In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Julius

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  Emmeline

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Frank

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Sample Chapter from WE THAT ARE LEFT

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First U.S. edition 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Clare Clark

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Virago Press

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Clark, Clare, author.

  Title: In the full light of the sun / Clare Clark.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019001730 | ISBN 9780544147577 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544146822 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lost works of art—Fiction. | Berlin (Germany)—History—1918–1945—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6103.L3725 15 2019 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001730

  Cover design by Steve Panton—LBBG

  Images © Shutterstock

  Author photograph © Juliana Johnston

  v2.0619

  For Clare A, with love

  I undertook to enlighten him . . . From that day on my van Gogh made astonishing progress: he seemed to have an inkling of all he had in him, hence that whole series of sunflowers on sunflowers in the full light of the sun.

  Gauguin, Avant et après (1903)

  Julius

  Berlin 1923

  I

  Julius took the night train back from Paris. He slept fitfully, a thin sleep threaded with whistles and the jolting clatter of wheels. It was still dark when he rose. In the dining car a yawning waiter brought him a cup of weak coffee. With its teak panelling and glass-shaded lamps, the diner was all that remained of the elegant Nord-Express which had run this route before the war. Julius stared out of the window. There was no moon. The passing telegraph poles sliced the blackness into squares.

  He supposed he should feel anger, grief even, but all he could summon was the weariness of defeat. His marriage was over and the end, like so much about Luisa, was both tawdry and unutterably banal. The pair of them writhing and grunting in her tumbled bed, their frozen horror as he switched on the light. He gave them one minute to get out of his house before he called the police. Frau Lang covered her face with her apron as they fled down the stairs, their clothes bundled in their arms. He should have done the same. I worship the nude like a god, Rodin once said, but there was nothing godlike about their nakedness, their shrivelled cocks, the skinny white shanks of their legs.

  And later Luisa, oblivious Luisa in the bottle-littered drawing room, her make-up smeared and her dress falling off one shoulder, her arm around Lehmbruck’s Kneeling Woman, a silver straw between her fingers like a cigarette. Her contemptuous smirk as she leaned down, eyes glittering, and snorted cocaine from the sculpture’s cast stone thigh. When he told her he wanted a divorce she laughed, shrill and sharp, like glass breaking.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said and, hoisting a champagne bottle by the neck, she put it to her lips. The wine ran out of her mouth and over her chin.

  The train slowed. Above the dark curve of the hills a grey dawn was breaking. Quicksilver balls of rain rolled diagonally down the window. Julius closed his eyes, his fingertips kneading the back of his neck. Though it troubled him to admit it, he was as much to blame as she was. Such a weakness you have for beautiful things, his old friend Bruno said drily when Julius first introduced them, and Julius only laughed. He was fifty-three, recently demobbed and dizzy with desire. Luisa was twenty-four. In the bleak, broken-down months after the armistice her loveliness was a kind of miracle. He could not get enough of her. In her arms the past grew hazy, shedding its horrors, and the future was ravishing and new. He thought she would heal him, that he could wash himself clean in the clear, cool stream of her. By the time he understood that he was wrong, that her exquisite face masked a crude, incurious mind and what he had taken for innocence was nothing but ignorance and lack of imagination, she was already his wife.

  Five years, three of them more or less wretched. They were neither of them what the other had imagined them to be. Their arguments, once fiery, grew bitter, hard with disappointment. There were no more passionate reconciliations, only silences, brief distrustful breaks in the bombardment. Like opposing armies they dug into their positions. Julius returned to his bachelor habits, burying himself in his work. Luisa shopped and danced and shrieked till dawn.

  He was ashamed, that was the truth. He had built his reputation, his whole life, on his ability to see, not only with his eyes but with his heart. In The Making of Modern Art he had railed against an establishment blinded by the seductions of technical virtuosity, urging them to seek instead the heroic struggle that was the soul of great art, and yet, confronted with Luisa, he had made all the same mistakes. He had succumbed to the surface of her, mistaken her physical perfection for a purity of spirit, for something transformative and true.

  A couple came into the dining car. The woman was short and dark with sleepy Modigliani eyes. She smiled at Julius and wished him a good morning, her German heavily accented with Russian. Julius nodded in return. He would do the decent thing. Since the Kaiser, with characteristic compassion, had deemed insurmountable aversion insufficient grounds for divorce, it was necessary for one side or the other to take the blame. Adultery was cleanest. In cases of proven adultery, divorce was granted automatically. The newspapers might still take an interest, but there was none of the public scandal that dogged a contested hearing. He would talk to Böhm this afternoon, have him make the necessary arrangements. In Berlin there were plenty of women who would pretend to have fucked you for a fee.

  He would pay for his principles, of course. Only guilty husbands paid alimony. And while a part of him raged against financing any more of Luisa’s extravagances—for the bourgeois daughter of a money-doesn’t-grow-on-trees bank manager, she had always displayed a staggeringly can-do attitude to prodigality—a larger part was glad. An honourable man paid for his mistakes. He took his punishment, however harsh. There was a kind of purification in it, a humility that was almost grace. And it was not as if he did not have the money. The van Gogh book had proved a runaway bestseller, not only in Germany but in France and Britain too. America beckoned. The royalties would have left him comfortably off even without the recent collapse in the value of the mark. With exchange rates as they were he could afford to be generous. Besides, there was the child to think of. People would gossip, they alwa
ys did, but he would not have anyone say he had mistreated the mother of his son.

  In Berlin the rain was falling steadily. It was the busiest hour of the morning. People jostled and pushed on the pavements, umbrellas raised like shields as the trams clattered past and the omnibuses sent up arcs of dirty water. It was nine thirty when the taxicab finally pulled up outside the villa on Meierstrasse. Julius paused on the pavement, gazing up at the house’s elegant façade. It was a long time, he thought, since he had looked forward to coming home.

  A red-faced Frau Lang greeted him at the door. She did not meet his eye as she took his coat and hat. His breakfast, she said, was already in the dining room, it would be getting cold. She made it sound like it was his fault. When he said he was not hungry, that all he really wanted was a bath, she hardly seemed to hear him. She scowled at the floor, her fingers working the sleeve of his coat into pleats.

  And some coffee,’ he added. ‘The swill they served on the train was undrinkable.’

  Still Frau Lang did not move. Julius felt a twinge of irritation. He could not think what had contrived to provoke her so early in the day. No doubt it was another trivial altercation with the nursemaid. The two of them were as territorial as bears.

  ‘The bath, if you please,’ he said crisply. ‘Or do I have to draw it myself?’

  The housekeeper’s face crumpled. For a terrible moment Julius thought she might cry. Then, bundling his coat against her bosom, she scuttled away towards the stairs. Julius sighed. Frau Lang had come to work for them when he and Luisa were married, Luisa had insisted on it. She told Julius that Frau Lang had worked devotedly for her parents for years, that they would never have survived the war without her. Had Julius known his parents-in-law then, he would not have been so quick to count that in her favour.

  Wearily he rubbed his forehead. The smell of trains clung to his clothes and his eyes ached. From the morning room he could hear the muffled tap-tap of the typewriter. He would ask Fräulein Grüber to telephone the lawyers and make an appointment with Böhm. There was nothing to be gained from putting it off. Above him, in the arch made by the twin staircases, the Vuillard panel gleamed, a riot of sunlight and pink roses. He tilted back his head, breathing in the sweetness of it, the play of colour and texture that was at once as simple and as complex as nature itself. Then, crossing the hall to the morning room, he opened the door.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. The typist started, her hands flying up from the keys to cover her mouth.

  ‘Herr Köhler-Schultz, you’re back,’ she said. Her voice was bright, artificial. ‘Did you have—I mean, ah—is there anything you need?’

  ‘I need to change. Half an hour, then we’ll go through the letters. I assume there’s nothing urgent?’

  Fräulein Grüber bit her lip. ‘I didn’t know—your appointment this morning with Herr Rachmann—’

  The dealer from Düsseldorf. Julius had forgotten all about him. ‘That’s today?’

  ‘Half past ten. I’m so sorry, I would have cancelled him, but he didn’t leave an address in Berlin and I wasn’t sure—that is, if you’d rather not see him—in the circumstances, I mean—I can ask him to come back another day. If that’s what you’d prefer.’

  Julius hesitated, half tempted to agree. The last thing he wanted was some insolent young Turk from the provinces sprawling in his study with his hands in his pockets, drawlingly addressing him with the familiar du.

  ‘The boy has verve,’ Salazin had said with a shrug. ‘Perhaps he’ll bring you something marvellous. And if he doesn’t, well, it’s an authentication, not an adoption. At worst he’ll remind you how blessed it is no longer to be young.’ Hugo Salazin, who at sixty still had the instincts of a pickpocket and the smile of a Prussian sphinx. No wonder his gallery was one of the most successful in Berlin. With a sigh, Julius shook his head.

  ‘No, I’ll see him,’ he said. ‘Dealers are like cockroaches. If you don’t get rid of them immediately, they multiply.’

  The typist laughed politely, showing her teeth. When the telephone rang Julius gestured for her to answer it and went upstairs. There was little danger of running into Luisa this early in the morning, it would be hours before she deigned to surface, but all the same he steeled himself a little as he crossed the galleried landing. His rooms were on the east side of the house, hers on the west. Reflexively, uneasily, as he passed it he glanced down the wide passage towards her door. To his surprise it stood open. A wedge of pale light gleamed on the parquet.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he walked along the passage and looked in. Usually Luisa abandoned her bedroom in a chaos of discarded clothes and magazines and torn-open letters, a tray of half-finished tea and toast congealing among the bedclothes. This morning the bed was neatly made, the table in the window bare but for a bowl of flowers. There was a sudden hurried scuffle of footsteps on the landing.

  ‘Frau Lang?’ Julius said, turning, and like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car she froze. ‘Where is my wife?’

  The air went out of her. She subsided on to the stairs, one hand clutching at the banister.

  ‘She went,’ she said. Something choked her throat, she could hardly get out the words. There had been no warning, Frau Lang would not even have seen them go, Wednesday was her afternoon off, only she came back early and there they were, the mistress and the nursemaid under umbrellas on the pavement outside the house and the baby swaddled in blankets and screaming fit to bust as the cab driver tried to cram the heaped-up luggage into the boot of the car. So much luggage, Frau Lang said, she could not think who had packed it or how they would manage. When the mistress saw her she pushed the nursemaid into the taxi. They had to hurry, she said to Frau Lang through the window, they were late for their train. She did not say where they were going, only something about her parents and having the rest of their things sent on. Frau Lang had supposed it was an emergency. She could still hear the baby screaming as they drove away.

  ‘This was yesterday?’

  The housekeeper nodded unhappily. She did not look at him.

  ‘And did she say when she’d be back?’

  There was a long silence. ‘She left a letter,’ she said at last. ‘In your study.’

  Julius went downstairs. His chest was tight, cramped with foreboding. Luisa would not have taken the baby, not if she meant to come back. His study looked just as he had left it, the books on his desk neatly ordered, a fire blazing in the grate. Taking the room in four strides he flipped through the sheaf of letters on his blotter, discarding them like playing cards. Nothing from Luisa. He turned to the mantelpiece, pushing aside the Rosso head. Nothing there either. Nothing but an unnatural blankness in the corner of his eye. A coldness came over him, the blood shrinking from his limbs. It was not possible. It could not be possible. Dizzily he turned.

  It was gone. Julius stared at the blank wall, the grey line where the frame had marked the paint. At the envelope impaled on the empty nail. His skull was full of noise, a shrill hissing nothingness like an untuned wireless. He stumbled forward, his hand searching the wall as though he might still find it there. As though the absence was nothing but a trick of the light. The wall was cold. Blindly he grabbed the letter, ripping it from the nail. It was nothing. A mistake. A prank to frighten him. His face was stiff, someone else’s face. His fingers too. He could hardly tear open the envelope.

  A scrawl. Something about his deficiencies, her boredom and unhappiness. A gap. And then.

  Of course I couldn’t leave without my Vincent. Just having him with me makes me feel safer, protected somehow. What a comfort it is already to look at him and think of you.

  The anger was like pain, so complete he could hardly feel it. With a howl he hurled himself against the bare wall, smashing it with his fists. There was a fire in his chest, in his skull, smoke-thick and acrid. He could not breathe for the choke of it. The empty nail caught the side of his palm, the sharp metal slicing the skin. He closed his hand around it, jerking and twisting at it as tho
ugh he would wrench it from the wall. Blood bloomed, ran down his wrist. He closed his eyes but her voice wormed into his ear, over and over like a gramophone record with the needle stuck.

  ‘He gives me the creeps. Those piggy eyes ogling us when we make love, and where’s his other hand anyway? I mean it. It’s disgusting.’

  And he had laughed. She did not mean it, she could not mean it, she was teasing him. She was young, he would teach her. How had he not seen that she was unteachable? It’s disgusting. The painting that for thirty years had turned over his heart.

  There was blood on the wall. A smear of red and a faint grey line. An empty nail. The air blue somehow, as though the painting had left behind its stain. My Vincent. A fresh fury burst like a shell inside him, knocking the air from his lungs. Wheeling round, he kicked out at the low stool behind him, upending it with a crash. There was a lamp beside the armchair, a pile of books. He flung the lamp against the wall, then the books, handfuls of them, as hard as he could, but the rage kept exploding and exploding, thundering in his ears, so he turned to the bookshelves, tearing the books out by their spines, hurling them to the floor. His arms moved violently, mechanically, like pistons. Wildly he turned towards the mantelpiece. The Rosso head gazed at him, her blank eyes impassive.

  ‘She looks like me,’ Luisa had said once. He had not seen it then. He saw it now. Her faint smile was full of mockery. He had never hated someone so absolutely. Snatching up the head, he hurled her at the window. The glass smashed.

  ‘Ohhh.’

  It was not so much a word as a catch of breath. Julius turned, his hands held up in front of him. Fräulein Grüber stood in the doorway. There was a young man with her. He was slender, fineboned, with pale skin and coppery hair. Under one arm he carried a painting wrapped in brown paper. For a dazzling, impossible moment Julius thought it was his van Gogh, that she had sent it back. The young man looked at the broken window, at the lamp and the books, splayed and broken on the floor.