The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Rebecca imagined Marty sitting as she was now, having discovered that their business was built on extortion. Then her heart caught in her throat: Memling’s right forearm was tattooed with 887974, the number branded on his skin shortly after his arrival at Auschwitz in 1943. Though Memling rarely spoke of it himself, the potent tattoo was a reminder to all in the art world what this man had suffered. It had helped him become the dealer of choice to many wealthy Jews. Rebecca knew that her father was ruthless and determined, but would he go that far to realise his ambitions? Rebecca’s thoughts flicked back to her brother’s sudden death. Was it misadventure or murder? She stopped – what was she thinking? Memling had loved his son with a passion. He would never do that, would he? Rebecca felt tendrils of doubt and fear creep from her stomach to her chest and tighten around her heart. Again she went to the drawer of her desk and checked that her gun was still there and loaded.

  Looking at her watch, Rebecca saw it was already 5 a.m. Sometimes Memling arrived early. She had to cover her tracks quickly. Jumping up, she started to replace the ledgers in the walk-in safe, making sure that each was returned to exactly the same place. Taking a cloth, she wiped away her fingerprints from the shelves and the spines. Next she closed the door to the safe and reset the logs, making sure that her previous two entrances were wiped from the electronic records. Ten minutes later, Rebecca slipped out of the back entrance of Winkleman’s. She crouched on the step until the security camera was angled away from the door and then walked quickly up Curzon Street and into Berkeley Square; she had never felt so frightened in her life.

  The streets were lit by the bluish light of dawn. Apart from the odd taxi, Rebecca had London to herself as she walked, without any direction in mind, hoping that the exercise would bring calm and clarity. Her sense of panic undid her navigation system and later she could not recall where her feet had taken her. Rebecca wondered who else, if anyone, had guessed about her father. The evidence was probably there for anyone to find, but it had suited most to turn a blind eye. The majority of Winkleman’s business was legitimate: paintings were bought and sold on the open market. It was a hugely successful operation, worth in excess of a £1 billion and turning over several hundreds of millions of pounds per year.

  Surely, she thought, someone, an employee, a journalist or a competitor, must have suspected. How could a family from such humble origins possibly have built up a collection innocently during and immediately after the war? Did this explain why Memling kept so many people on an extended payroll, spreading his guilt and culpability like an acidic fog over the international art world? There were monthly payments to a number of ‘advisors’ who alerted the Winklemans to potential sales or matters of relevance: a member of the aristocracy was thinking of selling; a museum’s or collector’s new acquisition policy, or changes in government legislation. The Winklemans’ sphere of influence and patronage spread far and wide. Wealth brought legitimacy, and to bolster their reputation, the family gave generously to charities and museums. Only last week, Rebecca had signed cheques to a Holocaust Museum in Moscow and had paid for the reframing of two Old Masters in the Frick Museum in New York.

  The consequences of exposing her father would reverberate through an industry and across continents. Rebecca had to accept that she too was not entirely innocent. She had used her husband’s film company as a cover to export priceless works around Europe. She charged all domestic expenses to the business. She listed paintings sold at a fraction of their actual price to avoid taxation. Bringing Memling down would result in bankruptcy and shame for the entire family, their employees and associates. This was the moral dilemma her brother had faced and in his case that knowledge was fatal. Marty, Rebecca knew, could never have lived or operated under the weight of these lies.

  Crouching in a doorway out of public view, Rebecca wept. She was trapped, with no way to turn. Perhaps she should, like her brother, opt out of this life. She considered running away – leaving Grace and Carlo and absconding to some faraway island. Could you run away today? Was there anywhere out of reach? She thought not. Memling still had absolute control over Rebecca’s finances; he owned her house, paid her salary and her daughter’s university fees. Paintings given to his daughter as gifts had their title deeds stored in the offices of offshore companies. Memling had kept his children on a tight rein by refusing to allow them any autonomy and keeping them cosseted by wealth. She used to think it was a kind of benevolent controlling impulse; now she wondered if Memling’s iron-fisted control was an insurance policy: he knew his children would not survive outside the nest. Rebecca wasn’t qualified to do anything else and if Memling was exposed, she knew she would never work in the art world again. She was in no doubt that Carlo would leave her. The thought of life without her husband made her cry even harder.

  Wiping her eyes and smoothing down her crumpled overcoat, Rebecca squared her shoulders; she would delay any decision until she found out the extent of her father’s duplicity. Strengthened by a sense of purpose and resolve, Rebecca looked left and right, trying to establish where she had walked. The street sign said EC1 – she was several miles from home. A taxi came towards her, its orange light shining cheerfully. Rebecca put out her hand. Their downfall seemed suddenly inevitable but she wondered if, somehow, she could build up a case to mitigate the damage.

  Chapter 21

  The entrance to the meeting was through a side door of the dilapidated health and well-being centre. Built in the 1970s, the concrete pebbledash façade had worn away and the paintwork was now a rain-stained grey. Taped to the door was a piece of paper with ‘AA meeting’ written by hand and underneath it an arrow pointing upwards, apparently to heaven. Straightening her coat and patting her hair lightly, Evie checked herself in the grimy window. Her appearance was important. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was an alcoholic; she was just someone who needed a little support on occasion.

  ‘Are you here for the meeting?’ asked a young woman wearing pink trousers, a tight black jumper and a nose piercing, as she pushed past Evie and opened the door to the centre. She waited for Evie to follow her. ‘It’s just at the end of this corridor. I’m Lottie.’

  Evie wondered how she had guessed.

  ‘Your first time?’ Lottie asked. ‘Don’t be scared. We all start somewhere.’ She walked quickly down the linoleum-lined passage and, turning left at the end, opened another door into a large room.

  ‘Hi, Lottie,’ a large middle-aged woman in a cardigan and slacks called out.

  ‘Hello, Danni,’ said Lottie, giving her a big hug. ‘What did the doctor say last week?’

  ‘He changed my meds – I’m now on a different kind.’

  ‘How are they working?’

  ‘Feel a bit off, really,’ said Danni. She turned to Evie. ‘Welcome. Is this your first meeting?’

  Evie nodded, forcing out a smile. She wanted to turn around and leave. She knew that she didn’t belong with these people. Damn Annie for making her promise to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Danni asked.

  Evie nodded.

  Evie took her tea and chose a chair on the outer edge of the room. Over the next half-hour about fifteen people arrived, all known to each other. The mix of age and background surprised Evie; there was a dapper black man in his seventies, wearing a well-cut suit and carrying a cane; an elderly trim woman, Patricia, dressed immaculately in pearls and a twinset. A grubby teenager arrived with a sixty-year-old in a tracksuit, and a heavily tattooed man with a snub-nosed mongrel. Bella, who introduced herself to Evie, must have been a model – the vestige of great beauty clung to her ageing face.

  ‘Just listen to the similarities rather than the differences,’ Bella advised.

  ‘Keep coming back; it works if you work it,’ Danni added.

  Patricia got up and went to sit at the front of the room behind a Formica table.

  ‘My name is Patricia and I am an alcoholic,’ she told the room. Evie had to admit that
her story was extraordinary but it had nothing whatsoever to do with her own problems. After Patricia had finished speaking, others took turns to talk about their own stories. Some identified with Patricia, others talked about struggles in their daily lives. Their language was peppered with slogans, ‘One day at a time’ or ‘it works if you work it’. Psychobabble, Evie thought crossly. At the end, five minutes was set aside for newcomers. Everyone looked expectantly at Evie who looked at her feet. Eventually, unable to endure the deafening silence, Evie spoke. ‘I’m Evie and I am not like any of you.’ She expected a mass rejection but was surprised when the whole group smiled benignly and encouragingly at her and said in unison, ‘Welcome, keep coming back. It works if you work it.’ Evie arranged her mouth in a lukewarm smile. Bloody loonies, she thought.

  Nevertheless, she stayed for a cup of tea afterwards. The people were very kind and gave her leaflets and electric-pink-coloured biscuits. Evie took the newcomer’s welcome pack back to the flat and left it on the table for Annie to see. Privately she knew that AA was not for her; what she needed was the love of a good man and some money. Evie only drank because she was lonely and broke.

  In the good old days, Melanie Appledore thought as she handed her ticket to the man at the door, the chairman of the governors and the director would have met her at the entrance to the Royal Opera House. She still gave $100,000 a year to the institution, but these days, $100,000 didn’t buy much respect, just a priority booking number and a small window of time to reserve seats for popular performances. Once upon a time she walked into the lobby and every head turned to look at her and her husband. People knew exactly who she was and the importance of her diamond (the Shimla, 30 carats), the designer of her gown and the value of her sable coat. They would whisper her name and speculate on her husband’s net worth. Mrs Appledore knew that they wondered about her humble beginnings and a former life. Many assumed she was a Jewish refugee, sent to America on Kindertransport before the war. ‘You know it is too painful for her to talk about,’ one society friend told another. Melanie did not put them right or wrong; she didn’t mind being a Jew to the Jews or a goy to the rest. She knew that she was the object of fascination and occasionally of satire, but it was better to be talked about than never mentioned. Tonight it was like old times; the audience stared and whispered but Mrs Appledore knew no-one recognised or even cared about her. Instead their attention was aimed at Barty, who had come dressed as the opera’s hero Rodolfo, a struggling eighteenth-century writer.

  Barty wore a pair of torn breeches with a raggedy frock coat on top. His handkerchief was made from the pages of an unpublished play (written out in best boarding-school writing by Emeline that afternoon), his shoes were mismatched, and on his head Barty wore a bright-pink silk bonnet in deference to Mimi, the opera’s heroine. Lucky, Mrs Appledore thought, they were in a box or many would complain about the hat obscuring views. As it wasn’t an opening night, there were no photographers to capture his quite brilliant take on La Bohème, but Barty would never let sartorial standards drop. Besides, he had met his latest love, a young fashion student, one night leaving the ballet. Juan de Carlos had asked for his autograph and soon became Barty’s screensaver.

  Even if no one else understood who Mrs Appledore was, Barty made a huge fuss of her. Having walked ladies to the ballet and opera for half a century, he knew every back passage, every loo and most of the attendants. Mrs Appledore would get to her box without being jostled or pushed. They would get the best table in the Crush bar and an ice-cold bottle of champagne would be delivered to the box at the end of each act. Waiting for them in the box were Mrs Appledore’s other guests, the Duke and Duchess of Swindon. Windy Swindon (the nickname came from his ancestral home’s position on top of the Marlborough Downs) and his wife Stinky (her real name was Glendora and she never smelled) were, in Barty’s opinion, the dullest members of the aristocracy and that was saying something.

  ‘What are you wearing, Barty?’ Stinky asked.

  ‘The references aren’t that difficult,’ Barty said, pointing to the bonnet and the manuscript. ‘I am Rodolfo mourning Mimi.’

  ‘Who the fuck are they when they are at home?’ Windy asked.

  ‘You are about to find out,’ Barty said.

  ‘Are they joining us too?’ Stinky looked around.

  ‘Rodolfo and Mimi are the hero and heroine of La Bohème,’ Mrs Appledore said, giving Barty a warning glance.

  ‘It’s the opera you are about to see,’ Barty said incredulously. He often wondered how the aristocracy had survived so much longer than their brain cells.

  The bell sounded and in Box 60 the party of four took their seats. Barty chose the high stool at the back, a position he liked. Although it gave an impaired view of the stage, it offered the best view of the audience. Taking his opera glasses out of his pocket, he scanned the boxes opposite and stalls for familiar faces. It was rather a poor night. Lord Beachendon was there with his tired-looking wife in an exhausted dress. She looks, Barty thought, like someone from a 1970s BBC documentary on rural gentility, one of those (probably only fifty-looking seventy-year-old) wives who had been retired to the country in a Laura Ashley smock with a couple of Labradors. Her hair, salt-and-pepper blonde, was pulled back into a velvet band and round her neck she wore the last family heirloom, three strings of good pearls. Earl Beachendon, Barty thought, looked emaciated. His old smoking jacket hung like velvet weeds from narrow, stooped shoulders. His hair, or the very little left of it, needed a trim. Both the Earl and Countess reminded Barty of party balloons left to deflate in a cupboard.

  In complete contrast, the next-door box was full of over-pumped hedge-fund types who probably bought the tickets at a City auction, thinking that Bohème was related to Beyoncé. Dame Fiona Goldfarb was in the Royal Box (which, as Queen of the Jews and the major patron of the Opera House, she deserved); Tayassa, the eldest daughter of the Emir and Sheikha of Alwabbi, was there (probably deciding whether to build an opera house to go with their new museum) but apart from that, it was all rather déclassé, Barty thought sadly. Once you came to the opera to be seen; now one comes to escape.

  The conductor took to the stand and the audience erupted into applause.

  ‘Honestly,’ Barty whispered to Mrs Appledore, ‘it’s not like he just landed a holiday plane in the Costa del Sol – let the man prove himself.’

  The conductor turned to his crowd and bowed.

  ‘Oh do get on with it,’ Barty said a little too loudly. Then the huge red velvet curtain swept open and the audience was transported on a wave of violins, piccolos, flutes and cellos into Rodolfo’s garret where the writer sat next to an unlit stove, with his friend, the painter Marcello, complaining about being cold and, of course, about love.

  In Box 60, four pairs of eyes were fixed on the stage, but four minds were elsewhere. Barty lamented the drop in standards and how sad it was that few bothered to dress for the opera. Mrs Appledore decided to blow the rest of her husband’s foundation on one major donation, a real showstopper. Windy Swindon wondered if he should sell the grouse moor in Scotland. It wasn’t worth much these days – the grouse had long since gone – but it might buy a new roof for the west wing of Swindon Hall. Stinky worried about her box-hedge blight that threatened the whole structure of the garden. What could she do to preserve the neat knot garden without box? Someone suggested yew but that took ages to grow; she had not been so worried about anything since Windy took a mistress (she was still around and turned out to be quite convenient really – Stinky was let off conjugal duties, a blessed relief).

  When Mimi and Rodolfo declared their love, the music was so rousing and the sight of the diminutive tenor’s arms trying to encircle the rotund soprano’s girth was so alarming that everyone in Box 60 turned their attention to the stage. Mrs Appledore began to cry; she remembered the other Bohèmes she and her husband had seen, at the Met, La Scala, Teatro La Fenice and the happy times they had spent before he died nearly twenty-two years previously, th
us consigning her to a life of pampered peripatetic loneliness, moving between her houses in London, New York, Aspen, Paris, St Barts, Buenos Aires, Cap Ferrat, St Moritz and, of course, their yacht. The ever-attentive Barty noticed the three tiny tears meander down Mrs Appledore’s entirely smooth cheek and he passed her a scented handkerchief. Barty understood loneliness and, taking her tiny wizened hand, he held it for the rest of Act Two as gently as a baby swallow.

  On stage the young people did what young people did: kissed and drank, fell in love and argued. The audience, most in their dotage, had to trawl the depths of their memories to remember what all that was like.

  On the other side of the auditorium Earl Beachendon was not thinking about love or sex; he was worrying about money and a visit he had paid that afternoon to the world’s highest-selling contemporary artist, a man formerly known as Gary Mitchell, who now went by the name of Blob. As he was over six feet tall and as etiolated as a peeled cucumber, no one understood why Gary had chosen such an unlikely sobriquet. Gary didn’t explain or elaborate; as Lord Beachendon found out that morning, Gary or Blob kept words to a minimum. After two hours spent in his company, all Blob had conceded was ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’, and on the whole only ‘maybe’. Maybe he would consent to a selling sale/exhibition at the auction house. Maybe it would happen this year. Maybe he would split the profits 60/40 with the auction house. Maybe he would leave his dealers.