that I even began to think about painting again. But whenever I considered what I might commit to canvas, the same old apparitions popped up, scenes that haunted my dreams and spilled from my subconscious. When I looked in the mirror above the fireplace, wondering if I might try a simple self-portrait, I still saw a Sphinx staring back at me, a girl weighed down with secrets she could never share. Sometimes, I would leaf through the pages of the journal I had kept in Paris, where I had sketched those figures and creatures, or the photographs I had taken of the painting before Oskar stole and sold it. But still the box of paints that I had brought with me from France in my suitcase sat in a corner of the kitchen, untouched.
I thought about the other painters we had known, followed in the news as they scattered, fled to Mexico and Portugal. Meaning that there were even fewer places I could now go, in case one day I was walking down the street and someone saw me, a ghost from a past life.
Even though I knew I had been declared dead—I sometimes even imagined the funeral, that poor woman’s remains shipped back to Longhurst, a discreet, apologetic affair in the village church—I still went to great pains to remain invisible. I built a reputation for shyness, preferring to let my photographs speak for themselves. A. Long was the name under which my work appeared in the papers. I only accepted commissions where I was confident I would not see anyone who knew Juliette Willoughby—nothing political, no high-society events, no gallery openings.
The possibility of crossing paths with my father was what really kept me awake at night. Fortunately, by now this prospect was fairly remote. It was well known that he rarely attended the Commons these days, spending most of his time at Longhurst, undertaking his Egyptological studies. Every now and again there would be a story in the papers, a little paragraph about how much he had paid for a single scrap of papyrus or a sarcophagus.
Then it happened. It was a bright July day, and I was traveling up to a job in Oxford. Across the tracks at Paddington, I caught sight of a tall man standing stiffly at the platform edge, a briefcase gripped tightly in his leather-gloved hands. My heart froze. It was him. He appeared to be reading one of the advertisements on my side of the tracks. If he had looked just slightly to the left, he would have seen me.
Terrified that he would feel himself the object of my attention, I turned away, walking slowly and steadily along the platform, head bowed. When I glanced back, someone was shaking his hand, perhaps congratulating him for his recent elevation to the House of Lords. I was surprised that the fear was stronger even than the last time I had seen him, a fierce revulsion at the thought that we were related, that his blood ran through my veins. More than once I asked myself if what I had done to Oskar had really been an accident, whether it was something in my bad Willoughby blood that prompted me to pick up that knife, made me capable of using it. And I reminded myself: he was not a murderer, my father; he was something far worse.
When I got home, bolting the door even though I was sure I had not been followed, I knew what I had to do. I would paint Self-Portrait as Sphinx once more. Oskar had sold it to my family, who had undoubtedly destroyed it. What was there stopping me, though, from painting it again? Even if I could not exhibit it, at least it would exist. An invisible victory over my family. A work that might survive me, a symbol of the truth that my father could suppress but not erase.
There was also a part of me that simply missed painting. Which relished the challenge of seeing if I could re-create my poor destroyed work in all its twisted intricacy.
I bought the canvas in the same art supply shop in Covent Garden that Uncle Austen had always taken me to as a girl (making it an early-morning in-and-out trip, to ensure I did not accidentally run into him), replacing several tubes of near-spent paint at the same time, ensuring an exact match. I found that I barely had to refer to the photographs of the original that I tacked up on the wall beside my easel. The entire story poured out of me exactly as it had the first time. I even found myself fussing and fretting over the same details: the pyramid, my father rowing the boat across the lake, his tragic cargo, the incantation in hieroglyphics from the east wing’s painted lintel. All those details I had carefully arranged as a message, which would have been loud and clear to my father: I know what you did and why you did it. I am not the mad one in this family. The mad one in this family is you.
For years, everyone had conspired to ignore his growing strangeness, his steadily worsening behavior. My father had always had a temper. Once I had seen him tearing the house apart, smashing things, in search of a lost cuff link. If anyone was late to breakfast, you could see him seethe. But the rages, the screaming fits, the furies prompted by nothing and aimed at everyone, all got so much worse after Lucy died. Terrible things he would come out with, screaming them across the dinner table, accusing me of having capsized the boat deliberately, saying he wished that I had drowned instead. My mother would simply continue eating.
Every single day, always alone, he would visit the pyramid where Lucy’s body lay. Every year on her birthday he would spend the whole day on the island. On the anniversary of her death, he would lock himself away in the east wing for a week.
He talked to her. We all knew it, but no one ever mentioned it. When he was alone in his study, when he was shuffling around the garden, he would conduct a muttered one-sided conversation with my dead sister. Talking to her—fondly, warmly—in a way he never spoke to the rest of us. Sometimes, late at night, in the east wing, I heard him shouting other words, foreign words, over and over. Ga ba ka, baba ka. Ka ka ra ra phee ko ko. When I asked my mother about this, she insisted I must have been dreaming, and forbade me from leaving my room after dark.
As I began to paint, in my cramped little Clapton flat, other vivid snapshots of my past lives presented themselves: a primly dressed little girl in the nursery, losing whole days to whimsical watercolors of plants and flowers, my beloved sister begging me to come out to play on the lawn. Eighteen-year-old me on a gloomy afternoon at the Slade, sketching a life drawing model with a stinking cold—poor girl!—a little droplet of moisture gathering on the tip of her nose.
As I set up my easel next to the window in the kitchen, I recalled Oskar’s endless little practical hints in the matter of paint mixing, brush cleaning, the extreme care with which he arranged his materials before he began work. For the first time since Paris, I allowed art to take me over completely, hour after hour passing, day darkening to night, as I obsessed over a single passage. And then the spell would be broken—children shouting outside, a series of clanks from the building’s ancient pipes—and I would notice it was night and I was famished.
Once I had finished, having ignored all photographic commissions for nearly three months, barely leaving my flat in that time, I knew that was it. That I was done with painting, for good this time. I had painted my masterpiece, twice. I had proven I could do it. This new Sphinx, both guardian and secret-keeper, I hung at the head of my bed. Then, as the phony war ended and the Blitz began, I picked up my camera once more.