Chapter 1

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Oh bloody hell.That was my first thought as I plowed through an axle-deep puddle and turned onto Elm Lane, making out through my windshield a bedraggled figure, her blond hair hanging in dripping ringlets down her back. This was going to be awkward.

It was Caroline Cooper.

There seemed little doubt we were headed for the same place—why else would she be wandering up a windswept street on the outskirts of Cambridge on a weekday morning? My director of studies had mentioned that these final-year dissertation supervisions would be taking place à deux. He said he hoped that would not be a problem and I reassured him it would not be, vaguely hoping my supervision partner would be attractive, female. I should also have hoped for someone with whom I had not already slept.

She was standing at the end of a driveway, peering up it, presumably looking for a house number. I slowed the MG to a crawl. Even rain-soaked, she was stunning. I checked my own appearance in the rearview mirror. Caroline Cooper. What were the chances of that?

She and I had slept together twice, back at the very beginning of our first year. Once after a party, then again a few weeks later, having tipsily bumped into each other at a college dance. The first time was in her room, with its fairy lights around the mirror and Frida Kahlo poster on the wall. I recalled the narrowness of her bed, waking up in the night desperate for a pee but not wanting to disturb her or break the moment's spell, our legs entangled, her head on my chest.

The second time, we had meandered back to my room holding hands, stopping now and then to kiss in a doorway. Half that night we stayed up talking, drinking cheap white wine from chipped mugs and smoking out the window, surveying the moonlit quad below. Talking about Cambridge, her first impressions of it. Discussing art and artists. I told her stories about my father, about boarding school. It was obvious we were attracted to each other. It also felt like we were really connecting, as if this was the start of something very exciting indeed.

What happened next was... nothing. I left a note in her college cubbyhole. No reply. I kept an eye out for her in lectures. She began arriving just before they started and sitting on the opposite side of the lecture hall, then slipping off quickly at the end.

I turned that second night over and over in my mind, trying to pinpoint what I'd done wrong. Was it something I had said? I probably was a bit of a show-off in those days, keen to make an impression, establish myself as a bit of a Cambridge character. Driving around town in my silly sports car. Playing up to the public schoolboy thing, the floppy hair, the posh accent...

It quickly became obvious what while I may have felt a spark between us, Caroline had not. When we passed in the Art History Department corridors or she accidentally sat opposite me in the library, I received only the faintest of acknowledgments. Once or twice, I caught her crossing the street to avoid me. After a while, no matter how much you like someone, you have no choice but to take the hint.

I tapped the horn lightly and Caroline looked up. She recognized my car, of course—how many students tooled around Cambridge in a red MG convertible?—and forced an unconvincing smile. I pulled over and rolled the window down. It was not a situation in which we could just both ignore each other, after all.

"I suspect we're looking for the same place," I said.

"I think this is it," she replied. "Number thirty-two?"

"That was the address Dr. Bailey gave me."

The house certainly looked the part. Let's put it this way: either an academic lived here or the place was derelict. Slates were missing from the roof. The downstairs curtains were drawn. Something shrubby was sprouting from a sagging gutter. Caroline pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened.

"Are you sure you...?" I asked.

She invited me to try for myself. It was unclear if the buzzer was even connected to anything. Tentatively at first, then again more firmly, I knocked. Caroline took a step back to peer up at the first-floor windows.

"There are no lights on," she pointed out. "Do you think she's forgotten?"

"Maybe. She must be getting on a bit, after all. Have you ever heard of her, this Alice Long?"

I had not, although the university library did list three books by her—one on Man Ray, one on Brassa?, and another on the history of photojournalism. She had been a press photographer herself, for Time and Vogue, according to the author bio in the last of these, published in 1980. Even a decade ago, Alice Long had looked quite old in her author's headshot.

"Maybe she can't hear us," I said. "Do you think I should go around and shout over the back fence?"

"For God's sake," Caroline muttered behind me. "Who is this person, anyway? She isn't part of the faculty. She isn't affiliated with a college. Why is she supervising final-year dissertations? I might complain. This project is an important part of our degree, you know."

I could understand Caroline's anxiety. Even in the first year, she had been clear about how seriously she took her subject, what her end goal was: a life of scholarship, teaching, writing. I could easily see her as a cool young academic, inspiring her students, probably while wearing a leather jacket and red lipstick. Like a dickhead, trying to impress her, I had detailed my own career plans: a first-class degree, a job at Sotheby's, my own Mayfair gallery by the age of thirty. I must have sounded obscenely entitled and overconfident, but in my defense, I was eighteen. I said a lot of things out loud in those days that I have since learned to keep to myself.

Still, the bottom line was this: if we had been stuck with a dud supervisor and it impacted badly on our final-degree result, we could both kiss our respective dreams goodbye.

From the other side of the door, a bolt was pulled back with a screech. It was another few minutes before the door finally opened—in the meantime much fiddling with other locks could be heard.

"Hello there," I said loudly, I hoped reassuringly. "It's Patrick and Caroline. We're History of Art students. From the university."

The face in the doorway was wrinkled and sallow, topped with a tangle of white hair. Alice Long was wearing a brown pleated dress, gray knee-length socks, and a suspicious frown. She looked even older than I had been expecting.

"You're late," she said sternly.

"Sorry," I told her. "We have been knocking for a while..."

As I stepped into the hallway, I checked my hair in a foxed little wall mirror. Alice Long shuffled off, disappearing through an open door, obviously expecting us to follow her. In the gloom, I was vaguely aware of a Persian rug underfoot, dirt-darkened, threadbare. Framed black-and-white photographs hung on the wall, a thick layer of dust obscuring their subjects.

I let Caroline go ahead of me and when she reached the end of the corridor I saw her stiffen.

"Please," Alice Long said, indicating a very small sofa—a large armchair, really—with high sides. "Sit."

She settled on a wooden chair next to a table piled with books. Caroline and I sat gingerly on the sofa, trying to avoid touching each other. The room's net curtains were drawn, its main source of light an unshaded bulb hanging from a wire.

"So, Patrick," said Alice Long without preamble. "You're interested in Surrealism, are you?"

"Very interested," I said firmly, leaning forward to emphasize this, eager to make a good impression. "What fascinates me is the way Surrealist art fearlessly explores the inner workings of the mind. Its rejection of conformity and willingness to embrace the mythical and dreamlike. All those haunting, seemingly random scenes and images that seem to spring direct from the subconscious."

Alice Long smiled faintly, eyeing me intently.

"People always go on about Dalí and Magritte," I continued, "but the painter who really encapsulates the movement for me is Oskar Erlich."

This was clearly not something she had expected me to say. She raised a slightly surprised eyebrow and gestured for me to continue.

"Anyway, I want to focus my dissertation on the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, their last great show before the war. It was a huge media event, all the artists associated with the movement showing: Erlich, Picasso, Man Ray, Miró..."

Alice Long made a little gesture with her hand as if to say, I know all this.

"I intend to explore the way the exhibition was organized," I continued. "The manner in which it was publicized, its cultural impact."

She greeted this with a thoughtful frown. "You have a potentially interesting topic there. The argument will need development, though," she said.

"Oh, definitely," I said, a little crushed. Potentially interesting? Potentially interesting?

Alice Long then pivoted in her chair to ask Caroline what she was working on. Caroline cleared her throat, brought out her notebook, and started to read. It quickly became clear that she had done a lot more preparation than I had. She intended to explore Sphinxes in Surrealist art, she explained. She had notes on the different types of Sphinx (royal and monstrous, Greek and Egyptian), male and female, winged and unwinged. She made the point that we use the Greek word Sphinx—masculine, I interjected, pleased with myself—to describe interchangeably what were actually distinct and unrelated creatures in Greek and Egyptian mythology. She ended by saying something like: "And that's as far as I have got, Sphinx-wise."

Alice Long—engaged, enthusiastic, a lot livelier than when I had been talking—asked her which particular works she would write about. Caroline mentioned Max Ernst's Une Semaine de bonté, Dalí's Three Sphinxes of Bikini, Leonor Fini's Little Hermit Sphinx ...

"What about Juliette Willoughby's Self-Portrait as Sphinx?" asked Alice Long.

"Oh yes, of course," said Caroline, although with a trace of hesitation in her voice.

If that was a line of inquiry Caroline was interested in pursuing, Alice Long continued, she should examine the Willoughby Bequest. "It's a collection of Egyptological materials formerly in the possession of the Willoughby family deposited at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, here in Cambridge," she explained, in response to Caroline's confused frown. Caroline wrote this down and as she did so glanced at me meaningfully. I offered her in return the facial equivalent of a hapless shrug.

Juliette Willoughby? The Willoughby Bequest? Was Alice Long being serious? Like most people with an interest in the Surrealists, I knew only two things about Juliette Willoughby, the most obvious being that she had been Oskar Erlich's lover. All his biographies recounted their love story and its tragic ending.

This had to be some sort of test. If it was not, then I really did think we were going to have to talk seriously to our respective directors of studies about this supervisor they had assigned us. From the look on Caroline's face, she was thinking the same thing. I raised my hand.

"Mr. Lambert?" Alice Long said curtly.

"Isn't there a bit of a problem, for anyone planning to write about Juliette Willoughby?" I asked. Because there was only one other thing everyone knew about the artist and her work. "Her paintings don't exist." I continued. "None of them. Everything she produced at art school was lost when she left England for Paris in 1936. Self-Portrait as Sphinx, the only thing she ever exhibited publicly, is listed in the catalogue of the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition and described in a couple of reviews, but that's it. Not a single photograph of it survives, none of her sketches or studies, and the painting itself was destroyed in a fire in Paris in 1938."

The same unexplained fire that killed both Juliet Willoughby and Oskar Erlich.

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Philophobia. That's the technical term for it. A fear of falling in love. A chronic fear of falling in love. I didn't know it even had a name back then, but thanks to Patrick Lambert, I knew its symptoms well enough: panic attacks, dizziness, nausea, a feeling that your throat is closing up and you are about to pass out. Every time you think about someone, or how much you like them.

The first time I met Patrick, I was instantly smitten. The dark curls, the hooded green eyes, the lopsided grin that poked a dimple in one cheek. He was funny, smart. Unlike a lot of the boys I had met at Cambridge, when he asked you a question, he genuinely listened to your answer.

The second time we slept together, we were both quite drunk. We kissed on the dance floor. We kissed on the quad. We kissed in his room, unable to keep our hands off each other, then sat, sheets wrapped around our naked bodies, talking and laughing for hours. He told me how it felt being sent off to boarding school at the age of seven, suddenly surrounded by larger, louder, more confident boys and desperately missing home. I listened intently, deftly deflecting his questions about my own childhood.

"Hey, I really like you," he said at one point, casually cool, bumping bare shoulders affectionately.

"I really like you too," I said back truthfully, although even then I could feel my spine stiffening, my stomach tightening. Because how many times had I heard from my grandmother about what a brilliant, joyful girl my mother had been, growing up. About her painting, her drawing, all the competitions she had won. All the friends she had, all the hopes and ambitions, before she met my father. How many times had I promised myself I would never allow anyone to stand between me and what I wanted to achieve? No matter how much I liked them. No matter how tousled their hair, how appealing their dimple.

Perhaps I could have handled things better, tried to explain all this to Patrick. But where would I have begun? How could I have explained something that I could not yet put a name to?

Even now, it is hard to describe the roil of emotions, the hot surges of embarrassment and alarm, of horror and happiness, that I felt when Patrick pulled up outside Alice Long's house and it dawned on me we would be meeting like this all year. I spent quite a lot of that first hour-long supervision trying to work out if I could politely decline a lift back into town. Then we got outside and saw the weather.

The drizzle had turned into a downpour. Patrick was standing a step ahead of me on the porch, trying unsuccessfully to angle his umbrella so it sheltered us both from the rain.

"Can I offer you a ride?" he asked.

"Um, well..." I hesitated, aware of how long I'd had to wait for a bus out here.

"On a count of three, then," said Patrick. We ran to the car in attempted lockstep under the umbrella, his bag bumping between us.

I had never been in a sports car before and was unprepared for the intimacy of the experience. How close to each other we were sitting. The way that every time he changed gear, his hand brushed my knee. Just like in the supervision, I tried not to think about the last time we had been this physically proximate.

By the time we approached the center of town, the rain was even worse, bouncing off the car windows, hammering on the roof. When we stopped at a set of traffic lights, Patrick turned and fixed me with a serious look. "So what do you make of Alice Long, then?"

"Well, she's certainly... unusual."

"That's an understatement."

"I also think she's kind of... amazing? All that stuff she was saying about Juliette Willoughby?"

There had been moments over the last three years, in lectures, in seminars, when it felt like my whole world was being tilted slightly on its axis. When things I had unquestioningly accepted my whole life suddenly came apart to reveal their constituent components and they all fitted together, or else disintegrated entirely. When the thing that everyone took for granted turned out to be not the end of the discussion but the start of a much more important one. Had Juliette's masterpiece been lost? Maybe so, Alice Long had conceded. But what does it mean to say lost? Lost why? By whom? Are you happy—her bright eyes burned into mine as she asked—to simply accept that? Her Self-Portrait as Sphinx was personally selected for the exhibition by André Breton—the pope of Surrealism himself, the movement's great theorist and propagandist. Contemporary reviewers compared her talent to that of Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, Alice Long reminded us. Why not reexamine those reviews, the letters and diaries of Juliette's Paris circle? There must be mention of her work somewhere. Lost? Pfft, Alice Long exclaimed. Lots of things in the world are only lost because no one has bothered to look for them.

It sounded like a challenge. It sounded like a life's work. It made me think of my own mother and her dreams of becoming an artist, and all the overlooked, underappreciated women like her over the centuries.

Patrick did not seem to have found all this quite as inspiring as I did.

The windshield wipers swept back and forth, squeaking. He mused in silence for some minutes. "Lots of Oskar Erlich's work was lost in that fire too, you know," he said defensively.

"Exactly Alice Long's point! Lots of his work was lost but lots survives, because he spent pretty much his entire career being celebrated and collected and written about in books that barely mention Juliette, let alone the fact that she was an artist in her own right."

The light turned green and we sped off, Patrick careering through a massive puddle and soaking from head to toe a student in an orange raincoat. In the rearview mirror I could see him shaking himself down, staring after us. I turned in my seat to mouth an apology.

"Here we are," said Patrick, flicking the indicator too late as he swerved over to the other side of the road. "The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology."

It was time to lay my cards on the table. "Patrick, had you ever heard of it before, this Willoughby Bequest? Have you any idea what Alice Long thinks I'm going to find there?"

He smiled. "I do know a little about it," he said. One of his hands was resting loosely atop the steering wheel. The other was on the stick, ready to shift his car into gear. "Have you ever read anything about Juliette's family and their history?"

"Not much. I know the Willoughbys were well-off. Her father, Cyril, was an MP, wasn't he?"

"And a collector of Egyptian artifacts. He filled an entire wing of his house with them. Quite an eccentric, by all accounts, and a bit of a recluse in his later years. He's buried at Longhurst Hall, the family estate, in a mausoleum he commissioned, supposedly a scale model of the Pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, the oldest known pyramid in Egypt."

"So Alice Long wants me to explore if there is a personal angle to Juliette's interest in Sphinxes?"

"I'd imagine so, and in that case this Willoughby Bequest would certainly be a good place to start. When Juliette's father died, Longhurst Hall and his collection all went to his youngest brother, Austen, Juliette's uncle. Who kept the house but off-loaded the Egyptian stuff to the University of Cambridge."

"And that's how it ended up here?" I gestured out the window to the looming redbrick building that Patrick's car was currently double-parked outside, hazard lights flashing.

"Exactly. As it happens, my dad was at Cambridge with Austen's son Philip. And I was at school with his son, Harry."

Of course you were, I thought. It was still astonishing to me, after three years as a student here, how frequently and how casually people like Patrick would slip this sort of thing into conversation. That his father had been at Cambridge with Juliette Willoughby's cousin. That Patrick had been at school with his son. Like my friend Athena Galanis, who halfway through a Picasso lecture had told me she was pretty sure her father had at one point owned the painting in the slide. Like the boy in a second year tutorial whose uncle turned out to have written the definitive work on the week's topic (Flemish Mannerism in the Early Sixteenth Century). It was a small world and it felt very distant from the one I grew up in.

"The thing is," Patrick continued, "even Philip and Harry can't quite explain what happened. Because the family never even tried to sell what Cyril spent decades accumulating, although it was worth a fortune. They just gave it all away. Which, if you knew the Willoughbys and what they're like about money..."

Someone trying to squeeze their car past us down the street honked their horn. "Okay, okay! Keep your wig on," Patrick muttered over his shoulder. He returned his attention to me.

"The rumor is that the Willoughbys wanted to get rid of all that stuff because—well, they have had a lot of bad luck, that family. Odd and unfortunate things have happened in that house."

"Patrick, are you seriously trying to tell me they believed the collection was cursed?" I asked.

He shrugged stagily. I opened the car door and climbed out.

Patrick rolled down the window and rested his elbow on the frame. "I guess all I am saying is"—he dropped into a parody of a horror movie voice, adding a little creak and echo to his words—"be careful, Caroline!"

He grinned and winked, then revved the engine and sped away, and with a slight tingle of apprehension—and a lurch of the stomach—and perhaps just a touch of annoyance I realized just how attractive I still found Patrick Lambert.

FIVE HOURS LATER, MY excitement about working on Juliette Willoughby, and much of my enthusiasm about working with Alice Long, was wearing off. The library was airless and silent. Through the windows, the gloom of an autumn afternoon was deepening rapidly to night.

As far as I could see, the Willoughby Bequest was a mess. The first thing the librarian—an elderly woman with striking blue eyes and a somewhat suspicious manner—had asked me was which part exactly I wanted to view. I must have looked blank. She explained that the bequest was divided into three parts: the artifacts, some of which were on display in the museum upstairs; the many papyri (very fragile, not accessible without special permission); and the seventy-two boxes of unsorted general material, unlabeled, undated. Assuming this was where anything relevant to Juliette and her interest in Sphinxes would be, I asked for this unsorted ephemera first.

It was possible this had been a mistake.

The boxes seemed to contain the entire contents of Cyril Willoughby's study. Old letters. Handwritten notebooks full of hieroglyphs. Notepaper from Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. One by one, the librarian brought these boxes up from the bowels of the building. One by one, I combed through them, trying to give the appearance of someone who knew what they were looking for. She explained that a new archivist, a PhD student, had been hired to put it all into some sort of order. His name was Sam Fadel and if I had any questions I should look him up.

After five hours and nineteen boxes, I was getting increasingly frustrated with the whole process. Promising myself that if I managed to sift through them all I could at least tell Alice Long I'd done my best, I began lifting the next battered manila carton's contents out item by item and placing them on the table. More letters, invoices. More notebooks. Then a tattered envelope caught my attention, M et Mme Cyril Willoughby written in looping script on the front. It was heavier than I had been expecting, when I picked it up, and much more intriguing than anything else I had yet come across.

Easing the envelope open carefully with my thumb, I tipped it and out slithered a thin gold chain—a necklace, with a pendant attached. The pendant was beaten gold, oval-shaped, about two inches long, etched on one side with an elaborately stylized representation of an eye: a long, curving line to represent an eyebrow, a line sweeping back from the eye's rear corner, terminating in a curl.

I could also feel the outlines of two book-like objects inside the envelope. One had a grainy texture, and I shimmied this out first. It was a navy blue British passport, the royal coat of arms embossed on the front. Handwritten, in block letters, in the little lozenge-shaped window at the bottom, was "Miss Juliette Willoughby."

I let the passport fall open, and from the photograph page the most extraordinary face stared back at me—wide-awake, icy eyes; thick, arched eyebrows; a full mouth set in a hard line; a young woman with a dusting of freckles. Juliette's wild tumble of curls filled almost the entire frame. I turned the pages and found Juliette's signature and two stamps, one for Rome (1935), one for Paris (1936). It was a stark reminder that she had been a real, living person, just like me. That with this in her hand, she might have imagined traveling all around the world, and instead...

Hands quivering, I placed the passport on the desk and slid from the envelope a fragile-looking notebook, its unlined pages filled (as I discovered when cautiously I opened it) not just with dated diary entries but sketches and studies. Charcoal drawings of a Sphinx, the artist's fingers dragged across the page to contour the creature's eyes, lips, mane. Intricate pencil compositions, the same characters over and over placed in different scenes. Interspersed between these, passages of text in spidery, barely legible cursive handwriting. On the back pages there were daubs of color, each with a number and a scribbled comment next to it.

On the flyleaf, in fountain pen, someone had written the initials "J. W." and an address in Paris.

I traced the letters with a finger. Their curves. Their swirls.

J. W.

Juliette Willoughby.

I turned the pages carefully, terrified that the brittle paper would crack or crumble, until I came to the first entry. It began: 11th November 1937—It is almost midnight. I am writing this in bed....