The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Along with his new discovery came its opposite, fear of loss. From the moment he saw Annie, he knew real terror for the first time. His insouciant, nonchalant attitude to life evaporated and every move, each tiny event was underscored by a sense of panic and trepidation. Now, sitting in the kitchen of 21 Fford Pentre, Jesse realised he had lost, that Annie and he were never going to be together and that the person he loved most in the world faced a desolate future. Placing his head in his hands, he started to cry.

  ‘There’s a stranger crying in my kitchen,’ Delia said.

  Taking his handkerchief out of his pocket, Maurice passed it to Jesse. Turning to Delia he said, ‘Get the shopper out and the string bag. Go through the recycling pile. It’s got to be here.’

  Delia looked at the clock. She was in a slight muddle about what was on next. What day was it?

  Maurice got up and went to the cupboard. He threw out the broom and pans to get to the shopper and other carriers.

  ‘You’re making a mess,’ Delia said plaintively.

  ‘Get the recycling box now,’ Maurice snapped.

  Delia got up and went out the back door to the old coal shed where she kept bundles of papers and plastic. Since the council made its cuts, they only came every fortnight and there was a fair pile.

  Maurice turned the shopper upside down. A lone carrot fell out. He turned the bags inside out. Nothing.

  In the shed, Delia turned on the light and started to sift through the layers of paper. She was angry now and humiliated. How dare Maurice talk to her like that in front of a stranger? How dare this strange wailing man interrupt her TV schedules? She kicked the pile of papers and they spilled over the floor. Of course there was nothing there. What did Maurice think? That she wouldn’t remember putting his dead uncle’s stuff in the pile? Delia stopped suddenly. There was a telltale grey padded corner. She pulled it towards her and that now familiar spidery writing appeared. Delia felt a flush of panic. To find it suddenly constituted a further loss of face and made her look even more stupid. It was probably best to hide it and once Maurice had gone to work in the morning she could rip it up or take it down to Tesco’s for recycling. The most important thing was to get rid of the weeping man in her kitchen and get back to her TV. Delia could only cope when her world was ordered, otherwise she felt the shakes and panic set in. She had the certain feeling that whatever lay inside that envelope would change her life, and not necessarily for the better.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ Maurice appeared behind her, casting a terrifying shadow over the shed.

  ‘You frightened me,’ Delia said, stepping backwards and trying to cover up the envelope by moving some papers around with her foot.

  Maurice, from the corner of his eye, saw her nervous side-glance.

  ‘What are you hiding?’ He asked.

  ‘Nothing – what would I hide out here?’ she replied. ‘Let’s go in and comfort that young man. Poor thing. You could drive him to the station.’ Delia knew that no one must find this envelope.

  Maurice pushed her aside and, sinking to his knees, started to go through the pile.

  ‘It’s dirty down there, get up,’ Delia urged.

  It took Maurice less than twenty seconds to find Trichcombe’s envelope. Grabbing it triumphantly in one hand, he got to his feet and walked out of the coal shed without looking at his wife.

  He went back into the kitchen and dropped the envelope in front of Jesse.

  ‘Found it. Who’s going to open it? You or me?’

  Jesse lifted his head from the table and looked from Maurice to the envelope and wiped his face.

  ‘This is wonderful. This is so wonderful. You do it.’ He got up and hugged Maurice. He went to hug Delia.

  ‘Don’t you dare come near me,’ Delia hissed, drawing herself up to all of her five feet two inches.

  Very carefully Maurice prised open the edge of the envelope and, slipping his hand inside, removed a memory stick, some photographs, a neatly typed manuscript of about forty pages and a letter.

  Dear Maurice,

  I hope that you never have occasion to need to read this letter or act on its contents. If that day has come I am probably dead. As you are my closest living relative and an apparently reliable and upstanding member of your community, I have always prevailed on your good nature to keep copies of my work. I suspect that you have neither had the time or inclination to digest my books. I never met one person growing up in Mold who shared my passion for art. I am not at all sure where it came from. Your grandparents’ house did not have even one reproduction, let alone an original work; my passion was ignited when the headmistress, Miss Quilter, forgot to book a school trip to the Bournville factory and we had instead to waste time in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. You may not remember, but I took you there as a small child. I felt everyone deserved a life-changing experience even if they didn’t take it up. For me, art was my lifeline; studying it, looking at it, loving it was the only way I could feel a little less lonely and odd. Some love women or men, gambling or the bottle; I love paintings and have devoted my entire life to their study and to trying to explain their beauty and mystique to others.

  Maurice readjusted his glasses and, peering at the letter, continued.

  One man helped me establish a career and the same man destroyed it. His name is Memling Winkleman.

  Maurice stopped and looked at Jesse. ‘Is this him?’

  Jesse nodded. His tears had dried and his heart thumped in his chest. ‘Read on,’ he urged.

  I hope by the time you read this letter that his name is internationally recognised and that he has been exposed for what he is – a duplicitous, dishonest criminal, a Nazi, who let nothing stand in his way to create the world’s most successful art business.

  ‘A Nazi. Fancy that,’ Delia said.

  Maurice gave his wife a silencing look and went on reading.

  As you may or may not know, I was his authenticator, an expert who pronounces if something is right or wrong. I have a prodigious (if I might claim some credit) knowledge of paintings and a photographic memory. Once I have seen a picture, studied it for some time, I never forget a single detail. Show me a corner of a Rembrandt and I will tell you everything about that work. This made me an expert spotter – Memling and I would roam the salerooms; I would identify and certify a master painting, Memling would buy it. Oddly enough, I was never much interested in money; I wanted the association with great things and the chance to publish my thoughts and insight. Memling and I had a great partnership; he got rich, I got approbation.

  ‘What does approbation mean?’ Delia asked.

  Maurice and Jesse ignored her.

  There was one thing I could never understand; one thing he could never explain. Even when the market constricted, when there were fewer good things around, Memling could unearth great paintings, magic them from nowhere. He would get on a plane and return with one or two canvases. I would ask how and where? He never replied. Once he turned up with a really great Titian, a portrait of a young woman, small but perfect. Something about this painting piqued my curiosity. I knew the composition from an etching I had seen in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. I soon established that this painting had belonged to a Jewish family before the war but had disappeared. I started to run checks on other paintings that had been through the gallery – surreptitiously, of course – and found out that during the ten years I had worked for Winkleman, about thirty paintings we had handled had been owned by Jews exterminated during the Holocaust. I think that I knew then what this knowledge might cost me.

  One day I walked in to Memling’s office, forgetting to knock, and there on his desk was a painting by the French master Watteau, called The Improbability of Love – I knew it from etchings, of course – it is a truly wonderful work of art. It’s said that its beauty has the power to inspire love in mere mortals; it certainly inspired some madness in me. Without thinking, I picked it up from the desk and devoured it with my eyes. I should have pretende
d not to see it. Memling snatched the painting away and shouted at me to leave his office, to leave the building. I was so shocked that I did what was asked. Returning the next morning I found my possessions and books loaded in a box placed outside on the pavement. I was barred from entering the building. The rumours started immediately. The art world is a tiny place run by a powerful elite. I would walk into private views or galleries to be met with blank stares or outwardly hostile glances. My manuscripts were rejected; I couldn’t get published, let alone employed. I tried to blow the whistle on Memling, to tell others of my discoveries, but no one would listen. They knew where the power lay. We are all complicit in a dance with power.

  I made ends meet. Just. I had my flat and a small stipend from the Wallace. I have continued to write books – most remain unpublished. You have a copy of all of them. I accepted that this was the way of the world. That the Memlings of this world would prosper and the little men from Mold would moulder away.

  One day hope returned. I saw a drawing of the painting – the Watteau, The Improbability of Love – and a young woman told me that she had it. Maybe it was years of latent unexpressed rage or some remnant of Welsh fighting spirit, but I knew that I had the chance to expose the monster. This tiny, beautiful work of art gave me the strength and purpose to do what I should have done many years earlier.

  This long essay, which I hope has been published and disseminated in all the world’s press, will tell you how I did this and what my evidence is based upon. Though lives have been lost, justice will now be meted out.

  If for any reason my life is cut short (and it would not be overdramatic to assume that it might be), I ask you, dear nephew, to make sure that this information sees the light of day. I would urge you to do this anonymously and with great care, but I know that you are the kind of man who wants to see a wrong put right.

  Your respectful uncle,

  Trichcombe

  Delia put her hand on her heart. ‘I knew we should have left it in the shed, Maurice. This is trouble.’

  ‘Put the kettle on,’ Maurice replied.

  For the next two hours, until 10 p.m., he and Jesse read and reread Trichcombe’s essay and pored over his detailed footnotes. The art historian had abandoned convention and written his story in the first person, detailing his relationship with Memling and their dealings together. He spoke of suspicions cast aside and of the Titian portrait followed by the other ‘miraculous’ apparitions. Trichcombe spoke openly about subjugating his suspicions in order to further his own career until the day that he saw the Watteau. Each painting that he mentioned came with a detailed provenance showing that they had once belonged to Jews who lost their lives during the war. The most devastating evidence came with the photographs of young ‘Memling’ with the Winkleman family standing before The Improbability of Love in their Berlin apartment. Trichcombe had gone straight from Danica Goldberg’s apartment at Schwedenstrasse 14 to the public records office. He had a copy of Memling Winkleman’s birth certificate and also of that of a lad called Heinrich Fuchs. Trichcombe had not stopped there. The next photographs he unearthed were from the Hitler Youth, showing a young conscript called Heinrich Fuchs, a younger version of the man everyone now called Memling Winkleman. Trichcombe traced the man’s career to the Nazi art squad, where Fuchs worked directly under an officer called Karl Haberstock. Perhaps the most astonishing photograph found showed a junior officer standing behind Hitler holding up a painting. Though the photo was smudged and slightly out of focus, the young man with the cap pulled over his face, his back ramrod straight was, unmistakably, Heinrich Fuchs.

  ‘What the hell do we do now?’ Maurice asked, pushing his chair back.

  ‘You pretend you never saw any of this,’ Delia said. For the last two hours she had been hovering nervously, moving from the television set and back to the kitchen.

  ‘The genie is out of the bottle now. We have to do right by Uncle T,’ Maurice said firmly. ‘I can’t see the local boyos in blue taking this seriously.’

  Jesse was taking photographs of each picture and every page of manuscript on his smartphone and saving that to a remote server.

  ‘Maybe I could email these to someone?’ he said.

  ‘We are driving the evidence to London,’ Maurice said firmly.

  ‘You’ve never been to London. You won’t find it,’ Delia interjected.

  ‘Some things are too big to miss,’ he said, looking her up and down.

  ‘You can’t leave me here,’ Delia said.

  ‘I should have left you here a long time ago.’ Maurice walked out of the room and up the stairs. Jesse and Delia stood in silence at the kitchen table. His face was split by a broad grin; hers looked like a lump of wax after a night spent on a radiator, with hanging cheeks and drooping eyes.

  A few minutes later Maurice appeared with a small suitcase in one hand and his overcoat in the other.

  ‘Come on, Jesse. Let’s go.’

  Chapter 37

  From the Daily Shout

  Art and Arrests: The Improbability of Anything

  By our Chief Arts Correspondent

  Arthur Christopher

  Measuring only 18 inches by 24 inches, made up of oil paint on a canvas backing, the little painting The Improbability of Love has an extraordinary history, which has just got even more fantastical. Due to be sold at Monachorum auction house at 8 p.m. last night, the picture by the eighteenth-century master Antoine Watteau had been expected to break all records. Though not as fine or as historically important as a great Titian or Leonardo, nor as fashionable or cutting edge as a Richter or a Warhol, this picture’s provenance has captivated imaginations worldwide. Many collectors fancied adding their names to the illustrious roster of history’s most notorious kings, queens, great thinkers and lovers who have owned this painting.

  Moments before the sale started, a power cut plunged the saleroom into darkness and the auction house into chaos. Automatic security gates descended, locking some 250 important guests into the saleroom. Pandemonium ensued, made worse by the arrival of twenty armed policemen who clashed with the private security teams protecting some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, as well as the President of France and the British Minister of Culture. Several shots were fired; Mr Barthomley Chesterfield Fitzroy St George was shot in the arm, but the only fatality was the seventy-nine-year-old Mrs Melanie Appledore, the New York-based philanthropist, who died of a sudden heart attack.

  Matters were not helped by the crowds outside who had gathered to watch the live auction feed. When the power loss cut the TV screens, disgruntled spectators tried to force their way inside the auction house.

  In the mayhem, no one noticed that the picture had disappeared from under the noses of the world’s media, the police and the security teams. Unmitigated confusion followed; had a handler taken the painting to a strong room? Had one of the grand guests swiped it? Then staff discovered that CCTV cameras had been wiped.

  In the early hours of this morning, a journalist from this paper, stationed outside the private home of Mr Memling Winkleman, reported that uniformed officers had arrived at the house at 8 a.m. and left accompanied by the prominent art dealer. Later, Paddington Green Police Station confirmed that a ninety-one-year-old man and his fifty-year-old daughter, Rebecca Spinetti-Winkleman, were helping with inquiries. No charges have yet been brought.

  At noon today, Ms Annie McDee was released from HMP Holloway, and all charges have been dropped. Readers will recall that Ms McDee had been remanded in custody, charged with theft, extortion, conspiracy to defraud and the murder of Mr Ralph Bernoff, son of the proprietor of Bernoff Antiques, Goldhawk Road, London.

  At 10 a.m., the Simon Wiesenthal Center tweeted that one of the last Nazi section leaders, Heinrich Fuchs, had been unmasked. Fuchs, one of the key players in Hitler’s notorious ‘art squad’, or the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), has been at large since 1945. Unconfirmed rumours suggest that Fuchs had stolen the identity and heritage of a decea
sed Berlin Jew, Memling Winkleman, who died in 1943 at Auschwitz.

  At 11 a.m. the President of France issued the following statement: ‘Last night I came to Britain to complete the purchase of an important French work of art, Watteau’s The Improbability of Love, which should be hanging in the Elysée Palace in Paris. It is of utmost importance to my country that the painting be returned as soon as possible.’

  At midday, Number 10 Downing Street issued the following statement. ‘We are pleased to announce that one of our operatives was able to rescue the painting by Watteau, The Improbability of Love, from the auction rooms last night. The painting is being held at an undisclosed address until further notice.’

  Chapter 38

  As you have probably guessed, it was an entirely put-up job by the young government operative, Mr Darren Lu, posing as a porter. In the mayhem following the power cut, he cut a hole in my so-called impenetrable glass, put me into a rucksack, walked down the stairs and out of the back entrance.

  I felt for poor old Melanie Appledore – a lady who made it through a world war, had navigated the brutal waters of Park Avenue, and survived as a lonely widow for nearly quarter of a century, only to snuff out in the saleroom. At least she died hors de combat, believing that the deal was as good as done.