The Girl You Left Behind (50 page)

Because you know what? I secretly like the idea that you could have a painting
so powerful it could shake up a whole marriage. And she’s kind of pretty.
I can’t stop looking at her. Given
everything else that
seems to be going on around here, it’s nice to have something beautiful to
look at.

The courtroom is in complete silence as
Marianne Andrews closes the journal in front of her. Liv has been concentrating so hard
that she feels almost faint. She steals a look sideways down the bench and sees Paul,
his elbows on his knees, his head tipped forward. Beside him Janey Dickinson is
scribbling furiously into a notepad.

A handbag.

Angela Silver is on her feet. ‘So let
us get this straight, Ms Andrews. The painting you know as
The Girl You Left
Behind
was not inside, and never had been inside, the storage facility when
your mother was given it.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘And just to reiterate, while the
storage facility was full of looted works of art, stolen works of art, this particular
painting was given to your mother, not even within the facility.’

‘Yes, ma’am. By a German lady.
Like her journal says.’

‘Your Honour, this journal, in Louanne
Baker’s own hand, proves beyond doubt that this painting was never in the
Collection Point. The painting was simply given away by a woman who had never wanted it.
Given away
. For whatever reason – a bizarre sexual jealousy, an historic
resentment, we will never know. The salient point here, however, is that this painting,
which, as we hear, was almost destroyed, was a
gift
.

‘Your Honour, it has become very clear
these last two weeks that the provenance of this painting is incomplete, as it is for
many paintings that have existed for the best
part of a turbulent
century. What can now be proven beyond doubt, however, is that the painting’s last
two transfers were untainted. David Halston bought it legitimately for his wife in 1997,
and she has the receipt to prove it. Louanne Baker, who owned it before him, was given
it in 1945, and we have her written word, the word of a woman renowned for honesty and
accuracy, to prove it. For this reason, we contend that
The Girl You Left
Behind
must remain with its current owner. To remove it surely makes a mockery
of the law.’

Angela Silver sits. Paul looks up at her. In
the brief moment that he catches her eye, Liv is sure she can detect a faint smile.

The court adjourns for lunch. Marianne is
smoking on the back steps, her blue handbag looped over her elbow, gazing out on to the
grey street. ‘Wasn’t that marvellous?’ she says conspiratorially, when
she sees Liv approaching.

‘You were brilliant.’

‘Oh, my, I have to confess – I did
enjoy it. They’ll have to eat their words about my mother now. I knew she would
never have taken a thing that didn’t belong to her.’ She nods, taps the ash
off her cigarette. ‘They called her “The Fearless Miss Baker”, you
know.’

Liv leans over the rail in silence. She
pulls up her collar against the cold. Marianne smokes the rest of her cigarette in long,
hungry gulps.

‘It was him, wasn’t it?’
Liv says finally, looking straight ahead.

‘Oh, honey, I promised I
wouldn’t say a word.’ Marianne turns to her and pulls a face. ‘I could
have kicked myself
this morning. But of course it was. The poor man
is nuts about you.’

Christopher Jenks stands. ‘Ms
Andrews. A simple question. Did your mother ask this astonishingly generous old woman
her name?’

Marianne Andrews blinks. ‘I have no
idea.’

Liv cannot take her eyes off Paul.
You
did this for me?
she asks him silently. Oddly, he no longer meets her gaze. He
sits beside Janey Dickinson looking uncomfortable, checking his watch, and glancing
towards the door. She cannot think what she will say to him.

‘It’s an extraordinary gift to
accept without knowing who you are getting it from.’

‘Well, crazy gift, crazy times. I
guess you had to be there.’

There is a low ripple of laughter in the
courtroom. Marianne Andrews shimmies slightly. Liv detects unfulfilled stage
ambitions.

‘Indeed. Have you read all your
mother’s journals?’

‘Oh, good God, no,’ she says.
‘There’s thirty years’ worth of stuff in there. We – I – only found
them last night.’ Her gaze briefly flickers towards the bench. ‘But we found
the important bit. The bit where Mom was given the painting. That’s what I brought
in here.’ She places great emphasis on the word ‘given’, glancing
sideways at Liv, and nodding to herself as she says it.

‘Then you haven’t yet read
Louanne Baker’s 1948 journal?’

There is a short silence. Liv is aware of
Henry reaching for his own files.

Jenks holds out his hand and the solicitor
hands him a piece of paper. ‘My lord, may I ask you to turn to the journal entry
for the eleventh of May 1948, entitled “House Moves”?’

‘What are they doing?’
Liv’s attention is finally drawn back to the case. She leans in towards Henry, who
is scanning the pages.

‘I’m looking,’ he
whispers.

‘In it Louanne Baker discusses her
household move from Newark, in Essex County, to Saddle River.’

‘That’s right,’ says
Marianne. ‘Saddle River. That’s where I grew up.’

‘Yes … You’ll see here
that she discusses the move in some detail. She talks of trying to find her saucepans,
the nightmare of being surrounded by unpacked boxes. I think we can all identify with
that. But, perhaps most pertinently, she walks around the new house trying …’
he pauses, as if ensuring he reads the words verbatim ‘… “
trying to
find the perfect spot to hang Liesl’s painting
”.’

Liesl.

Liv watches the journalists rifle through
their notes. But she realizes with a sickening feeling that she already knows the
name.

‘Bollocks,’ says Henry.

Jenks knows the name too. Sean
Flaherty’s people are way ahead of them. They must have had a whole team reading
the journals through lunchtime.

‘I would now like to draw Your
Honour’s attention to records kept by the German Army during the First World War.
The
Kommandant
who was stationed at St Péronne from 1916, the man who
brought his troops in to Le Coq
Rouge, was a man called Friedrich
Hencken.’ He pauses to let that sink in. ‘The records state that the
Kommandant
stationed there at the time, the
Kommandant
who so
admired the painting of Édouard Lefèvre’s wife, was one Friedrich
Hencken.

‘And now I would like to show to the
court the 1945 census records of the area around Berchtesgaden. Former Kommandant
Friedrich Hencken and his wife, Liesl, settled there after his retirement. Just streets
away from the Collection Point storage facility. She was also recorded as walking with a
pronounced limp, given a childhood bout of polio.’

Their QC is on her feet. ‘Again, this
is circumstantial.’

‘Mr and Mrs Friedrich Hencken. My
Lord, it is our contention that Kommandant Friedrich Hencken took the painting from Le
Coq Rouge in 1917. He removed it to his home, seemingly against the will of his wife,
who might reasonably have objected to such a – a potent image of another woman. It
stayed there until his death, upon which Mrs Hencken was so keen to dispose of it that
she took it a few streets away to the place she knew held a million pieces of artwork, a
place where it would be swallowed up and never be seen again.’

Angela Silver sits down.

Jenks continues – there is a new energy
about him now: ‘Ms Andrews. Let’s go back to your mother’s memories of
this time. Could you read the following paragraph, please? This, for the record, comes
from the same journal entry. In it, Louanne Baker apparently finds what she believes is
the perfect spot for
The Girl
, as she calls the painting.’

‘As soon as I put her in that front parlour, she looked comfortable.
She’s not in direct sunlight there, but the south-facing window, with its
warm light, makes her colours glow. She seems happy enough, anyhow!’

Marianne reads slowly now, unfamiliar with
these words of her mother’s. She glances up at Liv, and her eyes hold an apology,
as if she can already see where this is going.

‘I banged the nails in myself – Howard always does knock out a fist-sized
chunk of plaster when he does it – but as I was about to hang her, something
made me turn the painting over and take another look at the back of it. And it
made me think of that poor woman, and her sad, embittered old face. And I
remembered something I’d forgotten since the war.

‘I always assumed it was something out of nothing. But as Liesl handed
over the painting, she briefly snatched it back, as if she’d changed her
mind. Then she rubbed at something on the back, like she was trying to rub
something off. She rubbed it and rubbed it, like a crazy woman. She rubbed so
hard I thought she actually hurt her fingers.’

The courtroom is still, listening.

‘Well, I looked at the back of it just now, just as I looked at it then.
And it was the one thing that really made me wonder whether that poor woman had
been in her right mind when she handed it over. Because it doesn’t matter
how long you stare at the back of that painting – aside from the title – there
is truly nothing there, just a smudge of chalk.

‘Is it wrong to take something from someone not in their right mind? I
still haven’t worked it out. Truthfully, the world seemed so insane back
then – with what was going on in the camps, and grown men weeping, and me in
charge of a billion dollars’ worth of other people’s things – that
old Liesl and her bleeding knuckles scrubbing away at nothing seemed actually
pretty normal.’

‘Your Honour, we would suggest that
this – and Liesl’s failure to give her last name – is pretty clear evidence of
somebody trying to disguise or even destroy any sign of where the painting had come
from. Well, she certainly succeeded.’

As he pauses, a member of his legal team
crosses the court and hands him a piece of paper. He reads it and takes a breath. His
eyes scan the courtroom.

‘German census records we have just
obtained show that Sophie Lefèvre contracted Spanish influenza shortly after she
arrived at the camps at Ströhen. She died there shortly afterwards.’

Liv hears his words through a buzzing in her
ears. They vibrate within her, like the aftershock of a physical blow.

‘Your Honour, as we have heard in this
court, a great injustice was done to Sophie. And a great injustice has been done to her
descendants. Her husband, her dignity, her freedom and ultimately her life were taken
from her. Stolen. What remained – her image – was, according to all the evidence, taken
from her family by the very man who had done her the greatest wrong.

‘There is only one way to redress this
wrong, belated as
it might be – the painting must be returned to the
Lefèvre family.’

She barely takes in the rest of his words.
Paul sits with his forehead in his palms. She looks over at Janey Dickinson, and when
the woman meets her eye, she realizes with a faint shock that for some other
participants, too, this case is no longer just about a painting.

Even Henry is downcast when they leave the
court. Liv feels as if they have all been run over by a juggernaut.

Sophie died in the camps. Sick and alone.
Never seeing her husband again.

She looks at the smiling Lefèvres
across the court, wanting to feel generous towards them. Wanting to feel as if some
great wrong is about to be righted. But she recalls Philippe Bessette’s words, the
fact that the family had banned even the mention of her name. She feels as if, for a
second time, Sophie is about to be handed over to the enemy. She feels, weirdly,
bereaved.

‘Look, who knows what the judge will
decide,’ Henry says, as he sees her to the rear security area. ‘Try not to
dwell on it too much over the weekend. There’s nothing more we can do
now.’

She tries to smile at him. ‘Thanks,
Henry,’ she says. ‘I’ll – call you.’

It feels strange out here, in the wintry
sunlight, as if they have spent much longer than an afternoon in the confines of the
court. She feels as if she has come here straight from 1945. Henry hails a taxi for her,
then leaves, nodding farewell. It is then that she sees him, standing at
the security gate. He looks as if he has been waiting there for her,
and walks straight over.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, his
face grim.

‘Paul, don’t –’

‘I really thought – I’m sorry
for everything.’

His eyes meet hers, one final time, and he
walks away, blind to the customers exiting the Seven Stars pub, the legal assistants
dragging their trolleys of files. She sees the stoop to his shoulders, the
uncharacteristic dip of his head and it is this, on top of everything else that has
happened today, that finally settles something for her.

‘Paul!’ She has to yell twice to
be heard over the sound of the traffic. ‘Paul!’

He turns. She can see the points of his
irises even from here.

‘I know.’ He stands very still
for a minute, a tall man, a little broken, in a good suit. ‘I know. Thank
you … for trying.’

Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a
matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it
is simply a matter of blind faith. ‘Would you … would you like to go for
that drink some time?’ She swallows. ‘Now, even?’

He glances at his shoes, thinking, then up
at her again. ‘Would you give me one minute?’

He walks back up the steps of the court. She
sees Janey Dickinson deep in conversation with her lawyer. Paul touches her elbow, and
there is a brief exchange of words. She feels anxious – a little voice nagging:
What
is he telling her now? –
and she turns away, climbing into the taxi, trying to
quell it. When she looks up again through the window,
he is walking
briskly back down the steps, winding a scarf around his neck. Janey Dickinson is staring
at the taxi, her files limp in her arms.