Chapter 19

PATRICK, DUBAI, THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

Being in a cell with no windows and no clock does strange things to your sense of time. Overhead strip lights that are never turned off. Doors slamming, keys jangling, men shouting, crying, praying.

Dinner last night was watery curry with rice, delivered in a plastic container, with a stack of metal bowls and no cutlery. After we had finished—all silently shoveling food into our mouths with unwashed hands—a small pile of thin blankets arrived, but only enough for half of us. We tried to make ourselves comfortable for the night on the floor with spare clothing as pillows. I settled back against the wall with my head on my knees, arms wrapped around them to ward off the icy chill of the air-conditioning.

As I sat there, I tried to shake off the numbness, but still could not force my brain to process that Harry had been murdered, that somehow my fingerprints were on the broken champagne glass used to slash his throat. It felt like a nightmare, but the one thing I knew, as I shifted position again to stop my back from seizing up entirely, was that I was not asleep. Was I being set up for some reason? Harry was being blackmailed, I told the police. Maybe he had confronted the blackmailer and there had been a struggle. That was what they should be investigating. Did I have any evidence that such a person existed, they had asked. I was forced to admit I did not.

Breakfast is dates washed down with water from the few bottles the guard left on the floor, and I am about to take a swig when my name is called. Before they open the cell door, they make me hold my arms out and cuff me—the first time they've bothered to do so. Then I am led down a corridor with a series of small, high windows, faint daylight filtering through. The guard barks something at me and, when it becomes clear I don't understand Arabic, grabs me by the shoulder and turns me to face the wall. Another door is unlocked before I am forcibly turned back around and bodily steered through it.

This room in which I find myself is almost identical to the room in which I was first interviewed. There is a single high window, frosted reinforced glass. A table. Two chairs. On one of them is Sarah. The guard directs me to the chair opposite her. I can tell from her reaction, and the way she quickly tries to mask it, that I must look even more terrible than I feel.

I place my cuffed wrists on the table and her eyes flick to my fingernails, which still have last night's dinner caked underneath. I give her a reassuring smile. Her face hardens slightly. She knows, I understand from this. She knows about Caroline and me. Or at least she suspects.

"I'm so sorry, Sarah."

She does not meet my gaze. Her eyes look sore and puffy. Her lips look chewed.

"The police came to the house last night," she tells me. "They didn't leave until dawn. They were going through your office, looking through your filing, at your bank statements. They asked about your movements on the night Harry was murdered. I told them that I was working in Abu Dhabi at a wedding, no phones allowed," she says, slowly, raising her gaze to fix me with an ice-cold stare.

I nod.

"I said that you left me a message to tell me about the painting's sale and that you were about to drive home, and I am sure you did just that. I told them there was no way my husband was capable of murder. That the very idea was ludicrous."

She pauses. "That was when they told me about the CCTV footage from the hotel, Patrick. They know when you arrived there. They have you in the lobby, getting into the elevator. They have you leaving the elevator again just after three in the morning. Three in the morning, Patrick."

I start to speak. She stops me. "They know you're lying to them, Patrick. And they think the reason is that you murdered Harry. But I know why you were really there."

I let my head drop. I close my eyes. I deserve this. In some ways I deserve all of this. "Sarah. I'm so, so sorry. I never meant..."

I trail off. It doesn't matter what I meant or didn't mean, it matters what I did, and with whom. I have chosen the worst way possible to break my wife's heart. I have cheated on her with the most hurtful possible person I could cheat on her with.

One of the things I could never quite forgive my father for was the way that each of his affairs poisoned a whole crop of seemingly unrelated memories. "How long?" was what my mother always demanded to know, on discovering his latest illicit dalliance. Meaning which holidays, which Christmases and anniversaries have you sat and smiled through knowing you were sleeping with someone else. Meaning which of the times you said you were working late and missed school plays or bedtimes or birthdays were because you had been sleeping with someone else. Meaning how many times have you said you loved me and been sleeping with someone else. Now Sarah must be going back through all our happiest moments together, our whole life here, and wondering if the entire time I had been pining for Caroline.

"I know you, Patrick. You're not as hard to read as you evidently think. I always knew that the only way this would work, with us, is if we stayed in Dubai." She is choosing her words carefully. "I knew that it wasn't over with her, even if you didn't. That she was someone who still took up space in your head. So I'm not surprised. But I am angry, I am hurt, and I—"

Her voice catches. "It could have been nice, Patrick. Ours could have been a really lovely, happy life."

She swallows, rubs at the corner of her eye. "I have a message for you. From Tom. He is at the embassy right now. His law firm has a fixer, and they are trying to get him in here, to speak to you, but he has told me to warn you it all takes time."

"Thank you," I say, smiling weakly.

"I am not going to come here again to visit. When you get out, whenever you get out, I don't know if I'll be able to forgive you, or if I even want to. But if there is any chance of us working through this, I have to ask you something, and I need you to give me an honest answer," she says.

I nod.

"Are you still in love with her?"

What I want to say is whatever will hurt Sarah the least, something about how it is possible to stop loving someone, or to persuade yourself you have stopped, and then start again without meaning to. That to have loved the same person twice at two different points in time does not mean that everything you felt in between was invalid. I want to tell her that I know loving someone, anyone, is no excuse for the damage I have done.

"All I want is the truth, Patrick."

As I am thinking about all the many things I want to say, I see that they are all just different ways of saying the same thing. That I am still in love with Caroline Cooper. I look into Sarah's eyes and my own start to swim a little. Even though I know it means the end of my marriage, my second marriage, I nod once, giving Sarah the answer she already knows is coming.

CAROLINE, DUBAI, THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER HARRY'S DEATH

It is now a full twenty-four hours since Patrick was arrested. I have left the hotel just once since yesterday afternoon, to buy painkillers for the headache lodged between my temples.

I have the unshakable feeling that if I just think about everything hard enough, an explanation will present itself. Pacing the room, raking over the past few days' events in my mind, what I can't figure out is who would want Harry dead—and who might benefit from framing Patrick for it. Nor have I fathomed how there can be two equally authentic versions of the same painting, and how this and Harry's death might be related.

All my books and papers are on the desk in the corner of the room—my original, lovingly transcribed version of Juliette's journal, my pictures of both paintings, a copy of my biography of Juliette, feathered with sticky notes. From time to time I pick one of them up as if the answer might lie there. The sudden loud ringing of the telephone next to the bed is so unexpected it startles me.

"There is a gentleman for you at reception," a voice brightly informs me. Presuming it's the police with more questions, I reluctantly head downstairs, taking the long way around to avoid Harry's room. In the lobby, a tall man in a dark suit and mirrored sunglasses is waiting for me.

"I've been instructed to take you to the Airport Freezone, madam. Mr. White will be meeting us there," he says, before ushering me outside to a silver Rolls-Royce Phantom. So he is not a policeman. He has been sent by Dave White—someone I still can't help but think of as Terry—to fetch me, as we had previously discussed but I had subsequently forgotten, to come and spend some more time with the painting he had bought.

I suppose it should not surprise or irritate me as much as it does that Dave White plans to store it in a Freezone. Such designated districts around the world are often where billionaires stash their assets, places where business can be conducted untroubled by taxes, customs duties, or VAT. Their impenetrable chambers can hold everything from vintage cars to fine wine to watches in temperature-controlled secrecy. I do sometimes wonder what those artists in their freezing cold Paris studios would think if they could see where their work had ended up all these decades later.

The drive does not take long.

From the road, the Freezone looks like a security installation, with its barbed-wire-topped fences, its floodlights, its sequence of gates and sentry boxes, the absence of windows on the concrete buildings themselves. The driver presses a buzzer and announces our arrival, then parks outside a nondescript door. I'm led into a marble foyer and from across her desk—enormously long, like the control panel of a spaceship—a woman gestures for me to sit, and makes a brief phone call.

After a few moments, a door at the far end of the room swings open and Dave White walks out.

Patrick had told me that when they met for lunch, Dave was wearing boardshorts. At the gallery dinner, he was in an immaculately cut navy suit. Today he is in a nondescript T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. The only thing about him that suggests his wealth is the enormous Rolex on his wrist.

"Thank you so much for coming, especially under the circumstances," he says, holding out a hand for me to shake, then leads me along the corridor of numbered doors. "I was so shocked to hear about Harry, and about Patrick," Dave says, without turning. "If there is anything I can do..."

He stops, and the chauffeur, who has been following discreetly behind us, overtakes us to tap in a keycode. The door slides open, and inside is a gallery-like space with a white leather sofa in the middle. Hanging around us, carefully spaced and beautifully lit, are paintings by the best-known names in twentieth-century art. I can see a Chagall, a Duchamp, a couple of Erlichs, and several Picassos. And there, on the far wall of the room: Self-Portrait as Sphinx.

Then I realize what is hanging next to it, and gasp. I turn to see Dave, amused by my shock, grinning.

"That's the painting from Tate Modern. The other Self-Portrait as Sphinx."

"The painting that is usually in Tate Modern, yes. Except that last week, given the confusion about the existence of two seemingly genuine versions of the same work—which I am quite aware is a chronological impossibility, by the way—its anonymous owner decided to withdraw it from public display pending further analysis," he says. He is now grinning very widely indeed.

"You? You're its anonymous owner?" I say. I had always imagined the person who outbid us for the painting in Ely to be someone older, an amateur art-lover with a little money saved up or a connoisseur who got lucky. Not some teenage nerd. Not Terry.

"I am. I own both these paintings. One of them I bought from Patrick Lambert for forty-two million, forty-eight hours ago. The other I bought from under his nose, for quite a lot less, in 1991."

"You were the telephone bidder at the auction? How?" Even as I say this, I know that we must have somehow led him to it. "Also: Why?"

I stumble over to the sofa as Dave pours a glass of water, places it gently onto the coffee table in front of me, and takes a seat himself.

"To be perfectly honest, I bought it to fuck with Patrick, because I hated him."

"You hated Patrick? You hardly knew Patrick."

"That was the worst of it. I hardly knew him, he hardly knew me, and still I could hear him through the wall, making fun of me."

"Dave, I'm sure you're imagining—"

"No, I'm not imagining anything. You know I'm not. Patrick used to joke about me all the time. About my snoring. About what I was doing in my room late at night. About me being your boyfriend. I would be in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, you would come in to grab something, say hello, and the rest of the evening I could hear him teasing you about your boyfriend Terry. It was a running joke, that someone like you would ever consider going out with someone like me."

That did all sound vaguely familiar, now that he mentioned it.

"And that was how you knew we had the painting? That Patrick put it up for auction? You were listening through the wall?" My heart racing, I am trying to work out all the other things he might have heard.

"It would have been impossible not to eavesdrop, actually. Given the thinness of the walls. Given that it never seemed to occur to Patrick to moderate his volume, that there might be someone trying to get some studying done just a few feet away from you. I knew you were looking for a painting at Longhurst. I knew you found it and took it. I heard you fight endlessly about what to do with it. I listened when Patrick told you how he planted the painting in the back of a removal truck, and I heard him explain his whole marvelously stupid plan, and I wrote down the name of the auction house. And I just thought, what a way to pay him back. Because he was so clearly in love with you, and when his scheme backfired, I was certain you would dump him. I still can't quite believe you didn't, to be honest."

I am staring at the painting from the Tate, trying to take this all in.

"I heard him say when the sale was, what your budget was. I had some cash—from share trading. I used to dabble back then, late at night, as you know—you could probably hear me tapping away, turning years of saved-up birthday money into a nice little pot to play with."

"But if you wanted to screw Patrick over, why not crow about the painting once you'd bought it—at least to him?" I ask, astonished he could keep a secret like that for so long, resist the temptation to advertise his own cleverness.

He squirms a little under my gaze. "I wanted you to dump Patrick, not to hate me. To think he was a dick, not that I was. I am sorry if I hurt you in the process. I know that you've been through some... stuff in your life," he says, at least having the decency to look apologetic.

I feel a sudden wave of revulsion. If he had been listening through the wall all that time, he probably knew things about me that I had never told anyone apart from Patrick. Some of which my grandmother had not even told me until I left for Cambridge.

Such as that until my eighteenth birthday, when I reached the age of majority, my father had remained in a position of legal authority over me. That when I had gone on a school trip to France, it was his permission that had to be sought. That if I had fallen seriously ill, he would have had a say in my medical treatment. Perhaps Dave had also heard me describe the devastation I felt when my grandmother explained that a life sentence does not mean the rest of a person's life, no matter how terrible the crime they had committed. That I had to learn to live with the knowledge that someday, my father might try to find me.

I was twenty-six when he was released.

Cooper is my mother's maiden name, and Caroline is my middle name, which perhaps made me slightly trickier to track down. Still, I knew that if he put his mind to it, it would not be hard. He had done so before, after all. But years passed, and nothing. I could not fathom why this silence upset me so much, and then eventually the penny dropped: the only circumstance in which my father would not try to reinsert himself into my life was if he had a new family now. And that was the most horrifying thought of all.

There is a simple reason why I tell no one about my childhood. From the snatches of my story he heard through a wall, Dave might think he knows me, but there is no way he could begin to understand all the ways in which my father's crime has shadowed my life—nor my determination not to let it define me.

Abruptly I get up and cross the room to where the paintings are hanging, to inspect first one and then the other, and to hide the tears of fury collecting at the corners of my eyes.

"What made you decide to loan your painting to the Tate?" I said, trying to smooth over the catch in my voice. "Was that just to rub Patrick's nose in it?"

Dave White frowns and shakes his head. "I did it for you, Caroline. I must admit, when I first bought Self-Portrait as Sphinx at that auction, I had no idea what it was. I didn't even really look at it for years—I wasn't much of an art fan back then, let alone a collector. Then I read your book. You'd done incredible research, written a brilliant biography, but as far as anyone knew Juliette's painting no longer existed, so only a few other art historians cared. Who wants to buy a book about a painter with no paintings? I felt bad, and I was in a position to do something about it."

He pauses a moment, smiling to himself. "And having the painting turn up like that did wonders for your book sales, didn't it? Of course, having Self-Portrait as Sphinx accepted into a national institution also increased the painting's value exponentially. And now with the publicity around there being two genuine, near-identical works, authenticated by the world expert, the value of both is bound to soar further..."

"You wanted me to authenticate the second painting?" I ask incredulously. I had assumed that whoever owned the original would be hoping the opposite.

"Yes. Although I'd rather not have spent quite as much on it," he concedes. "I was a little annoyed that Athena's client was so lavish in his offer. I thought I knew all of the serious Surrealist collectors, but that guy came out of nowhere."

"So it was you. You sent me those photos. You tried to blackmail me!" I said slowly, searching his face for a reaction.

He looked genuinely confused. "I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You were the only one apart from Patrick who knew I was looking for Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Harry's party. You must have heard us talking about it through that wall," I say, processing it aloud. "You followed me to see whether I found it, didn't you? You were there, with my shawl, after Harry's Granny got upset. You were there the morning after, by Patrick's car. You kept tabs on me the whole time. You took those photos. I saw the flashes, but I didn't realize what they were until a set of pictures arrived in the mail last week. You made a deliberate attempt to influence my professional opinion with a threat to expose me."

He laughs. It starts as a giggle and turns into huge, shoulder-shaking guffaws. Tears roll down his face.

"My God, you have no idea how rich I actually am, do you? People as wealthy as me don't need to extort art historians. Or anyone else, for that matter. Only desperate people blackmail. I could have paid three times what I did for that painting without even blinking," he says matter-of-factly.

"This, all of this," he says, gesturing around the room, "is a hobby. A passion project. And besides, your authentication was never, strictly speaking, necessary. Do you know how I made my money, Caroline? My business is training computer systems—it's what I'd have told you I was working on at Cambridge, had you ever asked. I was based in the Vision Lab, programming neural networks to identify patterns and recognize images."

It must be clear from my face that I am not quite grasping all the connections here. Dave smiles patiently, perhaps a little patronizingly.

"I make systems that can identify faces, even when they are partly obscured—say if someone is wearing dark glasses or a burqa. For my own interest—a sort of hobby, if you will, albeit quite a lucrative one—I've also created systems that identify a particular painter's technique, flagging when the imprimatur of the artist on one work aligns exactly with another. So I know with close to one hundred percent certainty that these two paintings were undertaken by the same hand. Juliette Willoughby's."

I had heard about tech like this—although it was viewed with condescension and suspicion by the art world. What I had never heard of was the person who invented the tech being the collector who used it.

"I am not dismissing your expertise, Caroline, but with this AI I can do exactly the same thing faster and more objectively than any art historian."

"So why am I here, then?" I say, finding it hard to stay entirely composed. "So you can show me all the art you can afford to buy because a computer tells you to?"

He looks pained. "Of course not. It was your book that got me interested in Surrealist art in the first place. The reason I've brought you here is because I own both these paintings and you are the only person in the world who can explain how they are both genuine works by the same artist. Because if anyone is ever going to know why there are four differences between them and what those differences mean, it is you."

There is a moment of silence, both of us looking up at the paintings. "You spotted all four?"

"Of course. I may not have studied art history, but I do look at the paintings I own. I noticed all four of them right away. The hieroglyphics. The mummified body in the boat. The boatman's beak. The pyramid on the island. All visible in the painting I have just bought, all overpainted in the one you stole from Longhurst."

"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.