That Summer: A Novel (13 page)

Where had they lived when she was little? Not here, she assumed. This was a teenager’s room—and besides, Julia couldn’t imagine her father submitting to being a kept man in the spousal familial home.

“A garden flat.” The phrase came out of nowhere. She could hear it, someone saying it, with a little laugh as though it were a joke, one of those adult jokes she didn’t quite understand. Beige walls and glass sliding doors and a concrete patio with a wire table and chairs. There was a cat, too. Their cat? A neighbor’s cat?

She could see its tail disappearing between two potted plants, just out of her eager grasp.
Mummy, kitty!

The image disappeared with a pop, leaving Julia blinking at the pasteboard back of the wardrobe.

It had seemed so real, that child’s-eye view, but that didn’t mean anything at all. It was too easy to manufacture memories, to stitch together bits of books and stories and convince herself that they were real. Only the solid, the physical, held any true security. The scratchy wool of her mother’s old skirts, that was real. So was the heavy wood of the wardrobe, although the back didn’t look quite so solid as the front.

Julia leaned forward, into the now empty wardrobe. The back wall was a totally different color, a discolored beige rather than a rich mahogany. When she poked it, the whole panel shifted. Whoa. Instinctively Julia snatched her hand back. If the wardrobe was going to collapse on her.…

But that wasn’t part of the wardrobe. That wasn’t even wood. Cautiously, Julia stuck her head back in, feeling around the edges of the panel. It was some kind of heavy cardboard, or something similar, cut to fit the dimensions of the back of the wardrobe.

Tentatively, Julia jiggled the pasteboard panel. When tentative didn’t work, she gave it a good yank. Whoever it was had stuck the false back in good and hard. The panel popped free, Julia staggered back, and something plopped heavily into the cavity of the wardrobe, raising a heavy cloud of dust.

Coughing, Julia went to investigate. It was a rectangular parcel, wrapped in layers and layers of linen, linen yellowed by age. With difficulty, Julia extracted the bundle from the wardrobe. It was nearly as wide as the wardrobe itself, made even wider by the layers of padding. Whoever had constructed the hiding place had fixed it to fit the dimensions of this parcel.

Slowly, Julia began unwrapping the layers. The linen smelled faintly of lavender, the fabric strange to the touch, not at all like the synthetics to which she was accustomed. Julia felt a prickle of excitement. This wasn’t her mother’s, whatever it was. This had to be older, far older. These sheets had never seen a factory. They had been hemmed by hand, the stitches small and neat—amazingly small and neat—but without the perfect sameness of machine stitching.

It was too ridiculously Nancy Drew.

“The Mystery of the Old Wardrobe,” Julia murmured to herself, but her hands were quick to strip the old sheets, only to encounter a layer of plain brown paper wrapping tied in twine. Tied in twine because there had been no tape?

She was going to be really disappointed when it turned out to be an old pile of magazines or someone’s large cutting board. It was the right size and shape for a cutting board, but not quite heavy enough.

The knots in the twine had hardened to glue-like consistency with time. Julia gave up on trying to untie them and wiggled the cords off along the sides, feeling like a child trying to get at a prissily wrapped Christmas present. Finally, the brown wrappings fell away.

It was a painting. Not a copy or a print, but a genuine oil painting, stretched out over matting but unframed. Julia lowered it onto the bed with an ungraceful thump. Freed from its wrappings, the colors glowed amazingly bright, the brushwork as fresh as though it had been painted yesterday.

And she was looking at it upside down.

Julie turned it right side up, scooping old sweaters and skirts ignominiously out of the way. She knelt before the bed, entirely entranced. It wasn’t a portrait, or a landscape, or someone’s beloved pug dogs. It was a story scene, knights and maidens and feasting. At the center, the king dined at the high table. Julia cleverly deduced his position from both his seat at the center of the table and the rather conspicuous circlet on his brow. He was surrounded by fawning courtiers, all leaning towards him.

In the foreground, however, a man and a woman stood in a window embrasure, the only ones not paying attention to their monarch. Their focus was fixed on each other, their eyes yearning, while their hands were locked around a golden goblet they held between them. Although they were off to the side and the king’s trestle table in the center, the artist had worked it cleverly so that the attention was immediately drawn to the clandestine couple—including the king’s. His goblet was raised in a toast, but his eyes had slid sideways. He was watching the man and woman and didn’t like what he saw.

It was all pure Pre-Raphaelite, the stained-glass windows, the pennants flaring from the beams, the colorful doublets of the courtiers. The lady wore a long gown with a dropped waist in a rich sapphire blue. Her hair wasn’t the usual Pre-Raphaelite red but a dark, dark brown, nearly black. It fell unbound to her waist, held only by the golden circlet at her brow.

There was something very familiar about the woman.

“Julia?”

She caught at the edge of the bed as someone called her name. How long had she been kneeling here? Her knees had gone numb and her neck was stiff.

“Julia?” It was Andrew, popping his head around the door. “I thought you might want to see— What’s that?”

Julia lurched to her feet, fighting the urge to step in front of the painting, to hide her discovery.

Like Gollum with his Precious, she thought in disgust, and stepped aside. “I found this in the back of that wardrobe. Pretty neat, no?”

Andrew’s eyes widened as he started at the canvas on the bed. “I’m no judge of art, but whatever that is—it looks real.” He grinned at her, his open face lighting up. “Maybe you’ve found that Rubens.”

Julia put out a hand to stop him. “I’m sure it’s not—”

But Andrew was already shouting down the stairs. “Nick? Nick! Come up here! You’ll want to see this.”

“It might be a copy of something,” said Julia hesitantly.

But it wasn’t; she was sure of it. Copies didn’t look like that. They didn’t have that firmness of brushstroke. They didn’t glow with life.

Julia heard the
click-clack
of Natalie’s heels on the stairs.

“What is it?” Natalie asked her brother grumpily just as Nicholas came up behind her, bracing one hand against the doorjamb.

“This had better be good,” he said. “You’ve taken me away from a cow creamer for this.”

“This,” said Andrew, and pointed at the painting on the bed.

For a moment, everyone in the room just stood and stared. And then—

“That isn’t a Rubens,” said Nicholas.

EIGHT

Herne Hill, 2009

“No shit, Sherlock,” said Julia.

“It
is
a painting,” said Andrew helpfully.

“Brilliantly spotted,” drawled Nicholas.

Julia gave him a look. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Pre-Raphaelite,” she said. “It’s got the right … feel to it.”

Maybe if she’d stuck with art history she’d have the technical terminology to elaborate on just what those details were that made her so sure. It was something about the colors, about the subject matter, the quality of the light. She hadn’t taken any classes on the Pre-Raphaelites back in college—they were considered vaguely déclassé by the art historical establishment at Yale when she was there—but they’d been standard dorm room decoration. In her own room she’d had Dicksee’s
Belle Dame sans Merci,
Millais’s
Ophelia
, and Waterhouse’s
My Sweet Rose,
all courtesy of the poster collection at the Yale Co-op.

But those had been prints. This was the real thing.

“You’re right,” said Nicholas, surprising her. “Is there a signature?”

Their heads narrowly escaped collision as they both leaned over the painting at the same time. Julia’s arm brushed Nicholas’s, damp with sweat in the un-air-conditioned room. Andrew had been wrong; there wasn’t any pong about Nicholas. He smelled of soap and laundry detergent and the slightly musty odor of old books.

“Well?” said Natalie impatiently from behind them.

Julia’s eyes met Nicholas’s. They were blue, but not a pedestrian, workaday sort of blue; his eyes were like stained glass limned in sunlight, the blue tinged a translucent green.

“PRB.”
Julia’s voice was breathless. Three little letters, such a small thing to make the hair on her arms prickle like that, to send a chill down her spine. Julia used the edge of the bed to lever herself back up to a standing position. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? On the bottom right. The initials
PRB
.”

“Who’s PRB?” asked Natalie.

“Not who, what,” said Julia before Nicholas could. “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were a group of painters in the mid-nineteenth century. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But they painted beautiful things.”

“Postcard art,” said Nicholas, rising to his feet. Standing, he was considerably taller than she was, placing her eyes somewhere on a level with the top button of his shirt.

Julia refused to be loomed over. “Tell that to the Met,” she retorted.

“Or the Tate,” said Nicholas blandly, and she realized he’d been deliberately winding her up. To Natalie he said, “The art community is always suspicious of anything that’s too popular with the masses.”

“Is there a name, or just those initials?” asked Natalie, placing a proprietary hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Julia took a step back, feeling, strangely, chastened. “Do we know who painted it?”

“I’m not seeing a signature,” said Andrew, hunkering down by the painting. “Not that it means there isn’t one,” he added hastily.

“Even if there isn’t one,” Nick said slowly, “I think we can narrow it down. If I’m right.”

“How?” asked Julia.

His eyes met hers, the glint in them belying his reserved tone. “It was a small movement. It wasn’t just anyone who used the initials
PRB
. It was only members of the original brotherhood and only at the very beginning of the movement. They dropped the use of the initials—I don’t remember exactly when. Within the first few years. Early enough.”

That would be easy enough to find out; she could Google it once they were gone. Julia’s head swam with possibilities. The idea that this painting, sitting here on the bed, might be a genuine Pre-Raphaelite, that it might not have been seen since it was first painted … Someone, 150-odd years ago, had dipped his brush into paint and produced
that
.

The mind boggled.

“I wouldn’t get too excited,” Nicholas warned her. “There were a few of those early Pre-Raphaelites who were non-starters. They weren’t all Rossetti and Millais.”

Julia ignored that. “So you think it’s real,” she said. “I mean, a real Pre-Raphaelite, not just a copy or an imitation.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or don’t want to say?”

Natalie quickly stepped between them. “Really, there’s no need—”

Ignoring Natalie, Nicholas said abruptly, “Look. Would you let me take this into my shop? I know a person or two who might take a look at it, tell us what it is.”

Natalie clapped her hands together. “Didn’t I tell you? Just like
Antiques Roadshow
!” She linked an arm through Nicholas’s. “What would we have done without you here?”

“Taken it to a real expert?” Disentangling himself from Natalie, Nicholas turned to Julia. “What do you say?”

Julia found herself oddly reluctant to relinquish the painting. “Won’t some snapshots do just as well?” She scrounged for a plausible excuse. “Hauling it back and forth can’t be good for it.”

“It’s been sitting in the back of a wardrobe for the better part of a century,” Andrew pointed out. “Hardly archival preservation.”

“Do you have a digital camera?” Nicholas asked.

Julia looked at him in surprise. “Yes. Hang on. I’ll go grab it.”

She hurried out towards her own room, hoping that the camera was actually at the bottom of the second pocket of her suitcase, where she usually forgot it for months at a time.

Her own room was diagonally across the hall. As she bent over her suitcase, scrabbling for the camera case, she heard Natalie ask, “Why not take the painting with you? Wouldn’t that be simpler?”

“And risk losing it over lunch?” said Andrew laughingly. “Or getting egg mayonnaise on a lost masterpiece?”

“No one’s going near this with any kind of food.” Julia returned, breathless, with the camera. “Okay. Who wants to play photographer?”

Miraculously, there was actually still some battery life left in the camera. The three of them stood by while Nicholas photographed the canvas from every possible angle, with particular attention to those three entwined letters:
PRB
.

Julia couldn’t resist asking, “Whose do you think it is?”

“I don’t know enough to make an educated guess,” he said. “The subject matter is reminiscent of Millais, but the color palette looks more like Rossetti. My friend Anna will be able to tell you.”

“Anna?” said Natalie, arching an eyebrow.

Nicholas was oblivious. “A lecturer at Cambridge. This is her area. She’ll know.” He set the camera down on the desk, his eyes fixed on the painting, incongruously nestled among Julia’s mother’s old skirts and sweaters. “It might be a copy.”

“Of course,” murmured Julia. And she might be Genghis Khan.

“But if it were a copy,” said Andrew, “wouldn’t they have copied something more familiar?”

“Andrew,” said Julia, “I love you.”

Andrew jostled her arm affectionately with his elbow. “Anything for a cousin. Weren’t you meant to be going, Nick?”

Nicholas glanced at his watch and swore. “Bugger. I’m late for lunch.” Turning to Julia, he said, “You’ll remember to e-mail me those files?”

There was one slight problem with that plan. “I don’t have my camera cord with me. Just take the camera with you. There’s nothing else on it right now anyway.” She hoped. Not without malice, she added, “Natalie can always get it from you for me.”