Rachael's Gift (5 page)

No obvious assumptions jumped out at me; there wasn’t an ERR reference number. To the layman this code looked innocent enough, painted on the back of the stretcher, and could have belonged to any number of galleries’ systems, but they were catalogue reference numbers for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi organisation whose primary function was the looting and confiscation of ‘ownerless’ Jewish art collections during the occupation in France. To double-check, I ran a quick search on the ERR Project’s website, but nothing came up. I had to be extra thorough in this instance. Being a Courbet and allegedly stolen Jewish art, the case would attract huge attention; it would make the papers, worldwide Jewish organisations would make it their fight – there was no room for errors. I always made a point of not getting involved with either claimants or consignors; Nazi Holocaust provenance cases were highly sensitive and fraught with emotion. It was my job to complete the provenance. The Blakes hoped to find proof that the claimants had sold the painting well before the beginning of the Second World War and were therefore not entitled to anything.

I slumped in my chair and picked up a copy of the letter from the claimant’s lawyers filed with the Looted Art Registry. Selina Goldman and her grandmother, Lilian Bernard, the daughter of the original owner, Georges Bernard, had registered the painting as stolen in 1999.
La Baigneuse aux Cheveux Roux
was not the only valuable artwork missing from their family’s possession. I wondered why it had taken them so long to register it. Why hadn’t Lilian done it straight after the war? According to the notes, Georges Bernard had lived with his family at 56 Rue de Varenne, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris and had been a senior banking executive at Lazard Frères before it was ‘Aryanised’ by the Nazis. They were middle class, wealthy, had a minor art collection and were also Jewish. Georges had planned to escape with his family to America via Portugal, but they were arrested before they could leave and sent to Drancy internment camp on 20 August 1941. The only surviving member of the family, Georges’ daughter Lilian, who was only thirteen when interned, recalled that the painting used to hang in the family’s sitting room, next to the grandfather clock.

There would be auction house sales catalogues I had to get hold of – Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Galerie Georges-Petit. I should check, too, if the Bernards had any family records – although I doubted I would be given access to those. I wondered if my grandfather had ever come across
La Baigneuse
.

In my bar fridge there was a bottle of white wine that was already open. I poured myself a glass and sat by the window where the air was warm, but still cooler than the room, and looked across the crinkle-cut iron roofs of the little cottages, towards the harbour.

My grandfather.

What would he do? What had he taught me?

I didn’t even know if he was still alive.

The sky seemed deeper and vaster than usual today and for a moment I caught myself wondering whether my mother was up there, watching me, if she could see me now, wondering whether I should contact him again.

Anton Delamotte was an esteemed art scholar and expert in nineteenth-century French painting; originally trained at the Sorbonne and then the Louvre’s art school, he became a curator and professor at the Louvre before leaving to work independently; his speciality was Delacroix and he had co-authored an updated catalogue raisonné on the artist, as well as being an official Delacroix authenticator.

But I had known him as a man with a large shiny forehead, who cared more for fine art and objects than anything that lived and breathed.

I swallowed the last splash of wine and realised that, as my mother’s executor, I might be legally obliged to inform her family of her death, even if we hadn’t spoken in over twenty years.

*

As I drove home through the city, my mobile rang. It was Barry Lonsdale, auctioneer and founder of Lonsdale’s, and the man who had commissioned me to do the research on behalf of the Blakes.

‘Mills.’ It was his special nickname for me. Barry and I were old friends and had worked together for years. In the seventies, he had studied art history in London at the Royal Academy, where he’d met the A to Z of
Tatler
magazine’s social pages, the springboard for his successful business.

‘Baz.’

‘I’ve got Rosalind Blake barking at me for answers – have you found anything?’

‘I’m on it, Baz – you know what these things are like. Sometimes you have it solved in an afternoon and sometimes never.’

‘Their Parisian lawyers are meeting with the claimants on 16 November in preparation for the mediation. Will you be ready by then?’

‘Who knows? Maybe. Look, I haven’t found anything to indicate that it was stolen but I’ve barely scratched the surface.’

‘Keep me posted.’

We rang off. It wasn’t a lot of time. These things couldn’t be forced. I hated being pressured, but then I was dealing with the Blakes and they lived for a fight. And I needed the huge sum I would be paid for my efforts.

*

A strange car was parked in our driveway as I pulled up to the house. In the shade of the veranda, a man moved. I saw floppy blond hair and recognised Ashley Everett. How had he got our address? He wore the scuffed brown leather jacket that all the girls swooned over, but I thought just looked cheap.

I ripped the keys out of the ignition, grabbed my phone from the console and left the car door open, trying to stifle the heartbeat in my throat. He had some nerve showing up here.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked, feeling the anger rise up in me.

‘I came to see Rachael.’ His eyes shifted nervously. They were small piggish eyes, too close to the nasal shaft.

‘I don’t know how you found our address, but you shouldn’t be here.’

He stood in front of the door, barring the entrance to the house. I held my keys, sliding one of them in between my fingers.

He looked like a man drowning, sweat on his temples. Finally he said, ‘Nothing happened.’

‘You’d better leave.’

His face went bright pink and he shook his finger at me. ‘I never laid a fucking hand on her. Shit. You know this will ruin me, don’t you?’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘It’s not good for her either.’

He looked deranged and I began to feel afraid – I gripped my keys harder.

‘There’s something wrong with your daughter.’ His hands scraped through his hair. ‘She lies . . . She came on to me!’ He was frantic now. ‘You must know that. She stole that painting. She knows I know and that’s why she made up this story.’

Panic surged. I held my phone up, my hand shaking. ‘I’m calling the police!’

But he scuttled down the drive to his car and drove off with a screech before I could press the buttons. I let my breath go. I was trembling so much it took me several times to get my keys in the lock.

Inside, I went straight to the kitchen and poured myself a gin. Wolfe and Rachael were out. I decided not to mention this little incident to either of them.

It took me another gin to calm down. The man’s voice haunted me. He was desperate and desperate people did unpredictable things. Who knew what he was capable of? He was clearly backed into a corner and didn’t know how to get out. Perhaps I should call the police? But that would just escalate matters, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Would he come back? Would he come for Rachael? No wonder she was afraid. The man was completely deluded! How dare he come here and call my daughter a liar!

With my nerves half-settled, needing to keep busy, I went in search for my mother’s address book. Wolfe’s father had made the garage a collecting house for unclaimed possessions from the police station, where he’d been a high-ranking detective. One side was filled with useless bric-a-brac and now my mother’s boxes and Wolfe had converted the other half of the garage into a shaping room and a workshop. At the far end was a drafting table covered with sketches of new surfboard designs and hand-drawn motifs; a rack of completed surfboards was stacked in braces along another wall, and an old wooden Aloha he’d brought back from a trip to Hawaii hung from the rafters. In the sectioned-off shaping room – a specially designed rectangular cubicle, painted in blue and lit with waist-high horizontal white lights – a new board he was working on balanced across a sawhorse. Wolfe spent hours shaping his boards, experimenting and testing. But he was a one-man band, not interested in business or money, and so his amazing craftsmanship was known only to a bunch of locals. ‘I’m happy the way things are,’ he’d say to me when I badgered him about it. ‘I’m no artist, Cam. Don’t try to make me one.’

I slit the packing tape on one of my mother’s boxes marked
Keep
and began searching for an old address book with my mother’s family details.
She stole that painting
. . . It was Ashley Everett’s voice in my head. I shivered, and felt the anger surge again – how dare he.

Her address book was in here somewhere. I flicked through various papers and files, and came across some letters and postcards and a few photographs. I recognised the lightweight tissue of the blue airmail paper my mother and I used to use when I had lived with her family in Paris.

You don’t have to go
, my mother had said before I’d left to stay with her family.
It’s not too late. They’re different people. You’ll see
. But she never did talk about it.

My Parisian days had been faithfully recorded in diaries and letters to my mother. I’d filled them with pictures of art, architecture, photographs, tickets for the cinema, the metro, the museums and also notes from my grandfather. I loved his handwriting; he had perfect even strokes and I looked forward to every Monday when I would find instructions to that week’s art study left on the side table in the hall and then to the following Friday when we would meet in his study for a follow-up discussion. But that was a short interlude in my life. My mother always said,
Never write down what you don’t want other people to read
. She was right, of course. Francine had read my diary, discovered I was seeing Lucien and sent me home. ‘What can you expect from a girl without a father?’

I picked up the photo I’d taken of my French family and Lucien. I studied his face, so typically French and brooding. No wonder I’d fallen for him. I was charmed and blinded, sucked into Lucien’s sphere of brilliance. I recalled that silly Australian girl, the one who paraded her legs and smiled with sparkly eyes, because that was all she thought she had. It was hard to think of myself as the same person. So open, so ridiculous. She sought something different – genius, gifted, remarkable, ahead of their time – just like the artists her grandfather used to speak of: Delacroix – of course – Vermeer, Rembrandt, Ingres. Anyone could settle for ordinary but not her, it was in her blood. It should have been easy to jump worlds.

To be intoxicated by another. Intoxicated: to drink their presence so that it trickled into your mouth like the taste of whisky, sharp and yet warming, so that your limbs unfolded towards him, opening up to his shining gift.

No, I was not looking for genius anymore. And anyway the talent had, at last, found itself in Rachael. It was Rachael’s gift.

‘Jab with your left, cover with your right,’ the old man used to say. ‘Don’t drop your guard. That’s boxing. That’s life.’ Eventually, even he slipped up. I felt as if I’d dropped my right and scored a bruiser smack bam on the end of the old honker. This Rachael business left me cold; something just wasn’t adding up. I was waiting for Rachael to tell us what had happened, but any mention of the subject and she burst into tears; you couldn’t say boo without her wailing off to her room. Yesterday she ran off and seconds later she was posing in the mirror and snapping a photo with her phone, not a trace of a tear. I was taken aback and it got me wondering how many faces she had. The old man would’ve given her a good clip behind the ear. I didn’t want to admit it, but my doubt was growing. Ms Sheehan’s charge of Rachael as a serious liar was bothering me. Okay, so I had a deep mistrust of authority, but why would she suggest it if there wasn’t some truth to the accusation? Yeah, yeah, she just wanted to dust the whole ugly thing under the carpet and casting doubt on Rachael’s credibility was an easy way out.

But this lying business was beginning to haunt me, and all those times she had lied before began to crowd my head. She’d lied about eating the last of the bolognaise – did that count? About doing the washing-up when she hadn’t. About going to the cinema when she’d really gone to a friend’s house instead. And then there was the time she’d ‘borrowed’ a super-flash new board I’d been working on for one of the pro surfers. One day it was there, the next it had ‘disappeared’. When I asked her if she knew where it was she’d looked up at me with innocent eyes and said, ‘Maybe Wayne came by and picked it up already?’ But the next day it was sitting back in its cradle. When I asked her about it she looked at me blankly as if I’d gone loopy. But wasn’t this normal teenage stuff? I mean, we’ve all been guilty of a white lie. Did a couple of white lies make her an out-and-out liar? You’re meant to love your kid no matter what, but no one talked about what matter your kid was. And what if she was telling the truth about this Everett guy?

Over the last couple of days, Cam and I had taken it in turns to ‘look after’ Rach while this mess was worked out. Mostly she sat in her room drawing, or I took her to the gym or the beach. We didn’t want to keep her under lock and key. We had to get on with things as best we could, pretending to be normal; Cam had to go to work and I had to get stuff done in my workshop. The three of us moved around each other like currents, pushing and pulling in different directions with this black shadow all the time moving underneath. Cam looked terrible; her eyes were hollow, unseeing, and she seemed so frail. And it was beyond hard to talk to her about Rach. To Cam, Rach was this perfect little wave; she could do no wrong. ‘Let her come to us in her own time,’ she said.

In response I put my hand on my heart, found a beat and feigned relief. She cocked her head. ‘Just checking it hasn’t stopped,’ I said. ‘Since when do you sit back and let things happen?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You been taking those chill pills I’ve been on at you about for years?’