She googled him, obviously. Julian Jessop was described by Wikipedia as a portrait painter who had enjoyed a flurry of notoriety in the sixties and seventies. He’d been a student of Lucian Freud at the Slade. The two of them had, so the rumors went, traded insults (and, the implication was, women) over the years. Lucian had the advantage of much greater fame, but Julian was younger by seventeen years. Monica thought of Mary, exhausted after a long shift delivering other women’s babies, wondering where her husband had gone. She sounded like a bit of a doormat, to be honest. Why hadn’t she just left him? There were, she reminded herself, as she tried to do often, worse things than being single.
One of Julian’s self-portraits had hung for a brief period in the National Portrait Gallery, in an exhibition titled The London School of Lucian Freud. Monica clicked on the image to enlarge it, and there he was, the man she’d seen in her café yesterday morning, but all smoothed out, like a raisin turned back into a grape. Julian Jessop, about thirty years old, slicked-back blond hair, razor-sharp cheekbones, slightly sneering mouth, and those penetrating blue eyes. When he’d looked at her yesterday, it had felt like he was rummaging around in her soul. A little disconcerting when you’re trying to discuss the various merits of a blueberry muffin versus millionaire’s shortbread.
Monica checked her watch. 4:50 P.M.
“Benji, can you hold the shop for half an hour or so?” she asked her barista. Barely pausing to wait for his nod in response, she pulled on her coat. Monica scanned the tables as she walked through the café, pausing to pick up a large crumb of red velvet cake from table twelve. How had that been overlooked? As she walked out onto the Fulham Road, she flicked it toward a pigeon.
Monica rarely sat on the top deck of the bus. She prided herself on her adherence to Health and Safety regulations, and climbing the stairs of a moving vehicle seemed an unnecessary risk to take. But in this instance, she needed the vantage point.
Monica watched the blue dot on Google Maps move slowly along the Fulham Road toward Chelsea Studios. The bus stopped at Fulham Broadway, then carried on toward Stamford Bridge. The huge, modern mecca of the Chelsea Football Club loomed ahead and there, in its shadow and sandwiched improbably between the two separate entrances for the home and away fans, was a tiny, perfectly formed village of studio houses and cottages, behind an innocuous wall that Monica must have walked past hundreds of times.
Grateful for once for the slow-moving traffic, Monica tried to work out which of the houses was Julian’s. One stood slightly alone and looked a little worse for wear, rather like Julian himself. She’d bet the day’s takings, not something to do lightly given her economic circumstances, on that being the one.
Monica jumped off at the next stop and turned almost immediately left, into Brompton Cemetery. The light was low, casting long shadows, and there was an autumnal chill to the air. The cemetery was one of Monica’s favorite places—a timeless oasis of calm in the city. She loved the ornate gravestones—a last show of one-upmanship. I’ll see your marble slab with its fancy biblical quotation and raise you a life-size Jesus on the cross. She loved the stone angels, many now missing vital body parts, and the old-fashioned names on the Victorian gravestones—Ethel, Mildred, Alan. When did people stop being called Alan? Come to think of it, did anyone call their baby Monica anymore? Even back in 1981 her parents had been outliers in eschewing names like Emily, Sophie, and Olivia. Monica: a dying moniker. She could picture the credits on the cinema screen: The Last of the Monicas.
As she walked briskly past the graves of the fallen soldiers and the White Russian émigrés, she could sense the sheltering wildlife—the gray squirrels, urban foxes, and the jet-black ravens—guarding the graves like the souls of the dead.
Where was the Admiral? Monica headed toward the left, looking out for an old man clutching a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. She wasn’t, she realized, sure why. She didn’t want to speak to Julian, at least not yet. She suspected that approaching him directly would run the risk of embarrassing him. She didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot.
Monica headed toward the north end of the cemetery, pausing only briefly, as she always did, at the grave of Emmeline Pankhurst, to give a silent nod of thanks. She looped round at the top and was halfway back down the other side, walking along a less-used path, when she noticed a movement to her right. There, sitting (somewhat sacrilegiously) on an engraved marble tombstone, was Julian, glass in hand.
Monica walked on past, keeping her head down so as not to catch his eye. Then, as soon as he was gone, about ten minutes later, she doubled back so that she could read the words on the gravestone.
ADMIRAL ANGUS WHITEWATER
OF PONT STREET
DIED 5 JUNE 1963, AGED 74
RESPECTED LEADER, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER,
AND LOYAL FRIEND.
ALSO, BEATRICE WHITEWATER
DIED 7 AUGUST 1964, AGED 69
She bristled at the fact that the Admiral got several glowing adjectives after his name, whereas his wife just got a date and a space for eternity under her husband’s tombstone.
Monica stood for a while, enveloped in the silence of the cemetery, imagining a group of beautiful young people, with Beatles haircuts, miniskirts, and bell-bottom trousers, arguing and joking with one another, and suddenly felt rather alone.