‘I don’t know any more than you,’ she said.
‘But you must have some idea. I don’t even know who these people are.’ I thought of the sleeping figure, face down on her bed. ‘Are they threatening you? What do they want?’
‘No, no.’ Again she sounded angry that I needed everything spelled out. ‘Listen. I really don’t know. But think about it. Work it out. That’s what I’ve had to do. If you wanted to frighten someone, what would you do?’
‘Beat them up,’ I said vaguely.
‘No, no. Use your imagination,’ she was saying. ‘If I wanted to put pressure on you, what would I do?’
‘Kidnap the children. Attack you. Ah. I see.’ I realigned my thoughts. I remembered what Minna had done to Patrick Jameson, damaging a third person to punish me.
‘If they wanted me dead, I’d be dead. You’ve seen what they can do.’
‘So they think that frightening you is putting pressure elsewhere.’
‘Yes.’ Pressure on Anatoli.
‘Is it working?’ I asked eventually.
Her shoulder blades were raised like wings, the crest of her spine sank into a narrow channel between two ridges of muscle. I reached out to run my hand down her back to her waist and up the reverse curve.
Her reaction to my question was horrible. She turned over to face me. The stillness of her face, with its control and determination, was broken. Her mouth contorted.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’
16
Julian slept later than usual the following morning. I worked at home and as I sat at my desk, I considered what to do. I must persuade her to go to the police; Tom Naish was the obvious person to turn to. She must be given protection.
The next day I was due to go to Paris where I had a long-arranged meeting. I was a trustee of a charitable foundation set up by an old friend, an Indian art collector, to give bursaries to students in developing countries to enable them to come to Europe to study art. I was the only British trustee and I was reluctant to cancel my visit. Equally, I could not bear to leave Julian alone for a day and a half. I concluded that the only solution was to take her with me. I rang to book another seat on the train, to change mine so that we sat together, without consulting her. She accepted the fait accompli with unexpected meekness.
The next morning she restrapped her torn knees, and we set off together to catch the first train to Paris. Victor was just going off duty and, as our taxi was delayed, he gave us a lift to Waterloo in his Rover.
‘What have you done to yourself, Julian?’ he asked as he lifted her cabin bag out of the boot, noticing the plasters on her legs. ‘No one’s been having a go at you again, have they?’ He sounded anxious.
‘It’s nothing,’ Julian said firmly. ‘I fell over and scraped my knees. I must’ve been drunk.’ He still looked concerned. ‘Joke, joke, Victor. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Thank you. You look after yourself.’
‘Very smart car,’ I said, as he drove off. I didn’t add, for a night porter, but that’s what I meant.
‘It’s new,’ Julian said. ‘He only changed it in August. Before that he had a Volvo.’
‘Expensive tastes.’
In Paris, we drove to the hotel together, then I went off to lunch with my fellow trustees, telling her that I would be back for a late dinner with her at a restaurant nearby.
‘What will you do until then?’ I asked.
‘Don’t worry about me. It’s not difficult to amuse yourself in Paris.’
I watched her set off down the little street, heading for the Boulevard St Germain, limping, liberated from prison.
The meeting I attended was meant to agree the nominations for the year to come. As usually happened, a great deal of passionate debate went into each selection and only the necessity of eating dinner eventually brought the session to an end. When I found her waiting for me at our hotel in the evening, one glance showed me that she had enjoyed her day. I wondered if she had friends here, if her mysterious life extended into other cities apart from London.
When we left the hotel Julian took my arm. ‘No, not there,’ she said, turning me away from the restaurant I had booked. ‘I’ve now oriented myself. Let me take you somewhere I know.’
We walked for about ten minutes and she led me with confidence through the little streets. We had crossed the Boulevard St Germain and were moving parallel with the river, but not actually on the Quai.
‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘La Belle Pelletiere.’ We were seated on the ground floor at the back in what appeared to be a covered courtyard.
‘Another of your student haunts,’ I said as we sat down.
‘No, Nicholas. You have the most ridiculous ideas. Students can’t afford to eat in places like this, except the sort of student you were, so rich you hardly knew what real life was. Anyhow, I was never a student in Paris.’
As I looked around I could see I had been misled by the dimness of the room. The tables were well separated by pots containing bay trees and were lit only by candles. The sound of conversation did not reach from one table to another and, above the hushed hubbub, came the sound of a piano being played at the end furthest from us. I saw now it was indeed not a student haunt, but a rendezvous of another kind, allowing French men and women to combine two passions with discretion.
Julian was unfolding her napkin. ‘It’s good for you, Nicholas, to have a change from the pompous places you normally go to. Where did you have lunch?’
It was true that the committee had lunched, at the trust’s expense, at a pompous place. Brilliantly lit, voices as reverent as in a church, silent, constant service, widely spaced tables, it had been like eating on a stage.
‘I knew it. At that sort of place people go to look at other people eating and to be seen themselves. If s a public performance, not a meal.’
‘Whereas this place is for another sort of drama altogether, which I much prefer. It’s a very good choice.’
I could guess how she knew this place. She would have come here with her former lovers, with the Russian, perhaps others before him. The thought did not trouble me. I was with her now, not he. The past and the future were in abeyance for us both. And she felt the same, of that I was convinced at the time. She had chosen it because she wanted to be there with me. On our table were two candles and she faced me, disembodied by the glow, between two nimbuses.
She chose the sort of food she liked, a whole veal kidney, while I ate my way through a plate of cassoulet. We had reached the pudding, which she had refused, though she was stealing spoonfuls of my marquise au chocolat, when I asked her what she had been doing.
‘I had a very good day,’ she said, ‘considering I don’t like Paris.’
‘I didn’t know there was anyone who disliked Paris.’
‘I only came to be with you.’ And not in London. ‘Bad things always happen to me here.’
‘What happened? Did anyone follow you? Was there…?’
‘No, no, nothing. I just went to some places I used to go. I had lunch in a brasserie in Place St Germain and saw the same old waiter I used to know. And then I went to some decoration and antique shops around there, where I’ve bought things in the past, just to get ideas. They have such wonderful things here, Nick, which we could use for redoing your mother’s flat.’
I ordered coffee for us both. She was nibbling at the petits fours that had been placed between us. I was content. The combination of a good day’s work completed, a delicious meal and Julian’s company wiped out all thoughts of Minna or Anatoli or Emily. I slipped my fingers under the cuff of her blouse and around the sharp wrist bone to feel the skin of the underside of her arm. She ducked her head forward to take another petit four. I could see the tip of her tongue curling within her mouth, as she opened her lips to receive it.
At the far end of the room the piano had fallen silent some minutes ago. Now the pianist, or rather a pianist, was sitting down to applause. I had thought that the original perform
er had been a man and this was a woman, whom I saw briefly in the second before she seated herself on the stool and disappeared from my view. She was playing Chopin and confirmed the change: this was a classical pianist. I closed my eyes, concentrating on my pleasure. Tone deaf, I only recognise the most obvious music and this was one of my favourite piano pieces. It seemed cornily appropriate to hear it with Julian’s wrist under my fingers. I felt her pulse leap and thought that the power of music to move and to convey emotion was greater than any other art.
I opened my eyes to see that Julian was looking beyond me into the mirror that hung behind us.
‘This is Chopin, surely?’ she asked. Her face looked startled, wary.
‘They’ve just changed pianists,’ I said.
‘She should be singing. There are words for this music.’ And she sang, in a low, humming tone that barely reached us. L’ombre s’enfuit, adieu mon reve.
Julian said no more and we both sat in silence, I in happiness, looking at her extraordinary beauty, the chance assemblage of features in just such proportions to produce a face that was unforgettable. She had moved her attention from me and was looking at the world in the mirror. The music finished and the pianist, who had evidently played by invitation, rose and bowed to acknowledge applause from one or two tables nearby. She sat down in one of the dim corners, where she had been dining with a broad-shouldered man, whose cigar hung a faint grey canopy over them both. The first performer resumed his place.
‘Shall we go?’
She removed her eyes from the mirror behind me, in which she had followed the same scene. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home, to London. Horrible things always happen to me in Paris.’
‘But nothing horrible has happened this time. It’s been a marvellous evening. And in London…’
The mention of London brought back the memory of her self-imprisonment in my flat, my battle with Minna, Emily’s capture of everything I used to have. There was so much to do to straighten London out.
The next morning we woke early to go to the Gare du Nord. If it had been she who had exploded with rage, her excuse might have been that it was an unnatural time for her to be functioning. But I provoked the scene, enacting it before her composed gaze. She was still in bed, awake, when I began.
The respite was over. We were going back to the same world we had left, one that was closing in on us, narrowing our range, surrounding us with fear. We had to break out, but I could do nothing without her co-operation.
‘Julian.’
‘Hmm?’ She turned her head to signify that she was listening, but did not open her eyes.
‘We’ve got to go to the police, you know.’
‘Do you think so?’ she said, indifferently, as though the idea had never occurred to her.
Toil can’t go on as you have done for the last few weeks, hiding yourself away, never going out. We’ve got to confront them, to take them on.’
‘We?’
‘I’m involved too. I’m not going to let these people get away with it. We’ve got to do something and the first thing is to get you a bodyguard.’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t want that.’ She got out of bed and walked into the bathroom, shutting herself inside. I was knotting my tie when she re-emerged.
‘Julian, what are you going to do?’ I nagged. ‘What’s your plan if you don’t like mine?’
I watched her in the mirror. She was performing the contortions that women go through every day to put on a bra. She had done it up in front, at waist level. Now she was swivelling it round so that the catch was at the back, putting her arms through the straps, manoeuvring the whole elaborate, flimsy structure into place over her breasts. Now that the wire and lace were positioned, she was psychologically armed for the day.
‘I have no plan.’
I undid the knot that I had just made for the third time. We were in a parody of a bad marriage: intimacy and distance. As the comparison came into my head, I lost my temper. I had not raged at Emily throughout the weeks of our break-up, however unreasonably she behaved. I had never in my life raised hand or voice to the children. Yet, unprovoked, I was shouting in tones that could not fail to wake the sleepers on either side of us, in this expensive, well-insulated hotel.
‘You’re so stupid,’ I shouted at her. ‘You’re a stupid wilful bitch you live in a fantasy world in which you seem to think that if you shut your eyes all the folly all the danger all the criminal activity that you’ve got yourself mixed up in won’t be noticed by anyone else either you think you can use other people’s time property and emotion and give back nothing and that somehow being beautiful will get you through just as it always has so far well it won’t work much longer your old associates are calling in the debts and I fail to see why I bother to try to protect you against yourself you can go and sort out your own mess.’
Emotional rage is painfully childish. To listen to the appalling and illogical stuff that came pouring out of my own mouth was bad enough, worse that I felt no better for my display of resentment. There was no catharsis, for Julian did not react. She had stood perfectly still during my outburst. Once it was over, she resumed dressing. I picked up my tie, my hand shaking with shock at my unexpected fury, rolled it into a ball and put it into my pocket.
‘I’m going to have some breakfast. Do you want any?’
‘I’ll join you for some coffee.’
We went through the rituals of breakfast and departure in an atmosphere of constraint. Our banal words were cold and sharp and were flung between us like knives pointed with unmeant significance. Once we were on the train, she put her head back and closed her eyes. We ran ahead of the dawn across northern France. I recognised the contours of the century’s battlefields. Just before Arras, between the TGV line and the autoroute was a little cemetery. The crosses stood in their ranks, like a platoon which has been cut off from its company and faces annihilation. The light, when it reached us, revealed sleet spitting from a low grey sky. The gloom of having deliberately separated myself from Julian, so unreasonably and so much against my own wishes, settled over me.
I opened my briefcase to do some work and saw a pile of mail that I had picked up in haste on leaving my office on the day of the attack. I came upon a large manila envelope addressed to ‘Professor O’, typed onto a computer label. I tore it open incuriously and pulled out a block of photocopies. The top page was entitled, ‘Dendrochronological Report on Lady in a Pelisse, 02/03/89.’ I examined the envelope, inside and out. There was no indication of where or from whom it had come.
With a prevision of triumph, at a time when I could not have cared less, I opened the report. There was a series of preliminary memos from a curator asking for the tests and giving reasons for doing them, replies from Minna resisting. It was not clear in what circumstances they had been made, but the results were unequivocal.
The principle of dendrochronology is exactly the same as the counting of rings of the stump of a felled tree, which I remember doing on my father’s estate as a child. A northern European panel painting was usually done on oak and the tree rings are clearly visible at the edge of the painting, in the thickness of the panel, as a series of parallel lines, indicating the years of growth. The width between the rings varies according to the climatic circumstances of the year and so forms a distinctive pattern, which is valid for the whole region. Fully authenticated panel paintings by a number of Netherlandish artists covering the whole of the seventeenth century have provided a standard chart of the pulses of growth for Dutch trees, against which a reading for any particular painting can be calibrated. The most important date is given by the final growth ring, which gives the date for the felling of the tree.
I looked at the chart for the second half of the seventeenth century against which the ring pattern of the Litvak panel had been placed and, for a second, I thought it was an exact match with Vermeer’s life and all my efforts were wasted. Then my view cleared and I saw that the last ring showed that the tree
had been cut down in 1685, ten years after Vermeer’s death.
We had just passed Vimy Ridge on our left when Julian, who had not spoken since the Gare du Nord said, without opening her eyes, ‘Nicholas.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been thinking.’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re right. The police, perhaps the police are the answer.’
‘They’re certainly the start.’
She hesitated. ‘All right. If you want me to.’
Her head was lying back, her eyes still closed. She looked exhausted. She put a hand up to push away hair, which had fallen forward onto her cheek. She opened her eyes and looked at me directly.
‘And, Nick, I think I’d better tell you everything.’
Part 3
Russian Counterfeit
17
Julian started her story on the train journey from Paris. She added to it day by day over the next two months, sometimes returning to an episode to insert another detail that had come to her mind. This tale of a thousand and one nights replaced the saga of Victor and Mary, Rose and Josie and I listened with far greater concentration than I had ever paid to the family life of our porter. She had vivid descriptive powers and a sharp observation of people and her surroundings. She did not have to tell me what she felt about the characters she described, her attitude to each was apparent enough in the way she spoke.
At the time I assumed that what I heard was the truth, her truth. But even as I listened, I realised that she was not telling me everything. Sometimes an indirect reference would indicate more to a situation or a relationship than she was willing to say. I knew better than to cross-question her. She herself had not wanted to know certain things, and she passed on to me what she had seen, watching me to see if I read the same meanings that she had. I observed a parallel, too, between her discoveries about Anatoli and my own about her. I knew very well how you can hold two conflicting ideas in your mind, refusing to choose between them. So her story was told in shreds and I put it together in my own way to create the picture I wanted to see.
The Art of Deception Page 12
