Chapter 2

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

The day after our first supervision with Alice Long, I returned to my college room from a morning lecture to find a note under my door. My father had called and someone had jotted down a message from him: he was passing through town today on his way back from East Anglia and would be waiting to meet me for lunch at Browns at one o'clock. I checked my wristwatch. It was 12:45.

This was very much par for the course with Dad. Turning up unannounced. Expecting me to drop whatever plans I might have and meet him.

As a child, I idolized my father. He was handsome. He was stylish (the cars, the tailored blazers, the monogrammed silver hip flask: Q. M. for Quentin Lambert). He was conspicuously charming, with a considered opinion about everything (wine, art, London restaurants). He was also, it turned out, a deeply unreliable serial philanderer.

As we were being shown to our seats, Dad immediately started flirting with the waitress, trying to upgrade our table. I sighed inwardly. It was one of the things I had told Caroline about my father, his obsession with always trying to get a window table, a better table, the best table. A performance I had to endure every time we dined together. A chance to demonstrate his powers of persuasion. A way of drawing attention to himself.

We ended up—the two of us—at a six-seat table by the window, looking out on Trumpington Street.

Once we were settled and had ordered our drinks, the first thing he asked about was the car. Running okay, was she? I was taking good care of her, he hoped. Like a dream, I told him. Waxing her every week. It was a big symbol of my relationship with my father, that car. He'd bought it the day I received my Cambridge acceptance letter. On one hand, it had been an extravagantly generous gesture, one I suspected he could not really afford. On the other hand, it was also a massive pain in the backside. Finding somewhere safe to park it. Never knowing on cold mornings if it would start. Having a car at all in a place where I was never more than a ten-minute walk from anywhere else I wanted to be. When I had tried to explain all this to Caroline, she had asked me why I did not just sell it. She had a point. She also did not know my father.

The next thing Dad asked was how my studies were going. He wanted to know all about my dissertation, my supervisor. Although I had not mentioned this to Alice Long, it was actually my father—an art dealer himself—who had first got me interested in the Surrealists, when he took me to the Oskar Erlich retrospective in London a few years back, and who had suggested the 1938 Paris Surrealist Exhibition might provide an interesting topic for a dissertation. He had also encouraged me to think about my chosen topic in career terms, as a chance to establish myself as the expert in some corner of art history no one else seemed very interested in.

Over our starters, Dad explained why he'd been in East Anglia (a house clearance just beyond Norwich—he was there to value things on behalf of the family, make sure nothing valuable accidentally got sold for a song, or if it did, that it was to him). He had popped into Longhurst on the way back to see Philip Willoughby. There were a few things at the house that Philip had wanted him to value. He had, as usual, stayed in the Green Room, the bedroom he always stayed in at Longhurst, and which by some weird tradition Harry's mother also now always put me in. This was the sort of thing that delighted Dad, and that he was always trying to shoehorn into conversation.

They were pretty formulaic, these catch-ups of ours. He asked about Mum, I asked about his latest girlfriend (these were of quite a specific type, usually, divorced blondes who drove convertibles and owned boutiques in the Cotswolds). He would tell a work-related story in which he was right about something and everyone else wrong and then (a glass of wine in) grill me on whether I was making the most of Cambridge, moving in the right circles, meeting the right sort of people.

He had, once or twice, actually used that phrase the right circles. "Do you mean posh people, Dad?" I had asked him. "Or do you just mean rich people?"

"I mean the kind of people who can give you a leg up in life," he had replied. "Especially if you are serious about getting into my line of work. People who own art, people who buy it."

As we were waiting for our mains to arrive, he asked if I had been invited to Harry Willoughby's twenty-first, at Longhurst.

Every time we met, Dad asked me about Harry. Not about any of my new friends here, whose names he stubbornly refused to remember. Always it was Harry he wanted to know about. If we saw much of each other. If we were still close. If he had a girlfriend. No, was always the answer to this last question, because never have I met anyone in my life more focused on their future political career than Harry, anyone who showed less interest in romantic entanglements of any kind. It sometimes felt that the only reason Harry even had friends was because he thought it was the sort of thing a future prime minister ought to have.

"Of course I've been invited," I said. It would have been embarrassing had I not, given how long I had known Harry, the connection between our fathers, the fact that we were in the same college.

It was not until the end of our meal that Dad revealed he had a favor to ask. Over dessert, I told him I was popping down to London the next week to look up some things in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute—Alice Long had suggested that their extensive holdings of exhibition catalogue clippings might hold something useful on the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition.

"The Witt?" he said. That was handy. There were a couple of paintings that Philip Willoughby was planning to sell and had asked him to establish the provenance of—who had owned them when, who had bought them where, the sort of paper trail that played such an important part in establishing a painting's authenticity.

With its archive of millions of photographs, reproductions, and clippings documenting the work of tens of thousands of artists, the Witt Library was as valuable a resource for art dealers as it was for scholars—once you had gotten used to its somewhat complicated filing system. The thing that was especially helpful for my father's purposes being that among the library's holdings are thousands of pictures taken by the Witt's own librarians, who from the 1920s until the 1970s were periodically sent around to the great houses of England with cameras to record their art collections. To Cliveden. To Longleat. To Longhurst.

Which meant there was one simple, surefire way of establishing that a painting had been in the possession of the Willoughbys when the Witt's librarians visited with their cameras in 1961. The downside being that someone had to go through all those green fabric-covered folders of hundreds of unsorted grainy black-and-white photographs and find the ones of the specific paintings in question.

Would I mind, if I was down at the Witt, my father asked, just checking a few things for him? He would make a note of what he wanted me to look for, the names of the paintings, the dates.

"Of course," I heard myself saying.

"There might be some cash in it for you," he added.

"Fine," I said. "Sure. Since I'm down there anyway."

It would have been churlish to refuse. He had done a lot for me, after all. He was the one who was paying for lunch. Who had paid my school fees, even when the business was not going well. I had been given a lot of chances in life that he had not. I did not ever want to seem ungrateful. It probably would not take me more than a couple of hours.

Still, it would have been nice if just once in a while, my dad dropped in on me without warning like this and did not have a favor to ask.

AS I WAS WALKING Dad back to his car, two abreast on a pavement carpeted with wet leaves, he asked if I was excited about that evening.

"This evening?" I asked, as if I did not know what he was referring to.

"Your investiture," he replied, grinning, practically nudging me in the ribs. "The Osiris Society."

Ah yes. Two things I had been attempting not to think about, as it happened.

For almost as long as I could remember, Dad had been going on about the Osiris Society. Their famous dinners. Their legendary antics. How important it was, when I went to Cambridge (never if), that I was asked to join. For the seal of social approval. For the ridiculous pinkie ring.

It being the first Thursday of the month, it was also the first dinner of Michaelmas term, when new members were invested. There only ever being thirteen at any one time, this was considered something of an honor. When I had showed Dad the embossed invitation, signed by Harry as society president, it was a little tragic how excited he was.

"I'm not sure," I told him, "whether it's really my thing."

He asked me what I was talking about.

One did not turn down an opportunity like this, he told me. If I really did not understand the potential professional advantages for someone planning a career as an art dealer in making these kinds of contacts, perhaps I should consider a different way of making a living. He probably did have a point.

I had once, as a snotty teenager, made an offhand remark about his never having been made a member, despite his great friend Philip being president when they were students. How that must have stung. How that must have rankled. Because at the end of the day, I observed—coldly, unkindly, annoyed with him about something, aiming to wound—despite all his sucking up, despite all his efforts at self-reinvention, none of those people were ever really going to forget, were they, that he was just a grammar school lad from South London who had grown up in a council flat?

He did not speak to me for a month.

"Are you nervous about the investiture?" he asked.

The truth was, I was dreading it. I had spent my whole time at Cambridge consciously avoiding the kind of boozy, boorish evening I was letting myself in for tonight. To make matters worse, Harry's cousin Freddie—a practical joker, and like Harry a member of Osiris ever since their very first term at Cambridge—had been trying to make me as anxious as possible. Dropping hints about what it would involve. Like a cross between a rugby club initiation and joining the Masons, was how I had always imagined it. As it turned out, it was going to be far worse than that.

A week earlier Harry had told me what I was expected to procure for the ceremony. He had said to meet him in a pub around the corner from college, and I had arrived to find half the society at a table next to the fireplace, Osiris signet rings glinting as they sank their drinks. Freddie Talbot. Ivo Strang. Benjy Taylor. Arno von Westernhagen. Eric Lam. Handsome Hugo de Hauteville—Hugo de Hotville, some of the girls called him. All of them the sort of boys my father was so keen for me to associate with: rich, ambitious, well-connected. Absurdly so, in some cases. Arno von Westernhagen—tall, tanned, a keen skier, an even more enthusiastic rugby player—was an actual German count. He had gone to school in England but spent summers at his family castle—the schloss—in Bavaria.

I offered to buy a round and, when they all nodded thanks, prayed I had enough cash for eleven pints of lager and a Diet Coke with ice and lemon. This last item was for Arno von Westernhagen, who was not currently drinking, on medical advice, following a rugby head injury a few weeks earlier. "I was out cold for ten minutes," I could hear him explaining to Hugo and Benjy. "I went out for a few pints with the rest of the team that night and had a fucking seizure. The doctor told me no booze for six months."

Harry followed me to the bar and handed me an envelope.

"What's this?" I asked him.

"Instructions," he said.

I went to open it, but he shook his head and told me to wait until I got home. So I finished my beer, made my excuses, and slipped off to fumble the envelope open. On the piece of paper inside, in Harry's weirdly childish writing, were three words. Freddie was outside smoking with Eric Lam and Arno von Westernhagen as I left. He glanced down at the note in my hand.

"Bring an animal?" I said incredulously. "What does it mean, bring an animal? A live animal? A dead animal? What kind of animal?"

"That's up to you, Patrick. We've all had to do it. What was yours, Ivo? A pheasant?" Freddie said, smirking.

Ivo nodded. "Got my dad to send it in the post."

"Arno, you brought a rabbit, if I remember correctly," said Freddie, clearly enjoying himself.

Arno confirmed this. He seemed to be smoking twice as much as usual now that he could not drink—he stubbed out one cigarette in a shower of orange sparks and immediately lit another.

"Fur and all," he added. "I had to buy it frozen from a place that does pet food for snakes."

Everyone seemed to be laughing, but I genuinely couldn't tell if Freddie was joking.

"We didn't make this shit up. It's all in the rules. It's been the same investiture ceremony since the society was founded." He shrugged.

I gave him a long, hard look.

"And what am I going to have to do with it, this animal?"

Freddie's smile just widened.

"Can't tell you that, I'm afraid, Patrick."

"Why not? The rules again?"

Freddie shook his head. "Oh no, nothing in the rules about that. I just don't want to spoil the surprise."

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Right up till closing time I had stayed, reading Juliette's journal, so intent on the pages in front of me that I didn't notice the library emptying out. Eventually, the only ones left in the building were me and the librarian and someone pushing a mop around.

It was a vertiginous, rabbit-holey feeling, reading those diary entries.

Juliette's story. In her own words. In her handwriting (beautiful but extremely hard to decipher), with her illustrations in the margins or sometimes taking up a page to themselves. Ink splotches from a fountain pen elaborated into drifting clouds, watercolor waves and landscapes in outline, deft charcoal sketches of the objects, places, and people she was describing. Had it really been sitting right here all these years, at the bottom of a cardboard box?

If I was not finished with what I was looking at, the librarian gently reminded me, I could put the box to one side and continue with its contents when they reopened at 9:00 a.m. I looked up at the clock on the wall—it was five to seven. The cleaner had finished mopping now and begun turning lights off.

In the middle of a fitful night's sleep, I did experience a brief moment of panic. What if I went back the next day and the box was gone? What if I opened it and the journal was missing?

At ten to nine the next day, I was waiting outside the library, clutching my notepad. Without a break all morning, I laboriously transcribed, frowning over crossed-out phrases, indecipherable words. Eventually, I reached the end of that long first entry, winning a hard-fought battle with Juliette's inky swoops. In the lobby of the library was a pay phone. From it, I called my friend Athena to ask if she could meet me for lunch in our college hall. I needed to speak to someone about all this. I was also starving.

In some ways we were an unlikely pair, Athena Galanis and I. If we hadn't been put in neighboring rooms in our first year, I probably would have been too intimidated even to talk to her. She was confident. She was clever. She was gorgeous, with a beauty people felt compelled to comment on the moment she left a room (tall and slender, with long, dark hair and enormous green eyes). It was only as I got to know her better—we first spoke properly when she asked to borrow my lecture notes, having missed a lecture for a family wedding on a private Greek island—I realized how funny she was too.

Athena was unlike anyone I'd ever met, and yet somehow, incrementally, over the course of that first year, she became my best friend. She was certainly the only person here I had told anything about my family, my childhood—although even with her there were lots of things I left out. Athena, in contrast, was full of stories about her dad (a Dubai-based Greek Cypriot businessman) and her mother, his second wife, Mila, a former model and Miss Russia runner-up.

Athena's phone—she had moved out of college at the end of the first year, into a house her father bought her in central Cambridge—rang for a long time before she answered. When eventually, groggily, she did so, it was clear I had woken her up. I checked my watch. It was midday.

"Caroline! I am so glad you called," she squealed when she realized it was me. "Because rumor has it you were spotted yesterday cruising through town in Patrick Lambert's red sports car..."

"We had a supervision together. He offered me a lift afterward. It was raining," I explained, trying to ignore the way that even the mention of Patrick's name made me feel.

I could hear a soft chortle at the other end of the line. "You know he still fancies you, right?"

It was not the first time Athena had aired this theory—based as far as I could tell on nothing more than having seen him looking at me ("with those soulful eyes of his") across a lecture hall.

As usual, because just the thought of having to explain how I felt about relationships—and why—could threaten to bring on familiar throat-tightening symptoms of panic, I swerved the subject. I wasn't calling about Patrick, I said. This was something much more important. She agreed to meet me in twenty minutes. As ever, despite having only just rolled out of bed, she looked immaculate when I arrived at the college dining hall. On the long oak table in front of her was a plate of cucumber onto which she was shaking a snowstorm of salt, her lunch most days. She greeted me with an expectant expression as I unraveled my scarf and sat down.

I talked her through the last twenty-four hours as swiftly as I could. Alice Long. The Willoughby Bequest. The passport and the necklace and the journal. Telling someone else about it for the first time made it all feel both more real and more strange, somehow.

"My God, Caroline, this is incredible," Athena kept saying, eyes wide. "So exciting."

"That's not all," I told her. I took my notepad out and read her my transcription of the final paragraph of the first journal entry.

Athena put her fork down. She was looking at me seriously. "Go on, then," she said. "What are these secrets, the things she has not told Oskar about herself? What happens next?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I've only read the first entry so far."

Athena rolled her eyes in frustration. "So let's read on, right now."

"We can't. There is only one copy of that journal in the whole world," I explained. "It's not something they are going to let anyone photocopy or borrow."

"I'd just have taken it," Athena said. "I'd have liberated the lot. Are you seriously going to copy the whole thing out by hand?"

"Of course!" I said. If that was what it took, I mentally added, suddenly aware of the scale of the task ahead of me. This was precisely the kind of discovery which Alice Long had been talking about. The kind which put forgotten female artists back on the map. The kind which shed new light on women we thought we knew. The kind—and I must admit this thought had also occurred to me—which launched academic careers.

"What I don't understand," said Athena, "is how any of that stuff got there in the first place."

"I'm meeting the archivist to ask exactly that, at two o'clock," I said. I was also planning to go first to the History of Art library to borrow Walter Loftus's classic, definitive biography of Oskar Erlich.

"Well, well, well," a familiar voice boomed from across the hall.

We both looked up. Freddie Talbot.

He barreled over with his lunch tray, dropped down onto the bench, and pecked Athena swiftly on the cheek without ever quite breaking eye contact with me.

"Caroline," he said, a little curtly.

"Freddie," I replied, without warmth.

I had never understood Athena's relationship with Freddie, her on-off boyfriend—although I'd never heard him use that word—of the past two years.

On paper at least, I suppose they were well-matched. Athena was charming, intelligent, gorgeous. She spoke at least five languages fluently—Greek with her father and half siblings, Russian with her mother, the French and Arabic she had picked up from her Lebanese nanny, and English at her international school. Freddie, a final-year vet student, was tall, well-built, and every bit as good-looking as she was, with a mop of sandy hair, freckles, an oddly appealing sports-flattened nose, and a strong jaw. He rowed for his college. He played rugby for the university.

He was also a complete arsehole. The kind of person you are never quite sure is going to acknowledge having met you before. Useless at making plans, or at least remembering them. Rude. Deliberately boorish. A liability when drunk, with a well-known habit of suddenly climbing up things: fountains, scaffolding, stationary Sainsbury's trucks. The kind of twat who deliberately sets off fire alarms.

Pretty much their entire relationship, it seemed to me, was conducted between the hours of 11:00 p.m. (college bar kicking-out time) and whenever he skulked back from Athena's room to his. More than once he had staggered in after some boozy dinner with his equally awful friends just to throw up in her sink and pass out. Every so often, he would publicly hook up with another girl in a nightclub, and there would follow weeks of recriminations and crying.

Whenever I had tried to talk to Athena about their relationship, she had made it clear that the situation was complicated, that Freddie was complicated, that I would not understand. Occasionally she would also drop unsubtle hints about their sex life. How passionate it was, how intense.

Something I had not noticed about Freddie before, or at least really registered, was the signet ring on his pinkie. Seeing me glance at it, he swiftly moved his hand under the table.

"Freddie," I said, "can I ask about your ring?"

"My ring?" His expression, the tone of his voice, sought to suggest he had not even really been aware he was wearing a ring.

"Can I see it?"

Freddie hesitated. Eventually, Athena nudged him. Reluctantly, he brought his hand out from under the table and held it up for me. The ring had the same design on it as Juliette Willoughby's necklace. The same elaborate eye design, exactly.

"Well, go on," said Athena, nudging him again. "Tell her what it is."

Freddie said nothing.

"It's an Osiris ring," explained Athena. "It means Freddie is a member of the Osiris Society."

"The Osiris Society? What's that?" I asked.

"It's nothing," said Freddie, with a scowl at Athena.

"It's a drinking society," said Athena, smiling back at him. "A secret drinking society."

"It's a dining society," Freddie corrected, his scowl deepening. "We have dinners four times a term. There's nothing secret about it."

Having finished his lunch and pushed his plate away, Freddie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and checked his watch.

"Christ," he said. "I'd better go. Got something to pick up from the vet school at one thirty." Then with another peck on Athena's cheek—and a little glance around to see if anyone had noticed—he was gone, leaving us his empty plate and tray to clear.

THE HISTORY OF ART library is on Scroope Terrace, a ten-minute walk from my college. I was approaching it when I heard the banging. Unable for a moment to tell which direction it was coming from, I finally spotted a dark blue car, parked facing in my direction—in the front were two men, the passenger screaming at the driver, so furious he was repeatedly punching the ceiling of the car, bouncing red-faced in his seat like Rumpelstiltskin. The driver was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, flinching occasionally. Then the angry man abruptly stopped yelling and took three attempts to get out of the car—kicking the door open so hard it swung closed on him again, catching the sleeve of his gray tracksuit on something and then storming off past me, muttering to himself, a man in his forties with glints of silver in his close-cropped hair.

Only as I got closer and I saw who was sitting in the driver's seat did I realize whose car it was: Freddie's. I was about to walk over, tap on the window, and check that he was okay when he started the car, swerved out into the traffic, and screeched off.

The strangest thing of all was his expression, one I had never seen on his face before. Freddie Talbot looked genuinely scared.