The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  There is one terrible blot on my landscape: my poor Annie, who is facing the rest of her life in prison on charges of theft, arson and the murder of the shopkeeper Ralph Bernoff. The ‘evidence’, kindly provided by Ms Winkleman, is apparently incontrovertible and includes film of Annie taken near the shop, film of the girl with the painting, witness statements, affidavits – you name it. Apparently she inveigled herself into the Winklemans’ lives, got keys and passwords and stole the painting from their vaults. If I didn’t know better I would be thoroughly convinced. The mother, never one to miss a drama, tried to stab herself in front of me as some kind of protest. Pretending to be a normal visitor, she took out a bread knife and started slashing at her body, screaming, ‘She’s innocent. She’s innocent.’ Of course the Earl loved it – more publicity, more notoriety. I heard him tell an assistant that the incident pushed my price up by another £800,000.

  What is sad is that not one person has stepped forward to defend the girl. Some louse ex-lover sold a story to the newspaper about his years of terror with Annie – apparently she tried to steal his business; he had to fight to preserve it. The press found friends from Annie’s primary schools who admitted there was something ‘funny’ about the girl and her mother. The girl was always on her own – the mother never appeared at the school gates. The press worked out that Annie and Evie moved town every few months – that led to another orgy of comments on the problems of single motherhood. If there is a modern ill, a social issue, Miss McDee is suddenly a perfect example. The girl doesn’t stand even half a chance. The young man, the mother and I are the only ones who remain convinced of her innocence – but can the inanimate and the unconnected triumph against vigorous and powerful opponents?

  When you have been around for as long as I have, you get familiar with the tipped scales of justice. I think specifically of my master’s short and tragic life; the perpetual presence of ill health, the spectre of death hanging over him and plucking him from the mortal world aged only thirty-six.

  Since my master’s pathetic and painful demise, I had not allowed myself a soupçon of sentimentality for any of my owners. Yet there is something about this young woman, Annie, her vulnerability, passion, the essence of her character both fragile and strong, that has insinuated itself into my weft and warp.

  At least she became, even for a short time, part of a long line of extraordinary patrons and collectors, part of an illustrious cabal of great leaders, tastemakers and intellectuals. She held me in her hands. She looked into my depths. That counts for something.

  Chapter 34

  Jesse joined the long orderly queue of friends and family outside Holloway Prison. It was the third week he had been to visit Annie and this time he hoped she might see him. Until now she had refused any visits and was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

  While the whole world was convinced of Annie’s guilt, Jesse knew she was innocent – even the most practised liar could not have upheld that level of deception. Apart from Evie, no one else shared his conviction. He had visited the police, had solicited affidavits and statements from Agatha at the National Gallery, and even from the market traders whom Annie dealt with regularly. But the evidence against Annie was overwhelming.

  Evie’s grief and protestations added theatricality rather than substance. Jesse tried to explain that Annie needed to create a portrait of a troubled family life rather than overblown hysteria. Evie trying to commit suicide in front of the painting, throwing herself in front of a racehorse at Windsor or tying herself to a railing near Downing Street only added negative publicity. For a while the press gave Evie print and air time. She was the gift that kept on giving. When Evie showed reporters round Annie’s destroyed apartment, most assumed she had wrecked it in a drunken stupor. Soon the press got bored with Evie’s claims and few bothered even to tweet about the mother’s antics.

  After an hour of waiting there were only two families in front of Jesse – a woman and her three young children and an elderly, smartly dressed couple.

  ‘Why do we have to come again?’ a little girl whined.

  The woman looked at Jesse sadly.

  ‘Can I give them a sweet?’ asked the older woman, opening up her bag and taking out a packet of mint humbugs.

  The mother shrugged as if she had stopped caring long ago.

  ‘Where you from?’ the boy asked, opening the sweet and dropping the wrapper on the floor.

  ‘Jamaica,’ the elderly lady answered.

  ‘My dad – my real dad – is Jamaican,’ the boy said proudly.

  ‘Do you see him?’

  ‘Nah – he left her.’ The boy jerked his head towards his mother. ‘Can’t blame him.’

  ‘Visitor, McDee,’ the warden opened the metal door and looked at Annie, who was lying on her side. ‘The same man, Jesse, who has come to see you every day for three weeks.’

  Annie did not move.

  ‘Give the guy a break,’ the warden said more kindly. ‘You’ve got to get up sometime.’

  Annie rose. Her limbs had stiffened through lack of use. Her hair was greasy and she pushed it behind her ears. If Jesse sees me like this, she thought, it would scare him off once and for all.

  She had not slept properly since arriving at HMP Holloway. It was not only the constant banging of doors, the shouting and her cellmates’ incessant ramblings, it was also her recurring nightmare. It starts with Annie at home, fast asleep; someone starts banging on her door and shouting ‘Open up! Police! Open up!’ Going to the door, she finds a man and a woman in blue uniforms.

  ‘Miss Anne Tabitha McDee?’ the man asks.

  Annie nods. She is confused, sleepy.

  ‘I am arresting you for the crimes of theft, arson and first-degree murder. Anything you do or say may be given in evidence.’

  In her dream, Annie laughs. There is some kind of mistake, she remonstrates, they have the wrong person. The police officers shake their heads.

  ‘You are to come with us now.’

  The female officer watches Annie while she pees and dresses.

  Annie is taken from a cramped cell to a windowless holding area in Holloway Prison. While she waits, visions from her life, good and bad, float in front of her like patterns in a kaleidoscope, but when she tries to remember an incident in any detail, it instantly evaporates. Occasionally Rebecca or Memling poke their faces into her dreams, laughing loudly and so closely that all she can see are the backs of their blackened throats.

  A guard dumps her on to the back seat of a van whose tiny windows are heavily tinted and too high to see out of. It takes off at great speed, rolling and bucking through traffic. Annie holds on to the seat so as not to fall. She looks down at the floor and it is covered in sick – it is hers. In the yellow gloop she sees the remains of Delores’s banquet. Tiny quails, lumps of pâté, eggs and twelve featherless chickens dressed in harlequin suits float around on the floor at her feet. She tries to fly out of the window into a piercingly blue summer sky but the trees’ leaves are made from knives and force her back down. Occasional noises deafen her: a baby screaming, the relentless boom-boom beat of a dub track from a nearby car, the honking of horns and screeching of brakes.

  Eventually the van tips down a ramp. Annie is thrown against the end. She shakes as she walks down a long ramp and into another airless room. There are other men wearing orange bibs and twisted expressions.

  ‘You are that woman – the murdering art-lover,’ they sing to a chorus from Gilbert and Sullivan.

  ‘I am innocent, innocent,’ she sings back.

  ‘Tell that to the judge and jury. Tell that to the judge and jury.’

  ‘Not guilty, not guilty.’

  The men chant. ‘A crime is a crime is a crime. You’re no better than any of us.’

  ‘I don’t belong here,’ Annie sings into darkness.

  She is taken into the courtroom to be met by a wall of grimacing familiar people. Her primary-school teachers, mean girls from past playgrounds, Robert, the ‘one-night�
� German, the Winklemans and her mother.

  Together they chant, ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty.’

  To her horror, the prosecution is led by Desmond, who holds a baby in the crook of his arm.

  ‘How do you intend to plead?’ the judge asks.

  ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty,’ the chorus chant more loudly.

  Annie looks up at the judge, hoping he will show mercy, and finds she is looking into the eyes of the doleful clown in her painting.

  ‘Take her down,’ the judge cries out.

  The ending is always the same.

  It took Jesse a few seconds to register that the figure shuffling towards him was Annie. Her eyes were dull, limbs concave, hair dank, mood utterly listless. She had lost weight; worst of all, some life force had drained from her.

  ‘Are you here to gloat?’

  Jesse recoiled. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Mostly it’s journalists who ask to see me.’

  ‘You know I am not a journalist.’

  Annie sat down at the Formica table facing Jesse. Around them were other families and couples, but Jesse could only see Annie. Pushing her lank hair behind her ears, she spoke in such a quiet, low voice that Jesse had to lean close to catch her words.

  ‘I don’t really understand any of this, Jesse. Even my solicitor can’t be bothered to listen to my explanation. He just talks about plea-bargaining and mitigating circumstances, about deals and time for good behaviour. He tried to make me blame Evie, to say I was some kind of accomplice and she was using her drunkenness as a cover.’ As she spoke, Annie’s fingers picked at tiny pieces of skin by bitten nails.

  ‘I know you are not guilty,’ Jesse said firmly.

  Annie looked up at him. ‘I’m not sure myself any more. They play that CCTV footage on the news – I look weird and furtive.’

  ‘You are not guilty, Annie – you must keep reminding yourself of that.’

  ‘It would take a miracle to convince anyone else.’

  Jesse reached across the table to try and take her hand in his. Annie pulled it away.

  ‘The only way to get through this is to close down – not to think about anything good or bad. Not to have memories or dreams. We are shut up for twenty three hours a day. I am lucky to have three cellmates who are really troubled – being with them takes my mind off my situation.’

  Jesse nodded – he had to force himself not to come around the table and take her in his arms. He loved her now even more.

  ‘You have to help me to help you, Annie,’ he said. ‘Please, let’s go through everything to see if there is a tiny detail that might help your case. Start from the day you bought the picture: did you take the money out specially? Did you tell anyone else that you bought it? Show it to anyone? We need to establish that you got it from that shop in the first place.’

  ‘I put it in the plastic bag in the front basket of my bike, and went to the market – it stayed there until I got home.’

  ‘Did you tell the traders about it?’

  ‘I was thinking about cooking dinner.’

  ‘When you got home? Did you see anyone on the stairs to the flat?’

  ‘No – I got stood up. The following morning Mum came to stay. You were the next person to see it at the Wallace and then Agatha at the National Gallery.’

  ‘Didn’t you show it to Delores?’

  ‘That is being used as evidence against me – apparently I was trying to sell it behind the Winklemans’ backs.’

  ‘What about that man Trichcombe Abufel?’

  ‘He saw your sketch; he never saw the painting.’

  ‘You told me he left you a message.’

  ‘The day after Delores’s dinner, he asked to see me urgently; something about Berlin and an attribution.’

  ‘Did you call him back?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘You heard that he died?’

  Jesse nodded. ‘Larissa, a colleague and friend of mine, told me that in his will he left all his research papers to the Courtauld, but when someone went to collect his files, nothing was left. The hard drive on his computer was wiped.’

  For the first time, Annie looked up. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I asked to see his death certificate – the police had trouble finding it.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove very much,’ Annie said.

  ‘When I eventually got a copy it was dated last week – he died a month ago.’

  ‘How is this relevant?’

  ‘I am not sure, Annie – the establishment has closed ranks. The museums, the police, the press, the authorities have all toed some invisible line. Someone put out a story and everyone just bought it. There was no question of testing its validity – it’s a done deal.’

  ‘So I am done for?’ Annie’s head sank back into her chest.

  Jesse leant over the table and took her hands in his. She tried to pull them away but Jesse held on to them.

  ‘As long as there is breath in my body, you have hope. I will not let them lock you away, Annie, I promise.’

  Many hours later, Annie lay in her bunk bed thinking about Jesse. She had underestimated him, seeing him as charming, attractive even, but somehow un-concluded, a person on his way to being fully formed. She had found his diffidence irritating and had assumed it hid an innate fecklessness. If only she had realised this was a mask and seen the real person months earlier, then she might have had a shot at love. Moments later, she dismissed these musings as mere fantasy: incarceration was warping her judgement and exhaustion was clouding her ability to judge situations. A few weeks earlier, she reminded herself, the plan had been to work in America. Now, with a criminal record, she would never get a visa even to visit America and by the time she got out of prison, Jesse would be with someone else; if she ever got out of prison.

  Feeling waves of desperation well up inside her, Annie turned to her failsafe escape route and planned a banquet to celebrate her release. But today, she could not assemble the ingredients, let alone think of interesting combinations of food or people. She turned instead to a much-loved spring walk on Dartmoor. The hillsides were still scorched by sunless winter winds and only a few ferns were pressing tentative fingers out of the earth, waiting to unfurl their fronds. The banks of the lanes were covered in primroses, dandelions and early cow parsley. Scattered all over the moorland were tiny violets, like freckles of purple on brown earth. Walking through the hedgerows, she noticed alexanders, stitchwort and campion on the ground and the last vestiges of flowering blackthorn. Lying in her bunk, tracing her imaginary footsteps, Annie realised that for the first time she could remember Devon without the normal stab of pain; instead she felt glad simply to have known and loved a place so dearly.

  She thought back to that random act of generosity: buying a present for a lover stricken by the loss of his wife. All her life she had tried to be good and fair. She had rescued her mother from a myriad of situations – some dangerous, some merely humiliating. She had loved a man who had tired of her. She had given up the idea of having children to please him, only to watch him father a baby with someone else. She had worked hard and conscientiously at every job and had never even stolen a paperclip. In spite of this she was caught in a trap with no prospect of escape.

  Annie started to sob.

  ‘Will you shut the fuck up,’ one of her cellmates grumbled.

  ‘Sorry,’ Annie mumbled, pushing her face into her hard foam pillow. Even through a clean cover, she could smell other people’s breath, phlegm and dirty hair, the effluents of prison living.

  Only Jesse believed her, but how could one person wade against the tide of public opinion? A visit to Trichcombe’s friend Larissa yielded nothing. The editor of Apollo had never had lunch with the art historian – it had been scheduled for the day after the heart attack. The Winklemans produced an exhibition catalogue and an invoice dating from 1929 proving that the painting was theirs. None of the market traders remembered seeing Annie the morning of the purchase, but the female police officer c
learly remembered Annie at the scene of the fire asking after the man in the shop and the extent of the damage. It appeared that innocence counted for nothing.

  Annie thought how much she had been looking forward to this summer, to longer days, walks by the river, picnics in the park. Most of all, though, she thought of that new life just started and now eviscerated. Even if she got out, she knew that her confidence was shattered. She had tried and failed to enter a new world. Looking up, she saw an aeroplane fly past the small barred window. Ordinary sights seemed suddenly so magisterial. What other everyday pleasures was she was going to miss?

  In two days’ time, her little painting would be sold at auction. It was no comfort that though hundreds of pairs of eyes had looked at the canvas, she had been the only one to recognise its quality. She had read about her picture’s provenance with a sense of wonder and in other circumstances perhaps she would have enjoyed the photographs of it surrounded by armed guards and lauded by the great and the good. For now though, it was an evil talisman, bringing nothing but bad luck. She didn’t care that its value was estimated to be tens, possibly hundreds of millions, or that by owning it she was automatically tied to some of the most notorious characters in history. Annie, wanting nothing to do with the picture or its stained history, had signed away any rights of ownership to the work. The further away from it, the better.

  As a blanket of self-pity adjusted itself around her, Annie’s spirits sank even further. Perhaps she should take her lawyer’s advice, plead guilty and paint a self-portrait of a desperate, deluded woman. But then, from nowhere, Evie’s voice called out. ‘I dare you to find a way out of this. I dare you.’ Annie sat up and looked around the cell for her mother. She was not there, but her words bounced off the walls. Evie was right. Annie must not give up so easily. She had to find a way through the quagmire of lies, think through every tiny possibility, every irregularity. She needed to start at the end. Why, she wondered, was Rebecca so determined to frame her for this crime? It can’t be about money – the Winklemans had enough of that – they didn’t need to risk being accused of embezzlement or subterfuge. Annie knew that this enmity was not directed at her personally – she was a nobody to Rebecca, simply a means to an end.