The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  Max says, “I talked you and the gallery up quite a bit and then the chap insisted that he handle all the arrangements at his end. You have to love American philanthropy!”

  Ellie coughs away from the phone to steady her voice. She is about to enlighten Max—she’s certain of it for a lingering second—that two paintings of the same name, from two different hemispheres, are on their way to his museum. She might call it a baffling mix-up. But instead she says, “And who is this generous fellow?”

  “A Mr. Martijn de Groot from Manhattan.”

  Ellie does the math: somewhere in his eighties, unless there’s a male heir with the same name. Through the glass doors she watches as the bay silvers with scales of afternoon sunlight.

  “Goes by Marty—a brash sort, but very generous, if you ask me. The picture’s been in his family for centuries. Remarkable, really.”

  The carbonized smell of the quiche makes her feel light-headed. Max says something that she doesn’t quite hear—it’s muffled by a boarding announcement at the airport—then he comes back in, as if through static: “… apparently the painting is already bequeathed to the Met. They’re just waiting for the old codger to die. But this is the best part, Ellie. Marty de Groot insists on bringing the painting himself. He’ll be flying out with it sometime before we open. Isn’t that something?”

  She feels her throat thickening with dread.

  Max says, “Speaking of flying, I should head over to my gate. I’ll be in touch from Beijing.”

  Because she’s terrified of what her voice might sound like, she hums a goodbye and hangs up the phone. Her kitchen floor is plummeting for a few seconds, an elevator in free fall. She thinks, I have invited ruin back into my life. She stares dumbly at the oracle of the old rotary dial telephone, as if it might unring. She’s been gone long enough that Kate comes bustling in from the veranda to lend a hand. “You’re hopeless,” she says in a bright, cheery voice. “You went in search of wine and now you’re standing there like a lobotomy patient. Ooh, smells like a house fire in here. What have you done to poor old mum’s quiche?”

  Ellie is jolted into action and opens the oven door. The quiche is smoking and charred beyond recognition. Kate nudges her out of the way, slips on an oven mitt, and pulls it out onto the stovetop. “You really know how to charm your guests,” she says. Then she opens the kitchen window to let out some of the smoke. “No fear,” she says, crossing to the fridge. “I saw some smoked salmon in here. We’ll serve that up.” When she pulls the packet of salmon from the refrigerator she finally turns to see Ellie’s ashen face. “What’s wrong? You look like you need smelling salts.”

  Ellie says, “I’m getting a terrible migraine. I can barely see.”

  Kate’s face washes with sisterly affection and concern. She touches Ellie’s forehead with her wrist, as if checking for a fever. Their mother’s migraines were burdensome acts of God that they both resented as girls, but Ellie’s—which came on during puberty—were treated with tenderness and precision. Kate used to black out the windows of the old house with blankets if Ellie had an attack when she was back from boarding school. She used to make cold compresses and cups of tea and bring them to Ellie in the darkness of their shared bedroom. Kate says, “Go lie down and I’ll bring you some medicine. I’ll handle your guests and get them on the four o’clock ferry.”

  Ellie is shocked by the panic burning in her chest and hands and face. There’s something jagged and electrical about it. The aura of a migraine, that first pulse of recognition, is nothing compared to this. She nods and says, “You’ve always looked after me, Kate. I’m sorry I’ve spent most of my life on the other side of the world.” Kate kisses her cheek and sternly points her toward the back of the house.

  Ellie walks toward her bedroom, goes inside, and closes the door. She sits on the bed and looks out the window, obstructed from her guests out on the veranda. A dozen yachts belly out with their spinnakers across the bay, dashing down toward Palm Beach on a steady breeze. Her mind seems to resist the immediate puzzle for a moment and so she finds herself thinking of her father. Whenever she watches the sailboats unfurl or the fishing trawlers come into the bay after a night’s catch she thinks about him. He’s been dead since before she was forty, but to this day the sound of halyards plinking on metal mastheads, especially at night, brings him back. There he is sleeping in his eighteen-foot ketch, anchored in the Parramatta River just to avoid the domestic claims of his wife and two daughters. Their hatchet-shaped lot in Balmain gave onto a view of the navy yards and industrial docks and she remembers the sight of her father’s boat amid the hulking silhouettes of frigates and cargo ships. The darkness pulsed with the sound of ship generators and she always wondered how he could sleep through the night with all that racket. That noise was infinitely preferable, apparently, to the sound of young girls bickering or a wife calling out in her sleep.

  She’s incredulous that both paintings have coexisted for nearly half a century—a planet and its orbiting moon. Over the years, a few other de Vos paintings have been discovered, one of them authenticated by Ellie, but At the Edge of a Wood has remained the crown jewel. The private collection in Leiden had agreed to loan not only it but also another de Vos landscape she has never seen. She wonders if that one is a fake as well. While she listens to the sound of Kate corralling the guests with good humor and smoked salmon she replays in her mind the late 1950s in New York. A panicked escape, then the big push into the straight and narrow. After her dissertation was accepted by her department and some of her papers begun to be published, she took a post teaching at University College London. She had tenure in her early thirties, having walked away from the New York underworld of runners and pickers and dealers as if from a burning house, incredulous and grateful to emerge unscathed.

  She didn’t know all the circumstances of the painting’s return, but she knew that Gabriel had both the copy and the original as of late 1958. In December of that year, Marty de Groot reached out to the public—or the forgers and thieves—like a mogul with a kidnapped child, placing a full-page appeal in the Sunday Times and offering a reward of seventy-five thousand dollars. The painting wasn’t worth much more than that at the time. She was already in Europe when the ad appeared, and she heard about it months later. Because the painting had never been sold or exhibited, she assumed that the fake had been quietly destroyed or kept as a memento in the de Groot attic. But now, as she watches a yacht come about in a strong gust, she considers all the possibilities, follows them like the branches of some sprawling equation.

  One proof entails visions of Gabriel fleeing the country with his reward to live in exile, in Morocco or Brazil, wearing a rumpled cream linen suit. Another version sees him spending years in a Rikers Island jail cell, extradited and disgraced, before teaching art appreciation to pensioners at night school. For a decade after the incident, she’d been so busy constructing a new life for herself and projecting onto Gabriel’s unknown fate that she’d either ignored or denied a rather obvious and elegant solution: Gabriel returns the original painting to Marty de Groot, collects the reward, keeps the fake, and sits on it until, forty-two years later, he’s cash-strapped and desperate to sell. He finds a small private museum in Leiden, thinking Marty de Groot is probably dead and the scandal forgotten. It has the audacity and simplicity of mathematical truth. And if it is true, she can’t help admiring the calculated restraint of Gabriel sitting on the painting all this time.

  * * *

  She doesn’t leave the island until Wednesday, when she has to teach and the courier is due to arrive at the museum with the Leiden paintings. Whatever she does next, she feels certain this is the beginning of how it all ends. She barely eats, drinks too much wine, falls asleep out on the veranda in a deck chair. Her dreams are lifted from a Fellini film—full of ticking clocks, abandoned houses, inscrutable strangers, doors loosed from their hinges. She is forever hearing the sound of turbines, of jets coming in to land.

  Early one morning she w
akes in a panic and decides to send Max Culkins an e-mail. She wishes she hadn’t incriminated herself by saying marvelous news on the phone to him. He will soon discover the paper trail—not to mention the paintings—and wonder why she hadn’t told him.

  Dear Max,

  Hope you’re enjoying the conference in China. I’m embarrassed to say that I was a bit out of it the other night when you called. People were over and I was distracted. Anyway, somehow we seem to have two copies of the same de Vos coming to the gallery for the exhibition. A double-up on the New York picture. No idea how that happened … but I’ll get to the bottom of it. Probably a faulty attribution out of Leiden. By the way, Leiden also claims to have another de Vos landscape. So we’ll see. Anyway, let me know if you want to strategize.

  Best—

  Ellie

  After she sends the e-mail, she wonders if the word strategize is too cold and calculating. She waits to see what will happen next. Max never responds directly, but later that day she gets e-mails from the curatorial staff that suggest they are all in the know. One e-mail from Mandy, the registrar, has a subject line that reads “The Same Painting Twice.” The body reads: I think Max wants to tread lightly in case rumour of a forgery gets out before the exhibition opens. Also, the poor old sod’s retiring next year, so everything is hush-hush. We’re under strict instructions not to let on we know anything with either of the lenders. Max says he’ll handle it personally when he gets back from China.

  Ellie has bought herself some time, recovered from the ridiculous use of the word marvelous, but now there’s the looming matter of Marty de Groot crossing the international date line. She morbidly tries to conjure the worst of the headlines if she’s exposed. The national papers might go with something restrained like “Feminist Art Scholar Forges Her Way to Prominence,” while her hometown tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, would settle for “Art Maven Uncovered as Crook.”

  She has visions of federal police—she doesn’t know why they’re federal—showing up to a lecture she’s giving on Frans Hals. They wait at the back of the auditorium until she’s done, politely escorting her across the quadrangle without handcuffs. Or she sees herself being called into a meeting with her faculty dean and a plainclothes detective. She finds herself dialing up her modem to connect to Internet legal advice sites, conducting searches in the middle of the night, researching the statute of limitations and international extradition treaties and case history for forgeries. There’s no reason to be concerned about a criminal case, but she feels hollowed out by the specter of Marty de Groot’s arrival.

  The threat of being found out makes her want to take stock, to peer into the corners of her life for broader deceits. Is she a fundamentally flawed person? She fixates on small lapses, as if they might reveal something larger. Unanswered e-mails, promising students she could have given more attention to, art reviews she’s published that could have been more evenhanded. She tries to uncover a bread-crumb trail of moral failure, a trail that perhaps began with her forgery, or even before, with the shoplifting excursions at boarding school. But the trail peters out after 1957. The truth is she became tirelessly disciplined and scrupulous as an academic; she forever felt the aftermath of her decision to copy the painting for money, experienced the fact of having been spared as viscerally as survivor’s guilt. She was always trying to make amends. Her art-dealing ex-husband, Sebastian, liked to make gentle fun of her at dinner parties, because in two decades he’d never seen her speed or jaywalk or take a shortcut on her taxes. What’s happened to that convict blood of yours, he would chide, and she would smile demurely and think about her undeniable role in the theft of a landmark painting.

  * * *

  As she casts about for evidence of her flawed character, she happens upon something unexpected. At the edges of her carefully managed life, at the center of her thin social circles, is a kind of shocking loneliness. It’s been there for years, even back in England. Up until now she’d thought there was liberation in solitude. She could stay in town after lectures, go see a foreign film at the Dendy, and not worry about bumping into ex-lovers or lapsed friends while eating a large popcorn in the glimmering desolation of a weekday matinee. Until Sunday afternoon, she’d thought that was real freedom. Now it seems to her like a narrow and stingy way to live.

  Then she recalls the solo sightseeing trips she’s done over the last three years, the tours of the old stomping grounds. A gleeful tourist in her own haunted homeland. How to explain those? The pub in Balmain where her father held court, the family lot down by the navy yards. Her first year back, she roamed the city as if struck by nostalgia. She’s at a loss to explain the dozen or so trips she made across the harbor, shadowing her father’s ferry routes to Manly and the Taronga Zoo. This was a man who barely knew she breathed the same air that he did. The one time her father let her ride along in the wheelhouse of the South Steyne she got terribly seasick and clutched her sketchbook the whole time. This was before the nuns and the priests, before the onslaught of puberty. During the summer the harbor smelled of kelp and iodine and she couldn’t wait to get off the boat in Manly. She snuck off for a quick swim in the roped-off area beside the terminal and a lightning tour of the shark aquarium and the Fun Pier. She’d taken some money from her mother’s bedside table (had the moral failures started as far back as that?) and was determined to put it to good use. Half an hour later she emerged from the Ghost Train breathless with fear and hurrying back to make the scheduled departure of her father’s boat. She stood on the dock in her damp swimsuit as the South Steyne pulled away, the water churning and foaming in the ferry’s wake. It was two hours before his boat returned. She sat patiently and watched bare-chested boys dive for coins from the giant wooden pylons. Her father never mentioned the incident, but she never forgot the sense that the world—and her father—was indifferent to her actions and inclinations. The clocks didn’t stop running just because something struck her fancy. He never asked her to ride along again.

  All this floats about her—another time and city. A lifetime has elapsed but this is where things began, where the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn. Ellie the forger took root somewhere here, but where? The old house in Balmain with its bullnose veranda and loose-framed windows was leveled years ago, a brick cube of apartments in its place, a rogue banana tree and a flaming jacaranda the only visible reminders of that time. Everything has moved on, but she has come back in search of the brooding teenage girl who smelled like acetone. The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating. The invitation to curate the exhibition for the Art Gallery of New South Wales was supposed to be her way forward, the beginning of widening her circle of friends and acquaintances, of rejoining the ranks of the living. Instead, it’s become the way back to the wreckage of the past.

  * * *

  On Wednesday afternoon, after delivering a lecture on Judith Leyster, Ellie receives a phone call from the art gallery, letting her know that the Dutch courier has arrived at Mascot airport with the two paintings from Leiden. She estimates there are about twenty-four hours before the packing cases are opened and her forgery is carefully removed. Over the past few months, as the paintings for the exhibition have trickled in from the lenders, the protocol has been perfected—the museum van with security guards and the collections registrar meets the courier, the cases are delivered to the museum for safekeeping, the courier is taken to his or her hotel, and everyone reconvenes the next day for the opening, allowing the paintings time to warm back up to room temperature after many hours in the hold of a plane. She tells the curatorial assistant that she’ll come over to meet the courier and to expect her shortly. Normally, she waits until the opening of the cases to meet the couriers. These people are usually curators or conservators from the lending institution and they arrive harried and jet-lagged, riffling through binders of paperwork and eager to be off the clock for the first time in days. But because they have personally overseen the packing at the other end, Ell
ie knows they have intimate knowledge of the paintings inside. She wants to see for herself what the Dutch courier knows.

  Usually she leaves her car in the faculty parking lot and takes the train to the St. James station for the short walk through the Domain, but today she bustles out onto King Street to find a taxi. The city streets have taken on a mineral sheen after a downpour and everything smells of iron. While she waits for a cab heading in the right direction she reminds herself to take note of the light, the flush of pink over in the west. She’s forever telling her students to notice the light, but for three days she’s seen nothing around her. She hails a cab and climbs in. Something about the Olympics and the city’s state of readiness has been in the papers, and the taxi driver delivers a monologue about the city being caught with its pants down around its ankles. She looks out the window and notices the sections of Cleveland Street gone to rot, the filigreed metal balconies of the shambling terraces like rusted lacework, the grimy tiled pub facades, the windows of the Lebanese restaurants filmed with grease. This is old Sydney, her father’s town of grit and mildew. The driver is talking about the general lack of courtesy in the early days of the twenty-first century as they near the gallery. She has him go around the back to the loading dock and pays the fare.

  A handful of store men are milling around the loading dock in dustcoats. The museum employs two full-time packers, two installation technicians, and a carpenter. They all work for Quentin La Forge, a meticulous man in his sixties who calls himself Chief Handler. Everyone else calls him Q. When Ellie arrives, she finds him sitting in his glassed-in office, bifocals perched on his head, dunking biscuits into a cup of tea and picking through the newspaper. Over the past year, while the exhibit has slowly fallen into place, Ellie has learned to kiss the papal ring of the shippers and handlers. They mean the difference between timeliness and inexplicable delay. She brings them Mars bars and hands out movie passes when one of them has a birthday. In her planner, she’s written down their full names, mobile phone numbers, and birthdays. Q’s office is a fortress of industrial-green filing cabinets and laminated diagrams on the walls that chart the Dynamic Cushioning Curve or the insulation properties of various woods and polymers. Q is roughly Ellie’s age but of another time—a man of pressed handkerchiefs and pomade who smells of wood glue. He wears a navy dustcoat with his monogrammed initials above a pocket crammed with mechanical pencils.