The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  She plunks down in the cracked swivel chair in front of his neatly arranged desk. He looks up, nods, takes a soggy bite from a dunked Scotch finger biscuit.

  “So they’re in transit?” she says, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “What’s in transit? Venus? I need a few more specifics, love.”

  She knows better than to broach a delivery schedule without the requisite three minutes of chitchat. But as they sit there the paintings are en route, she thinks, clearing customs or wending through traffic. She pictures her forgery like some embezzled diamond, sitting snug inside its vapor barrier, encased in layers of glassine and plywood.

  She says, “The ones from Leiden.”

  Chewing, Q says, “Yeah, Mandy and a few of the guards went to meet the Dutch chappie at the airport.” He says this with a casualness she finds infuriating. A Caravaggio could come into Mascot and he’d dunk his biscuits and prefer to talk about the weather, horse racing, the footy, really anything but the actual purpose of his job. He could be packing and unpacking plastic souvenirs for all his apparent curiosity. Early on, she’d made the mistake of transposing this apathy to the work itself and remembers her first time watching him build a custom packing case. It was a thing of beauty—every joint, batten, and corner pad perfectly made and aligned, his little wooden trolley of brass fixtures and trunk handles and his hot-melt glue gun at his side as he worked with a headlamp. He listened to the Goldberg Variations while he worked patiently for hours, his attendants fetching him certain chisels and fine-toothed files and cups of tea.

  It’s also clear to her from his lack of interest that he’s not in the loop about a potential forgery coming through his loading dock. Ellie has spent her life around museums and knows that the curatorial staff and packers are vaguely suspicious of each other. The curators and Max Culkins have kept the news from the men in dustcoats.

  She wants to ask him what the ETA is, but instead she asks, “How are the grandkids?”

  “Yeah, good, took the whole tribe to Bondi on the weekend. We all ate fish and chips at the Icebergs and I even conned one of the boys into a swim.”

  “Bit cold, isn’t it?”

  “Rubbish. Gets the heart pumping.”

  This small talk goes on for a few excruciating minutes. Ellie notices that Q rarely asks about her weekends and plans, as if her island hermitage and childless, divorcée status makes her life inscrutable and a bit unsightly. After a while, the carpenter—a quiet man named Ed—comes into the office to report the arrival of the van from the airport. Q nods and picks up the telephone on his desk and calls upstairs to the head of conservation to announce the news. He says, “The cases are here with the Dutchman.” He hangs up the phone, drains his cup of tea, and stands behind his desk. He pats down his dustcoat, checking the pockets, then remembers the bifocals resting above his forehead. He lowers them into place, squinting into the lenses as they suddenly magnify his pale brown eyes. On the side of a filing cabinet hangs a clipboard with the receiving checklist and the signature pages. Q grabs it on the way out and Ellie follows along.

  The van has reversed and beeped into the loading bay and two guards get out to open up the rear cargo doors. Mandy, the registrar, is the next to get out, and then a scruffy, long-haired man with a goatee and a tattoo on one forearm emerges in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a small backpack and a bulging manila envelope. Ellie is standing beside the handlers and she hears Q say to his men, “Our courier looks like he’s out on parole from Long Bay.” The men laugh quietly. Ellie crosses behind the van to get a better look and sees two identical wooden cases, each with caution labels in multiple languages. Mandy and the courier come up the stairs and she introduces him as Hendrik Klapp. He shakes hands with everyone.

  “How was the flight?” Ellie asks.

  “About six hours too long,” he says, opening his envelope of papers.

  Q steps forward to assert his domain. “Hendrik, what’s your affiliation with the private museum in Leiden?”

  “I oversee handling there, among other things.”

  “Excellent. So you know how these cases were put together? Perhaps you have some diagrams?”

  “I made them and packed the art myself,” Hendrik says. “Down to the last nail.”

  Q looks at his underlings, gives them a stagey wink. “I do hope there are no nails.”

  “Of course. I was using an expression.”

  The hostility between Hendrik and Q is immediate.

  Hendrik says, “Even though the cases are about one hundred pounds each, I recommend using a hydraulic hand truck to remove them from the vehicle. The cases are fitted with skids on the bottom.”

  With his backpack, surly disposition, and his pale, gaunt face, Hendrik looks like he’s auditioning for a film role as a Dutch hacker. Ellie suspects he doesn’t mean to sound arrogant or bossy; it’s just the curse of a certain nonnative English speaker, a kind of mechanical efficiency that comes off as rude. But she also knows Q and his men aren’t making any such calculations or allowances. Hendrik has become a scab on the knee of a Wednesday afternoon and they’re eager to pick at it.

  Ed goes to fetch the hand truck while the packer and the framer get inside the van to slide the cases to the rear. The ramp is perfectly level with the dock so that Ed can easily snug the tines of the hand truck beneath the cases, between the wooden skids. He lifts each case six inches from the ground and rolls it onto the dock. Normal practice is to leave the packing crates in the exhibition space overnight and then open them in the courier’s presence for immediate hanging. But water damage to a skylight and ongoing repairs has meant that none of the exhibition space is available yet. All of the paintings will hang in storage until the gallery is ready. Ellie explains all this to Hendrik as the crates are wheeled toward the storage room. He stares at her, a look of incomprehension on his face.

  Ellie can see from the outside of the cases, from the carefully planed corners and the countersunk brass screws and the barcode stickers, that these are exceptionally well made. Q is accustomed to receiving cases that sometimes look like they’ve been dropped from a height. She watches as he walks around the cases warily, like he’s sizing up an unknown dog. Hendrik stands back with his bundle of papers. Ellie can tell that Q is impressed with the workmanship of the cases but also a little riled.

  Abruptly, Hendrik says, “This is highly unusual, not putting them in the gallery space.”

  “We did notify your institution of the delay,” Q says.

  Hendrik looks down at his paperwork. “Well, I will need signatures of receipt and also to know of the security detail for the overnight period.” He looks up at a clock on the wall. “I will return at this time tomorrow.”

  Ellie wishes, for his own sake, that he could stop sounding like a German spy from a World War II movie. Q takes the paperwork and a pen from Hendrik and studies the receipt under one of the lights. After a moment, he says, “We’ll have to make some amendments to this, if that’s all right. For starters, we won’t know what’s in these cases until tomorrow. Could be two boxes of rocks for all we know. So this part here where it lists the painting descriptions and asks for a signature, we’ll have to change the wording to the cases with the barcodes you’ve provided. We’ll sign the rest after we open our presents tomorrow. How does that sound?”

  “That will be fine.”

  Q continues to flip through the bundle of papers. “Good. And we have our own condition report we’ll use tomorrow. In addition to the Leiden one.”

  “Naturally.”

  It occurs to Ellie that these loans are never quite received with gratitude at the loading dock. It’s always just another crate to unpack.

  Q makes a few wording changes to the receipt form and both he and Hendrik initial the changes before signing. Mandy takes a copy of the paperwork and heads upstairs, but not before giving Ellie a knowing glance.

  Turning to Ellie, Hendrik asks, “Is it possible to use your fax machine to send this to Leiden?” />
  “Of course,” Ellie says. “I’ll take you upstairs to the office. You can also speak to the head of security if you like.”

  “That would be perfect.” Hendrik turns one more time in the direction of his packing cases and then says to Q and his men, “Gentlemen, I will see you all tomorrow.”

  As they walk out of the shipping and receiving area Ellie can feel the men watching them leave. She knows there will be impersonations of Hendrik at the pub in a couple of hours, that he’ll be added to Q’s ledger of foreign upstarts who didn’t show him the proper respect.

  Hendrik faxes his forms to Leiden with some country code help from one of the admins. Then Ellie takes him to meet the head of security, who suffers him with the same impatience as Q. Satisfied with the outcome and checking things off his prepared list, Hendrik says that he’s ready to go to the hotel and could he order a taxi.

  “We’re putting you up at a small hotel in the Rocks, an old part of Sydney right on the water. I’d be happy to take you down there, if you’re up for a walk. Do you have other luggage in the van?”

  “This is it,” he says, gesturing to his backpack slung over one shoulder.

  Ellie estimates that he couldn’t have more than a change of clothes in there.

  “How long are you staying?”

  “Just a few days. Not really enough to do any sightseeing.”

  “Have you been to Australia before?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ll give you a short list of must-sees in the city.”

  She leads him out under the arched ceilings and skylights to the main entrance and they head down toward the botanical gardens. It’s only a little after four but already nearing dusk. A heavy bank of clouds has formed in the west. Through the trees, Ellie watches as a sunburst streaks through and turns the harbor from slate to sapphire and back again. She remembers how much she likes the city in winter. The pale sunshine in the mornings, the bouts of rain, the strange rockeries of sandstone and ferns along the waterfront, the smell of moss that always makes her think of grottoes and her early Arcadian landscapes. She misses painting, feels its absence like a great loss. They walk between flowerbeds of hibiscus and golden banksia and she wonders how the gardens look to Hendrik, to a Dutchman accustomed to tulips and teahouses nestled in pristine woodlands. She spent time in the Netherlands teaching and researching over the years and remembers the Dutch with fondness. She also recalls their sturdy, unflappable manner and their occasional brusqueness.

  They pass through a palm grove where grey-headed flying foxes hang below the fronds, ravaging pods and fruit and dropping seeds on the leaves below. Other bats are taking off above the trees to forage for the night, beating their leathery wings into a sudden flurry. Hendrik stops walking and cranes up. Ellie was gone long enough from Australia to see it through his eyes—a colony of southern vampires marauding in the treetops. At the museum, Ellie’s heard talk of some relocation program in the works, of predawn noise disturbance to stop the bats from roosting. They continue walking, past hoop pines and swamp mahoganies that were planted in the early 1800s, a fact Ellie would never share with a European visitor. The Amsterdam house she lived in for a summer researching Sara de Vos was four hundred years old, with the original gable clock still installed and working.

  They talk about Dutch museums and cities, but Ellie doesn’t let on she once lived in Amsterdam, for fear of an inquisition. By the time they pass out of the lower gardens, dusk has hardened the shadows between the office towers and there’s an exodus of commuters streaming down toward Circular Quay. Hendrik strides along with his backpack, Sydney’s jewels—harbor, opera house, bridge—laid out neatly for his consideration, all of them in a single line of sight.

  Ellie says, “It’s very generous of your museum to make this loan.”

  “The Hofje van Foort is trying to widen its reputation.”

  His breath punches behind the formal Dutch name and she assumes it’s to assert his authority. Or perhaps he thinks she’s nervous about the pronunciation. All the Dutch she knows is strictly academic and used for parsing monographs; even during her time in Holland she found it hard to find locals who would speak Dutch with her. The running joke with her colleagues was that Dutch taxi drivers—often driving black Mercedes in dark suits, like embassy chauffeurs—spoke better English than the Australian expats.

  Hendrik says, “It’s good press for us. I assume we’ll be featured in your program?”

  “Prominently,” Ellie says. A beat later, she asks, “When did your gallery acquire the paintings?”

  “My employer bought the funeral scene some years ago but kept it a secret. Mr. van Foort wanted a second de Vos before showing the pair. It was like he wanted a couple to arrive at the same dinner party together.”

  “How romantic,” she says. “And when did he purchase At the Edge of a Wood?”

  “It came on the market recently.” Hendrik suddenly seems evasive, looking down at his feet.

  She pictures a much older Gabriel in a shabby raincoat in Leiden, sitting in a café with a yellowed espionage novel and a forgery wrapped in brown paper, killing time before his appointment at the private gallery. She doesn’t want to sound like she’s prying, so she changes her tactic. Casually, she says, “I’m so surprised about the new discovery … a funeral scene, you say?”

  “Yes,” he says, “Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession. An outdoor scene, painted in 1637.”

  “Another outdoor scene? I don’t know of anything for de Vos after 1636.”

  “Ah, yes, well, you might have to revise your book.”

  This sounds like a dig, but it’s hard to tell. If she asks him whether he’s read her book about seventeenth-century Dutch women painters she risks sounding vain. Instead, she asks, “Where was it found?”

  “Mr. van Foort keeps those details to himself. Trade secrets. I like to think it’s something like Coco Chanel’s old suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris because that would be straight from a Disney movie!” He says this with sudden glee, as if he’s landed a joke that’s inside her cultural tent. Another thing she recalls about her Dutch friends is that they were listening to pop music a decade beyond its prime.

  Ellie says, “Well, Paris would make more sense than Cincinnati, which is where two other de Vos paintings have ended up.”

  Without expression, he says, “You believe she stopped painting in 1636.” It’s not a question so much as a statement of her fallacy.

  They’re walking through the bustle of Circular Quay during rush hour. Ferries are filling up as she leads him across the grain of pedestrian traffic. A few buskers are performing along the handrail by the water, including a troupe of painted Aboriginal dancers. The city is built for tourists, Ellie thinks. When they get into a clearing, she says, “From a few letters and archival documents we know that Sara de Vos was raised in Amsterdam, the daughter of a landscape painter but she trained in still life. She married a landscape painter from Haarlem, lived with her husband and child for some years near the Kalverstraat. The child, a daughter, died young, possibly from the plague. We don’t have death records for either Sara or the husband. The guild records are mostly destroyed for that period but we know from court dockets and auction receipts that the couple was going bankrupt after the daughter’s death. Her name was Kathrijn. She’s buried in a pauper’s grave behind a church in Amsterdam. Sorry, I’m prattling…”

  Hendrik looks at her for the first time in several minutes. In the falling dark, it’s hard for her to tell whether it’s smugness or knowing when he says, “But no graves for the parents have been found … so de Vos could have lived another twenty years and painted many more works?”

  “Technically that’s true. Though I’ve always suspected At the Edge of a Wood was the high-water mark. It might have tapered off after that.”

  “This new painting might throw that into doubt.”

  “If it’s really hers.”

  “Well, you are the expert and will have to ju
dge for yourself. But your theory may need some revising.”

  In a burst of vindictiveness, she imagines adding that, by the way, not only is the new landscape probably a misattribution, but also I’m pretty sure your At the Edge of a Wood is a fake I painted in my midtwenties.

  But they’re already on the outskirts of the Rocks and she gets distracted by the rowdiness of the pubs overflowing with office workers, some of them spilling out onto the street. Ellie points to the Russell Hotel, a stone building with a turret that hugs the corner. It’s not flash by any means, but cozy, within budget, and in the thick of things. It’s where they put all the couriers; the VIPs stay at one of the five stars at the other end of the quay. They go inside and stand for a moment in the quaintly shabby Victorian lobby.

  Ellie says, “Everything should be set up under the gallery’s account.” She takes a business card from her purse. “Call me if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” Hendrik says.

  “I hope you get some sleep. We’ll send a taxi for you in the morning. Shall we say eleven?”

  Hendrik looks at his watch and shakes his head. “Forgot to change my watch. Apparently I’m still in the Netherlands. Yes, eleven will be fine.”

  Ellie says good night and walks out onto the street. The thought of taking a taxi or train back to the university and the long drive to Pittwater exhausts her. She strolls along the quay and contemplates her options. On a whim, she heads inside the InterContinental and crosses the vaulted atrium lounge, the interior of the old treasury building, and stands at the front desk. The impulsiveness of it shocks her. A corner room with a view will cost her close to four hundred dollars, but she produces her credit card unflinchingly. The desk clerk is young, Asian, and beautiful, and Ellie’s surprised by how easily she lies to the woman, telling her she’s just arrived from London and her luggage is delayed. The woman tells her that the concierge would be happy to arrange some clothes bought on her behalf if she phones down with her sizes. Ellie thanks her and takes the room key. She already knows she’ll order room service and request a new blouse in the morning before heading back to the gallery for the case opening.