The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel (16 page)

The boys stood in a row gazing at Bluma, taken aback by the force of her enthusiasm. Charlie was the first to speak.

‘Yes. I’ll do it.’

Bluma took his hand, grasping it warmly, a smile of frank happiness spreading over her face.

‘Wonderful. Wonderful. And how about you, Mr Brownwick? I’ll pay you twenty guineas.’

Jim nodded. ‘Yeah, okay. Twenty guineas is all right, I reckon.’

Bluma clapped her hands in delight. ‘And, Mr Hockney? Have you had time to think?’

There was a slight hiss as she said ‘think’. Juliet tried to put George out of her mind.

David shrugged and plunged his hands deep into his pockets. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Zonderman,’ he said. ‘I like what you’re doing and everything. But I can’t. Not for twenty guineas. At my last exhibition they were selling my work for a hundred pound.’

Juliet’s eyes widened. A student selling pieces for a hundred pounds? She’d priced Max’s bird pictures at seventy but it had made her feel a little sick. She’d wanted to ask a hundred for Jim’s
Night Swimmer
but in the end Jim had decided he didn’t want to sell.

‘Then I wish you luck, Mr Hockney,’ said Bluma with a shrug. ‘This is the fee. Nobody, no matter how famous, is paid more than twenty guineas. I would have loved a picture of you. I am sure I’ll regret it.’

The boys disappeared in search of more cigarettes, leaving Juliet alone with Bluma.

‘You can find talent. Trust that stir you get inside the belly that feels like joy or indigestion, when you stand in front of something truly marvellous. Sometimes you will get it right and sometimes not, but the truth is you’re not ever really right or wrong. It’s only luck. She’ll be with you and then she won’t.’

Bluma pointed to Max’s painting of high-flying geese.

‘He’s the best painter but you’ll have the least success with his work. He’s too old. The public doesn’t want middle-
aged painters having a second spring. The pictures seem old-
fashioned even though they’re not. They want the young and modern.’ She nodded towards Jim’s
Night Swimmer
. ‘He’s your star. The brush work is ordinary and the light’s a little flat but that’s not important. It feels new. It isn’t but that doesn’t matter. And, best of all, it will reproduce beautifully. Those expanses of colour will print nicely and you won’t notice the flatness.’

Juliet took a sip of wine to avoid making a reply. She didn’t care what Bluma said, she was determined to make Max a success. It was his pictures that she loved the best and she’d make everyone understand. She started to excuse herself but Bluma took her arm.

‘I won’t tire you with any more advice except this: only sleep with one of them at a time,’ she glanced towards the makeshift bar where Charlie and Philip were opening bottles of wine. ‘Men are more fragile than you think.’

Juliet reddened in embarrassment and irritation. ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t—’

Bluma cut her off with a laugh. ‘Well, when you do, remember my suggestion. It’s as useful as anything I’ve said about painting. Now take me to some champagne.’

Grateful that the conversation was at a close, Juliet led Bluma to the bar. She wished that she could slip outside for a minute. In the cubby that passed for a kitchen she saw Frieda and Philip washing up glasses and laughing. Juliet sighed. She never seemed able to make Frieda laugh any more. Sometimes she felt that her daughter had joined the ranks of the disapprovers of Chislehurst. She watched Charlie’s mother Valerie glide among the partygoers, sleek in a hot cerise dress that skimmed her knees, eyes perfectly stencilled into Elizabeth Taylor sultriness – her hand must be as steady as a draughtsman’s. Juliet wondered for the first time if Charlie had inherited his skill with a pencil from Valerie. She was everything that Juliet was not. Perfectly at ease, Valerie understood whose jokes to giggle at, who needed to be flattered and with whom to flirt. Juliet watched in admiration and anxiety. This was supposed to be her party but she felt like a beech tree in the middle of a pine forest. She had tried to make herself look more like one of them. She no longer frequented Minnie’s Boutique on the high street and her new skirts were cut a fraction shorter and a trifle tighter. She wore lipstick every day but she still couldn’t sense, as Sylvia or Valerie could, when to reach out and brush a man’s arm.

A slim hand slid into hers.

‘You look like a wallflower, darling. This is your party,’ said Sylvia. ‘Come. I’ll introduce you. Half of them came because they’d heard a popsie was running a gallery but now they’re here, they’re really rather impressed.’

Sylvia was the only woman artist included in the exhibition. Juliet was determined to discover more for the next, but it had taken some persuasion for Sylvia to agree to show. It was true that her style was enigmatic. She spent so much time restoring paintings by other artists that she absorbed a little of their style. Juliet supposed it was like listening to Beethoven on a loop and then being unable to get a chord sequence or a melody out of one’s head.

Juliet allowed herself to be paraded before the collectors and critics, smiling until her lips were sore. With a smile and a laugh from Sylvia they sold one of Max’s paintings, which turned out to be the only one to sell during the entire run. Whenever she started to feel nervous, Sylvia thrust another glass of wine into her hand, hissing like the rabbit from
Alice
, ‘Drink, drink!’ For once, Juliet did as she was told – finding talent wasn’t enough: unless she wanted to return to typing letters at Greene & Son, she must learn to sell, sell, sell.

‘Darling, it’s going terribly well.’

Juliet looked round to see her parents hovering beside her. She kissed them both, feeling the sheen of sweat beneath the layers of powder on her mother’s cheek.

‘Are the uncles coming too?’

Mrs Greene started to rummage in her cavernous handbag.

‘It’s just us, I’m afraid, sweetheart.’

‘Not even Uncle Ed?’ asked Juliet, with a frown. Ed, the factory’s salesman, had always been her favourite.

Mr Greene scrutinised a drawing over Juliet’s left shoulder and Mrs Greene dabbed the shine from her nose with a starched handkerchief.

‘He’s selling specs in Bournemouth. He couldn’t get back in time.’

At once Juliet understood. Her parents had never passed on the invitations to the rest of the family. They might be trying to tolerate this change in their daughter but they would not advertise it to the others.

‘We’d like to buy a painting.’

Their flushed, good-natured faces displayed all the unease she felt and she tried to ignore a tingle of irritation.

‘There’s no need.’

Mr Greene frowned and clutched his wife’s hand a little tighter.

‘But we’d like to.’

Juliet wanted to be grateful but she felt like Leonard at his school craft fair when she’d been the only one to buy one of his toilet-roll telescopes. She knew her parents didn’t like the pictures. Mr Greene valued objects with a purpose like spectacles or table lamps and while her mother was more flexible, Juliet knew her taste (Renoir, Monet, perhaps a little bit of Gainsborough for the splendid hats) and the paintings at Wednesday’s did not fit. Mr and Mrs Greene were both simultaneously generous and careful with money. They’d give Juliet a handsome birthday cheque and pay her properly for her work at Greene & Son, but on lending her seven pence to buy some milk when Juliet was short of change, Mrs Greene expected the loan repaid. She took scrupulous pleasure in saving Greenshield stamps and the grocer’s penny-off vouchers at the back of the paper, but thought nothing of lavishing gifts on her grandchildren. Money must be spent on good quality chicken (‘You get what you pay for!’) but meals out were a wanton extravagance (‘It’s a sin when there’s food at home’). So Juliet knew that the decision to purchase a painting was not born out of a newly discovered passion for art but the desire to demonstrate their support, if not approval, of their only daughter.

‘Which picture do you like?’ she asked.

‘We thought that one might be best,’ said Mrs Greene pointing to one of Jim’s pictures of the Clacton seaside. Fat ladies in flounced swimming costumes swarmed among seagulls and ice creams dripped onto dimpled thighs.

‘Why do you like that one?’ asked Juliet.

‘Well,’ Mrs Greene paused for a moment to consider. ‘Well, I suppose, it’s very small.’

Juliet sighed in exasperation. ‘Do you even like it?’

Mrs Greene prickled. ‘I thought that those large women in their silly frills would remind me not to have that second slice of cake.’

Mr Greene chuckled, glad that painting could have a useful purpose after all. Juliet wanted to tell them to stop being kind, that she didn’t need their help and that this wasn’t a school craft fair and she wasn’t twelve and that paintings should be bought because they fill you with delight, not to provide encouragement for a diet, but a weariness overtook her.

‘I’ll go and mark it as sold,’ she said.

 • • • 

A perm drove Juliet to leave London for the Christmas holidays. It seemed that everyone was getting one. The party had been full of bouffant hairstyles, all as perfectly leavened as a tray of golden
challah
loaves. When Juliet reflected on her unease among the guests, she concluded that much of it could be put down to the lack of a perm. If only her hair had more volume then she too might possess the smiling confidence of a Valerie or a Sylvia. She booked herself into the salon on the high street one Saturday morning and looked forward to a transformation both physical and existential. The
mikvah
had disappointed her but she had faith in this secular ritual. Mrs Greene wished that the appointment had not been made on the Sabbath, but – now resigned to her daughter’s multitude of blasphemies – she requested only that Leonard be left with her. She recognised that in a battle between sermon and salon Frieda would not hesitate in her choice, but Mrs Greene still held out hope for the boy’s soul.

While Juliet crouched with her head dangling over the sink, soap suds stinging her eyes, Frieda complained at the unfairness of a world that denied her having a perm as well. The girl maintained her stream of complaints while a thin-lipped woman with nicotine-stained fingers tugged Juliet’s hair into rollers, then sat her under a dryer that singed her scalp. Frieda only stopped complaining when the rollers were finally removed, the combing out of the hair was finished and Juliet was enthroned before a mirror, with another angled behind so she could inspect the mysteries of the back. Then Frieda took one long look at her mother and announced, ‘Thank God I didn’t get one of those.’ The perm transformed lucky women into chic sophisticates but Juliet was not one of them. Like the
mikvah
, the perm had failed to achieve metamorphosis.

There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t stay at home until it subsided as there was too much work at the gallery preparing for the next show and, she decided, the distraction would be a good thing – it would prevent her from sitting on the loo in front of the bathroom mirror and succumbing to tears. She did her best to hide it under a hat but the hat wouldn’t fit over the wobbling tower of hair. Trying to convince herself that it wasn’t all that bad, she took Frieda to her mother’s. Mrs Greene opened the door, looked Juliet up and down and declared, ‘You broke the holy laws for this unholy mess?’

Hurrying through Bayswater to Wednesday’s in the darkness of the December afternoon, Juliet avoided eye contact with passers-by, silently telling herself that heads were not turning owl-like to stare. She hesitated outside the gallery, key poised in the lock. The boys would be kind. They would make her tea and reassure her that the hair was perfectly fine and it just seemed out of place in Chislehurst. This was a London hairstyle, part of a new life, and no wonder it didn’t fit in the old. She pushed open the door and found to her surprise that the boys were not alone – it took her a moment to find them in the rows of strangers filling the gallery. The electric lights had been left off and the room was lit instead by the glow from dozens of candles. No one noticed her come in and she leaned against the door examining the clusters of people sitting on the floor and perched on foldout chairs, all clutching an array of sketchbooks and notepads. Some scratched away with pencils or charcoal; here and there she noticed the flicker of a watercolour brush. A makeshift platform had been set up at the back of the studio and enthroned there, on the fat and ancient armchair, were a young man and woman both perfectly naked, the candlelight spilling shadows on their bare skin. The woman looked little more than a teenager, she had pale blonde hair (though not everywhere, Juliet couldn’t help but notice) and an adolescent thinness. She leaned against the man, her cheek flattened against his shoulder.

Juliet must have made some noise as all at once the heads swivelled to stare at her, and the girl on the platform shrieked and started to shout for a dressing gown. Juliet pinked with irritation. The girl had been naked before the crowd without displaying any sign of unease so Juliet couldn’t see what difference her presence made. The atmosphere created by the candles vanished in an instant as someone switched on the too-bright overhead lights. As the shrieking girl jammed her arms into the wrong sleeves of a dressing gown, Juliet grimaced. She felt like a boarding-school matron who’d stumbled into a dorm-room feast. The boy, however, made no attempt to conceal his nakedness and stood, hand on angular hip, gazing down at her.

‘Jim, Charlie, who’s that?’ he demanded, his voice shrill and imperious.

Charlie emerged from the crowd, having the grace to look sheepish. He turned to Juliet. ‘We didn’t think you were coming in this afternoon – my God, what on earth happened to your hair?’

Juliet raised a hand to stroke the unfamiliar volume on top of her head. It felt strange, not really part of her at all.

‘It’s a perm. Everyone is getting them,’ she said stiffly, daring him to say anything else. ‘And my hair is hardly the point. Who are all these people?’

Jim and Philip slipped out from among the strangers and hustled Juliet into the cramped kitchenette at the back of the studio. The boys fussed, boiling the kettle for instant coffee and looking by turns defiant and embarrassed.