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“And what am I going to have to do with it, this animal?”
Freddie’s smile just widened.
“Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid, Patrick.”
“Why not? The rules again?”
Freddie shook his head. “Oh no, nothing in the rules about that. I just don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
CAROLINE, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Right up till closing time I had stayed, reading Juliette’s journal, so intent on the pages in front of me that I didn’t notice the library emptying out. Eventually, the only ones left in the building were me and the librarian and someone pushing a mop around.
It was a vertiginous, rabbit-holey feeling, reading those diary entries.
Juliette’s story. In her own words. In her handwriting (beautiful but extremely hard to decipher), with her illustrations in the margins or sometimes taking up a page to themselves. Ink splotches from a fountain pen elaborated into drifting clouds, watercolor waves and landscapes in outline, deft charcoal sketches of the objects, places, and people she was describing. Had it really been sitting right here all these years, at the bottom of a cardboard box?
If I was not finished with what I was looking at, the librarian gently reminded me, I could put the box to one side and continue with its contents when they reopened at 9:00 a.m. I looked up at the clock on the wall—it was five to seven. The cleaner had finished mopping now and begun turning lights off.
In the middle of a fitful night’s sleep, I did experience a brief moment of panic. What if I went back the next day and the box was gone? What if I opened it and the journal was missing?
At ten to nine the next day, I was waiting outside the library, clutching my notepad. Without a break all morning, I laboriously transcribed, frowning over crossed-out phrases, indecipherable words. Eventually, I reached the end of that long first entry, winning a hard-fought battle with Juliette’s inky swoops. In the lobby of the library was a pay phone. From it, I called my friend Athena to ask if she could meet me for lunch in our college hall. I needed to speak to someone about all this. I was also starving.
In some ways we were an unlikely pair, Athena Galanis and I. If we hadn’t been put in neighboring rooms in our first year, I probably would have been too intimidated even to talk to her. She was confident. She was clever. She was gorgeous, with a beauty people felt compelled to comment on the moment she left a room (tall and slender, with long, dark hair and enormous green eyes). It was only as I got to know her better—we first spoke properly when she asked to borrow my lecture notes, having missed a lecture for a family wedding on a private Greek island—I realized how funny she was too.
Athena was unlike anyone I’d ever met, and yet somehow, incrementally, over the course of that first year, she became my best friend. She was certainly the only person here I had told anything about my family, my childhood—although even with her there were lots of things I left out. Athena, in contrast, was full of stories about her dad (a Dubai-based Greek Cypriot businessman) and her mother, his second wife, Mila, a former model and Miss Russia runner-up.
Athena’s phone—she had moved out of college at the end of the first year, into a house her father bought her in central Cambridge—rang for a long time before she answered. When eventually, groggily, she did so, it was clear I had woken her up. I checked my watch. It was midday.
“Caroline! I am so glad you called,” she squealed when she realized it was me. “Because rumor has it you were spotted yesterday cruising through town in Patrick Lambert’s red sports car...”
“We had a supervision together. He offered me a lift afterward. It was raining,” I explained, trying to ignore the way that even the mention of Patrick’s name made me feel.
I could hear a soft chortle at the other end of the line. “You know he still fancies you, right?”
It was not the first time Athena had aired this theory—based as far as I could tell on nothing more than having seen him looking at me (“with those soulful eyes of his”) across a lecture hall.
As usual, because just the thought of having to explain how I felt about relationships—and why—could threaten to bring on familiar throat-tightening symptoms of panic, I swerved the subject. I wasn’t calling about Patrick, I said. This was something much more important. She agreed to meet me in twenty minutes. As ever, despite having only just rolled out of bed, she looked immaculate when I arrived at the college dining hall. On the long oak table in front of her was a plate of cucumber onto which she was shaking a snowstorm of salt, her lunch most days. She greeted me with an expectant expression as I unraveled my scarf and sat down.
I talked her through the last twenty-four hours as swiftly as I could. Alice Long. The Willoughby Bequest. The passport and the necklace and the journal. Telling someone else about it for the first time made it all feel both more real and more strange, somehow.
“My God, Caroline, this is incredible,” Athena kept saying, eyes wide. “So exciting.”
“That’s not all,” I told her. I took my notepad out and read her my transcription of the final paragraph of the first journal entry.
Athena put her fork down. She was looking at me seriously. “Go on, then,” she said. “What are these secrets, the things she has not told Oskar about herself? What happens next?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ve only read the first entry so far.”
Athena rolled her eyes in frustration. “So let’s read on, right now.”
“We can’t. There is only one copy of that journal in the whole world,” I explained. “It’s not something they are going to let anyone photocopy or borrow.”
“I’d just have taken it,” Athena said. “I’d have liberated the lot. Are you seriously going to copy the whole thing out by hand?”
“Of course!” I said. If that was what it took, I mentally added, suddenly aware of the scale of the task ahead of me. This was precisely the kind of discovery which Alice Long had been talking about. The kind which put forgotten female artists back on the map. The kind which shed new light on women we thought we knew. The kind—and I must admit this thought had also occurred to me—which launched academic careers.
“What I don’t understand,” said Athena, “is how any of that stuff got there in the first place.”