Chapter 11

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

I was not sure whether to be impressed or appalled.

It was one thing to process the news that Alice Long was dead. How ought we to grieve for a woman whom we'd met only twice but who had changed our lives irrevocably?

To absorb what Patrick had done—immediately, instinctively, unilaterally—after learning of her death was something else entirely.

"Okay," I said. "Run me through all this one more time."

"Alice Long had no relatives, or at least none she left anything to. That's what the moving guy said. From the looks of things, the house was rented and the landlord wanted it empty as soon as possible, to let it to new tenants, so everything inside was being carted off to Ely Auction Rooms when I arrived. The proceeds from the sale are going to charity, the removal guy seemed to think. They weren't doing an inventory, as far as I could see—so I slipped in our Sphinx alongside a load of other pictures."

"So it's just... gone? You just gave it away? Without even consulting me?"

Patrick shook his head. "I know the Ely Auction Rooms. I know the kind of people who attend those auctions. If it was a print of a laughing cavalier or a Wedgwood tea set, it would be snapped up for well over the estimate. If it was a painting by Austen Willoughby, it would be gone in a shot. What I can promise you is that no one in that room will want some weird painting of a cat lady with six boobs by an artist none of them has heard of. So all we need to do is wait for it to come up in the sale—in a few weeks' time, probably—and we buy it."

"With what?"

"I've got a bit of money my mother's parents left me."

"And then what?" I asked. "What happens after we buy back the painting you have just given away?"

"Then Self-Portrait as Sphinx has a solid paper trail. A provenance. Bought fair and square, at auction, by us—at an auction house in the very same county as the painting's last recorded location at Longhurst. It is not stolen goods, it's a sleeper legitimately bought by two lucky art-hunting students who just happened to know what they were looking at. Our supporting evidence? The journal you found in the Willoughby Bequest, the photograph we found in the Witt."

He sounded proud of himself. "Our receipt and its date will be verifiable, and the auction records will show the painting came from somebody who can't tell anyone where she acquired it because—"

"She's dead," I said.

Patrick did have the decency to look a little embarrassed by this. "She's dead, and we're about to rewrite art history, just like she wanted," he said.

It was his idea that we should attend the funeral, which was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. It was held on a gray Thursday afternoon, in a crematorium out on the edge of the Fens. We were the only guests in the redbrick chapel where the celebrant gave a brief talk about Alice Long's life and career before pressing a button that closed the curtains around the coffin.

Then we waited.

The Ely Auction Rooms were located in a large dusty shed on a small industrial estate. Patrick drove us there every Friday so we could scour the aisles, and when we'd finished we'd stop at the Four Horseshoes pub for lunch on the way home. Sometimes we talked about our dissertations, the new supervisors we had been assigned. Sometimes we talked about Freddie, still missing, the police having failed to find any trace of him at Longhurst or in any of the bodies of water they had dredged.

Sometimes we talked about how Harry was coping with it all. About Athena, who was still not speaking to me, who had still not responded to any of the messages I had left, the long letter I had written her. I was sorry, I kept repeating. If she needed me, when she needed me, I would be waiting. She stalked right past me in college, and on the rare occasions she turned up to a lecture she pointedly ignored any empty seats near me. Give her time, said Patrick. Give her space. The day after I put the letter through her door, I found it returned, unopened, in my cubby.

As the weeks passed, with the end of term rapidly approaching, I did start losing faith a little in Patrick's plan. There was still no sign of any of the stuff from Alice Long's house clearance at the auction rooms. I kept imagining the painting discarded in some trash bin somewhere. Patrick said we just had to be patient, although he always sounded more confident than he looked. He asked Eric Lam, a law student, what happened when someone died and left everything to charity. The gist was it all took a while—some time to apply for probate, then for an executor to distribute the assets as set out in the will. Not a complex process, unless there had been any questions surrounding the death or any challenges to the will. If things had gone smoothly, then where had Alice Long's auctionable effects gotten to? I asked. Patrick could not answer.

Then, one Friday, there it was.

Before starting our tour that day, we had skimmed as usual the cheaply photocopied catalogue for any mention of the painting we were looking for. Unhelpfully, the individual who compiled these things was not given to flowery descriptions. "Mahogany table." "Big jug." "Small jug." "Chair." We had been extremely excited one week to see "Picture: Big Cat." It had taken us an hour to find: a faded poster of a lion in a cracked frame with an asking price of ￡5. Today the descriptions were even more taciturn than usual: there were twenty-seven items listed only as "Medium Oil Picture" for us to look through.

"Shall we divide and conquer? We've been here an hour and we've still got about ten pictures left to tick off," I said. He looked a little put out, but nodded and then stalked off to the other end of the huge room.

It was all I could do not to squeal when I spotted it: a small collection of old cameras and lenses, piled in a battered cardboard box. I closed my eyes and mentally walked around Alice Long's cluttered living room, scanning up and down her bookcase in my head. Yes, I was sure of it—these had been on the top shelf.

Feeling suddenly lightheaded, I placed both palms on the desk next to me to steady myself, realizing that it, too, with its cracked leather top, had been in the house. Scanning the aisle, I could see that I was surrounded by remnants of the old lady's life. Lamps, umbrella stands, the very couch Patrick and I had sat on, all scattered around an unfamiliar room, all labeled with lot numbers. Things that had been chosen with care and intention, the accumulated effects of a woman who had been forgotten by everyone but us, now stripped of all context and meaning. And mixed in with all that were things that did not belong to Alice Long at all. A collection, in a basket, of dog leashes and water bowls. A stack of Punch annuals.

I felt a tap on the shoulder and spun around to see a very excited Patrick. Wordlessly, he grabbed me by the hand and led me to the end of the row, gesturing with a flick of his eyes to the back of a canvas that had been thoughtlessly shoved between a matching pair of threadbare armchairs. I knew it instantly from having handled it, and flung my arms around his shoulders.

"It's here," I whispered into his ear, feeling his breath hot against my cheek. "That's it!"

Patrick smiled and nodded and winked. Then he leaned in to give me a kiss, and I felt sure he must have felt the thump-thump-thump of my heart in my chest. Juliette Willoughby had believed—for reasons I could not fully fathom—that her family would stop at nothing to destroy this painting, take it from her, punish her for making it. For half a century it had been hidden away. Now, thanks to us, it was about to dazzle the world.

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Provincial auction houses always remind me of my childhood. The smells—of dust, of varnish, of musty coats. The cases of military uniforms and memorabilia, folding screens, old records, walking sticks. The occasional stuffed crocodile.

This was what Dad and I did together on weekends, the thing I used to look forward to all week: hopping in the car and driving off somewhere "to see what we can see," as Dad put it. Only when I was older did I work out that Saturday was the one day Dad did the childcare, and that his version involved doing exactly what he was going to do anyway, but with me in tow.

He would always know a few people in a place like Ely. He would exchange nods with the owners, other dealers. My father was known to have an eye, so people always asked if there was anything in particular he was interested in. "Just browsing" was always his response.

At the viewings, if there was a painting he was interested in (but did not want to seem too interested in), he would send me to look and tell him what I thought. By the time I was about eleven, he had trained me pretty well at this—I could explain with some degree of technical precision what sort of condition something was in, whether any of his regular clients might be interested in it. Once or twice, I had pointed out a painting he had overlooked and been rewarded with a fiver.

It was not therefore unfamiliar to me, the tingling excitement you get when you know that there is a lot coming up that you think is special and that you are pretty sure only you have noticed. Getting one over on everybody else, that's part of the tingle, too. Part of the psychological gamesmanship being never to let it show when you are excited about an item, the other part being not to let your enthusiasm overwhelm your better judgment. Never falling in love with something so hard you bid more than it is worth.

It was reassuring to see that there had not been much of a turnout for today's auction. We sat on our chairs, catalogues on our laps. There could not have been more than thirty other people, all of us waiting for someone to take to the rickety lectern on its raised podium. Caroline and I were the youngest people there by far. There was no one I recognized—none of my dad's colleagues or rivals. Some of these people looked like they had only come in to be out of the rain.

Then Giles Pemberton walked in.

Caroline noticed him first, and nudged me. Just as she did so he looked over and saw us. My heart sank. Giles Pemberton, from our year, from our course, the chap from dinner who had known all about Austen Willoughby's paintings and heard us talking about Juliette's.

Oh fuck, I thought to myself.

I asked him if he was interested in anything in particular. He showed us a pair of antique hand-painted porcelain spaniels. "Aren't they just the most horrible things you have ever seen? J'adore un petit chien moche. They're going to look absolutely ghastly on my mantelpiece."

Caroline smiled. I said he was not wrong.

"And what are you two here for? You know, I love to come to these things. I always dream that one of these days I'll spot a misattributed masterpiece, a genuine Willoughby."

For a moment, my whole body froze. Then I realized he was talking about Austen Willoughby, the dog painter. Or was he? Was that a test, to see how I reacted? All of us—Giles and Caroline and I—were smiling. Everyone was being conspicuously amused about how funny it was to have all bumped into each other here. What a strange coincidence.

My brain was spiraling in paranoid circles. Giles had been at the party. What if he had seen Caroline take the painting? Was there any reason he could possibly have to suspect that Self-Portrait as Sphinx still existed, and that we had found it? If he had stumbled across the painting here at the auction house, was there any way he could have put two and two together?

Caroline was telling Giles about a pair of earrings she was interested in. Smartly, I noted she had chosen an item far down the list of lots after the porcelain dogs that Giles was here for.

On the podium the auctioneer appeared—frizzy hair, bow tie, waistcoat—and the auction itself began. I had expected to be a little nervous. The presence of Giles had sent me for a loop.

This was not the sort of auction with formal paddles you raised to make an offer, I had explained to Caroline. Here, you just nodded or shook your head. Caroline made the same joke that most people make at their first auction about hoping she did not buy anything by accident by scratching her nose. All through the early bids she kept her arms carefully folded across her chest.

Our painting was lot number 76, and so we sat and watched as everything preceding it went under the hammer, most selling at a first and only bid, easing my nerves slightly. Giles got his dogs, at a snip. He trotted off to collect them, apologizing on his way down our row. We mouthed our goodbyes.

I don't think I have ever felt so relieved to see the back of anyone. Even after he had left to collect his dogs, I kept dreading he would come back, for a forgotten umbrella, to see if he had left something under his chair.

We were ten lots now from our painting. With each one that passed I could feel my pulse quicken. Was this really going to work? Ahead of me seemed to open whole vistas of possibility—the career dreams I had so boastfully told Caroline about in the first year suddenly within reach. What a start to both of our careers this would be, what a start to our lives together. I could just picture us, on the cover of the Cambridge Evening Post with our discovery, being interviewed with the painting on the local news: Caroline explaining the art historical significance of this discovery, the interviewer asking us to tell the amazing story of how we had spotted it. I was already imagining how I would break the news to my father, the mixture of pride and jealousy he would feel.

"Lot seventy-six," shouted the auctioneer from the podium finally. I took a deep breath and straightened in my seat. "Who will start me at twenty-five?"

I nodded. The auctioneer acknowledged this. He looked around the room. In the corner, a man at a desk was taking offers over the telephone from remote bidders. I saw him catch the auctioneer's eye, give a nod. The auctioneer acknowledged it. Back to me.

"Fifty," I said.

Back to the man with the phone. He said something into it and waited for a response. "Seventy-five," he said.

The auctioneer turned to me again. I nodded. "That's a hundred, then," said the auctioneer.

The man with the phone said, "One hundred and twenty-five."

I felt Caroline shift in her seat next to me. Her grip on my hand tightened.

"What's happening?" she asked me. "Who is that on the phone?"

Precisely the question I was asking myself. "I guess someone who saw it and liked it," I said.

There was no reason to get paranoid, I reminded myself. There was no reason to imagine we were bidding against someone who knew what lot 76 really was. The only people we had told about the journal were Athena, Harry, and Giles at dinner, and Alice Long, of course. The only person who knew about the photograph of the painting was Alice Long. Without having seen the photograph we had seen, there was no way anyone could have identified with confidence the painting we were bidding on as Juliette Willoughby's Self-Portrait as Sphinx.

When the bidding hit ￡250, I started to get twitchy. Never had I expected anyone else to show this much interest in our painting. In the whole world, Caroline and I had, between us, ￡1,087.96 exactly—and that was if we both emptied our bank accounts entirely.

The painting was expected to raise one to three hundred pounds, according to the catalogue. I was hopeful that the other bidder might therefore have set three hundred as their upper limit, and made a resolution to stop there. Alas, this proved to be wishful thinking. The bidding cruised straight through and past that sum without a pause. Now bidding was advancing in fifty-pound increments. Three-fifty, four hundred, four hundred fifty pounds. It was easy to forget this was real money, a third of all the money we jointly had in the world, in fact. Five hundred. Five-fifty. Six hundred.

I had seen this before at auctions, a bidding spiral, when the competitive instinct kicked in. Was that what had happened here? Not being able to see the opposing bidder, it was hard to tell. At least the pace of the escalation had slowed a little. Now each time the price went up, the man on the telephone spent a little time conferring with his client before he gave his approving nod. A hundred quid each time we were going up now. Seven hundred. Eight hundred. Nine.

A little gasp went around the room when we hit one thousand pounds. People who had been wandering around the rest of the building had begun to gather in the doorway of the auction room to watch.

Caroline's hand was clasping mine very tightly. My stomach lurched. It seemed to take almost no time for us to reach fifteen hundred pounds. The man with the phone had begun to showboat a little now, to add little pauses before bidding with a flourish, which annoyed me, since it was not his money at stake. I kept bidding. Seventeen hundred. Eighteen. I could speak to my father, explain the situation. I was not going to let this painting go for the sake of a few hundred quid.

"Patrick," Caroline whispered, when the bidding hit two thousand. "Patrick, what are you doing?"

Now every time the price of the painting went up—and it was doing so at leaps of two hundred fifty pounds—there was a collective intake of breath.

"I'll sell the car," I told her. "I'll sell that fucking car."

By the time the bidding had reached three and a half thousand, I had mentally sold the car, maxed out a credit card I didn't have, extended my overdraft. If I needed more money I would go to my dad. Caroline was shaking her head now, which meant that every time the auctioneer turned to me and I nodded, he would glance at her and then back at me, as if to ask: "Are you sure?"

I was sure. We had to get it. Because if we did not get it, it would be my fault. This had been my stupid plan. Thanks to me, this painting, lost for decades, might be about to vanish once more, into someone's private collection, and all the castles I had been building in the air—my future, Caroline's future, our future together—were in the process of dissolving.

If I were Caroline, I did not know if I would ever be able to forgive me. That was the worst feeling of all. I was not sure I would ever be able to forgive myself.

I had often wondered what it felt like for my father to have lost that Raphael. To spend your life trying not to think about how different things could have been. To live the rest of your days with that disappointment. Clinging, as a salve, to whatever small measures of social status you could—a friendship with a Willoughby, a son in Osiris, the best table in a restaurant.

At four thousand pounds it was clear that the other bidder was not going to stop, that they would keep going until they secured the painting. I could see Caroline looking again at the catalogue, the description of the painting, the guide price, as if there might be some answers there. The auctioneer turned to me. I shook my head. It was over. It was hard to believe, after all we had been through, but we had lost our painting.

"Gone for four thousand pounds to my bidder on the phone."