The Girl You Left Behind (43 page)

‘One cutting in particular tells how
Ms Baker spent one day around the time of the liberation at a vast warehouse known as
the Collection Point, housed in former Nazi offices near Munich in which US troops
stored displaced works of art.’ He tells the story of another reporter, who was
given a painting to thank her for helping the Allies at this time. It had been the
subject of a separate legal challenge, and had since gone back to its original
owners.

Henry shakes his head, a tiny gesture.

‘M’lord, I will now hand round
copies of this newspaper article, dated the sixth of November 1945, entitled “How
I became the Governor of Berchtesgaden”, which, we contend, demonstrates how
Louanne Baker, a humble reporter, came, by extremely unorthodox means, to own a modern
masterpiece.’

The court hushes and the journalists lean
forwards, pens readied against their notebooks. Christopher Jenks begins to read:

‘Wartime prepares you for a
lot of things
.
But little prepared me for the day I found myself
Governor of Berchtesgaden, and of Goering’s haul of some one hundred
million dollars’ worth of stolen art.’

The young reporter’s voice echoes
across the years, plucky, capable. She comes ashore with the Screaming
Eagles on Omaha Beach. She is stationed with them near Munich. She records the
thoughts of young soldiers who have never before spent time from home, the smoking, the
bravado, the surreptitious wistfulness. And then one morning she watches the troops go
out, headed for a prisoner-of-war camp some miles away, and finds herself in charge of
two marines and a fire truck. ‘“The US Army could not allow even the
possibility of an accident while such treasures were in its custody.”’ She
tells of Goering’s apparent passion for art, the evidence of years of systematic
looting within the building’s walls, her relief when the US Army came back and she
could relinquish responsibility for its haul.

And then Christopher Jenks pauses.

‘When I left, the sergeant told me I could take with me a souvenir, as a
thank-you for what he said was my “patriotic duty”. I did, and I
still have it today – a little memento of the strangest day of my
life.’

He stands, raising his eyebrows. ‘Some
souvenir.’

Angela Silver is on her feet.
‘Objection. There is nothing in that article that says the memento was
The
Girl You Left Behind
.’

‘It is an extraordinary coincidence
that she mentions being allowed to remove an item from the warehouse.’

‘The article does not at any point
state that the item was a painting. Let alone this particular painting.’

‘Sustained.’

Angela Silver is at the bench. ‘My
lord, we have examined the records from Berchtesgaden and there is no
written record of this painting having come from the Collection Point storage
facility. It appears on none of the lists or inventories from that time. It is therefore
specious for my colleague here to make the association.’

‘It has already been documented here
that during wartime there are always things that go unrecorded. We have heard expert
testimony that there are works of art that were never recorded as having been stolen
during wartime that have later turned out to be so.’

‘My lord, if my learned friend is
stating that
The Girl You Left Behind
was a looted painting at Berchtesgaden,
then the burden of proof still falls on the claimants to establish beyond doubt that
this painting was actually there in the first place. There is no hard evidence that it
formed part of that collection.’

Jenks shakes his head. ‘In his
own
statement
David Halston said that when he bought it Louanne Baker’s
daughter told him she had acquired the painting in 1945 in Germany. She could offer no
provenance and he didn’t know enough about the art market to be aware that he
should have demanded it.

‘It seems extraordinary that a
painting that had disappeared from France during a time of German occupation, that was
recorded as having been coveted by a German
Kommandant
, should then reappear in
the home of a woman who had just returned from Germany, was on record as saying she had
brought home with her a precious memento from that trip and would never go there
again.’

The courtroom is silent. Along the bench, a
dark-haired woman in lime green is alert, leaning forwards, her big, gnarled hands
resting on the back of the bench in front
of her. Liv wonders where
she has seen her before. The woman shakes her head emphatically. There are lots of older
people in the public benches: how many of them remember this war personally? How many
lost paintings of their own?

Angela Silver addresses the judge.
‘Again, m’ lord, this is all circumstantial. There are no specific
references in this article to a painting. A memento, as it is referred to here, could
have been simply a soldier’s badge or a pebble. This court must make its judgment
solely on evidence. In not one piece of this evidence does she specifically refer to
this painting.’

Angela Silver sits.

‘Can we call Marianne
Andrews?’

The woman in lime green stands heavily,
makes her way to the stand and, after being sworn in, gazes around her, blinking
slightly. Her grip on her handbag turns her oversized knuckles white. Liv starts when
she remembers where she has seen her before: a sun-baked back-street in Barcelona,
nearly a decade previously, her hair blonde instead of today’s raven black.
Marianne Johnson.

‘Mrs Andrews. You are the only
daughter of Louanne Baker.’

‘Ms Andrews. I am a widow. And, yes, I
am.’ Liv recalls that strong American accent.

Angela Silver points to the painting.
‘Ms Andrews. Do you recognize the painting – the copy of the painting – that sits
in the court before you?’

‘I certainly do. That painting sat in
our drawing room my whole childhood. It’s called
The Girl You Left
Behind
, and it’s by Édouard Lefèvre.’ She pronounces it
‘Le Fever’.

‘Ms Andrews, did your mother ever tell
you about the souvenir she refers to in her article?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘She never said it was a
painting?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Did she ever mention where the
painting came from?’

‘Not to me, no. But I’d just
like to say there is no way Mom would have taken that painting if she’d thought it
belonged to a victim of those camps. She just wasn’t like that.’

The judge leans forward. ‘Ms Andrews,
we have to stay within the boundaries of what is known. We cannot ascribe motives to
your mother.’

‘Well, you all seem to be.’ She
huffs. ‘You didn’t know her. She believed in fair play. The souvenirs she
kept were things like shrunken heads or old guns or car number-plates. Things that
nobody would have cared for.’ She thinks for a minute. ‘Well, okay, the
shrunken heads might have belonged to someone once, but you can bet they didn’t
want them back, right?’

There is a ripple of laughter around the
courtroom.

‘She was really very upset by what
happened in Dachau. She could barely talk about it for years afterwards. I know she
would not have taken anything if she thought it might be hurting one of those poor souls
further.’

‘So you do not believe that your
mother took this painting from Berchtesgaden?’

‘My mother never took a thing from
anyone. She paid her way. That was how she was.’

Jenks stands. ‘This is all very well,
Ms Andrews, but as
you’ve said, you have no idea how your
mother got this painting, do you?’

‘Like I said, I know she wasn’t
a thief.’

Liv watches the judge as he scribbles in his
notes. She looks at Marianne Andrews, grimacing as her mother’s reputation is
destroyed in front of her. She looks at Janey Dickinson, smiling with barely concealed
triumph at the Lefèvre brothers. She looks at Paul, who is leaning forward, his
hands clasped over his knees, as if he is praying.

Liv turns away from the image of her
painting, and feels a new weight, like a blanket, settle over her, shutting out the
light.

‘Hey,’ she calls, as she lets
herself in. It is half past four but there is no sign of Mo. She walks through to the
kitchen and picks up the note on the kitchen table: ‘Gone to Ranic’s. Back
tomorrow. Mo’.

Liv lets the note fall and releases a small
sigh. She has become used to Mo pottering around the house – the sound of her footsteps,
distant humming, a bath running, the smell of food warming in the oven. The house feels
empty now. It hadn’t felt empty before Mo came.

Mo has been a little distant for days. Liv
wonders if she has guessed what happened after Paris. Which brings her, like everything,
back to Paul.

But there is little point in thinking about
Paul.

There is no post, except a mail-shot for
fitted kitchens, and two bills.

She takes off her coat and makes herself a
mug of tea. She rings her father, who is out. His booming answer-phone message urges her
to leave her name and number.
‘You must! We’d LOVE to
hear from you!’ She flicks on the radio, but the music is too irritating, the news
too depressing. She doesn’t want to go online: there are unlikely to be any emails
offering work and she is afraid to see something about the court case. She doesn’t
want the pixelated fury of a million people who don’t know her to slide across her
computer and into her head.

She doesn’t want to go out.

Come on
, she scolds herself.
You’re stronger than this. Think what Sophie had to cope with.

Liv puts on some music, just to take the
edge off the silence. She loads some laundry into the machine, to give a semblance of
domestic normality. And then she picks up the pile of envelopes and papers she has
ignored for the last two weeks, pulls up a chair and starts to plough through them.

The bills she puts in the middle; the final
demands to the right. On the left she puts anything that is not urgent. Bank statements
she ignores. Statements from her lawyers go in a pile by themselves.

She has a large notepad on which she enters
a column of figures. She works her way methodically through the list, adding sums and
subtracting them, scoring through and putting her workings on the edge of the page. She
sits back in her chair, surrounded by the black sky, and stares at the figures for a
long time.

Eventually she leans back, gazing up through
the skylight. It is as dark as if it were midnight, but when she checks her watch,
it’s not yet six o’clock. She gazes at the straight, blameless lines of
David’s creation, the way they frame a huge expanse of glittering sky, whichever
angle
she chooses to look from. She gazes at the walls, at the
thermic glass interlaid with special sheets of impossibly thin insulating material that
he had sourced from California and China so that the house would be quiet and warm. She
gazes at the alabaster concrete wall on which she had once scrawled ‘WHY
DON’T YOU BUGGER OFF?’ in marker pen when she and David had argued about her
untidiness in the early days of their marriage. Despite the attentions of several
specialist removers, you can still make out the ghostly outline of those words if the
atmospheric conditions are right. She gazes out at the sky, visible through at least one
clear wall in every room, so that the Glass House would always feel as if it were
suspended in space, high above the teeming streets.

She walks through to her bedroom and gazes
at the portrait of Sophie Lefèvre. As ever, Sophie’s eyes meets hers with
that direct stare. Today, however, she does not appear impassive, imperious. Today Liv
thinks she can detect new knowledge behind her expression.

What happened to you, Sophie?

She has known she will have to make this
decision for days. She has probably always known it. And yet it still feels like a
betrayal.

She flicks through the telephone book, picks
up the receiver and dials. ‘Hello? Is that the estate agent?’

‘So your painting disappeared
when?’

‘1941. Maybe 1942. It’s
difficult, because everyone involved is, you know, dead.’ The blonde woman laughs
mirthlessly.

‘Yeah, so you said. And can you give
me a full description?’

The woman pushes a folder across the table.
‘This is everything we have. Most of the facts were in the letter I sent you in
November.’

Paul flicks through the folder, trying to
recall the details. ‘So you located it in a gallery in Amsterdam. And you’ve
made an initial approach …’

Miriam knocks on the door and enters,
bearing coffee. He waits as she distributes the two cups and nods apologetically,
backing out again, as if she has done something amiss. He mouths a thank-you, and she
winces.

‘Yes, I wrote them a letter. What do
you think it’s worth?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What do you think it’s
worth?’

Paul looks up from his notes. The woman is
leaning back in her chair. Her face is beautiful, clear-skinned and defined, not yet
revealing the first signs of age. But it is also, he notices now, expressionless, as if
she has grown used to hiding her feelings. Or perhaps it’s Botox. He
steals a glance at her thick hair, knowing that Liv could detect
immediately if it was entirely her own.

‘Because a Kandinsky would fetch a lot
of money, right? That’s what my husband says.’

Paul picks his words carefully. ‘Well,
yes, if the work can be proven to be yours. But that’s all some way off. Can we
just get back to the issue of ownership? Do you have any proof of where the painting was
obtained?’

‘Well, my grandfather was friends with
Kandinsky.’

‘Okay.’ He takes a sip of his
coffee. ‘Do you have any documentary evidence?’

She looks blank.

‘Photographs? Letters? References to
the two of them being friends?’