Rachael's Gift (8 page)

*

A flock of gulls floated on the surface of the ocean, riding up and down with the slipstream until a single bird took flight and the rest of them followed suit in an angular arc, swirling and diving in perfect formation. I wished it were that easy.

The sky had turned pink. I began to walk along the little path. Looking back, the edges of the cliffs jutted out with their sandstone-coloured fissures; in the gully below waves scored against them, carving and moulding shapes like Gaudi’s turrets. I was exhausted. This thing pushed upon me like a neighbour’s renovation or an unwanted guest, impossible to ignore. No, it was more than that. A disease. A horrible illness. A spreading cancer.

When I was a child and before my stepfather left, we lived for a time in Far North Queensland. Our town was a backwater, with sugarcane fields where toads the size of turkeys sang beside the roads; fat and bloated, they popped like balloons underneath car tyres. Rainforests with giant trees, glistening and green, towered over underbrush seething with deadly snakes and spiders. Mile-long beaches, with sand as white and as hard as cut glass, held mottled creatures that shone in rock pools of crystal water.

It was tropical and when it wasn’t a dry heat it was wet. As a child it never bothered me. Children don’t notice the weather. But my mother, she hated the heat. She was very fair and wore her blonde hair twisted up into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Wearing a floral cotton dress, she would sit on the sofa with a book in her lap, fanning herself. I would climb up next to her and begin to twirl the flyaway strands of her hair in my fingers as if she were a doll. When she had to leave the cool shade of our home she would wear a wide-brimmed hat to shield her from the sun. She would walk down the main street and the hat would brush the heads of passers-by, who would turn and stare. She would just keep on walking. Perhaps the heat dulled her senses.

It was mostly just the two of us. In the evening, when it was too hot to sleep, she would read to me in French, her lips moving softly in this language I had come to recognise but not speak. Rather, it flowed over me, evaporating as it touched the heat of my skin. Then, when she was too tired to read, she would stroke my arm and I would fall in and out of sleep as she told me about Paris, and the home where she grew up.

A large tanker distorted the faint line of the horizon. The bow of a lone yacht slapped over each peak as it went against the current. A shaggy caramel-coloured dog plodded up to me and smelt my ankles; its owner smiled in vague apology.

I saw a patch of purple flowers, the petals like trumpets, and bent over to pick one. I snapped it from its base, without a stem, and the white sap leaked out. I was careful not to touch it. I sniffed but it had no scent; I had forgotten. The sky had grown light blue. Wolfe would be leaving for his morning surf. I turned around and began to head towards home.

But in the bedroom Wolfe was still asleep. I crawled in beside him, pressing myself into his back. The map of moles I knew by heart. There was a new one, dark and raised like a pip. Or had I just forgotten it? The light fell across the side of his face, the soft baby fluff on the ridges of his ear. I pressed my teeth lightly into his skin, resisting the urge to press harder, to bite down. Two tiny imprints faded. We loitered on the vanishing point, swinging close and then far. Fighting for proximity. Running from it.

‘What time is it?’ he murmured.

‘Nearly time,’ I said, not letting him go.

‘Did you sleep?’ he asked, his eyes still clamped shut.

‘No.’ I brushed my leg over his thigh.

*

The office fan throbbed in the corner. Casual noises of life drifted about: the shout of workmen across the street, the screech of a tyre stopping abruptly, the tapping of the keys on a computer. Life went on. Someone died and it went on. Papers were printed. Milk was delivered. Buses choked into gear. Arguments were had. Secrets were revealed like the termite-riddled beams of an old house. Work was due.

I flipped through my mail and saw an expensive envelope printed with the École des Beaux-Arts’ insignia. I prayed to my fictional deity in the sky and slit the letter open:
We are pleased to invite you to our general open day, Monday 29 October. We look forward to your confirmation
.

It was just an invite to an open day. At least it wasn’t a rejection. The letter was dated 1 October; it must have been delayed in the post.

An email popped up. Barry was chasing me:
How close are you? The client needs an update.
I replied briefly:
Work in progress – may require further investigation. Will advise ASAP.

I began writing emails to my contacts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s to confirm the already-listed provenance, asking them to email me any relevant supporting documents and requesting the contact details of the sellers and buyers. It was a long shot, as these places protected the identities of their clients. I sent another email to the Getty Institute, where Galerie Georges-Petit’s archives were held, to confirm Mr Bernard’s purchase of the painting.

Another email pinged through with scanned photocopies of Courbet’s catalogue raisonné from the librarian at the National Library in Canberra. I was yet to hear back from Monica about the stamps on the back of the stretcher. I printed off the photocopies. If I were to discover serious new information easily, this was where it would happen.

The write-up for
La Baigneuse
said the painting was dated 1866. I held up the colour photocopy of the image next to the actual painting, confirming they were one and the same. There was a short description: a woman with red hair lies beneath a canopy of leaves on a blanket in the forest. Her body faces the viewer and her chin turns away to the left, her hair falls across her shoulders and chest, one arm rests on a fallen branch, her left leg is outstretched and her right knee is bent. According to M. Roger Bonniot, the painting depicted the forest at Ornans and the model was a young local girl called Françoise.

The bibliography stated that André Philippe, a prominent dealer during the war, mentioned the painting in his book,
Memoirs of an Antiques Dealer
. The painting had been displayed at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1889 and also at the Galerie Charpentier in November 1942. Now this was important. It was one of the vital gap years, between 1908 and 1967, for which we had, until now, no records. Furthermore it was the first proof of its existence in Paris during the war. My insides began to hum: the mystery owner would most likely be listed in their archives. I looked up exhibition catalogues for Galerie Charpentier and found them to be stored at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, which was part of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. I held myself in check – don’t get ahead of yourself. It was too easy to get caught up in the moment and I wasn’t anywhere near the end of the trail yet – it had just begun. I composed an email to an archivist at the museum, explaining the case and requesting a check on their files.

The workmen across the street began drilling into concrete. With each steel strike, rat-a-tat-tat, my body tensed. I closed the window. The noise was stifled, but the vibrations were still strong.

Trying to refocus, by sheer chance, I found André Philippe’s book for sale at a second-hand bookstore in the city and managed to buy it over the phone and have them courier it to the office.

I stared at
La Baigneuse
again, wishing she could speak. I was sure she would have a story or two to tell. The sensuous lines of her hips, the overt sexuality of a woman giving herself to the viewer – to the voyeur; she was so passive, so submissive. Yet the picture seemed to hint at a kind of violence. Courbet had caused a stir in the Paris Salon during his erotic period and was quite the enfant terrible of his period.

No,
La Baigneuse
was pure sex; it would not have fitted the Nazi ideal of racial purity and classical forms, the basis on which they collected art, Rembrandt being the pinnacle. Artists whose work did not fit the Nazi agenda, such as Picasso and Matisse, were called degenerate. But Courbet was an anomaly: there were Courbets that were taken for Hitler and Goering’s collections, and others that were not.

When the Jewish people were stripped of their citizenship and their assets deemed property of the state, the ERR swept through their households; they tracked down bank vaults and hiding places in friends’ chateaux in the countryside. Objects of value were either sent to Hitler’s Linz museum, Goering’s personal collection, decorated state offices or, if considered degenerate, were used for exchange or sold at auction. Neighbours, domestic staff and art dealers who knew the whereabouts of important collections became informants. Opportunists were born – carpetbaggers: people who made money out of war. But really, who knew why people did the things they did? Greed. Desperation. Cowardice.

I had a series of reference books on the subject stored on my iPad and began to reread them, looking for clues.

My BlackBerry pinged. It was Monica from the Courtauld Institute in London.
Very hard to decipher due to faded quality but one stamp looks to be École des Beaux-Arts in Paris – see comparisons attached. Still working on the second one. Sorry can’t be more help. Hope all well. Must run. MP. Xx

You’re up late!
I replied.
Thank you – you’ve been amazing! x

Monica confirmed what the catalogue raisonné had said – although it wasn’t a new lead, it was one less to follow up.

*

That night I dreamt of La Roche Guilbeault. The chateau, the sprawling gardens, everything was as it had been when I’d stayed there, and I was young again. I walked through the manicured garden, so closely shaved it might have bled, and stood before the mural on the north-facing wall. It was an image of an iron gate that led to another garden – a wild garden, where exotic flowers grew year round and one could become lost in their velvet colours. Thorns as sharp as scythes and rose petals like the cushion of an open heart – so darkly crimson I thought I could smell them. It was not unlike the rainforests of my childhood.

Lucien stood facing the wall, the legs of his trousers protruding beneath his heavy winter coat. He was painting and drew the fine tip of his brush along the edge of an unfinished petal. I couldn’t see his face.

‘Lucien,’ I said, but he didn’t hear me. ‘Lucien,’ I called again, but he remained frozen. I went to tug at his sleeve, but then my grandmother appeared, holding me back with her sharp nails. She kissed me three times on each cheek. Her skin had the touch of a bird’s feather and her shoulders were as frail. Then she smiled and her skin cracked into a thousand pieces.

I woke up with a start; it must have been around three a.m. I lay blinking at the mushroom-shadowed ceiling.

A rose.

A rose the colour of blood on her fingers. When she touches it, her fingers bleed. She raises them to her lips, but instead of blood she tastes the bitter root of the rose madder tree. The paint is still wet where the hog’s hair of his brush have left their delicate strokes, before the sun has gone down and he can no longer work in the dark. She sees the outline of the petals glinting in the darkening shadow of dusk – so real, she wants to pluck it from the wall and take it with her. From her bedroom window, she watches him paint. The concentration on his face as he wields the brush, his back arching as he reaches the furthest edges of the mural, his torso stretching across the acres of diminishing garden, revealing the illusion at its heart: he can go no further than the wall itself, but his mind, his talent, his mystery, can go on forever.

The morning lulled in a dead wind, lazy and hot. I cut the engine in the drive; Rach grabbed her board out of the tray. Mr Brown walked in circles, sniffed at the air and raised his leg to pee on the grass. There was a strange smell about, possibly a neighbour burning off. I leant my board up against the wall next to hers and took the bag of croissants we’d bought inside.

I put the kettle on and laid the croissants on a plate. I spotted the letter we’d left lying on the table from yesterday – another one from the school. Christ, we were in this thing whether we liked it or not. I re-read it.

Dear Mr and Mrs Larkin,

. . . Since Ms Larkin has not made a statement to the police, we have been given clearance to begin our own investigation. A third party, legal firm Bagshot & White, has been instructed to begin . . . We would like to invite Rachael and a support witness to attend an interview on Tuesday 23 October . . . This is not a criminal investigation . . .

A second investigation regarding Rebecca Tomlinson’s missing painting has been ongoing. Nothing has been uncovered yet, but please inform us should any new information come to light . . .

I dropped the letter on the bench and went to pop my head into Rach’s room to let her know brekkie was up. She had stripped off her wetsuit and swimmers and had wrapped a towel around her; one finger pulled suggestively at the corner and the other suspended her iPhone in the air as she grinned mischievously up at the camera. Jeez, was that the sort of photo she was putting up on that Insta thing?

Suddenly Rach saw me and screamed, ‘Jesus, Wolfe! Are you right?’

‘Brekkie’s on,’ I said, before she chased me out and slammed the door.

Bloody internet! That whole scene was just another opportunity for perverts. What happened to good old-fashioned letters and hanging around shopping malls? I’d never been one to go snooping around other people’s stuff. I’d been taught long ago to respect people’s privacy – the old man and his belt had made damn sure of that. But when it was your kid, there was a sense of ownership. When we’d given her the iPhone and the laptop we didn’t think it was necessary to put parental controls on them or ask for her passwords, but now I wasn’t so sure.

I found Cam in the laundry.

‘Croissants and tea on the table.’

She pulled sheets out of the washing machine.

‘Hey, you know Rach is putting raunchy pictures of herself on the internet?’