Chapter 4

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

When I first noticed Athena Galanis approaching, outside the department after our lecture, I assumed she was going to ask me for a cigarette.

"Hi, Patrick," she said. "What are you up to tonight?"

The question threw me a little, to be honest. I knew about her and Freddie, and I knew she was friends with Caroline, but Athena and I had been studying the same subject for almost three years now and this was the first time she had actually spoken to me. I was a bit surprised she even knew my name.

"I'm having a dinner party," she told me, even before I had answered her question. "You should come."

"I would love to," I said. "But actually I have plans already..."

Had Freddie put her up to this? Was it a joke, and if I said yes was there going to be some sort of punch line? Since my Osiris investiture, I had been dreading word somehow getting out about that cat business—one of the reasons I had not yet worn my pinkie ring in public. Athena asked what my plans were. I told her I was having dinner with Harry Willoughby.

"Harry! I know Harry. I love Harry. Bring Harry!"

"I can certainly ask him," I said.

"Tell him I insist," she said. "Tell him Freddie will be there. My place—you know where I live, don't you?—tonight, seven o'clock."

I did know where she lived, as it happened. It was something of a joke in our year that Athena's father had bought her a house three doors down from the Art History Department building and yet she still managed to be late to every lecture she attended.

When I went to his room to tell him, Harry seemed as bemused by our invitation as I was. "I've only met her once for about ten minutes," he said. "She and Freddie had a blazing row at the bar, and she stormed off."

"Well, she was very keen on us coming," I told him. "She also said to tell you Freddie will be there."

He made a face. Despite their being cousins, and both members of Osiris, I was never quite sure how much Harry actually liked Freddie. They were certainly very different characters—even as a child, Harry had been the serious cousin, the straightlaced one, conscious always that he was the one who would inherit the big house and the responsibility that came with it. Nor was there much physical resemblance between them. Freddie was confident, attractive, with razor cheekbones and a carefully maintained six-pack. Harry had a round, shiny face with pink cheeks, eyelashes so blond they were almost white, and hair that at twenty was already starting to thin in places.

"So what do you think?" I asked.

Harry—a classics student—rested on his chest the Loeb edition of Horace he had been reading on his bed and looked at me. "Do you want to go?"

"I wouldn't mind seeing what her place is like," I said with a shrug.

"Ghastly, I expect," he said. They could be very snobbish, he and Freddie, especially about people they suspected of having more money than they did. "But I suppose anything is better than college food."

AS IT TURNED OUT, the house was exquisite—the color scheme elegantly understated, the lighting soft, the carpets so deep your feet sank in them almost to the ankle. It was also even bigger than it looked from the street. Athena led us through a vast shiny kitchen to the dining room—an enormous glass box sticking out of the back of the house. There were two people already sitting at the table. One of them was Giles Pemberton, another art historian: blond, gay, a little tweedy, a self-conscious connoisseur of things. He was wearing a bow tie and swirling the glass of red wine he was holding up to a candle—the first person our age I had ever seen do this not as a joke. The other person at the table was Caroline. She looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

Two other places had been set, presumably for Freddie and Athena, but there was no sign of Freddie yet. I remarked on the lovely smells coming from the kitchen as Athena made sure everybody who did not know each other was introduced—placing rather a lot of emphasis on Harry's surname. This made little impression on Giles but gave Caroline a little start.

"Oh!" she said. "I'm writing a dissertation chapter on the painter Juliette Willoughby."

Harry smiled politely.

"Not just that," said Athena. "Tell them, Caroline."

Caroline gave her a look. She gave Caroline a look back.

"She's found a journal," said Athena. "Juliette's diary, with sketches. From her time in Paris."

"In the Willoughby Bequest?" I said.

Caroline nodded. A timer went off in the kitchen. Athena excused herself and hurried off.

Harry looked confused. "I thought that was all Egyptological papers. There is some research student—Sam something—working on it, trying to get it all into order. Every so often he writes to my father with some question about Uncle Cyril or the collection that none of us have the first clue how to answer."

"Mostly it is Egyptological material. That's what makes this so strange," said Caroline.

"What kind of journal is it?" I asked, leaning in across the table, intrigued.

"I'm still in the process of transcribing it, but it's very personal. I'm not sure she ever intended for anyone else to read it." She turned to Harry. "For instance, I hope you don't mind me asking, but do you know anything about her having been in a mental institution?"

Harry thought about this. "No, but perhaps that's why we don't really talk about her much in the family. I can imagine some of my relatives being a bit funny about something like that. My grandfather Austen, on the other hand..."

"You're related to Austen Willoughby?" said Giles, evidently both amused and excited by this information.

Harry confirmed this. Giles clapped his hands.

Caroline asked somewhat apologetically who Austen Willoughby was.

"Austen Willoughby was the most successful canine portraitist of his era," said Giles, half turning in his chair to face her. "A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. A genius, really. When it came to painting rich people's dogs, anyway."

Caroline was clearly unsure if she was being teased. She was not. Austen Willoughby had inherited Longhurst Hall when his brother Cyril died, and the place was still full of his paintings. Thoughtful spaniels. Plucky terriers. Noble setters. It was the expressions in the eyes of the dogs he painted for which he was most celebrated, his ability to capture an individual canine's character. As far as I could tell, both Harry and his father were entirely sincere in their admiration for his work. As far as it suited him, so was my dad.

No doubt the fact it still sold well helped. One of my strongest memories from childhood visits to Longhurst was leaving in our car with one of Austen's bubble-wrapped paintings in my lap, something my father was selling on Philip's behalf. Since there were many collectors around the world and a seemingly endless supply at the house—extraordinarily formulaic, absolutely consistent in style—it was a steady source of commission for my father and much-needed income for Philip. Even as a child I had a sense of how much it cost to keep a country pile like that going, the never-ending nature of the task.

"If you'd like to see them, do drop in sometime," Harry was telling Giles. "Similarly, Caroline, if ever you'd like to visit the house where Juliette grew up, we'd be delighted to have you. In fact, it's my birthday party next weekend. You should come. You should both come. The whole family will be there, Caroline—maybe someone will remember Juliette. Patrick can give you a lift."

"Absolutely, I'd love to," she said, perhaps a little too quickly, obviously delighted. Giles said the same.

"Is that really alright about the lift?" she asked me.

"Of course," I said, very pleased by this development, in fact.

Giles and Harry were already discussing trains and timing.

"I can't wait to see Alice Long's reaction when you tell her about the journal," I said to Caroline, perhaps just a little jealous of her discovery, in no doubt who was going to be the star of our next supervision. "Is there anything in there about the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition that might be helpful for my project?"

"There might be, but I haven't gotten to it yet," Caroline said. "It's been slow going—it's her handwriting that's the problem. There are five long entries, and I have only managed to get through two of them. I am starting to speed up a bit—I can distinguish her e's and her l's now, most of the time—but it's not something you can skim."

Her expression darkened. She leaned in closer to me, our shoulders almost touching. I could smell her perfume.

"There is one thing in what I have read so far that I can't get out of my head," she said, her voice lowered. "Juliette writes about how Oskar's wife used to follow them, harass them. She sounds genuinely worried about what Maria might be capable of. And what with the fire..."

She paused, watching my face as this sunk in.

"I don't want to jump to conclusions," said Caroline, "but there is something nagging at me, about the night Juliette and Oskar died. The knocking?"

I gave her a puzzled look.

"In his biography of Oskar Erlich, Walter Loftus mentions that someone knocked on the concierge's door and woke him up, which was how he saw the apartment was on fire, which meant he could raise the alarm, get the other residents out."

Her eyes were shining in the candlelight as she waited for the penny to drop.

"You're saying you aren't convinced the fire was an accident, and Oskar's wife might have been the one who started it?"

"I think it's a possibility. Juliette seemed to think Maria might be capable of something like that. Which also makes me wonder if Juliette sent her journal to Longhurst just in case something happened."

Caroline fell briefly, thoughtfully, silent. I followed her gaze. It was resting on Harry's signet ring, which he was absentmindedly fiddling with. "I'm also hoping the journal might explain why Juliette painted herself as a Sphinx, and how that's linked to her father's interest in Egyptology."

Athena appeared with plates piled high with meze, muttering something about not wanting them to get cold as she topped up our glasses. There was still no sign of Freddie. As the evening wore on, Athena spent ever longer periods in the kitchen, and each time she returned I expected her to bring the next course, but instead she arrived with more wine. No one seemed to know if we were waiting for Freddie, nor could we work out quite why we were there. Caroline had been invited the night before. Giles revealed that he had only been asked that afternoon.

By the time Athena served the mains, there were eight empty wine bottles and it was nearly midnight. I retain a vague impression of lamb. The dessert was cold. Ice cream, I think? There was brandy afterward, I'm fairly certain. Still no Freddie. By tacit consensus, his absence went unremarked upon.

Caroline asked how my dissertation was going, and I told her—with a bit of a grimace—that I was planning to drive down to London the next day to visit the Witt. I was not much looking forward to slogging through the archives on my dad's behalf, especially not with the hangover I was expecting.

As we were all leaving at around one a.m., Athena gave me a very firm hug and whispered something in my ear I did not catch. Harry and Giles wobbled off on their bikes, and I offered to walk Caroline back to her college.

It was a bright, cloudless night, everything sharply silvered, a hint of frost in the air. Both quite drunk, we found it difficult to stay two abreast on the pavement without bumping into each other. We brushed hands a few times and every time we did so, I felt an electric shock of hope. Then somehow I found her hand warm in mine.

We reached her college. Without saying anything, we kept walking. By now I could feel a distinct tingle in the base of my spine. The moon was full, the shadows long on the empty street in front of Trinity. From somewhere nearby came a peal of laughter. Caroline squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers back. We both looked up at the same time and locked glances momentarily and smiled. It felt a lot like the night we first met.

As we neared my college, I had mentally started to compose a casual invitation upstairs for a nightcap when suddenly she stopped. Still holding my hand, without breaking eye contact, she took a couple of steps backward, pulling me into a doorway, half disappearing into the shadows. Our faces were now so close we were practically kissing already. Then we were kissing, and her hands were on my shoulders. One of my hands was on the small of her back. Her legs were pressing against mine.

Then Caroline pulled away from me, ran her hands through her hair, and gave me a slightly sheepish smile. "Patrick," she said. "Let's go to your room."

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

"Well that was... unexpected," Patrick said, as we lay there in the dark, my head on his chest, sheets tangled at our feet.

I laughed, reaching around on the floor for a blanket to cover myself. "For everyone apart from Athena, I think."

He took a moment to process this. "You mean the whole evening...?"

"Was my best friend playing Cupid, yes," I said, laughing.

The instant Patrick walked into that dining room, I had realized it was a setup. That Athena—despite all my attempts to convey to her the complexity of my feelings about Patrick, despite all the times I had tried to explain to her the intensity of my anxieties around relationships generally—had taken it upon herself to matchmake. I was not sure if I felt annoyed about this or amused. Athena had always been so easy to read, at least to me (except when it came to Freddie, whose appeal was eternally baffling). Apparently the same could not be said the other way round.

Then again, I had often felt that Athena's brain was not wired quite like other people's—the directness of the way she approached things, perhaps to do with the way she had been brought up, an assumption that if she wanted something enough she would always get it.

It was a little irritating to think she would claim credit for all this, and yet as Patrick and I stood in that doorway, his lips pressed against mine, never before had I been so certain about what I wanted to happen next. Never in a moment like that had I felt so in control of my anxiety, so confident that if a wave of panic did start rising, I could face it down.

We giggled all the way up the stairs. We kissed in the corridor outside his room. There was a clash of teeth, more laughter. Then we were on his bed. His body on mine. My body on his.

It was only afterward, lying there, that I started to feel that familiar anxiety simmer. I sat up, asked Patrick for a glass of water. He passed me a mug, with a grin. "Even if it was Athena's doing," he said, "I'm really glad this happened. I really hope that maybe this time around..."

I tried to keep my breathing steady, to stop my throat from constricting. "Maybe," I said. "I think, perhaps... it's just that... it's not that I don't like you. There's just quite a lot of stuff I'm working through. Family stuff. Complicated stuff. I'm sure I'll tell you about it one day, but for the moment we are going to need to take things very slowly, okay?"

"Of course," he said. "We can take things at whatever pace you want. Just know that I like you—I don't think I ever stopped liking you—and I can be patient." He thought to himself for a minute and frowned—or pretended to. "Although I was going to ask you if you wanted to come to the Witt Library with me tomorrow. But if you think that would be too..."

"That sounds great," I said, with genuine enthusiasm.

Then somehow, we were kissing again, urgently. But even as we melted into each other, at the back of my mind was the knowledge that if I wanted this to be more than a three-night stand, I would have to find a way to open up to him. To try to explain why Juliette Willoughby's journal spoke to me so personally. To explain that I could remember exactly how it felt, that sense of constant anxiety she described, of always being on guard, never knowing if you were being too paranoid or not paranoid enough.

I was ten years old when my mother finally left my father. She must have spent years building up the courage to do it, months working out the practicalities, weeks waiting for the perfect moment to run. I understood implicitly that I would not be going back to that school or seeing my friends again. That we would be in a new place, a new city. That this was the last time I would ever see our house. I was allowed one bag and had half an hour to pack, and all that time she was standing by the window, watching for his car, terrified he would return early from work.

He had always said that if she ever tried to leave, if she ever tried to take me away from him, he would find her and he would kill her.

PATRICK'S VISION, I THINK, had been for us to cruise up to London in the MG with the roof down, stopping somewhere for a pub lunch in the sunshine. When we woke up it was raining. We got to the car and found it would not start. He was touchingly apologetic about this as we waited for a lull in the rain and then made a dash for the train station. All the way to King's Cross, Freddie Talbot was our main topic of discussion.

It was a relief to learn that Patrick was as uncharmed by him as I was. His not turning up for dinner the night before was typical, I explained. As was Athena's reaction to it, the realization visibly dawning on her that Freddie was either not going to show or would be wasted if he did come.

"There are good reasons why he is the way he is, though," Patrick commented. "Because my dad is friends with Philip Willoughby, I spent a lot of time at Longhurst as a kid, hanging out with Harry. Often Freddie would be there too. I remember playing hide-and-seek for hours. Freddie would always win—you'd spend ages looking for him and there he would be, stretched out on a rafter."

I tried to imagine them, three little boys with the run of a great big country house—the very house that Juliette grew up in. Perhaps I should have been more surprised than I was to discover that Freddie was Harry's cousin—when I had first arrived in Cambridge I would have thought it almost as bizarre a coincidence as the discovery that they were both related to Juliette. Now, though, it just further underlined the interconnectedness of the circles into which I had stumbled.

"Why was Freddie at Longhurst so much—did he live there too?" I asked.

"Not exactly," Patrick said. "Most of the time he was at boarding school, but he'd stay during holidays when Arabella—his mother—didn't want him. She'd be in Monaco on someone's yacht, or in Spain on honeymoon, or doing yoga up a mountain. She moved to South Africa with husband number five when Freddie started secondary school, but I don't think he's been over there once."

"That must have been unsettling for him," I said.

"He certainly never liked to talk about it. If you really wanted to annoy Freddie, asking him where Arabella was would always do it. Not that upsetting Freddie was ever really something you wanted to do, because he's always had a mean streak. To freak Harry and me out, he used to tell us about all the creepy stuff Cyril kept in the house—the mummies, the old scrolls. He also had this Usborne World of the Unknown book of unsolved mysteries with the story of Longhurst's Missing Maid—this servant who disappeared there back in the 1930s. He always claimed that the room I'd been given to sleep in had been hers, and he would tell us about various family members who had definitely seen her ghost. Which, aged eight, you laugh about when you're all together, but come bedtime I'd sleep sitting up, back to the wall, with all the lights on."

Patrick paused. "The thing that really explains Freddie, though, the root of all that bitterness, is that technically Longhurst should be his."

"I'm sorry?"

"Juliette's father, Cyril, was the oldest of three brothers, but he never had a son. So when he died, Longhurst should have passed sideways to the second-eldest brother. That's where it gets peculiar. Freddie's grandfather Osbert was the next in line. Harry's grandfather Austen was the youngest. It skipped a brother: the house, the inheritance, all of it."

"Why?"

"Not sure," Patrick said. "Harry says he doesn't know and neither does Freddie. My dad thinks it was to do with Freddie's grandfather being a drinker, that Cyril was worried he'd piss the lot away. But I would imagine it does rankle with Freddie."

What none of that explained, I said, was what I had seen the other day, the peculiar incident in the car, Freddie being screamed at. Patrick said he was not sure what that could have been about either, or who had been screaming at him.

"The thing about Freddie is, he's always had a peculiar talent for pissing people off."

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE Witt Library's front desk explained it would take me a little time to get a reader's card. Patrick asked if I would mind if he went ahead of me to start on the task his father had set him.

"Of course not," I said. It sounded like he had a lot of photographs to leaf through.

Frustratingly, in contrast, my search for material on Juliette Willoughby yielded slim pickings. Predictably for an artist with no extant art, her name was not listed in the library catalogue at all. Instead, I contented myself with leafing through the files for work by other Surrealists featuring Sphinxes. I was sifting through a box full to bursting of photographs of Salvador Dalí's paintings when Patrick's face appeared over the top of my carrel. He was grinning.

"Did you find the paintings you were looking for?" I asked.

He shook his head. He was still grinning.

"What is it?"

"I've made a bit of a discovery. Come with me."

A box was open on Patrick's desk. It was labeled Longhurst Hall, 1961.

"What is it?" I asked.

He pulled out a chair and invited me to sit. "This is one of those boxes of photographs I told you about," he said. "The ones my dad asked me to go through."

He indicated the picture at the top of the pile. It showed a painting of a sad-eyed bloodhound, the background incomplete, the work unfinished, the painting unsigned. The photograph was old and of poor quality, black-and-white. He shifted it across to a different pile. Under it was a photograph of a painting of a wolfhound, nose to the ground, clearly undertaken by the same hand. Patrick added that photograph to the other pile too, revealing the one underneath.

"What do you make of that?" he asked me.

"It can't be," I said.

The photograph—frustratingly fuzzy, annoyingly monochrome—was centered on a single female figure. I could feel Patrick watching my reaction. It was her. The young woman from the passport photograph. Juliette Willoughby.

On her face was an expression of bold challenge. Around her neck was a familiar pendant, which she was pointing at with an index finger. Her paws—this figure was from the waist down feline—were crossed on a rock in front of her. Around the central figure, infuriatingly hard to make out, were other scenes. A pale girl with dark hair. A hooded figure in a boat.

"It can't be. Nothing in that apartment survived the fire," I said, shaking my head. "Everyone knows that. You said it yourself."

"What about the journal, what about the passport you found, the locket?" said Patrick. "They clearly survived the fire. They somehow found their way to Longhurst."

"It's impossible," I said.

Patrick shook his head. "It's Self-Portrait as Sphinx," he said.