The Gallery of Vanished Husbands: A Novel by Natasha Solomons Page A

isn’t it nice to be thought young?’
    Charlie did not reply. Juliet lay back, studying the diluted blue of the sky, and listened to Leonard’s shriek of glee as he discovered a worm in a windfall and lobbed it at his sister.
    ‘My mother will watch him for ever – terrified he’s inherited his father’s genes. Vanishing is in the blood, you know.’
    ‘You’re not worried he’ll do it again?’
    She turned her face away to catch the last of the autumn sunshine.
    ‘He didn’t run away. He went looking for someone.’
    But to herself she said,
‘I’m terrified. I’m terrified of going to bed and lying in the dark and remembering how it was when he was lost. I’m terrified of the other children and the awful things they say to him and to Frieda. The lies they tell them. And the truth.
’
    Leonard had brought Charlie here but Juliet wished that he had not. She liked Charlie in the hush of his studio. She did not want his looks of kind concern. She wanted to seal up the memory of those afternoons, keep them crisp and safe. The cool, white world of the studio was separate from the cluttered lives of Mulberry Avenue and, like red and green on a paint palette, she didn’t want the two to meet and muddy.
    ‘I’m sorry for the worry Leonard must have caused but it’s good to see you again.’ He hesitated. ‘I could come back. Maybe next Saturday. See Leonard. Teach him some tricks.’
    ‘You can’t.’
    ‘Who says?’ Charlie snapped. ‘It would be good for him. Boy like that without a dad, needs to be around a chap from time to time.’
    Juliet sat up and took in the flush of indignation on his cheeks. ‘We’re not like you,’ she said. ‘Don’t be fooled by the electric kettle and the well-mannered children. The modern world hasn’t reached us yet. This isn’t London, it’s a village and it isn’t quaint and it isn’t charming. You can come and visit and eat strudel and everyone will be terribly kind and they are, they really truly are, but you don’t belong. Be glad you can go home to your white studio and your white walls where no one watches you.’
    Charlie shook his head. ‘You’re talking nonsense. I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying.’
    ‘Of course you don’t,’ agreed Juliet. ‘That’s why you can’t come here again.’
    She saw from his face that he still did not understand, and said more gently, ‘I can’t have a man calling round here. Be my friend, Charlie. Don’t come back.’
     • • • 
    The next day Juliet was unsure she had done the right thing. Leonard got into a fight at school and broke his spectacles while Frieda was sent home after cookery class for lobbing wet meringue at Margaret Taylor. Juliet spent a good part of the afternoon combing sticky egg whites out of Frieda’s hair. She knew she ought to punish both children but she didn’t have the heart. In the evening she discovered every single copy of
Bulldog Drummond
and
Biggles
stuffed into the wastepaper basket in Leonard’s bedroom.
    The following morning she caught the bus to work as usual. A dreariness hung in her soul as though it had been put through a whites wash with a rogue black sock and come out drab and grey. The walk from the bus stop to the factory seemed to take twice as long as usual and the piles of old fish and chip wrappings and billowing trash bothered her. Greene & Son, Spectacle Lens Grinders was situated down a tight, redbrick alley in Penge. The Victorian warehouses had mostly given way to modern shop fronts taking care of all life’s needs; the high street bookended by a shop hawking prams at the top of the parade and an undertakers at the bottom. A single row of blackened warehouses remained. Juliet was fond of the lone cobbled street, which had briefly hosted an unsuccessful fish market (Penge was not noted for its proximity to the sea) and she liked to think that the stones still reeked of cod.
    Juliet had officially joined the firm four days after her