The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel (3 page)

And a man who would not divorce his wife, thought Juliet, though she did not say this aloud even though she could tell Charlie was no longer listening.

 • • • 

As he paints, Charlie hears her voice as though from underwater. The picture pulls him on. Dark hair but with flecks of red from days in the sun, eyes not quite green, not quite grey. She is trying to be still, but she betrays her restlessness in the wiggling of her toes. She talks and talks but the sound of her voice is wordless, like the tumble of water. Juliet Montague. Charlie doesn’t know girls – or rather women – like her. She is not like his sister’s friends who are part of the smart set and speak on the telephone in loud whispers, desperate to be overheard. She’s younger than his mother and not a bit like her tennis pals with their cool white dresses and endless fretting about the help. He realises that he’s trying to paint her but he doesn’t really know her at all. She’s an assortment of parts, pale hands, blue dress, tiny mole on her left cheek, a bold cupid’s bow. He watches and watches her, trying to see. On the table rests a bowl of green apples all the way from Russia.

Years later, when Charlie Fussell is an old man, he sees his painting hanging in a gallery. He makes a beeline for her, eager to make her acquaintance once again, but when he reaches her, he’s struck by his own shabbiness. Back then she’d been older than him but now they’ve swapped places and time has run away from him and stopped for her. In age, he examines youth, hers and his, up there on the canvas. He’s filled with sadness (which he expects) and irritation (which he does not) and realises it’s quite clear that in a career spanning many decades he painted his best picture one spring in 1958 when he was not yet twenty-one. Nothing he has done since is as good as this dark-haired woman with her bowl of apples.

The summer was drawing to a close. The plum tree in the back garden had discarded its fruit onto the browning lawn faster than Leonard and Frieda could gather it up, so the small yard now smelled sweetly of rotting plums. It was a Friday and the children drifted around mournfully, conscious that Monday was the start of a new school year and that this last, precious weekend had an air of sorrowful finality, like the last penny sweet in a paper twist. They remembered all the things they had planned to do with the endless weeks that were now ending, and regretted the bike they had not learned to ride (Leonard) and the pocket money that they had not saved for the fancy new school bag (Frieda). Leonard perched on the swing his grandfather had fixed to the tree. It was wonky and he slid down to one end of the crooked seat, swinging half-heartedly and lopsidedly. Frieda lazed on the grass, sighing and sucking on sugar-cubes filched from the pantry. Leonard wondered whether if he hid in the abandoned privy / tool shed at the end of the garden, they would find him and force him to go to school. He concluded with regret that they probably would. He slithered off the swing and slipped out of the side gate. As he crossed the scrap of lawn with its pair of flowerpots that passed for a front garden, he noticed with interest that a large van was attempting to steer down the narrow suburban street, collecting snatches of twigs and leaves in its wing mirror like a jaunty buttonhole. His melancholy forgotten, Leonard scrambled onto the low wall between the garden and the pavement. To his intense excitement, the van shuddered to a halt right in front of him. The Montagues never had deliveries. The neighbours did, almost every week, it seemed to Leonard, who always came out to watch from his spot on the garden wall. He had observed with palm-tingling envy when next-door had their new television set delivered. It was so big and so heavy that it had taken three men to carry it up the front path. Leonard closed his eyes and, turning his face heavenwards, muttered one of his grandfather’s grace-before-meals prayers, willing his own prayer to become a grace-before-television. His supplication was disturbed by a loud honk of the horn, and his mother emerged from the front door, wearing lipstick in a glossy post-box red. Leonard understood this. If he had known that a television was arriving, he would have combed his hair and put on his Saturday trousers in its honour.

Juliet hurried along the path, calling, ‘Darlings, come and see my birthday present.’

She reached for Leonard’s hand and drew him round to the rear of the van, where two stout men bundled a rectangular wooden pallet onto their broad shoulders. Leonard eyed them with suspicion. Televisions should be handled with more reverence. Frieda joined them in the garden in her socks, also intrigued by the commotion.

Juliet hustled the children into the house, following in the wake of the deliverymen. Vibrating with excitement, Leonard padded into the living room as the men began to lever open the pallet. Frieda lingered in the doorway, hands thrust deep in her pockets.

‘I thought your birthday present was going to be a fridge.’

Juliet flushed. ‘Yes. It was. But then, well, I decided that was really rather a horrid present for a birthday.’

Neither Frieda nor Leonard spoke. They had always thought that refrigerators were horribly dull but believed them to be one of those things grown-ups term ‘an acquired taste’. They were surprised but intrigued to discover they had been right all along. As the deliverymen finished prying open the packing pallet Juliet, Frieda and Leonard stepped closer.

‘Oh,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s much better than a fridge.’

Leonard felt a sharp pang when he saw the object inside the pallet was not, in fact, a television and then a ripple of wonder. He knew somehow that his mother had done something unexpected, something marvellous and something that Grandma would not approve of. He looked at the woman in the crate who was his mother but transformed into some familiar stranger. He turned back to Juliet who stood behind him, head to one side as she surveyed her other self, and at that moment she was a stranger too.

Kneeling, Juliet eased the portrait out of the box and then, slipping out of her shoes, climbed onto the sideboard and hung it on the wall.

‘Is it straight?’

‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘That side is lower. The left. No the other left.’

Juliet jumped down and stood between her children. ‘Do you remember when another picture used to hang here?’

Leonard shook his head.

‘I think so,’ said Frieda. ‘It was a girl.’

‘It was me.’

It was me, thought Juliet, and he stole me when he vanished.

Whenever the opportunity arose, Leonard liked to describe his father’s death. He bestowed on him a different one every time, each more wretched than the last. But he knew his father wasn’t really dead only gone and
never-coming-back-into-this-house-so-help-me-God.
He heard the things the grown-ups said when they thought he couldn’t hear – ‘George Montague was a swine’ and ‘a good for nothing’ and a ‘coward and a wretch’. Leonard couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Sometimes as he fell asleep he saw a picture of a very tall man and he wondered if this was him but there were no photographs to check; not any more.

A week after the portrait arrived he snuck into his mother’s bedroom and pulled out her shoebox of pictures from its hiding place at the back of her cupboard. He emptied the contents all over the floor, searching for photos of his father. He’d rummaged through it many times before but only ever found snaps of his mother standing beside a scissored hole. ‘
Honeymoon, Margate, George and Juliet, 1947
’, it said in pencil on the back, but there was no George, only Juliet and a gap through which Leonard could see the swirl of the carpet. Tonight was no different and he sighed and started to shove the photos back in the box, wondering why his mother bothered to keep them and why he kept on looking, and then for the first time he noticed something else. A scrap of paper was tucked into the lip of the box
.
He glanced over his shoulder. The door was safely closed. From downstairs he could hear voices on the wireless crooning softly.

He drew out the sheet of paper:

Certificate of Naturalisation:

George Montague formerly Molnár, György

Leonard understood what this flimsy piece of paper meant. His father was a spy. George Montague wasn’t his real name, it was just one of his identities. This paper was proof that George Montague – aka Molnár György – had to leave them. He must have put up a fight – Leonard pictured the tall man from his dream declaring to his commander, ‘
I won’t do it. I won’t. I will not leave my son . . . or,
’
Leonard made him add,
‘
my women.
’ The argument went on and on in Leonard’s head, but in the end he saw his father go quiet, saying in a whisper as he wiped away a single tear, ‘
This is the worst sacrifice a man can make. In all my years of service, I never thought I’d be forced to do this. Only for Queen and Country and for my son, Leonard.
’

Leonard slid the paper back into the box and replaced it in the wardrobe. When he came downstairs his mother had abandoned the ironing and was now folding shirts into jumbled piles. She looked much happier in the painting, he decided. In the painting her mouth twitched with a smile, the one when she knew a really good secret, one she wasn’t going to tell you, not yet.

Juliet wondered that her parents’ house could contain so many people. She understood how they had once folded into the
shtetls
, sleeping ten to a room. The garden was even busier. Uncles Jacob and Sollie Greene attempted to prop up the left side of the
sukkah
, which was threatening to collapse, and the three Uncles Lipshitz herded more children than she could possibly count, filing in and out of the
sukkah
, in and out, as though practising for Noah’s ark. It made an odd sight, the tottering shack of leaves in the middle of the square lawn of Number Twenty-Six Victoria Drive. The
sukkah
was a mass of wild things, twisting stems of willow, hazel and snatches of creeper and the frenzied play of the children. They caught the whiff of the wild and careered and yelped.

‘Goodness what a racket,’ complained Mrs Greene. ‘Here, take these trays. Perhaps if we feed them, they’ll lose a bit of their savagery.’

Taking the plates of chopped fried fish, pickled herring and baskets of golden
challah
, Juliet approached the shack, squeezing past Uncle Ed who held a pair of hazel switches to his head like antlers, and chased the children around the flowerbed, his bad leg forgotten in the carnival. For most of the year these were indoor folk who might venture into the park if it was particularly fine, but who were infinitely more comfortable in a neat front room with a nice cup of something hot. Good weather could be conveniently admired through a window and a pot of geraniums was usually considered plenty of nature. But on this night everything changed. Juliet stepped back to avoid being skewered by Ed’s makeshift antlers or trampled by a pink and puffing Leonard.

‘How are you managing, my dear?’

Juliet turned to see Mrs Ezekiel arranging a line of marrows stuffed so full that the meat dripped onto the plate.

‘Very well, and yourself?’

‘Can’t complain. Can’t complain. But you, always so brave. We all think it’s wonderful how you manage.’