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CAROLINE, LONDON, 2023, ONE WEEK BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH

They pass in a heartbeat, the years.

In the Tate Modern gift shop, a dark-haired woman—she looked to be in her late twenties—was leafing through The Surreal Life of Juliette Willoughby. I was around her age when that book—my first and by far my most commercially successful—was published in 1998. The same year that I started my first permanent academic job, at Cambridge, that I married Patrick and he opened his gallery.

A photo of the girl I was then (young, ambitious, in love) stares out from the book’s back cover. On the front, a fluorescent sticker boasts Five Million Copies Sold Worldwide, which is pretty extraordinary for a scholarly biography of someone who—back when I wrote it—was an almost unknown female painter. I picked up a copy and it fell open at the dedication page: For my mother.

A further stack of the same hardback was piled on a table beneath a poster advertising my talk tonight, a tie-in to publicize this special twenty-fifth anniversary edition, with a revised introduction my publishers requested I write, reflecting on the book’s success. The truth was, I have never thought that I was responsible for it. I simply had the good luck to write about a woman artist at a point in history at which it felt like people finally started to care about them, an artist with a riveting life story that could be seen—depending upon the prism through which you viewed it—as a tragic romance, a family drama, a coming-of-age tale, or a parable about the ways in which female achievement is overlooked. Or all of those things at once.

Although Self-Portrait as Sphinx itself had disappeared after the auction, I still had Juliette’s journal—a remarkable historical document in its own right—to draw upon and reflect upon. And as Alice Long had wisely suggested, once you looked for Juliette, she could be glimpsed here and there—usually called Jules (Oskar’s nickname for her) or referred to as La Rousse Anglaise, the English Redhead, a quiet girl with little French—in the diaries and letters of her Paris circle.

Naturally enough, it was an academic press that first brought my book out, as an expensive hardback intended mostly for university libraries, to a couple of enthusiastic reviews in specialist journals and general indifference. What catapulted it straight onto the bestseller lists was the sudden reappearance of Self-Portrait as Sphinx in January 1998.

When a letter from the Tate landed in my college cubby requesting that I visit London and offer my academic opinion on a painting by Juliette Willoughby—the only painting by Juliette Willoughby—which they recently had been offered on long-term loan, my first reaction was to panic.

There was, for obvious reasons, no mention in my book of my having found Self-Portrait as Sphinx at Longhurst, or stolen it, or how we had lost it at auction—although privately, Patrick and I had speculated for years about who the buyer might have been, whether they knew what they had stumbled across. Instead, in the book’s conclusion, I described finding Juliette’s journal and the photograph in the Witt Library, proving the painting had survived the fire, and ending on a note of sincere hope that one day it would reappear.

The moment I set eyes on the painting again, propped up on an easel in the office of the Tate’s Head of Collections, I recognized it as the one that had slipped through our fingers. Who owned it, the Tate couldn’t tell me—they were communicating through lawyers to maintain anonymity, which Patrick explained was not unusual for serious collectors. Some don’t want to be inundated by art dealers sharking for new clients; others worry that a high-profile loan alerts thieves to the caliber of the rest of their collection.

I was unsettled, and frustrated its owner would remain a mystery, but Patrick convinced me that overall this was good news. The painting was back, and about to go on display in one of the world’s most prestigious art institutions. My status as an authority on the subject would offer all sorts of media opportunities to bring Juliette’s life and work to a whole new audience.

“Frankly,” said Patrick, “I think we are both extremely lucky that whoever bought it at auction did so over the phone and never got to see the people bidding against them–otherwise we both might have all sorts of awkward questions to answer, wouldn’t we?”

I had to admit he was right.

Self-Portrait as Sphinxwent on show at the newly opened Tate Modern to much media fanfare in 2000, newspapers worldwide covering the story, TV crews from as far afield as Japan and Argentina asking if they could interview me standing in front of it. At my publisher’s request, I swiftly wrote a new chapter on this miraculous rediscovery. My book was reissued with the painting reproduced in glossy color on the front cover instead of Juliette’s passport photo. This time it was reviewed everywhere, the publishers unable to reprint it fast enough to keep up with demand.

I did always mention it was Patrick who had found the photograph in the Witt, without which the painting could not have been authenticated. I did often suggest people interview him too. I was conscious that just as my career was going stratospheric, he was putting in eighteen-hour days at his gallery. It was a lot of pressure to put on a marriage.

The dark-haired woman placed my book down on the table, revealing a lanyard identifying her as Flo Burton, the events assistant I was waiting for to escort me to my talk. She did a double take, then smiled and offered her hand to shake.

“Professor Cooper? Lovely to meet you. Shall we head upstairs? We have a full house tonight,” she said as she ushered me toward the escalator. “It sold out weeks ago. Members love hearing from experts, and Self-Portrait as Sphinx is one of the most-visited paintings here...”

Every seat in the gallery was taken, and—a tribute to the cross-generational appeal of Juliette’s art and her story—there were teenagers next to pensioners, art students next to middle-aged couples in matching fleeces. Here and there, a past or present academic colleague or a former student. Flo clutched a piece of paper and leaned over the microphone.

“Good evening,” she began. “Please join me in welcoming Professor Caroline Cooper. As well as being the world’s preeminent expert on Juliette Willoughby, she was the guest curator of the exhibition Women Surrealism here last year here and has written extensively on the movement in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris and beyond. We are very lucky to have her with us tonight for our lecture”—a glance at her piece of paper—“Rediscovering an Icon: The Story of Self-Portrait as Sphinx.”

She moved swiftly off to take a seat in the front row. Positioning myself behind the lectern, I reached into my bag for my glasses, making a self-deprecating comment about needing them these days. This got a far bigger ripple of laughter than it merited.

“Thank you, Flo. It is not every day you get invited to speak about a painting with it hanging right there on the wall behind you. Welcome, everyone.”

I took a sip of water.

“If you were asked to imagine an auction house on sale day, how would it look? You’re probably picturing Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Masterpiece after masterpiece placed with white-gloved hands next to the auctioneer’s podium, collectors lifting paddles and aggressively outbidding each other in million-pound increments. Well, forget all that. Most sales in the secondary art market in the UK—that is, paintings which have been bought and sold before, rather than fresh off the artist’s easel—are conducted in rather less glamorous settings. Dealing with lower-priced, lower-quality lots, provincial auction houses are in fact the backbone of the art market. But they are not often where long-lost Surrealist masterpieces turn up.”

Some more generous chuckles, from two women in the back row.

“And yet when you consult the catalogue, there it is, listed in the weekly sale at the Ely Auction Rooms on November 29, 1991. Lot 76: ‘Medium Oil Picture.’ If we were to take the painting behind me from the wall now, you would see the label with exactly that on the back. Its owner bought it that day via phone bid for four thousand pounds—well over the estimate.”

I smiled.

“It is worth considerably more than that now, of course.”

Sometimes this thought did pop into my head. That Patrick and I, under different circumstances, might both be really quite rich. Millionaires many times over, surely, given the cult of personality that has grown up around Juliette. It would certainly be worth more than any of Oskar Erlich’s works.

I tried to keep my face neutral as my mind flashed back to the horror of that moment in the auction room, the hammer falling, the realization of what we had lost, the absolute bloodlessness of Patrick’s face.

I did not blame him. That was what I told Patrick that night, as he paced, as he rubbed his face with his hands, as he swore, as he apologized. Of course I forgave him, I promised. What would have been the point of recrimination? I could not make him feel worse than he already felt. There was still the journal, I reminded him. We still had each other. That was what mattered. I wasn’t angry. But even at the time, I suspected that I could keep telling him that for the rest of our lives and he would never quite know whether to believe it.

I willed myself back wholly into the gallery, the moment. It was the official version of history I was supposed to be recounting tonight. The story not of how I had found the painting and lost it but how I had decided, once it later resurfaced, that it was the genuine article.

“There are really three ways in which you can try to authenticate an artwork. The first is to use documentary evidence to establish its provenance. With some paintings, there is a very clear paper trail leading you back to its first owner, to the time and place it was first sold, even the moment of creation. Unfortunately, with Self-Portrait as Sphinx that is not the case. We don’t even know who the vendor was in 1991, because when the Ely auction rooms closed down a few years later, all their paperwork was lost, most likely shredded or thrown away. What we do have are Juliette’s journal, passport, and pendant, which were all seemingly returned to Longhurst Hall after her death, before being bundled up with other material and donated to the University of Cambridge. So there exists proof that at least some of her personal possessions survived the Paris fire. Similarly, we have a photograph of Self-Portrait as Sphinx taken at Longhurst in 1961, although we don’t know how it got there or what happened to it next, and the Willoughby family have always insisted they have no idea either.”

In fact, Philip and Georgina Willoughby had repeatedly and brusquely refused to answer any questions about Juliette, the painting, or the journal, at all.

“The second way to authenticate a painting—or identify a misattribution or fake—is via technical inquiry. We had more to work with here. The signature on Juliette’s passport matches very closely the signature on the painting.”

I stepped out from behind the podium and crossed to stand directly in front of the painting, drawing a circle in the air around the bottom right corner. The audience, squinting, shifted in their seats.

“Paint analysis ascertained that the pigments used were of exactly the same composition as the color swatches daubed in Juliette’s journal. The vibrant green you see here,” I said, pointing to the robes of the hooded figure, “had traces of arsenic. And the white”—I indicated the dress of the drowned girl—“was laced with lead. Both compounds are now known to be highly poisonous but were still widely used in the 1930s. Radiocarbon dating of the wood and canvas showed them to be the correct age. And then there are the thumbprints on the back, where Juliette handled the frame with paint-covered hands. They match those left in the charcoal sketches in Juliette’s journal.”

I took another sip of water.

“The third and final factor on which an institution like the Tate relies is expert opinion—which is where someone like me comes in. Someone who has spent their life studying an artist and their work. Someone who is prepared to put a professional reputation they have spent years accumulating on the line. It is a big responsibility, and there can be millions of pounds at stake. But when I was asked my professional verdict on this painting, I did not experience a moment’s doubt. The subject and the composition of the various scenes playing out across the canvas. Both fit closely with the fragmentary studies preserved in Juliette’s journal. When you take all the evidence together, there can be little reasonable doubt that the work you see behind me is the same remarkable painting that was exhibited by Juliette Willoughby at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition.”

It was after the lecture, after the audience questions, after the book signing, when I was left to my own devices and the chairs were being packed up, that my phone rang, and I answered it, and once again my life changed forever.

It was Patrick, calling to tell me that a second Self-Portrait as Sphinx had been discovered.

PATRICK, DUBAI, 2023, SIX DAYS BEFORE HARRY’S DEATH

I checked my watch. I am always early for meetings with potential buyers, to ensure the stage is correctly set, to check that everything is perfectly arranged.

Dave White was late. This did not surprise me. Dave White was a very rich man indeed, with a string of supermodel girlfriends and an astronomically valuable modern art collection. I was a man with a very expensive piece of modern art to sell. What was worthy of remark was not that Dave White was late but that he was having lunch with me at all.

For years, I had been attempting to sell art to him. Contacting his offices in New York, Dubai, and London whenever we had a piece—he was a collector of Surrealist paintings from the 1920s and 1930s—that I thought might interest him. I had never yet received a single response.

Yesterday at six in the evening, Dubai time, I emailed his people to let them know I had a painting by Juliette Willoughby for sale. Fifteen minutes later Dave White called me personally to suggest we meet for lunch. I asked where he wanted to go. Without clarifying who would be paying, he suggested a ninety-seventh-floor sushi restaurant where a meal for two cost the same as a small car. For a moment, I thought he was joking. Then he named a time, told me to book a table, and hung up.

I resisted the urge to check my watch again. He would be here. If only to hear how I had come into possession of an impossible painting, he would be here. I forced myself to ignore the menu—more precisely, the prices on the menu—and to gaze out instead across a sea of white tablecloths through floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows at the desert in the distance.

I had gone to some effort to make a good impression. My watch was a Rolex, not fake. I was in a new Favourbrook suit. One piece of advice my father always gave me was that no one buys anything valuable from a man who looks poor or seems desperate. This being especially true when you were as poor and desperate as I was.

Dave White was almost at the table before I noticed him. He offered me a hand, I offered him mine. He glanced at my watch and a faint smirk appeared on his face. The smirk did not really fade as we sat down.

“Hello, Patrick,” he said in a distinctly Brummie accent. He was wearing boardshorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops. All around the restaurant I could see people pretending—in their bespoke suits and spotless white kanduras—not to have noticed this. In a corner, I could see two waiters discreetly conferring, probably trying to work out if they recognized him as a regular, to decide whether this man was rich or powerful enough to get away with walking in here as if he had just wandered off the beach.

One of the waiters got his phone out, perhaps attempting to google Dave—a fruitless endeavor, because even if his name had been on the booking, it would not have helped. Like all extremely rich people, Dave White takes great care to ensure that none of his personal information, even his image, ever appears online—which is somewhat ironic, given that most of his fortune was made in facial recognition tech. There are no newspaper or magazine profiles. No Rich List position in the Sunday Times. Just one brief mention, in a two-line paragraph of personal information on the website of Vision Corp, the company he founded and still runs.

We exchanged pleasantries. He asked about my gallery and how long I had been based in Dubai, failing to offer any explanation for his delayed arrival. Had he flown in for this occasion specially, I wondered, or just been driven from the villa he was rumored to own on the Palm? I asked if he had made any interesting art acquisitions lately—my sources had told me he already owned two Picassos, six Dalís, a handful of Kahlos, a Delvaux, and a Man Ray, plus at least a dozen Erlichs, including Three Figures in a Landscape.

A waiter appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Dave ordered first—an omakase platter, a mineral water. I resisted the urge to cross-reference his order with the prices, and asked for the sea bass, the second-cheapest item on the menu. I suggested wine and, to my relief, he shook his head.

“Is it true, then?” he asked.

It was true, I said. I had in my possession, and through my gallery was offering for sale, what I believed to be an authentic painting by Juliette Willoughby.

“Self-Portrait as Sphinx,” he said.

“A second Self-Portrait as Sphinx.”

He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“We have done a full analysis and the results are compelling. The stretchers. The canvas. All dated to the 1930s. Samples of paint match the color notes in Juliette’s journal. The signature is a match for the passport and there are thumbprints too. We are also speaking to the world’s leading expert on Juliette—”

Dave White cleared his throat. “You don’t remember me, do you, Patrick?”

I smiled, a little confused. Remember him from where? He looked like a lot of people I had met in my career, although someone this rich you’d think might stick in memory. Had we been briefly introduced at a biennale? Crossed paths at a private view?

“We were in the same college, Patrick. At Cambridge.”

He named the year. He named our college. “Oh, right,” I said, although I had no memory of anyone called Dave White. “I’m sure we’ve all changed a lot since then.”

“You used to call me Terry,” he said flatly. “You and your friends. People I had never met thought my name really was Terry.”

“But your name isn’t Terry,” I said. I must have looked as baffled as I now felt.

I found myself wondering if this whole situation was some sort of setup. What had he studied? Mathematics? Computer science? Something nerdy, no doubt, given how he had made his cash. Perhaps this was the comeuppance he had dreamed of every time I swept past him on the stairs, off to some party; every time he saw me cross a quad with my beautiful girlfriend. Every time I called him Terry—for whatever fucking reason I used to do that.

“Perhaps I misheard your name when we first met?”

Dave shook his head. “I wore an orange coat, Patrick. I wore an orange raincoat that my mother bought me, and you made a joke about it, and everyone called me Terry for three years.”

I let out a chuckle before I could stop myself. The orange coat. Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Terry. That did ring a bell, now that I came to think of it. I wondered if the Terry’s brand still even existed and, if it did, if those big orange-flavored chocolate balls in their orange foil wrappers were still a staple in kids’ Christmas stockings. Dave White’s face remained impassive.

“We lived on the same floor, Patrick. In college. I was literally in the room next door to yours the whole final year,” he said.

“Of course!” I exclaimed, finally seeing something of the teenage Terry’s pinkish, puffy face in the tanned and chiseled one in front of me. “You’re Next-Door Terry!”

A smile played across his lips. Not a wholly friendly smile, but a smile nonetheless. “I was Next-Door Terry back then, yes. But we’re not here to talk about old times, are we, Patrick?”

I found myself smiling too, in nervous relief. There had been a horrible moment when I thought he was just going to order a magnum of vintage Krug, tell me what a prick I had been, and walk out leaving me the bill.

“Right, yes, good idea,” I said, thankful for the change of subject. “The painting was found at Longhurst, by Harry Willoughby, a direct descendant of—”

He cuts me off. “I know who Harry Willoughby is. I was at his twenty-first too.”

Were you?That was my first thought. Then I remembered that table of oddballs.

Dave White asked me why I thought Harry had come to me, to the Lambert Gallery, rather than to any of the big London auction houses. The real answer was simple: Harry wanted as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. This was not the answer I gave, naturally, because selling art at this level is 1 percent expertise, 99 percent PR.

“Well, for one thing, because we’re old friends, and for another, as you know, the Middle East is one of the most exciting art markets in the world, with multiple major institutions actively acquiring—the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, multiple new galleries in Saudi—not to mention some very wealthy private collectors...”

It never hurts to let potential buyers know they are not the only people interested in a painting.

“And you genuinely believe it’s authentic?” he asked curtly. “Because I really don’t see how it can be. I’ve done my homework. Juliette was working on Self-Portrait as Sphinx right up to the time she put it on display. There is no mention of any other versions of the painting in her journal. There was no time for her to paint any others...”

“And yet here we are,” I said, shrugging. “As I say, we are flying out the world’s leading expert to give her verdict in the next few days.”

“Caroline Cooper,” he said. “Your ex-wife.”

“She is also my ex-wife,” I conceded, a little reluctantly.

“So how are things between the two of you now?”

I mumbled something about things being perfectly amicable. They were certainly more amicable than they had been. It was five years since the divorce, after all. I was married to someone else now. From time to time, Caroline and I ran into each other at events in London, and we had always been perfectly civil. Once or twice, when I had a question about something that fell within her area of expertise, I called to get her opinion.

“And you are sure she’s going to come?”

It was a reasonable question. After all, Caroline had authenticated the painting in Tate Modern and then spent a career writing and talking about it. I could hear it in her voice on the phone, her shock at what I was telling her, the steady dawning of the professional implications if this new version of the painting proved authentic. Perhaps even the faint suspicion that I might be enjoying springing all this on her.

But if Dave White was fishing for details about how the marriage had ended and why, I was not going to satisfy his curiosity. One of our strengths as a couple had always been a reluctance to air our dirty laundry. Caroline and I had both done things, said things, of which we were not proud, and had hurt each other in ways we couldn’t have imagined possible. Love was never uncomplicated for Caroline, nor was that something which could be cured just by meeting the right person. The first time I proposed, she would not speak to me for a week, and then it took two more tries before she said yes. Even on our wedding day, as I was standing at the altar, part of me wondered whether she would actually show up. But there was no part of me that wondered whether she would come now.

“She’ll be here,” I told Dave.

She would come because when she examined the photos I had emailed her, she would see exactly the same thing I had: that this new painting was no straightforward copy of the painting in Tate Modern. Because as Caroline would recognize—even more swiftly than I had—there were two subtle but very suggestive differences between them. Two significant details which did not match up and which might shed light on the riddle she had spent decades trying to unravel.

She would come, I promised Dave, and myself.

Because if Caroline did not come, I thought as the bill for lunch landed on the table and Dave watched me pull out my wallet without reaching for his own, I was absolutely fucked.

JULIETTE, PARIS, 1938

There are some things that can never be written down.

We had to leave. Oskar and I. That was what I kept telling him. That it was not safe there. That if my uncle knew I was in Paris, then my father would know, and if my father knew where I was...

I was letting my nerves get the best of me. That was what Oskar kept insisting. Every time he caught me peeking around the curtain down into our courtyard, flinching at a tread on the staircase. I was not painting. I could not settle to read. Leaving the apartment, even popping around the corner to buy dinner or a little wire-wrapped bundle of firewood from the street seller, was an ordeal. As for my journal, I was far too unsettled to write in it, even if I had wanted to. The very idea of committing my thoughts to paper appalled me. Instead, the words swirled around in my brain. More than once, Oskar caught me in the kitchen muttering to myself, or had to shake me awake at night to tell me I had been babbling incoherently in my sleep.

In a moment of panic, I hid my journal and passport in the heavy-lidded cast-iron pot we used for soup, placing it on the highest shelf in the kitchen. Without my passport, my thinking went, how could my uncle force me to return to England? In that hidden journal, at least some part of my true story was preserved for others to read, some trace of my existence.

If I fell again into my family’s clutches, I was certain that I would be spending the rest of my life back in an asylum. Some nights, I dreamed in horror that I was there already, being made to detail to a doctor precisely what Self-Portrait as Sphinx meant. One night, after the third or fourth time I had woken him up with my gasps and twitching and insistent mumbling, Oskar angrily went off with a blanket to sleep on a chair.

I had never seen him as surly and abrasive before.

He was angry that I had withdrawn my painting so abruptly from the exhibition, especially given the excitement it had generated. He was even angrier that no one had bought his painting yet.

I wanted to leave, to run. Not to England. Not Germany. Perhaps, I said, I could see a future for us in New York. Finally, reluctantly, after much nagging, Oskar went to the American embassy.

I could hear just from his boots on the stairs that the expedition had not been a success. He kicked them off at the door, their heels slamming against the wall. “Idiots,” was his only comment as he threw himself down onto the bed in our room. A cloud of dust rose and settled. “Idioten.” Both of us aware that for the classical Greeks, an idiot was simply someone who took no interest in public affairs. Like a man tasked with allocating passports, who has a number of boxes he is permitted to tick and can find no combination of them that can accommodate an applicant with a German name and a German accent, whose parents are German and whose first language is German but whose hometown is now, after the end of the last war, solidly in Polish territory.

Oskar had, aware of the line of people behind him, attempted to give a condensed history of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, from the eighteenth century onward, believing that if he explained things clearly enough, emphatically enough, then all the bureaucratic pettifogging could be swept to one side and some arrangement arrived at. I could imagine the sinking spirits of the desk clerk, as on and on Oskar thundered, the shuffling resentment of those waiting behind him. The response, inevitably, being: had he tried the Polish embassy?

All afternoon, I sat in our apartment and listened to the flat metallic ticking of the clock, wondering if it had always been that loud. All day long, all night long, that ticking.

Then, all of a sudden, it seemed as if Oskar and I might have a future after all.

He had been out for lunch with friends (I turned the invitation down, as he knew I would), and when he arrived back he announced before I even said hello that he had found a man who could get us passports, who could take care of all the immigration paperwork for the United States. We would both have new identities—for the journey, at least. Oskar would be French. For reasons of plausibility, because it was the only language in which I was fluent, I would remain English. He would no longer be a stateless Galician. Juliette Willoughby would have vanished from Paris without a trace.

“So this fellow is a forger?” I asked.

“A very good one,” said Oskar. A lot of people in this man’s line of work, explained Oskar, had trained as artists. He was known, in our circle. People had vouched for him.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

It was all arranged, Oskar said. He must meet the man at a certain café, with our photographs. Within three hours, he would return with our new passports. We could take the pictures ourselves, with that little Leica camera Oskar had given me for my birthday, and develop them here, in the apartment.

“We can leave,” Oskar said. All we needed to do once we had those passports was to buy our tickets. Six hours to Le Havre. Within twenty-four, we could be in sight of the cliffs of Dover. And then? It had to be America, I told him. The new world. A new life. New York. He took my face in his hands, kissed me. Yet his smile had something a little cracked in it, like he could not quite believe all this either. As if there was a catch he had yet to spring on me. All we need now is the money, he said.

Then he told me how much money.