Chapter 5

PATRICK, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

Our second supervision with Alice Long was scheduled for ten the following morning, although when she opened the door she showed no sign of having been expecting us. For a moment, it was unclear if she even remembered who we were.

"Well, you'd better come in then," she said, eventually.

Caroline waited until we were all in the living room and Alice was sitting down before she told her about the journal. Where she had found it. What it contained. Juliette's words. Her drawings. On the back page, she had realized after some research, were Juliette's color notes, where she had daubed different shades, perhaps keeping it on hand as she was painting to remind herself of their exact composition. Alice leaned forward in her chair to listen. She let out little gasps—of delight, of surprise, of amazement. Her eyes were bright.

"This was in among the papers in the Willoughby Bequest?"

Caroline said yes. Along with Juliette's passport and pendant. "What I was hoping you might be able to help me with is how they got there."

"I have no idea, I am afraid," Alice said. Caroline and I exchanged a look, and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

"There's something else," I said. "We don't think the journal is all that survived the fire."

Alice tilted her head, raised an eyebrow. "And what would make you think that?"

"Did you know Self-Portrait as Sphinx was withdrawn from the International Surrealist Exhibition?" I asked her. "That Juliette only allowed it to be shown for a single night?"

"Of course I do," said Alice, a touch sharply. "That's well-documented. After the opening night of the exhibition, she decided that she did not want the painting on public view, and that it was no longer for sale. That's why it was in their apartment when the fire broke out. That's why it was destroyed."

"But what if it wasn't?" said Caroline. "What if it survived?"

As I explained about the photograph we had found at the Witt, Alice Long let out a few coughs and splutters of surprise and—I was pathetically pleased to see, given her obvious disdain the first time we met—a nod of what looked like grudging admiration.

I did feel bad that she was the first person with whom we had shared our discoveries, and not my father. Given his connection to the Willoughbys, to Longhurst, given he was the reason we had stumbled across the photograph of the painting in the first place. Should I have told him? Probably. Somehow, though, this felt like something Caroline and I were meant to do together—or to put it another way, what I did not want was for him to swoop in and grab all the credit.

As with most people in his profession, one of the dreams that had kept my father crisscrossing the country from auction house to estate sale all these years, that had him thumbing through typewritten auction catalogues in bed every night, was the dream of stumbling across a valuable work that no one had correctly identified. A sleeper. Unlike most people in his profession, he had actually already stumbled across one, once.

When I was about a year old, when money had never been tighter, he convinced himself he had found the painting that was going to make his fortune, change our lives. What he believed to be a small early Madonna by Raphael that had spent a century hanging in a country house outside Norwich, then ended up in a general sale of its contents. It was in bad condition, varnish thick and darkened. Someone had overpainted an arm (at a jarringly peculiar angle) to cover up damage to the canvas. Nevertheless, my father said, he knew.

It required a lot of expensive restoration that he would need to cover the cost of. He would have to spend months in the archives establishing a convincing provenance, and then it would have to be authenticated by an authority on the artist—he asked his former college tutor, an acknowledged Raphael expert. Dad brought the painting up to the professor's rooms himself, the murk of decades removed, the original colors glowing from the canvas. The expert scratched his chin, peered first at one corner of the painting then another through his glasses (Dad did a very convincing impression of this). His verdict was—School of Raphael. Probably undertaken by a follower, a decade or so after the master's death. A very nice piece, impressive in its way, but no Raphael. He even estimated what it might be expected to fetch at auction: about ten thousand pounds (when Dad sold it, it achieved just over eight, and he recouped only a fraction of his costs).

As they were walking to Dad's car, the professor—apologetic, friendly—had mentioned that he was working on a new edition of his own authoritative book on Raphael. Dad wished him luck. To my father's surprise, when the revised book was published, the professor's opinion had for some reason changed and the painting Dad had shown him was included among the canon of works by the master himself. The next time the Madonna came up for auction, three years later, it sold for fifteen million. There were many ways my dad told this story. Wry. Rueful. Self-pitying. Furious. I must have heard it in every variation at least a hundred times.

He had been robbed of that sleeper. There was no way, if I dropped even the slightest hint at what Caroline and I had found, he would not try to somehow claim this one for himself.

"What I don't see," Alice said, sounding genuinely confused, "is how it could have got there. Juliette's painting. To Longhurst."

I said we could not yet answer that either. The main thing was that, in the Witt Library, there was concrete evidence that the painting had been at Longhurst in 1961. It might still be there.

"I suppose there is really only one way of testing that theory," said Alice thoughtfully.

I told her that Caroline and I would actually be at Longhurst for a party over the weekend, that Harry Willoughby, her uncle's grandson, was at university with us, and turning twenty-one.

"And there's something else," Caroline said, clearing her throat. "I think I know why she painted herself as a Sphinx. Look here, at this photocopy of the photograph we found at the Witt."

Caroline took it out of her bag and passed it to Alice, who then brought the paper back and forth toward her eyes, adjusting her glasses and blinking. "Well, well, well," she said. "Well, well, well."

It was frustrating that the grainy black-and-white picture was not of high enough quality to allow the viewer to piece together what was happening in the inset scenes surrounding the central figure. The photocopy made it all even less decipherable. I pointed out to Alice where it was just about possible to make out what was being depicted. In the bottom left corner, a pale figure, female, young-looking, with hair floating upward. There was a boat of some kind down in the bottom right, with a hooded figure standing in it, crossing a dark river. Above all this, over a tangled treescape, hung the moon.

There was one detail, though, that Caroline had fixated on. "See there?" she said. "Wings, folded against her back. Juliette painted a self-portrait of herself as a winged Sphinx."

"Aha." Alice turned to me. "Meaning, Mr. Lambert?"

"A winged Sphinx is a Greek—as opposed to an Egyptian—Sphinx."

"The difference being?" Alice asked.

"An Egyptian Sphinx guards a tomb," said Caroline. "A Greek Sphinx is a Sphinx with a riddle. That's why she painted herself as one. That's what the wings are telling us. She's telling us this is a painting with a secret in it. A mystery for us to solve."

CAROLINE, CAMbrIDGE, 1991

I was looking through one of Patrick's drawers for a paracetamol, the morning we were due to drive up together to Longhurst for Harry's party, when I found his Osiris ring.

"Patrick," I said, "can I ask about this?"

He did seem a bit embarrassed. "Look, I have been meaning to mention it. It probably does seem weird, my wanting to join something like that. The thing is, it means a lot to my father..."

"You're a member of Osiris. The drinking society founded by Juliette's father. And despite everything, you never mentioned it?"

"I've been to one dinner. I've literally been inside their building once."

I asked him to describe it for me. He did so.

"You have to get me in," I told him.

"I can't," said Patrick. "It's not allowed. No guests. Definitely no female guests. No exceptions."

"Oh come on," I said. "If there's stuff in there that belonged to Cyril, that ended up in the possession of the Osiris Society rather than going into the Willoughby Bequest, there might be something which will shed light on how the journal and the painting ended up where they did..."

He breathed a deep sigh. He ran his hands over his face. He checked the time. "Okay, given that everyone should be heading up to Harry's party, this might be our only opportunity."

Half an hour later we were pulling up outside the building.

"Let me go first, okay?" he said. "Just to make sure the coast is clear. If anyone is around, I'll tell them I'm looking for a dinner jacket for tonight."

"Got it," I said with a nod. He did actually need a dinner jacket, as it happened. When he'd brought the one he had been planning to wear out of its garment bag the previous evening, it turned out to have had its satin lapels shredded by a cat.

"A cat?" I'd asked.

"Long story," Patrick told me.

I watched him walk up the street, take the stairs, tap on the door, and—when no one answered—bring a key out from his pocket and unlock it. He stepped through swiftly and left it slightly ajar. I counted to ten and climbed out of the car and followed him.

It was a little like stepping back in time, stepping into that house. Pulling the door closed behind me, I turned to confront an interior that it was easy to imagine had not changed much in a hundred years. The dim light falling through the stained glass over the front door. The brass umbrella stand. The checkerboard tiled floors.

There was a bowl of cat food and a water dish at the foot of the stairs. From the gloom at the end of the corridor, I heard a distant meow and glimpsed something dark darting across the hallway.

"Most of the Egyptian stuff is on the first floor, I think," Patrick told me.

Halfway up the stairs something creaked and both of us froze. What would they do, the Osiris boys, if they caught us here, I wondered. From the sounds of it, at the very least, Patrick would be out of the club.

All the doors on the first-floor corridor were shut, so we began trying their handles. The first one Patrick turned did not open, so he moved on to another. The first door I tried, the large brass knob did not budge at all. I turned around and tried the door directly opposite. This time, it gave. I tried not to flinch as it squeaked.

I stepped inside a room illuminated only by the light creeping in around the edges of its heavy velvet curtains, giving a vague sense of glass cases lining the walls. The gilded frames of the paintings on the walls were visible, but it was too dark to see the paintings themselves. Dust motes hung in the air. I made my way over to the curtains and parted them slightly.

"Good God," I said aloud.

In one corner was a whole case of wedjat eyes. Opposite it, another full of jade scarabs of varying sizes. Next to that was a trio of painted limestone busts. It was hard not to feel like this should all be in a museum. It was easy to see why the Egyptian authorities might want some of this stuff back.

Each glass case rested on a waist-high wooden cabinet with drawers. Gently, carefully, I tried one of these. It slid open to reveal a carefully arranged selection of papyri under glass.

I closed the first drawer and opened a second. For a moment, I genuinely could not quite take in what I was looking at. In the drawer was a single long strip of papyrus, its edges cracked and flaking. Clearly, at some point it had been ripped in half. The portion that survived showed the lower half of a robed figure, standing in a boat, steering it across the river. The boat itself—high in the prow and stern—was identical to that in the murky old photograph of Juliette's painting. The boat bobbed confidently amid stylized waves, their color astonishingly fresh and bright. If it was of a similar age to the papyri Sam showed me in the Willoughby Bequest, I was nevertheless looking at something thousands of years old.

I was leaning in to get a closer look when a door I had not seen, on the far side of the room from the door I had come in through, suddenly swung open. I froze.

From the door emerged Freddie, with something under his arm. What was he doing here? He was not supposed to be in Cambridge. He had told Athena he would be driving up to the party at Longhurst from a friend's place in London and that was why he could not give her a lift.

Quietly closing the door through which he had entered, Freddie locked it with a key which he then returned to his back pocket. He had not seen me yet, but if he turned his head just a little to the right, he was bound to.

He double-checked the door. He patted the key in his pocket. He turned to cross the room. Something, a creak of floorboards from another room, a change in the atmosphere, gave him pause. He stood where he was. He looked like he was listening for something.

I had been holding my breath for almost a minute, squeezing into the shadows. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Freddie had crossed the room and was closing the door behind him. Finally, with a gasp, I let out the breath I was holding.

From the downstairs hallway, I could hear voices—Freddie's, Patrick's. Then I heard the front door slam. A few minutes later, Patrick appeared.

"Are you in here?" he asked loudly.

"Over in the corner."

"No sign of a dinner jacket anywhere. I'll have to pick one up on the way," said Patrick. "Freddie was here. He came sneaking down the stairs and gave me the fright of my life. He didn't see you, did he?"

I shook my head. It had been a close call, though. Even now my heart was thumping.

Patrick asked me if I had found anything of interest. "Yes. I don't know what it means yet, but it must mean something. Remember that boat in the photograph of Juliette's painting?" I said, beckoning him over to the open drawer in front of me, the one with the papyrus in it. "Well, look at this..."

WE WERE HALFWAY TO Longhurst before Patrick revealed that the place we would be stopping off to pick up a replacement dinner jacket was his mother's house. That I would be meeting her for the first time. The plan had been to get to Longhurst early, so that Patrick could help Harry set up, and therefore I was dressed for comfort—hoodie, jeans, sneakers—rather than elegance. It was midday—were we expected to have lunch with her? Should I have brought flowers, a present? I tried to ignore the rising panic in my chest.

I had only the vaguest idea of what Mary, Patrick's mother, was going to be like. I knew he had lived with her when he was home from school for the holidays. That after the divorce from Patrick's father, she had trained as a paralegal. That she had a partner, Steve, someone Patrick always spoke of with mild disdain. He had made it very clear that Steve was her boyfriend, not his stepdad.

The house was not at all what I had been expecting. It was in Suffolk, and I suppose I had been imagining something charmingly rustic—a cottage, maybe, or a farmhouse. To my surprise, it was in a row of houses, in a village that reminded me of my grandmother's. The same sort of redbrick two-story 1930s semidetached houses, with about the same amount of front garden, the same red tiled roofs. The same sorts of cars in the driveways.

The MG was definitely an anomaly.

I remembered various self-deprecating things Patrick had told me about himself as a teenager—the smoking jacket he affected at home for a while, the hours he spent in the bath reading Proust and Wilde and L'Uomo Vogue—and found myself rapidly recontextualizing them.

"Well, here we are," he said, as we turned onto a sloped cement driveway. "Don't forget to take your shoes off. My mother is very particular about her cream carpets."

It is surprisingly tricky to extricate oneself with dignity from a sports car parked on a slope. By the time I had done so, the front door of the house had opened, and Patrick's mother was bustling out to greet us and to tell Patrick off for being late. She had sandwiches. Did we want sandwiches?

"It's fine, honestly," said Patrick. "We don't need anything. We had breakfast. We were thinking about stopping at a pub for lunch. It's going to be a big dinner tonight. Unless you want anything, Caroline?"

I said I did not unless she had gone to the bother of making it. Which is how, as Patrick and his mother searched his bedroom, I found myself sitting alone on the living room sofa with a large plate of crustless smoked salmon sandwiches in front of me.

"It was definitely here," I could hear Patrick saying, through the ceiling.

On the mantelpiece sat school photos of Patrick at different ages. Patrick and his mother and Steve on vacation somewhere, Spain, perhaps, Patrick with a center part and wearing an enormous white T-shirt and baggy swim trunks.

"Well, I don't know where it is, then," Patrick's mother was saying, with audible frustration. "What would Steve want with your dinner jacket?" I heard her ask a moment later.

They could not all be for me, these sandwiches. There were enough to feed a cricket team.

Eventually, Patrick reappeared with a jacket under his arm and announced we were leaving.

"It was nice to meet you, Caroline," his mother said, as she was showing us out. "I'm sorry we didn't get more of a chance to chat. Hopefully we'll see each other again soon."

Her smile was hesitant, tentative—she was evidently unsure if I was just a friend, or a girlfriend. To be honest, so was I. It was a week since the dinner party. He had slept over in my room twice. I had slept in his room three times. If we had not quite worked up the courage to put a name on what was happening, it was pretty clear something was. Without consulting me, when Harry had asked if we would want one bedroom or two at Longhurst, Patrick had said we would share.

Every time I had seen Athena recently, she had been smug about how things had turned out. It was okay, I reassured myself. Patrick was a nice guy. We were having fun. It was not when I was with Patrick but when I was not that my anxiety spiked.

"I hope you two have fun this weekend," Patrick's mum said. "Do you know Norfolk at all?"

I said not really. She asked me where I had grown up, a question I always dreaded. "Oh, all over the place," I told her. "Bedford for a bit, then London, and then Cherry Hinton, near Cambridge."

"Oh, lovely," she said. "Is that where your parents live?"

"My grandmother does," I said. "My parents aren't actually around anymore."

This was both technically true and a bit less stark than the full story.

Somehow, as we drove off, I found myself with three or four full sandwiches, elaborately wrapped in paper napkins, on my lap.

"Sorry about that," said Patrick. "I mean about your parents. I didn't know. I would have warned her. I hope she didn't upset you."

"It didn't upset me," I said, trying to reassure him.

Something in my tone must have warned him this was nevertheless not something I wanted to discuss further. Not here. Not now. Not yet. We drove in silence for a while.

"Oh, by the way," said Patrick. "I dug out something that might interest you."

He reached around and produced a book. Published by Usborne, one of those big illustrated kids' books from the 1980s: The World of the Unknown: Unsolved Mysteries. On the cover there was a picture of a UFO and a cowled apparition. I gave Patrick a puzzled look.

"You remember me telling you about Longhurst's Missing Maid? The story Freddie used to read to scare us, about that girl who vanished there in the 1930s? That's the book. It's all in there, photographs and everything. Of the house, the maid, the newspaper headlines."

I flicked through until I landed on the pages. One of the headlines read: "Is the Missing Maid a Victim of the Willoughby Curse?"

Patrick glanced over, the car swerving slightly. "I think it was around then that the idea of a family curse started to circulate. Probably not a good idea to bring it all up this weekend, though. They can be a bit funny about that stuff."

"I can imagine," I said, knowing all too well what it felt like to have to come to terms with tragedy and sorrow in public.

HE FOUND US. MY father found us.

After all those months in hiding, in hostels, in different women's refuges. Checking up and down the street for him every time we stepped out the front door. Being woken up in the middle of the night by a car outside and wondering if that was him. Unable even to tell my grandmother where we were, so as not to put her in danger of threats or violence.

I can still remember how it felt to finally have our own little flat. To know this was a place we could speak as loudly as we wanted, laugh as loudly as we wanted. Where we did not have to be always thinking three moves ahead to avoid upsetting my father. Where we were not always waiting for his mood to crack abruptly. Where I could spill a glass of water without expecting a sharp slap around the back of the head. Where the walls and the doors were not full of dents—foot-shaped, fist-shaped, head-shaped.

I think she thought he would give up looking for us eventually. That all his talk of tracking us down and making her pay if she ever left him was just performative, like so many of his promises. It turned out she was wrong.

A friend of his gave us away, it emerged at the trial. Someone who had spotted my mother and me, coming out of the library, and had casually mentioned it at the pub. That is something I will never understand. That decision. In a world in which to take no action would incur no consequences, where keeping your mouth shut would cost you nothing, why speak?

Another question I will never have an answer to is what would have happened to me if I'd been there when he came knocking. Would he have killed me too? I expect so. At the trial, he said a red mist descended. His actual words. A red mist. He had just come for a conversation, he said. He had been drinking, he admitted.

She had embarrassed him. That is the only explanation I can come up with. I was sure that if he had thought about it for just five minutes he would have seen he did not want us back. God knows having a kid around the house had driven him up the wall. The problem, the burr under the saddle, was the loss of face. Going from being the man with the pretty wife to the man whose wife had left him.

If I seem awkward, if I freeze a bit, when people ask where I grew up, or about my parents, that's why. Because, like Juliette, I know there are some things it is impossible to describe.

Because when I was thirteen years old, my father strangled my mother to death with enough force to fracture multiple vertebrae in her neck, and then left her there for me to find on the kitchen floor. And then gathered up her sketchbooks and put them on the barbecue in the garden and burned the lot, so I have not one single thing my mother ever wrote or drew to remember her by.

Then he left and spent the rest of the evening laughing and drinking with his friends in the pub.