Goodbye Again

by Joseph Hone

  ‘What possible connection could there be?’ she asked, sipping her coffee. She was wearing a stiff blue denim skirt, long pleats on either side, the material grating slightly, like the palm fronds in the breeze at the end of the garden, each time she moved her thighs.

  ‘A connection between our fathers, obviously. Both refugees.’

  ‘Your father never wanted to go back to Italy?’

  ‘What for? All his family were dead. After the war he ended up in a British-controlled displaced persons camp in Austria, and after that, through the Irish Quakers, to Dublin, in 1946 or 1947 I think it was. That’s really all I know. And the tattoo inside his forearm was, of course, his camp number. I remember first seeing it as a child, and thinking he’d written it there with a pen as a sort of game.’

  She sipped her coffee, bending forward, so that the neckline of her blouse fell slightly open. ‘Well, same as most of my parents’ family – killed in the war one way or another. My parents didn’t want to go on living in Vienna, and they finally managed to get emigration papers to Dublin, in about 1946 or 47. Must have got here about the same time as your father. So they couldn’t have known each other in the war.’

  ‘No.’ I rolled a cigarette. ‘They must have met in Dublin.’

  ‘You see,’ she said almost with enthusiasm, ‘my father, and yours, really suffered in the war, and then led perfectly ordinary lives here. Your parents certainly did. I read the appreciation of your mother in The Irish Times – all those charities your parents were involved in. And my father was well respected, here in Killiney and at his antiques shop in Baggot Street.’

  ‘Yes, blameless lives.’ Then, thinking of the Modigliani nude, I asked, ‘Did your father sell modern paintings in his shop as well as antique furniture and stuff?’

  ‘Not original paintings, no, but he sold all sorts of reproductions and posters: Renaissance masterpieces right down to the Impressionists. You know the sort of thing. But the really valuable things he sold at the back of the shop. A private room, by appointment only. Rare old books in leather bindings, illuminated manuscripts, churchy things, just like he sold in his family shop in Vienna before the war. Altar triptychs, lovely little enamel miniatures of the Madonna and Child. He was very Catholic. That was one reason he wanted to come to Ireland.’

  ‘Where did he get these things to sell?’

  She was puzzled for a moment. ‘Why, he went round country houses, I remember. He took me with him several times, and he bought things at auction, here and on the Continent – and in England, where I was sent to a boarding school when I was eleven, a dreadful place in Sussex. He came to see me sometimes …’ She stopped, aware how she was embarking on the personal, and I had an inkling then of some family unhappiness in her life. ‘Yes,’ I said lightly, ‘but how did your father start off here, in 1947? He must have been penniless.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ She was puzzled again, as if the question had never occurred to her. ‘Well, he wouldn’t have needed much, would he? A few things to sell initially, some money to rent the shop in Baggot Street. Not much.’

  ‘A few things to sell, yes, but they were very expensive things by the sound of it. Illuminated manuscripts and so on. And your Georgian house? That wouldn’t have come cheap, even in the 1940s.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She veered away from the subject.

  There was silence in the sunshine. I poured some more coffee from the filter pot. ‘Bewley’s Finest Rich Roast Arabica,’ I told her, sniffing my cup. ‘I used to go to their Oriental Café in Grafton Street when I was an art student here. One and nine pence for a whole pot with Marie biscuits, and you could sit there all morning reading or chatting, warm in the winter. It’s still there.’

  She was pensive. ‘I went there too, as a child, with my mother. She liked it.’

  ‘She was Austrian as well?’

  ‘Yes, from Vienna, which was why she liked Bewley’s. Only vaguely decent coffee in Dublin, she said.’ She picked up her cup, pensive again.

  Silence. I felt overwhelmingly sober and dull, but she became brisk, smoothing the denim skirt so that I saw the shape of her knees beneath the fabric.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘We’ve talked again and there doesn’t seem to be any new angles on how our fathers knew each other. Sorry to have wasted your time. You must have some clearing up to do. Big place.’

  ‘You, too, I imagine.’

  ‘Yes, the house is packed with stuff. No idea what to do with it. Anyway – nothing until after his funeral on Friday.’

  ‘And the house itself? Is it yours now?’

  ‘Yes, and I have to do something about that before I go back to New York.’

  ‘You don’t want to live there yourself? If it’s Georgian, looking over the bay, it must be lovely.’

  ‘It is, but I don’t want to live there.’ She stopped, ill at ease, and turned away. When she turned back, I looked straight into her green-blue eyes, smiling in a way that seemed to relax her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sometimes there was an uneasy air at home. My parents seemed difficult together sometimes.’ She shrugged.

  ‘I felt the same with my parents – they were unhappy, and my mother seemed to blame me for it. But obviously it must have been the war and Auschwitz. My father lost everything, like your parents did. More than enough to make one’s parents difficult, between themselves, and with their children.’

  She stood up quickly, back in her prim and preoccupied mode, as if she’d realized how she’d said too much. She wasn’t going to ask me over to her house, I saw, or to her father’s funeral. She’d done her business with me. There was no relevant connection between our families.

  Yet I felt there was – there in her father’s words to her on his deathbed. Those words had meant something crucial. The connection was lurking there, hidden in the past, just as the Modigliani nude had been hidden in the attic.

  In any case I didn’t want her to go. To keep her I had only one last card to play.

  ‘There is one strange thing.’ I came up behind her. ‘Which may have some bearing on it all.’

  She turned abruptly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I found a painting here last night, hidden up in one of the attic rooms. A Modigliani nude. An original. I know his work well.’

  She frowned. ‘A copy, surely.’

  ‘No. It’s too personal. Everything is right about it. The colours, the line, the woman herself. I know it’s an original. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Wait a moment – even if it is, how would this bear on the connection between our fathers?’

  ‘The painting was hidden in an attic here. My father had no interest in modern art, nor my mother, but your father, you told me, did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s possible your father came by this original Modigliani in some house in Dublin or in the country on one of his buying trips, or someone brought it into his shop, not knowing it was an original. And perhaps wanting money for his shop he sold it to my father, or gave it as security for a loan.’

  ‘That’s nonsense!’ She interrupted me. ‘My father would never have bought anything in an underhand way like that. He was absolutely honest.’

  ‘So was my father!’ I wasn’t going to be put down. ‘Upright, honest, God-fearing.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he was.’

  ‘Wait … I told you, we only really know our parents when they’re with us. You can never be certain what people get up to when you’re not with them.’ I looked at her carefully. She seemed transfixed. ‘Come and look at the painting.’

  In the drawing room I lifted the painting from behind the sofa and rested it on a chair, in just the right light from the big windows. In the fine light its colours were all the more vivid and striking. Elsa stepped back, involuntarily, as if the nude woman had threatened her.

  She was astonished. ‘It’s wonderful! Breathtaking … the woman … she springs out at you, as if she were alive.’

  ‘Yes, just that.’<
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  ‘You’re right – it has absolutely the feel of an original.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ I said quickly, ‘I wonder if the answer to the mystery of your father telling you to meet me, might lie right here in this painting?’

  She turned to me with that look of premonitory alarm in her face again.

  ‘Very fine. Very fine indeed,’ Dermot O’Higgins added judiciously, inspecting the Burges toilet cabinet upstairs in my father’s bedroom. A rotund, dapper little man in his forties, neatly dressed in an old-fashioned English manner, a light-beige summer suit, a vaguely regimental tie, red hanky in his breast pocket, brown brogues. Surprising, since his accent was pure Dublin. His face was pudgy and reddish, with a mole, like a beauty spot, on his cheek. He might have been a drinker, or queer. Or both. And he reeked of some lime-smelling aftershave lotion.

  ‘I’ve only seen one other like it,’ he continued. ‘A wash-hand stand, belonged to Evelyn Waugh. Exhibited at the V&A some years ago. This is finer, more delicate.’ Having opened the main doors, he fiddled with the various brass-handled drawers and cupboards, lovingly inspecting the flower-patterned chamber pot, the wash bowl and ewer. ‘Superb, Mr Contini. Quite superb.’ He sighed.

  I was pleased with the way things were going.

  ‘Of course,’ he turned to me diffidently, ‘I know something of Burges’s work. He sometimes included a secret recess or little drawer in such creations, for hiding jewellery or small valuables.’

  ‘Did he indeed? In this, do you think?’

  ‘Very possibly. May I?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Yes, you see here …’ He started to run his fingers over the wood inside. ‘One can sometimes find the key to such drawers in the strips of inset wood which Burges used decoratively, but which also act as a release mechanism into these hiding places. These rosewood strips here …’

  There were a dozen such inset strips of rosewood, an inch wide, six inches long, beneath the twelve pigeonholes for storing toilet knick-knacks inside. He pushed the end of each strip in turn, until one of them responded, the tip of his index finger pushing into a gap, as a small hinged drawer swivelled out in the shape of a half-circle.

  Inside was a folded yellowing sheet of paper.

  We both looked at it, saying nothing. I picked it out and opened it. There were two columns of writing, with numbers after the words, in Italian, my father’s hand. ‘It’s some sort of inventory of my father’s. Various paintings, objets d’art.’

  ‘Paintings? Objets d’art? May I look at it?’ I handed him the paper. ‘Yes, indeed, great Renaissance paintings and antique ecclesiastical objects. Altar furniture, triptychs, chalices, reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts. That sort of thing,’ he added easily, as if they were of little importance.

  ‘Great Renaissance paintings?’

  ‘Yes, here – this one.’ He showed me the paper, pointing to a line halfway down the first column. “Czartoryski: Portrait of a Young Man” – that’s by Raphael.’

  ‘Raphael?’ I was surprised. ‘But that would be one of his great portraits.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘So, why would my father … it can’t be an inventory of his things. He would never have had such a painting.’

  ‘Well, not an inventory of works he owned, but perhaps a list of things, in museums, art galleries or churches that he saw, or wanted to see in Europe. In churches particularly, it seems. You see here, lower down? This group of objects, “the Wroclaw Chalice, the Poznan Bible, the Lubin Reliquary” – all from churches in Poland, it seems.’

  ‘Valuable I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes, very.’

  ‘But those towns are all in Poland – not Italy.’

  ‘Yes, but your father was a cultured man, I’m sure. He would have travelled about Europe.’

  I looked at O’Higgins. His face was bland. ‘No, my father wasn’t a cultured man. He was a civil engineer and marble-quarry owner, and he wouldn’t have travelled to Poland to look at a chalices and reliquaries.’ I knew at once who had done this: Elsa’s father, Joseph Bergen, with his religious antiques shop in Vienna selling just such churchy things, and the same sort of objects from a private room in Dublin after the war.

  ‘No, well I couldn’t say then. Just some list your father made.’ O’Higgins looked bored. ‘Though there is one interesting thing here, at the bottom.’ He showed me the paper. ‘This item – the only one, so far as I can see, which isn’t medieval or Renaissance, indeed it’s almost contemporary. Here,’ he set his finger on the line, ‘“Modigliani Nude?” Your father must have had an interest in modern art.’

  I didn’t say anything for a moment, I was so surprised. ‘Well, possibly,’ I said at last, making nothing of it, folding up the paper and putting it in my pocket. ‘Anyway, shall we take a look round the other rooms?’ We moved out of my father’s bedroom and along the landing.

  ‘I wonder if you knew …’ I was going to ask O’Higgins if he knew Joseph Bergen and his back room in his antiques shop in Dublin. I stopped. Why would Bergen sell such things from a back room, by appointment only? Had he something to hide? At least one thing was obvious: here was a clear connection between my father and Joseph Bergen. Bergen had sold these things and my father had made a list of them, but why had my father made the list, and why had both men been so eager to keep the whole business hidden?

  Was this a list of things that my father had somehow obtained illegally long ago, and which Bergen had sold in his Baggot Street shop? I would say no more to O’Higgins about it all. Instead I showed him some more furniture about the house, before returning to the drawing room. I offered him a drink.

  ‘Thank you. Just a small one. I’m driving.’

  I poured him a large one. ‘Tonic, lemon, ice?’

  ‘Thank you.’ He eyed the glass approvingly, went over to the big window, looking out on the terrace, the rose garden, the bay beyond, sparkling blue in the sunlight. ‘An amazing place you have here, Mr Contini. The view – superb!’ He gazed at the view of Killiney bay with sad longing, like a picture at auction he couldn’t afford. ‘They say it’s like the bay of Naples.’

  ‘Yes, they do, and they’re wrong. The colours would be quite different as well as the climate. And they’d speak Italian, with pasta and wine and fat waiters singing “Come Back to Sorrento”. And pickpockets.’

  ‘Well.’ O’Higgins turned back and sat down, ‘You’re a painter yourself, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know your work, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No. I don’t exhibit now.’

  There was silence, until he leant forward confidingly, tumbler clasped in both hands between his knees. ‘Forgive me for mentioning it, Mr Contini, but a friend in the trade … he knows something of your situation here, about your family. How you have, as it were, only habitation rights in the house here, can’t sell it, or perhaps even things in it?’

  ‘He knows that, does he?’ I was genuinely surprised.

  ‘Well, yes, he does. These things tend to get around, small place like Dublin.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘The point is, I can understand your need for discretion in the selling of any of this furniture.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. I knew what he was getting at. ‘Of course I can rely on your discretion as well so far as your buying the furniture from me,’ I added sagely.

  ‘Of course.’

  I drank again, drew on my roll-up and looked at the man. A genial rogue. Of course they all were, these antique dealers.

  Later, for some fine items of original William Morris Gothic-revival furniture, Mr O’Higgins handed me £4000 in crisp British £50 notes. After he’d left, with the furniture inside and on top of his Volvo estate, I poured myself another gin and tonic, then picked up the money, letting the wad of notes flick from my thumb. ‘That’s better,’ I said, looking up at the wishy-washy portrait of my mother in her eau-de-Nil tea gown over the mantelpiece, with her
permed hair and faint smile, her charitable smile. ‘That’s much better.’ I raised my glass to her.

  ‘What a day!’ The June sun continued to beat down, a happy heatwave, and I was speaking to Elsa on the phone, two days later, after her father’s funeral. ‘Would you like to come out with me in my father’s old motor cruiser? It’s good fun,’ I rushed on. ‘Take your mind off things. We could go down the coast a bit, have a picnic lunch beyond Wicklow Head or somewhere. There’s still some good titbits left from that reception, olives and cheese and things. Would you like to?’ I paused, out of breath.

  Silence at the other end. I was sure she was going to say no, but after a long pause she agreed to come, and I felt a surge of real happiness for the first time in many months.

  The Sorrento was a fine old sixty-foot motor cruiser, pitch pine on oak, with a teak deck, built by Osbourne’s in Southampton in the early 1950s. Four two-berth cabins, fore and aft, dining saloon, wheelhouse amidships, big twin GM diesels, capable of driving her at over twenty knots, sleek lines, a square stern, long rising foredeck where the bows angled away sharply, radar and all the rest – she was a beautiful boat.

  Billy Mullins, the gardener and odd-job man who had helped crew the boat in the old days had kept her in good trim since my father’s death the year before. After a bit of tinkering about in the bowels that morning, both engines had fired, the exhausts uttering a throaty, burbling roar.

  Elsa came aboard and ten minutes later the twin propellers bit into the water, leaving a trail of frothy foam behind us and we roared away, making out to sea into the glittering morning.

  ‘No, I didn’t know what to make of you.’ Elsa spread the coarse pâté on a chunk of baguette, then took some salami and a wedge of Pont-L’Evêque. I poured us both a glass of iced Perrier water.

  ‘You didn’t know quite what to make of me? You didn’t like me one bit. I was on the bottle.’

  We’d anchored in a small inlet south of Wicklow Head. A steep cliff ran down to a small cove of jagged rocks where the green-blue swell lapped against jagged stone, swaying the boat gently, the water so clear that from the foredeck where we were eating we could see right down, fifteen feet or so, to the shingly barnacled stones, where fronds of dark seaweed moved.