Rachael's Gift (4 page)

She began to paddle back out to the horizon, but I grabbed her foot. She struggled, kicking me away. I held on until another wave was upon us, swallowing us in one mouthful. We were dragged under again, flipped round and round in a drum roll. My muscles ached, my senses blacked out, my lungs ripped apart. The muted vibrations of the world cracked. The noise of marbles breaking overhead. Dullness. You couldn’t fight it.

Eventually we were pushed to the shoreline. Exhausted, we crawled out and collapsed onto the sand, the sea sweeping around our toes. ‘What happened?’ I wheezed and caught Rach’s eye. ‘Is it true? Did he do something?’

Camille ran to us, her face knotted in worry and anger – not at Rachael, but at me. ‘Are you trying to kill her?’

I slumped on to my back, coughing. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

Camille helped Rachael to her feet and threw her arms around her shoulders. ‘Come on, honey, let’s get you home.’

Wolfe snored; deep lines were brandished into his skin from years in the sun. One of his eyebrows stopped short where he’d been hit with a surfboard, knocked out and left with a scar. I was still upset with him. Wolfe had been way too harsh. That was not the way to handle Rachael. I was amazed he had slept at all. I had been restless all night. But then to just
be
was a particular talent of his. Some would call it laidback, others lazy. ‘Wolfe time, is it?’ I’d said as I stood on a chair to change the light bulb in our bedroom; we’d been dressing in the dark for ten days. Over the years, it had become our own idiom. Only when the toilet had actually fallen off the wall in the bathroom and the kitchen had flooded from old plumbing had he finally agreed to update his parents’ house. That was after nine years of badgering. Wolfe had an endearing – or frustrating, depending on which way you looked at it – preference for things to stay the same.

There was a light musky smell in Rachael’s room. She, too, slept. I opened the window a sliver and turned to her desk. It was a mess. Tourist pictures of Paris, postcards of artists and their work, were stuck to her corkboard. A series of black-and-white photographs which I’d not seen before were spread over her desktop. They were shots of a couple, strangers, in an underground basement bar, smoking and talking and later sitting naked on the edge of a bed. The smoke disfigured their faces. There was something too adult about them, at odds with Rach’s own cheeks, peachy and round. Underneath those were several others, half-naked self-portraits, taken in the mirror. It made me feel uneasy and yet I didn’t want to stifle her creativity by insisting she stick to Disney subject matter. Rachael was too talented. It was all I could do to give her the best opportunity for success. The pictures had been developed in Ashley Everett’s darkroom – and possibly under his eye. I knew this Ashley Everett from her school. I’d seen the aloof glaze over his eyes, the lazy slouching of the shoulders, the thinning of his blond stringy hair and the hesitance in his stride; he’d possibly coasted on his looks for most of his life, but now age was chipping away and things did not come so easily. Except the adoration of teenage girls. That was easy.

I stroked Rach’s forehead, pushing back the stray strands of her hair. Was she all right? God, what had this man done?

She stirred, memory crawled in and a worry line appeared between her eyes. ‘Oh, crap,’ she said, rubbing her forehead.

‘My poor baby. Are you okay?’

‘Camille, I don’t want to talk about it.’ She flicked her sheets over her face.

‘Oh, honey.’ I wanted to hug her tight, check that she was still in one piece – that her flawless skin was unmarked. But I held back.

She brought the sheet down slowly, revealing eyes like jelly, tears about to topple over the rims.

I felt my own tears pull at the corners and strained to hold on to them. Be strong. She needs you to be strong.

‘You can tell me,’ I said, trying to level my voice and sound positive. ‘We can help.’ I stroked her wrist.

She looked at me hesitantly.

‘The police called. They want to come round to get your statement.’

She sat up abruptly. ‘What? No!’ She tore the sheets off, swung her legs to the ground. ‘I don’t want to talk to them.’

‘Darling . . . they won’t be able to press charges without it.’

‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what he’s like.’

My imagination ran wild; I began to feel afraid for her.

She drew her knees up to her chest. ‘Camille?’

I struggled to remain calm. ‘Yes, darling?’

‘I’m fucking scared. I want to go to Paris now.’

‘I know, honey. I’m so sorry.’ Paris. Yes, why couldn’t I magic us there right now? I smoothed her hair back and looked at her face, seeing there were slight shadows under her eyes and wondering what other unseen trauma she suffered. ‘We’ll see. If the Beaux-Arts come back we’ll go then,’ I said, putting my arms around her.

‘We’ll work it out. Just tell me everything, okay?’ Still stroking her hair, I noticed her painting, ‘Three Women’, leaning against her wardrobe. ‘Ms Sheehan told us about Becca’s missing painting,’ I said.

She pulled back sharply. ‘Oh – that bitch. I’m glad.’

Poor lamb, she must be so angry, so confused. ‘She would never have won over you anyway,’ I said, trying to make her feel better but knowing no matter what I did or said, this sinking feeling would be hard to alleviate. I decided to let the matter rest for the moment; there was no point in pressuring her – Rachael would come to me in her own time.

*

Later, Wolfe cornered me in our bedroom. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday. I was in shock.’

His shoulders were taut. He had even forgone his surf today.

This event had rocked us both.

‘We’ll get through this,’ I said, trying to find some kind of comfort, but as soon as I said it my mouth went dry and I physically recoiled. A teacher – a person in a position of power, someone who should know better – it was a complete violation. How? How would we get through this?

I looked at Wolfe, neither of us wanting to say what was on our minds.

‘Has she told you what happened yet?’

I shook my head. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘She’s frightened he’ll come after her.’

Wolfe’s jaw tightened.

I squeezed his shoulder. ‘Leave her for today. I’ll try to talk to her again tomorrow and then we’ll work it out from there. She’s exhausted.’

‘Cam?’ He grabbed the end of my fingers.

‘Yeah?’

‘You don’t think there’s any truth in the lying stuff, do you?’

His green eyes, the same as hers, searched mine for answers. There’d been times in the past when there’d been questions, but we’d solved those issues. ‘Right now, she needs our support.’

But he looked uncertain. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the psych stuff?’

I touched his face. ‘These people will say anything to make the problem go away – including suggesting that Rachael is a liar.’

The lines across his forehead deepened, the worry travelling through his thoughts. I knew what he was thinking and wondered if he doubted her because of it. I shook the memory away and squeezed Wolfe’s hand. ‘We have to trust her. You have to trust her.’

He looked away. ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right.’ He ran his thumb along his eyebrow. ‘I don’t know. How did we get here?’

There were many things about parenting we’d disagreed on over the years; he with his hands-off ‘Let them be their own person’ attitude and me with my preference for guidance, which he referred to as ‘overinvolved’. But I’d always made sure that he felt like some things were his decision.

‘You’ve always been an amazing dad,’ I said.

‘Jeez. I was shit-scared. Still am.’ He pulled me down beside him on the bed and held me against his chest; I looked up and saw his eyelashes blinking up at the ceiling. ‘She had always had that knowing look in her eye – even back then.’

*

I decided to go to work. My latest project was a nineteenth-century oil on canvas entitled
La Baigneuse aux Cheveux Roux
, or
Bathing Woman with Red Hair
, by Gustave Courbet. Normally I would have been salivating to get started, but everything, even this, was tinged with a sour taste. Its current owners, the Blakes, brought it to auction only to discover there were provenance complications: a restitution claim listed it as stolen Jewish art. I stopped in at Lonsdale’s auction house to begin my investigation in their laboratory.

I was glad for the distraction. I wished to close my eyes and when I opened them again none of this would be happening. I felt so ill about the whole thing and heard myself sigh; God, I sounded like my mother. She had had this way of pushing air out when she was stressed and I had hated it.

Poor Rach. This was what happened when you had a gifted child. They were singled out – marginalised, taken advantage of by people in positions of power trying to put them down. I just had to hold it all together. There was her emotional state to consider and her reputation and schooling. This was her second high school. She had seemed so settled. And the question remained – what to do about the teacher?

But I knew Wolfe had been thinking about Clippo. We’d got through that and we’d get through this too.

Jane at the front desk said hello and handed me my security pass; I signed in and she waved me through the security doors – I’d been coming here for years. Inside the windowless lab, a halo of dimmed light surrounded a small canvas, removed from its frame and mounted on an easel ready for my examination; a box file containing paperwork lay on the bench. I heard myself gasp gently:
La Baigneuse aux Cheveux Roux
. She was magnificent. Of course I always saw pictures of the paintings I researched but every time I saw the real thing – especially if it had only been in private collections – I was reduced to childlike astonishment.

I unpacked my camera, laptop and notepad, slid on my cotton gloves and began. Painted in muted colours, the subject, a nude female, languished in the Odalisque pose on a white blanket in a lush garden landscape, her unlit face turning demurely away from the viewer, auburn tresses falling over her shoulders and chest. The longer I stared, the more she revealed. I noted the presence of body hair and scratches on her skin from her corset, and the use of broad and rough brushstrokes, all of which was suggestive of the realist movement. I took a closer look through the magnifying lamp and saw ridges from a finger or thumbprint in the paint. I loved the portrayal of skin on the canvas, the power of Lucian Freud’s fleshy bodies as opposed to the minute detail of Chuck Close’s giant photorealist faces; the landscape of a human body could tell you much more about the subject than the face alone. In the far right-hand bottom corner was a signature scribbled in orange oil:
G. Courbet
. I really was lucky.

Taking down the canvas measurements – it was small enough to fit in a satchel and appeared to be its original size, I carefully turned it over. The stretcher was made of dark mahogany, its surface covered in dust, traces of old chalk – long since illegible – and several labels, the most obvious of which were two that were fully intact from Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, others were just yellowed fragments. Running my hands against the rough, unsealed wood I felt the remnants of a wax seal and could make out the words
Atelier de G
but the rest of it had disappeared. I guided the magnifying glass slowly across the stretcher, hovering over each crack and minuscule abrasion and found two faded stamps, both of which were indecipherable, and a French export stamp – so we knew it had crossed the French border. Well, we certainly knew that . . .

‘What’s your story?’ I said out loud, and then took a series of photographs for my files. I meditated on the actual evidence before forming any initial thoughts and then, feeling satisfied I had everything I needed to start, I took one last lingering look before packing up and returning to my office, feeling slightly smug that I could come back for a private viewing any time.

My studio was in an old wool bondstore, which had been turned into offices in the early eighties. The area used to be a major shipbuilding part of the harbour but had since been gentrified with coffee shops and media companies. I’d chosen it for the huge windows, which looked across the roofs of the old wharf cottages down to the harbour and filled the office with light.

Sitting at my desk, I switched on my banker’s lamp and opened the box file. I always liked to examine the painting with fresh eyes and then read the paperwork afterwards. The last known provenance was scant and had been written up in Christie’s 1979 sale catalogue, from where the Blakes had bought it:

Christie’s, New York, 27 April 1979, lot 170; Christie’s, New York, 16 March 1972, lot 283; Mr and Mrs T.S. Michaels, sale of the estate of Baroness Constance Lech, Sotheby’s, New York, 3 November 1967; Georges Bernard, Georges-Petit Gallery, Paris, 1908; Private Collector, Paris, 1871.

There was a distinct gap during the war years. How had it gone from Georges Bernard’s possession in 1908 to the estate of Baroness Constance Lech in 1967?

I plugged my camera in and uploaded the photos, preparing to catalogue them.

Of course, it could have been passed on legitimately – sold prior to the war, and the evidence was yet to be located. The painting was last sold in 1979, and it was almost another twenty years before the US declassified official army reports detailing the extent of Nazi art plunder, and the truth became more accessible. Museums agreed to carry out extensive provenance research and many were shocked to discover stolen Jewish art displayed on their walls.

I singled out the photos of the unidentified stamps and attached them to an email to Monica, my contact at the Courtauld Institute in London, who specialised in European dealer stamps. I also wrote to my friend at the National Library in Canberra to send me the painting’s record in the last-written catalogue raisonné – this was a heavily researched document compiled by an expert on an artist and essential for proving authenticity and provenance. Ideally it would include a timeline, information on the subject, the artist’s location at the time, previous owners, exhibitions, bibliographies and other reports.