The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Reaching his car, Beachendon saw that someone had keyed the left flank, leaving an ugly white jagged scar on the pristine blue paint. He looked back at the two boys; one turned around and gave him the finger. For a moment Beachendon was tempted to run after them, catch them and beat their heads on the pavement till their brains spilled like red bloody sausages all over the ground. Instead, he unlocked the car, slipped into the driving seat and headed back to the office.

  Chapter 24

  I am back in the plastic bag – this time it’s from a shop called Peter Jones and luckily Peter (whoever he might be) smells mainly of wool and paper, unlike his friend Waitrose, who stank of beef and potatoes. My mistress collected me from the gallery three days ago. I was extremely distressed to bid au revoir to my old friends. The other paintings, in a massive unified expression of their sadness and recognition of my importance, vibrated their surfaces as I left the building. I heard it above the noise of traffic in Trafalgar Square, the squealing of brakes, the puffs of exhaust, the slap of feet on pavement, the flap of pigeons’ wings, the tinkle of water from the fountains. A collection of paintings is only as great as the sum of its parts: my departure dented the magnificence of the national collection.

  Luckily, the conservator had wrapped me carefully in many layers of paper and spongy stuff. I saw her eyebrows raise a centimetre or two when Annie put me into a plastic bag. She would have fainted if she’d seen me put back in the bicycle basket. Heureusement, it was not raining. I was bumped through the streets at an improbable speed, lifted out, carried into her office and left in the bag on her desk in her kitchen. If I had the power of self-immolation I would have exploded there and then. The rage. You cannot imagine the rage.

  Late on the second night of my plastic incarceration, something rather interesting occurred. Long after Annie had left, a woman came downstairs and started nosing around in the drawers and checking my mistress’s computer accounts. Her mobile telephone rang and she started to talk about a picture. Needless to say, it turned out to be all about moi. Hysterical that I was only a few feet away. Her conversation started genially with small talk that did not come easily and she went through the questions without any intention of listening to the response. How are you, how is the family, how is business and then came the big one – ‘I am trying to locate a small French eighteenth-century painting, measuring about eighteen by twenty-four inches. The composition is of a woman watched by a man and clown in a glade. It is very important that I find it. Why? It’s for a client who’s willing to pay top dollar. Don’t ask me why it means so much to him – but you know what these collectors are like. How much will he pay? How far is the moon? Oh yes, and I hear your Winkleman retainer is up for review. I do hope we can renew it.’

  I wanted to shout and scream and reveal my whereabouts. Here finally was someone who understood my true worth. I know what it is like to be wanted, to be tracked down, and to be adored, but there was a brittleness in her voice that began to worry me and it occurred to me her eagerness for my return did not tally with my best interests.

  Later that night a penny dropped. Somehow this woman was involved with that time. The darkest hours of my long life.

  So let me explain how it all happened.

  After Frederick the Great I was sold to the son of Pope Pius VI. Of all my owners, the pope and his family were among the most avaricious and venal. I loathed them. The son was a hussy, the father a weak, solipsistic creature who, like many others, attempted to use the arts as a whitewash for his futile and immoral life, as if beauty offered some kind of absolution. He was the first to set up a museum in the Vatican and, ironically, it was this initiative that inspired my next owner.

  Art follows power. Just as soldiers hang medals from their uniforms, the rich hang paintings on their walls. Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest looter in the history of the world. He was neither the first, nor the last, but he was unquestionably the most systematic and determined. Hitler only dreamed of one museum in Linz; Napoleon laid plans for twenty-two. Hitler had Göring as his advisor; Napoleon had a man named Dominique Vivant Denon and together they organised thefts from all the palaces of Europe to ensure that theirs would become the greatest treasure house of the world. Hence, in the autumn of 1796, I found myself strapped to the back of a mule, crossing the Alps along with Raphael’s Transfiguration. I wondered seriously about my hopes of survival. We were part of the great art exodus as Napoleon gobbled up all the great works in Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Ancona, Loretto, and Perugia; I was on the convoy of eighty-six wagons from Bologna. It was quite fun really, being with so many great paintings and exchanging stories of what we had witnessed. It was the first time I met Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, the Apollo Belvedere, as well as the bronze horses from San Marco (spoils from an earlier war themselves).

  I remember arriving in Paris, part of a huge procession in an open carriage drawn by six horses. To add to the spectacle, there were also camels and a cage of lions. Each crate had a banner listing its contents; I was with two Correggios, nine paintings by Raphael, the Bears of Bern, and a collection of minerals and various religious relics. You see, beauty has always inspired brutality and the desire to possess, looting was always a facet of war, and art and power are constant bedfellows. Before Göring, Hitler, Napoleon and Denon, the Romans had Livy to keep records of their booty. The tombs of the Pharaohs were looted long before the invasion of Alexander the Great in 332 BC. The Old Testament has many references to looting and pillaging. In the book of Chronicles, King Shishak of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, taking away the treasures of the Lord’s temple and the royal palaces and everything including gold shields that Solomon had made.

  I am not giving you a history lesson, dear reader, I just want you to understand the power of art, the depths and heights that it inspires.

  Onwards with my story. Napoleon could have chosen any number of wonderful things to give to his Empress Josephine. There were tapestries, jewels, statues, paintings and all those other things that I have mentioned; he chose me. Only eighteen by twenty-four inches in size but more powerful than the great canvases of the Renaissance, more valuable to my owner than armfuls of precious jewels. (If I have time later, I will tell you the secrets of their marital bed. Let me just say that there was an animal in that relationship and it was not the tiny commander.)

  Josephine was an indefatigable mistress; she could make love all night and day and could coax heroic performances out of her lovers. Napoleon was a mighty leader on the battlefield but she made him feel better than a conqueror. As we all know, though, his seed could not stick inside her. He divorced Josephine to marry a womb. My mistress’s cries rang out for months, carried on the wind from her château at Malmaison to Napoleon’s bedroom in Paris. Once the personification in paint of a great love affair, I became the embodiment of a broken heart. On the afternoon of 11 January 1810, she threw me on to the fire. Luckily her maid rescued me and, secreting me beneath her capacious underskirts, smuggled me out of the château and into the rooms of a well-known dealer.

  My next owner was a British king. George IV was an absolute rotter. The most ill-natured, gluttonous, self-important buffoon. For twenty years I bore witness to an incessant bacchanalian feast punctuated by days of prostrate lamentation as he tried to recover from his self-inflicted excesses. The man would down crates of wine, port, whisky and champagne and only pause to stuff his fat face with meat and potatoes. Weighing over twenty stone, he suffered from gout, arteriosclerosis, dropsy and venereal disorders. I watched him die a horrible slow convulsive death and breathed a little sigh of relief when the last breath drained from his body just after 3 a.m. on 26 June 1830.

  I was sold (another four adventures all over Europe) but eventually was given by Albert to his beloved young Princess Victoria, soon to be Queen of England. Unfortunately and ignominiously I was consigned to a minor state bedroom at Buckingham Palace. I loathed London (as you already know) – the smog, the noise, the drab and dreariness. No
doubt I would still be in that airless bedroom if I hadn’t caught the eye of a young footman who wanted to give his true love a present before leaving for the front in 1914. His name was Thomas; hers was Ethel. He worked at the Palace and she at the Ritz. Perhaps the footman knew that his days were numbered and he would never be prosecuted for such an audacious theft, but the afternoon before he left for France, he whipped me off the wall, hid me under his coat and marched through the park to Piccadilly. Two weeks later, on 24 September 1914, he was dead, just another body in the mud and mire. Ethel wept for three weeks but found comfort in the arms of a doorman. After the war I was sold for £2 6d. No one was much interested in beauty at that time.

  I will skip forward to the sale of 1929 in Berlin. Another low moment: knocked down to a penniless Jewish lawyer as an engagement present for his beloved. They were my first Semites and perhaps my greatest fans. I looked rather strange hanging over the fireplace of their drab, brown small apartment in Berlin, but as Esther Winkleman used to say, ‘That painting is a window on to a better, purer world.’

  That so called better, purer world never materialised. Ten years later another war broke out and things got more and more difficult for the Winklemans, who lost their jobs and were forced to wear yellow stars stitched onto their clothes. Even though the apartment was tiny, his mother and her father came to live with them. There was no money for fuel and, piece by piece, the furniture was burned to keep the family warm through the bitterly cold winter of 1940 and 1941.

  I remember the boy clearly; he had the palest blue eyes and a shock of blond hair. He was not Esther and Ezra’s child but he spent a lot of time in their apartment. After the war broke out, he wore a black uniform; he came by for a time, with food parcels and even some brandy.

  Early in 1942, taking Ezra to one side, the pale-eyed man made an offer for me. ‘I can get you a million Marks for this picture,’ he said. ‘And tickets for your whole family to leave the country.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’ Ezra asked, genuinely baffled. ‘This is my home and I have to wait here in case members of my family need somewhere to stay.’ Blackshirt begged and cajoled. Ezra and Esther would not capitulate.

  The evening of 27 February 1943 is one I will never forget; a team of blackshirts came for the Winklemans. ‘Let us grab a few things, please,’ Esther said, casting a glance at me. She was dragged by her hair out of the room and down the stairs. She did not scream; she did not want to frighten her children.

  The pale-eyed man returned a few days later. He came tearing into the flat and seeing it empty he sat down on the floor and cried; he knew what had happened. Then he got up, took me down from above the mantelpiece, and hid me beneath his heavy black coat. I was sold for a million Marks to his leader. Herr Hitler only saw me once; he held me in his hands and stared into my depths for nearly an hour. Then, calling the young soldier, Herr Hitler told him to hide me in a secret place, away from Göring’s avaricious eyes, until the war had been won.

  ‘Guard this with your life,’ he instructed.

  Chapter 25

  Annie conceived the dinner as a thank you to Agatha as well as a practice run for Delores’s birthday party. She asked Jesse, hoping that he would take the invitation as a gesture of friendship only. In three days’ time, the day before the actual party, she would go to Smithfield meat market, followed by New Covent Garden market. She would buy eighteen chickens, ten pheasants, pullets, chicken livers, ten kilos each of onions, carrots and potatoes, along with armfuls of herbs and lettuce. On the morning of the dinner, 1 April, she would be at Billingsgate Fish Market by 2 a.m., stocking up on oysters, sole, crayfish and lobster. Caviar and foie gras were on order from a separate supplier.

  For the practice run, Annie could only afford to prepare certain dishes and they would drink prosecco rather than champagne. At Delores’s dinner the guests would enjoy twenty courses, starting with an asparagus omelette and finishing with a tart. Tonight there would be only five. For Delores’s dinner Annie would hire a small van to drive between the different destinations; for the rehearsal, she took a bus and a train to Vauxhall, walked across main roads and side streets before arriving at New Covent Garden market.

  Wandering through the rows of asparagus, aubergines, cabbages, the deep greens and ruby reds, the hard and fleshy, unidentifiable foreign variations as well as familiar cottage-garden vegetables, Annie felt a stab of joy. Each variety of vegetable suggested a story, a delicious possibility, and a recipe waiting to be discovered. Looking at a tray of quinces, Annie saw them baked, stewed or grated, imagined them with pears or lamb or cheese. Looking to her right, she caught sight of a pyramid of fennel – perhaps she could meld a few bulbs into the onion soup or create a side dish with a sauce perfumed with anchovy, or just sauté the vegetable until its gentle perfume quivered about a dish of braised chicken.

  Her thoughts turned to her painting and she wondered if the artist looked at pigments and bases in the same way that she thought about food: imagining the collision of different colours, the mixing of pigments and the overall end effect. For both the chef and the painter, creating tastes or scenes from an assortment of base ingredients was a way of navigating the world. She used salt, pepper, vegetables, oils, spices, herbs and meat; he used lapis, lead white, carmine, green earth, indigo, ochre, verdigris and smalt.

  On one large table there was a vast dome of aubergines, all circular in shape and heavily veined in a deep red and creamy white.

  ‘Aren’t they beautiful? Like jewels,’ Annie said to a woman who was also looking at them.

  ‘But when we cook them, they will turn to a grey mush,’ the woman replied.

  Annie looked at her in amazement. How could anyone think of an aubergine in such a disparaging way?

  That evening, Jesse was the first to arrive, clutching a bunch of daffodils, trying not to look too pleased to see her. He and Annie talked awkwardly about what they had been doing and events in the news, and were both relieved when Agatha arrived and Evie returned from her AA meeting. Annie gave Jesse and Agatha Bellinis and her mother a non-alcoholic fruit punch, and handed round some quails’ eggs balanced on tiny squares of smoked salmon and home-made bread topped with a sprig of dill. At first everyone was shy; they stood in a circle in the centre of the room around a Moroccan pouffe making small talk about the picture that was propped on the mantelpiece over the fireplace.

  ‘It needs a better frame,’ said Annie.

  ‘It still looks lovely,’ Evie said. ‘I knew from the first moment I saw it that it was something special.’

  ‘What’s next for it?’ Agatha asked.

  ‘Not sure really.’ Annie shrugged and went over to the painting. ‘I intend to live with it and admire it.’

  ‘I told her to take it to Christie’s or one of those places – they have valuation days,’ Evie said, before turning to Agatha. ‘You work at the National Gallery, don’t you? Maybe you could look at it?’

  Agatha and Jesse looked at each other, realising that Annie had not told her mother about their suspicions.

  ‘I just need to make a velouté,’ Annie said, heading towards the kitchen units.

  Jesse followed her. ‘Let me help.’

  Annie hesitated and, smiling gratefully, handed him a bowl and a whisk. ‘Can you mix those up with some salt and pepper while I blanch the asparagus?’

  Jesse expertly cracked the eggs with one hand into the bowl, added two twists of pepper and a generous pinch of salt and whisked them hard. Once they had turned into a frothy golden cloud he asked for the next job.

  ‘Can you layer that Gruyère and toast on top of the bowls of onion soup?’ Annie asked, making sure that her clarified butter frothed up but didn’t burn.

  ‘Do you have some parsley I can chop?’

  ‘Top left of the fridge in a small plastic bag.’

  While Annie gently sifted the flour, teaspoon by teaspoon into the butter, Jesse chopped the parsley into a fine green mist ready to sprinkle over the top
of the soup.

  ‘You can cook.’ Annie sounded surprised.

  ‘My mother needed a sous chef.’

  ‘Was she a cook?’

  ‘The best I’ve ever met – she can take the simplest, dullest ingredients and transform them into something delicious.’

  ‘That’s the best kind,’ Annie agreed, folding the last of the flour into the butter.

  ‘A roux?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘Yes, can you warm that small saucepan of stock?’

  Jesse turned the heat on and, bending over the pan, sniffed. ‘Vegetable with mushroom?’

  Annie smiled. ‘Very good – it’s for the sole – Louis XV liked his fish drowning in mushroom-flavoured cream but I thought this was a slightly healthier option.’

  Annie took an omelette pan from the hanging shelf and wiped a trace of olive oil around its base. Placing it on a lit hob she waited for the pan to smoke.

  ‘Shall I continue with the white sauce while you make the omelettes?’

  Annie smiled gratefully. ‘I don’t suppose you are free on the first of April? I am cooking this grand dinner for fifty for Delores’ birthday. I have waiters and washer-uppers but would love someone who is confident in the kitchen. It’s paid – about a hundred pounds for the night.’

  Jesse leant over the sauce, whisking hard, he didn’t want Annie to see his cheeks blush red with pleasure and the face-splitting grin.

  Annie read his silence the wrong way. ‘I’m so sorry. That was really presumptuous of me.’