Goodbye Again (24 page)

And I did, telling him the whole story of our trip across Europe.

‘A journey I should never had made. Elsa would still be alive if I hadn’t. What possessed me?’ I was shaken.

‘That’s very tough, Ben. Let’s have a shot.’

‘And you certainly told me not to,’ I went on. ‘Offered me ten million bucks for the picture, in effect not to go on with it.’

‘Yes, I did that.’

‘You didn’t want those old art-looting stones turned over either, did you?’

He stopped halfway to the kitchen. ‘No, I didn’t.’

I left it at that. I’d exposed enough damn truths and secrets. He returned from the kitchen with a bottle of chilled Polish vodka and two shot glasses. We moved over to the window.

‘Ben, it’s a damn sorry story, but if it’s any consolation let me tell you now you were right about that Modi painting, and I was wrong when we last met that morning. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” But good men sometimes have to say nothing – for the success of happiness.’ He raised his glass.

‘Yes.’ I raised mine. We drank.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Talking of provenance – that Modi of yours, selling it and giving the proceeds to Emelia and the nuns – well, your being Modi’s grandson and the woman herself still alive, and the dedication, gives the painting superb provenance, adds another couple of million to it at least.’

‘You think?’

‘Sure I do. I can get you – I’ll give you – ten, fifteen million bucks for it. Whatever it’s valued at.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I love it, Ben. I can have it valued here and buy it myself. Full value. You’ll lose twenty, maybe thirty per cent of it – two or three million – at auction, remember.’

‘You? You have fifteen million dollars to hand?’

‘I have plenty of dollars, don’t worry. And if I need any more, I can sell that Renoir nude, or the Soutine – each one around ten million alone, and I’ve seen plenty of them. I’d prefer to look at your grandmother for the rest of my life.’

‘Yes. Yes, okay. Then I can look at her, too.’

‘Right! Let’s celebrate – lunch at La Tourelle?’

I nodded. Harry and I were back where we’d started, twenty-five years before, when he’d bought two of my early canvasses and he’d taken me to celebrate at the same little restaurant.

We walked out into the sunshine, across the square, down to the quays, towards the Pont Neuf. The way I’d gone with Elsa two months before, and before that with Katie, making for the same
restaurant. And as if he sensed my thoughts, he took my arm, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Ben – giving you hell about all your women that morning.’

‘Yes, I wondered why.’

‘Because you think too much about women, Ben. And maybe you’re right. I’m not a painter. So you see, I don’t know the processes, whatever it takes, the inspiration. And if it’s women – any woman, prim and prude or naked under fur coats riding circus horses – why, that’s the best possible inspiration, and certainly a hell of a lot better than pickled sharks and tins of Campbell’s soup.’

‘Yes, those frauds made a real meal of that.’

‘But listen,’ he turned to me, taking my arm again. ‘The great thing is that you’ve survived. So the work must survive. You’ve got to get back to it, Ben.’

‘Yes, I know.’ I wasn’t very convincing. We walked on, crossed the river and entered the restaurant.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, after Madame had greeted us and led us to a corner table, and we’d ordered the coarse pâté and the plat du jour, the
lapin à la moutarde
they had on that day, and a bottle of Beaujolais. ‘You know I have a share in that gallery round the corner. Get a dozen or so canvasses together, whatever’s good in your barn and some new stuff, and I’ll organize an exhibition for you. But we’ll need some new material. Right?’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Course I am. You’re a damn good painter. Told you that last time we met, when I said some of your nudes were like Modi reincarnate. Well, as you’re his grandson, it turns out I was right about that at least.’ He smiled.

‘I’ll get some work together. Thank you, Harry.’

We drank the Beaujolais and chattered of other things, among all the other local chatterers, all squashed in together, the heady fumes of food and wine going nicely to my head.

And that was it, I thought. Paris, a new beginning. A week later, back in the barn when I had a letter from Harry saying that ‘Emelia’ had been valued at between fifteen and twenty million dollars, and that he’d buy it, I realized I could take a flat in Paris with my ten per cent, for that winter and the next. Paris was for painters, as well as lovers. I’d lost the latter. I could concentrate on the former.

What an autumn it was when I got back to my barn, days on end, still and gold and warm. Each morning was like the start of summer, except for the leaves of the chestnut tree and the beech above the privy, turning yellow, orange, ochre. My arm healed and a week later the sling and bandages came off. Harry had advanced me ten thousand dollars cash in Paris against selling the boat and the picture, so I had a phone installed, paid Tom three months’ rent, had the Bentley serviced and drove up to Yorkshire to see Angela and our daughters.

The girls were excited by their own young lives, and it was exciting for me that they were happy and doing well. They listened to my Carrara story, bemused. Not that Molly and Beatty didn’t want to know of my adventures, looking for the truth behind the painting and of Modigliani himself, their great-grandfather, and of Luchino, their grandfather, and hearing of what the latter had done in Auschwitz and afterwards. But it asked from them an understanding of which they were not yet capable. I didn’t speak more of the story. The two of them were perfectly aware, at least, that it was, in fact, unspeakable. So there was silence at the end of my telling.

As for meeting Angela again – that was rather speechless, too. I told her I was coming into some money and that if she needed any that wouldn’t be a problem now. She declined politely. She was a woman of principle too – albeit that she maintained this at the
expense of deceiving her lover’s wife, and living mostly on his money.

I had brought two thousand pounds in cash to split between Molly and Beatty. They accepted their share with some surprise, and grace. Molly said she’d use it to take her apprentice forester boyfriend to a holiday cottage near Loch Lomond, and the more prudent Beatty said she’d put it into her building society savings account.

When I left, driving down the rough track, waving furiously at the three of them standing outside the cottage, I felt a bad tug of familial sadness.

Back at the barn, with the ready money I had now – cash that I kept under the mattress – I stocked up on new paints and canvases for my Paris exhibition, a new music centre, new Verdi CDs, and some decent château wines. I went to Oxford and bought a few expensive art books from Blackwell’s, and visited my favourite pictures in the Ashmolean gallery – Pissarro’s
The Tuileries Gardens in Rain
and one of Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and gave myself another treat – a formal, donnish lunch alone at the Elizabeth restaurant.

I spoke to Tom and Margery the next Sunday, telling them of the money I was coming into. Would they be interested in selling me the barn? They would. They were both getting on, wanted to retire, and were thinking of selling the entire farm in any case. I could buy the barn first.

‘Thank you,’ I said. And Tom got out the gin bottle, dispensing a good whack of it in our tea mugs. We raised our mugs, and on the way home, driving down the lane, I sang ‘The Skye Boat Song’, loudly.

I tidied up my studio, sorting out possible pictures for the exhibition and finding old ones that I could work on again. I turned the nude of Elsa to the wall, along with the others of Katie. All over. Finished. For the first time since Elsa had died I was almost happy.

It didn’t last. I fiddled about with some old paintings – one of Tom and Margery, a trial for a portrait I’d given them several years before, and thought again with what I might start afresh. But what was there that could genuinely excite me, without a sitter, a model, a woman?

I thought of putting an ad in the local paper. ‘Model wanted, to work nude, for local painter.’ In our rural area such a request might have been misinterpreted. Or I could advertise as a portrait painter, looking for a commission, and perhaps, as a result, some wonderful new woman would swim into my ken, as Katie had. I doubted it. I might have set my brush to paintings of old horses, pet dogs, cats and prize porkers. There was a market these days for that.

The fact was I hadn’t any enthusiasm for painting pigs or for models or for strangers in my studio, nude or not. I was depressed. So much had happened in the last months, so much activity, danger, emotion and loss, that I was drained of any kind of response. The juices had gone, leaving me stranded on a dry shore, facing a cold winter alone.

One evening, after a week messing around pointlessly in the studio, I gave it all up. Instead I uncovered some of the old nudes of Katie and the reclining nude of Elsa. I brought the paintings downstairs, put them in semicircle by the big fire so that the peachy flesh tones, the lemon of thighs and ochre shadows between their legs glimmered memorably in the yellow flickering light. Unable now to distinguish between the women, they seemed as one – limbs moving, inviting, alive in sensuous delight. I gazed at them. I put on my new Tebaldi and Domingo
Traviata
CD and opened a bottle of the Rioja Reserva. And another.

TWENTY

It was early evening, a week later. I was outside the barn trying to start the Bentley. I hadn’t driven it in a while, and it had been damp and humid the last few days, which was why the bugger wouldn’t start. Thunder grumbled distantly in the air. I heard the sound of a motor coming up the lane. I looked round and a smart new red Peugeot drew up in front of me. A woman got out.  

She was in her late thirties, smallish, with a delicate, rather plain face, two swathes of reddish hair to either side of a central parting, rather formally, unfashionably dressed in a black wool skirt, cream silk blouse with a cameo brooch and brown buckled shoes. Fragile and dainty, an air of reticence, but in control.  

‘Hello.’ She stood there in the darkening air, both of us now uncertain. ‘I’m sorry – I left a message with your farmer friends up the lane.’ The voice was old-fashioned American. The words clearly enunciated. New England, I thought.  

‘I’ve not been out for a while,’ I said sourly. I was in no mood to entertain strangers. She looked at me, a trapped look. ‘I don’t think I know …’

We were both trapped now, standing gazing at each other, until she broke away.

‘I’m sorry. I’m Martha. Martha McGowan. Elsa’s friend. I’m over here in Oxford at a legal conference, Association of the American Bar. So I thought I’d call on you.’

‘Of course – Martha.’ We shook hands. I gestured to my car. ‘Damn car won’t start,’ I said.

‘Oh. Can I take you someplace?’

‘I was going shopping,’ I said. ‘I’ve run out of booze.’

‘Oh,’ she said again, nervously looking up at the sky and the approaching storm. ‘I got some – at Kennedy on the way over.’ She turned, rootled about in the car, and took out a bottle of Jack Daniels.

I was surprised. ‘Elsa said you were teetotal.’

‘Did she? Well, I’m not.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Not after six o’clock anyway.’ Then she glanced up at the threatening sky again.

The vast flash of sheet lightning dazzled me, the crack of thunder like the pit of doom opening. She ducked, holding her hands over her head. ‘Oh my God!’ she said. Now she was different: panicky, eyes darting, as if the approaching storm was about to hurl itself upon us and sweep her up into the raging skies. She was adolescent, naïve, frightened, and this appealed to me. Besides, any woman with a bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand couldn’t be all bad.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’ll be better off inside.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m terrified of thunder and lightning. It’s childish.’

‘Nothing to be ashamed of. Joyce was terrified of it, too.’

‘Joyce?’

‘James Joyce, the writer. You wanted to write too, didn’t you?’

‘Elsa told you a lot about me.’

We were in the barn now. The place was in some chaos, the result of a week’s dejection. I turned on the gilded papier-mâché chandelier. Another flash and another crack. The lights flickered and went out. It was almost completely dark in the long space.

I said, ‘Sorry about the lights. The power lines are a bit wonky up the lane. I’m pretty isolated.’

‘Oh no, I like it. I love this sort of place.’

‘I’ll get some light.’

There was no other light but the fire, which I lit. The wood was dry, so that soon the flames were storming up the chimney, a yellow flickering light illuminating the room.

‘I hope the chimney won’t go on fire,’ she said.

‘No. The chimney wall is at least to two feet thick.’

‘It’s not the stone that goes on fire, it’s the soot, and the birds’ nests.’

I was annoyed at this correction. ‘I didn’t know you had birds’ nests and chimneys in New York.’

‘We don’t, but we do in my parents’ farm up in New Hampshire.’ She was immediately enthusiastic, eyes gleaming in the firelight, looking at me. ‘I was brought up there. An old farm and stone barn, quite like this. My mother still lives in the farmhouse, and I made over the barn as a weekend place for me. All in the middle of nowhere, just like here.’

‘Elsa told me nothing of this about you,’ I said. ‘She gave me the impression you were a hard-nosed New York attorney. Never mentioned you were a country girl.’

‘Well, I am.’

‘Said you were shrewish.’

‘Only in court. I hope.’

‘That you had dark, not red hair.’

‘Well, reddish. My father’s family is Irish. From the North.’

‘A red-headed Irish girl – that’s not at all how Elsa made you out to be.’

She laughed. ‘People have to see you the way they want to see you, don’t they?’ She wandered about the room, looking at things, finding security in the long, thick-walled space, until there was
another flash and a fearful crack, right above the roof. She put her hands on her head again, came back quickly to the hearth.

Before we sat down I said, ‘There’s no plumbing – no tap water and only an outside privy. If you’re in need of that.’

‘I think I’m all right,’ she said primly.

‘I have enough water for the whisky.’

‘Does one need it?’

She wasn’t that prim. I poured us each a good tot of neat Jack Daniels, and we sat down in the two old armchairs with the stuffing coming out, some distance from the roaring fire.

‘Your health,’ I said.

‘And yours.’ She only half-raised her glass.

I had the feeling that neither of us really meant it. Turning her head to the fire, she smoothed her hair back. A fine profile, straight brow and a nose that angled out smartly.

‘You have a lot of paintings on the walls. Nudes. Are they yours?’ she asked.

‘Yes, though I do portraits as well, when I try to paint the real person.’

‘You don’t seem to have managed that with Elsa.’

‘No, and you’re not giving me the truth. She gave me a very different picture of you.’

‘What?’

‘She said that you became difficult with her,’ I said. ‘For no good reason. That you dropped her to write a crime novel, trying to get one up on her in the writing game.’

‘Not at all,’ she said quickly. ‘It was her idea that I write a crime novel. She encouraged me, but I never wrote it.’

I was surprised. ‘Well, she had this idea that you thought her a maverick, that her cookbook work was frivolous.’

‘Yes, she was unconventional. I’m not. And as for her work – she’d made a big success with her cookbooks. She was famous.
How could I ever have thought that frivolous, or tried to better her in writing?’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘People like to rewrite history,’ she said evenly. ‘Especially when they think you’ve behaved badly to them.’

‘She thought you left her because you were frightened by what the big noises in your law office would say if they found out you were living with a woman.’

‘That’s certainly not true. One of the big noises in my law office – a vice-president – has been living with another woman for twenty years.’

‘I see.’ I didn’t see. ‘You’ve contradicted almost everything Elsa told me about you.’

‘Yes, but …’

She didn’t finish. There was another flash of lightning, another crack right over our heads – the flames storming up the chimney, blazing like hellfire in the big grate. She cowered in the other chair. I gave us both another shot of whisky.

‘I suppose I’m really wondering why you came here,’ I went on. ‘To run Elsa down?’

‘No!’

‘One of you must be wrong about the other,’ I said tartly. ‘I knew Elsa better than I know you. So I tend to take her view of you.’

Another flash and a fierce crack. She ducked again. ‘Why should I want to do that?’

‘Because you feel guilty?’ I said briskly. I was annoyed that I hadn’t made any impact on her, and the drink gave me confidence now.

‘Why should I?’

‘Well, because you left her only the mushy bits of an apricot and meringue tart she made one Sunday evening for a little dinner party when she was late back.’

‘My God! She told you everything, didn’t she? Next it’ll be my not washing up the dishes that evening.’

‘It’s true then?’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t intended,’ she added quickly, defensive for the first time.

‘It never is.’ Silence. ‘And what of your asking her if she’d slept with other women while she was away on her trips?’ She didn’t reply. ‘Did you ask her if she slept around?’

‘I did! And what damn business is it of yours anyway?’ There was fire in her voice. She was rattled. ‘Anyway,’ she took up her cudgels again, ‘if anyone’s guilty, it’s you. And that’s why you’re attacking me. It’s you who took her Nazi hunting round Europe. If you hadn’t she’d never have found out about her father. She’d still be alive.’

‘Exactly, and I certainly feel the guilt. But I’m not attacking you for that. What I’m really wondering about is the truth – why did you leave her, for example?’

‘Does it matter now?’

‘It mattered plenty to Elsa, because you wouldn’t tell her.’

‘So? It hardly matters to her now.’

‘No? Can you sit on a bad conscience forever? Don’t you and I owe Elsa the truth? – now just as much as when she was alive?’ I was roused. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I swore I’d never go truth hunting again, because that’s what killed Elsa. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe, if I look at it coldly, I was right to uncover the dirt on her father, even though it killed her. Because don’t we owe the truth to the two million Polish Jews her father sent to the ovens? Who speaks for the dead there? Well, maybe I did, by finally identifying the man who sent them there.’

‘You’re arguing that you sacrificed Elsa to a good cause.’

‘Yes, if I’m being honest. So why can’t you be honest?’

Silence. I got up and offered her another tot of whisky.

‘No thank you.’ She stood up. ‘Is this trial over?’

‘As you like.’

‘I’ll tell you one truth,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was curious to see who Elsa had taken up with.’

‘And you’re surprised it was a boozy tosspot – and a man to boot.’

‘Yes.’

‘No accounting for it.’

‘There is. There must be. Elsa was an intelligent woman.’

‘Exactly. Which is why we were happy together. I was the same sort of man, in better times.’

‘Well, everyone has their own way of getting over bad times.’

She glanced at the bottle.

‘What’s yours?’

‘Work,’ she said shortly.

‘And love?’

‘I’ve put that behind me.’

She was about to leave, but there was another flash and a receding crack, and she had second thoughts. She hovered.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘That’s a pity.’

‘You think you – I – can just take up with someone else when you feel like it?’

‘No. You’re right.’ I stood up myself, kicking a log back onto the fire in a shower of sparks. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t just feel guilty for Elsa’s death. I miss her badly.’

‘So do I. And maybe that’s why I came all this way to see you, and if you weren’t just a boozy tosspot you might see that.’

The storm passed. She left, and that was that, I thought. She had her view of me, and I of her, but this hadn’t brought us any closer to the truth about each other or Elsa.

Martha had her head in the sand. She would face any crime in court and expose it, but wouldn’t face the crime in her own
heart, about what she’d done to Elsa. She had left the bottle of Jack Daniels. I poured another one, settled the logs on the fire, and put on
Traviata
.

Next morning I realized I’d behaved badly and called her first thing at the Randolph Hotel. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was rude. No excuse.’

‘You have a good excuse. Elsa. And two million Jews in the ovens.’

Her voice was cold. In a moment she’d put the phone down and we’d never speak again.

So I said very quickly, ‘Look, let’s not leave it this way. Will you have dinner with me tonight? I’ll pick you up at the hotel. There’s a pub I know not far from Oxford, they do very good fish.’

I was sure she’d say no, but she replied ‘Yes. Yes, thank you. That would be lovely.’ Her tone was almost warm.

I picked her up at the Randolph that evening. We went to a country pub I knew, beyond Woodstock. A back room, pine tables, not trendy, good cooking. I gave her the menu. She put on a pair of neat gold-rimmed spectacles to look at the dishes. I asked if she’d like red or white wine. ‘White,’ she said at once, very definite, unlike Katie, who hated to commit herself, even to a choice of wine. Would I tell Martha how Elsa had so resembled Katie, and how much Katie had meant to me? There was no point. I hardly knew Martha and once we’d made things up I was unlikely to see her again. She lived in New York. She liked women.

I looked across at her. In the good light I saw her properly. The face neat and composed, seemly. It was difficult to think of this woman being passionate with Elsa.

‘The haddock pie here is very good,’ I said. ‘Homemade.’

‘I’d like that.’

She got up to go to the Ladies. I saw her figure properly now: slim all over but thinner in the middle, like an hour glass. Her skirt
came down to below her knees, and her calves were – how can I describe them? – were scimitar-shaped beneath the folds. Yet I realized I didn’t want to paint her. I went up to the bar and ordered our food, with a bottle of seemly white.