by Jane Renshaw
‘To Scotland.’
Frieda nodded. ‘Jess discovered from Perdita that Max’s art collection was to go to Drumdargie Castle for safekeeping. She managed to secure an invitation to their engagement party, an invitation to stay at Aucharblet for several days. We thought – oh, I don’t know what we thought. That we might somehow gain access to the castle, to find the painting hanging in plain sight.’ She looked at Claire. ‘I’m not sure if I should tell you this next part.’
Claire smiled. ‘I don’t think you have to. I’m assuming Perdita let slip something about Hector, and Jess approached him, that night at Aucharblet?’
‘Almost right. The approach was made some time beforehand. The confab in Hector’s room was merely to finalise some details.’
Claire didn’t know how to ask this, but she had to know, so she just came out with it. ‘Did money change hands?’
‘Oh no. Apparently, in such cases, the commission is paid by the donor, not the recipient, as Hector put it. I did not enquire further.’
Claire breathed out. She assumed that Hector must have pocketed something while retrieving the painting – or had intended doing so, before finding Weber’s body.
‘But how on earth did you find out about this, Grannie?’
‘Oh well, I didn’t find out about it as much as put together a theory, after meeting Hector in the hospital and getting a sense of the cut of his jib – and putting that together with what you’d told me.’
What man art thou?
Claire blinked. ‘What do you mean, what I told you?’
‘About the painting Hector took, and about Frieda and Jess at Drumdargie Castle –’
‘Casing the joint,’ interjected Frieda.
Grannie nodded. ‘And Hector’s late-night assignation with Jess. And Hector saying he couldn’t tell you what they were talking about... I realised that Frieda and Jess must be his... customers? Would that be the term?’
Frieda laughed. ‘That day we first met at Drumdargie Castle, Claire, I was looking for our painting. A vain hope, of course, that it would be on open display. But Hector reassured Jess that he thought he knew where it would be.’
‘In the secret room.’ Which was no longer secret. ‘I guess a lot of other looted art might be returned to its rightful owners now.’ Claire looked back at the painting. ‘It really is lovely. Your mother... She’s not really smiling, but you can tell she’s happy.’
Frieda nodded. ‘My father and mother both belonged to rich German-Jewish families. My mother’s family did not approve of him – he’d been married before, and divorced. They wouldn’t let the two of them meet, but she defied them and they met in secret, and in secret she married him. Her family, who loved her very much, eventually relented. But this, I think, is the apartment of a friend of hers in which they used to meet.’
She got up, and walked to the painting, and pointed to a slice of room visible behind her mother, across the hall. ‘You see this open door; this glimpse of disordered sheets?’ Her long fingers moved across the canvas, touching the actual paint as she’d never have been allowed to do in an art gallery. ‘The homburg hat on the sideboard?’
‘Your father’s hat,’ said Grannie.
‘Yes. He wanted this painted just so. And the title was also his choice. The Time and the Place – from the Robert Browning poem Never the Time and the Place. They both enjoyed poetry, my father always told me.’ She went to one of the bedside cabinets and took a slim book from one of the drawers, which she handed to Claire.
It fell open at the page to which Frieda evidently habitually turned.
Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path – how soft to pace!
This May – what magic weather!
Where is the loved one’s face?
In a dream that loved one’s face meets mine,
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man!
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Thro’ the magic of May to herself indeed!
Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers: we
Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she –
I and she!
Claire’s vision blurred.
‘Only he and she, you see, would know, when looking at the painting, that this was the apartment in which they made love, before they were married, when the whole world was against them.’ Frieda smiled. ‘My father did not tell me this, of course, until I was old enough to understand. But he described the painting to me, again and again, from when I was a tiny child. He tried to paint it himself. He even commissioned an artist to attempt to replicate it, to his direction. But my father did not have the eye, as he said himself. The eye for visual detail. He gave up the attempt, in the end.’
‘Did your family all escape?’ said Claire.
‘Only my father and I. Mercifully, I don’t remember any of it – I was only two years old. But my father told me, of course, what happened. One day soldiers came to the apartment in which we lived, he and my mother and I, and told us we had to leave at once. Our apartment and belongings were being requisitioned. They were allowed to pack a bag each, and my father put the painting in his. We went to my mother’s family, to the apartment of my grandparents. One day, my father took me to the park in the afternoon. When we returned to the building, a neighbour intercepted him and told him that there were soldiers in the apartment, and that my mother and grandparents had been taken.’
For a long moment, none of them spoke.
Then: ‘To a concentration camp?’ said Grannie.
‘Ultimately, yes. I can only imagine the terrible dilemma my father faced, in that moment. Did he try to find them, to rescue my mother, somehow? Or did he take me to safety?’
‘But it would have been hopeless, to try to rescue her.’
Frieda took the slim book of poems from Claire and ran her fingers along the edges of the pages. ‘Yes, of course, and he knew it. We escaped on a train to France and then to Portugal, where we boarded a ship to this country. All his life he was consumed, I think, by guilt. He had abandoned his love, he felt, to her fate.’
‘But that’s –’ Claire could only shake her head.
‘It’s unimaginable, what was done then, I think. For me too. I have no memory of it. No memory of my mother, of what she looked like, and of course we had no belongings, no photographs. There is much debate among Jewish scholars as to the existence of an afterlife, but when I was a girl I used to hope that there was none, no Olam Ha-Ba, or at least that I would not go there, because I could not bear the thought that I would not be able to find my mother. I might walk right past her and never know. And she would no longer know me, having last seen me as a two-year-old baby. But my father, when I tearfully told him of my fear – he said, ‘Do not worry, Liebling. Do you think that I would let you walk past one another?’
For a long time, no one spoke. Frieda stood and Claire and Grannie sat, and they looked at Frieda’s mother, standing there, happy and loved, in that long ago summer in Berlin.
‘Do you believe in all that, in a God, despite everything?’ said Grannie at last.
‘Perhaps not,’ admitted Frieda. ‘But it is enough of a miracle for this world, I think, that my mother’s face has come back to me, at my great age.’ She nodded. ‘And not only her face. Her being is here, I think. The artist has captured something of her. Something...’
After another long silence:
‘But aren’t you angry?’ said Grannie, sounding angry hers
elf. ‘All these years your painting has spent with those awful people, when all the time it should have been with you.’
‘How could you bear to be in the same room as Max Weber?’ Claire added.
Frieda lifted her shoulders. ‘He wasn’t responsible for the sins of his grandfather.’
‘But he should have returned the looted things!’
‘Oh yes, he was a terrible man,’ said Frieda calmly. ‘And I won’t pretend that I wasn’t glad to hear that he was dead. It is some compensation, although I shouldn’t say it, that he died, and violently, in my mother’s presence. Perhaps the last face he saw was that of my mother, looking down on him.’ A little smile touched her lips. ‘I was glad. Yes, I was glad.’
As they left the room, Claire looked back at the woman in the painting, and it was as if Frieda’s mother was looking back at her, challenging her, with that slightly lifted chin.
Out in the street, Claire and Grannie started walking, without an aim in mind. The decorative Victorian-style streetlamps were coming on, glowing orange orbs in the rapidly falling twilight that streaked the sky with purple. A blackbird flew across the pavement in front of them, chattering.
‘How strange,’ said Grannie, ‘to come face to face, as an old woman, with the mother you don’t remember – and her still a young girl.’
‘But kind of wonderful,’ said Claire. And then: ‘How did you find Frieda?’
‘I’m not a complete Luddite.’ Grannie was smug. ‘I Goggled her.’
In a little, Claire said, ‘You would never think that inside one of these houses, on this peaceful street, lives a woman the Nazis wanted to kill when she was two years old.’
Grannie shook her head. ‘The storms and strangers.’
Claire shook hers. ‘I know what you’re doing.’
Grannie lifted innocent eyebrows.
‘It wouldn’t have had nearly the same impact,’ Claire went on, ‘if you’d just told me the story of the painting. Much better that I heard it from Frieda.’
‘Oh, much.’
Claire plucked a tiny leaf from the evergreen hedge they were passing and pressed her thumbnail onto it. ‘DCI Stewart has sent me a link to a job advert.’
‘Oh no, Claire!’ Grannie stopped on the pavement and faced her. ‘No! I thought you were finished with all that. No more undercover work. You’ve paid your dues. It’s time you –’
‘It’s a job in regular CID.’ Claire threw the leaf away. ‘A new Detective Constable position is being created at Inverurie. Partly, it seems, in response to the debacle of the investigation into Chimp and Weber’s murders. They must be seen to be responding to the complaints that Inverurie CID is under-resourced and “failing”.’
‘And they want you, of course!’ From dismay to delight in ten seconds.
‘I think the DCI’s hoping it’ll be another way of getting a foot in the Pitfourie camp. At the hospital – I think he might have picked up some sort of... vibe, between me and Hector. If I went for this job and got it, he’d expect me to tell him all about what Hector might be up to. And Hector would try to weasel stuff out of me about police operations, whether we were just friends or – whatever.’
‘Oh, surely whatever.’
Claire laughed, but she felt like sobbing. ‘Excuse my language, Grannie, but when all’s said and done, he is a fucking criminal.’
Grannie laughed too, then sobered, and turned her face up to the gunmetal grey of the February sky. ‘The narrow house. But, you know, I think one could argue that we are all living in a narrow house, one way or another. It’s who’s inside it with you that matters.’
‘But that’s my point.’
What man art thou?
Was she really any closer to knowing?
‘Darling.’ Grannie took her good arm, and patted it. ‘I’ve never seen you like this about anyone before. You told him about Dawn, didn’t you?’
Claire gaped. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I know because I know you, Claire. You have a strong connection with this man. You can’t deny it.’
Claire wanted to scream. ‘Yes, we have a connection, but not in a good way! I was able to tell him about Dawn because I knew he was in no position to judge me!’
‘That was the reason, was it?’
Claire shook her head. ‘Oh, Grannie, I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
Grannie patted her arm again and they strolled together down Keats Grove and into a street with the picturesque name of Downshire Hill, full of grand three- and four-storey white mansions, again set well back from the street behind beautiful gardens. The kind of place she could imagine Nick and Jess White living. Perhaps they did.
‘If I was going to run with the narrow house analogy,’ said Claire, ‘I might say something about the house being so narrow I’d be squeezed till the pips squeaked.’
Grannie laughed. ‘Oh, very good!’
‘I hasten to add that I’m using “house” in the metaphorical sense, as I suppose it’s meant in the poem. I would never actually live with him. I wouldn’t even want to live on the Pitfourie Estate. I wouldn’t want to be his tenant.’
‘Of course not.’ Grannie smiled. ‘But there must be some houses to let in the general vicinity that don’t belong to Hector Forbes?’
Epilogue
The living room in the apartment on Johannes Verhulststraat had two windows overlooking the street, at which Phil liked to sit with his morning coffee and watch the world go by. Not that much of it came here. The street was quiet, pedestrian-friendly, cobbled in a herringbone pattern reminiscent of a lockblock driveway. In the shade of the tall thin plane trees, cars were parked on either side of the street, end-on to the pavements. Opposite him was a wall of windows and doors and balconies four storeys high. Some of the balconies were made of wood, held up by angled struts that looked worryingly unequal to the task.
It was quiet, but it was the Museum Quarter, so you did get the occasional gaggle of tourists wandering by. Often there were teenage girls, and if he had the window open he could hear them, whining and chattering and laughing.
And yes it was a chance in a million, a billion, but Laura’s school did organise an incredible number of trips abroad. It was just possible that one day he would see her galumphing by in that long-legged coltish way of hers.
But then he doubted that Jennifer could afford to keep Laura at St George’s now. She was probably attending the local comprehensive.
He set his cup down on its saucer.
‘Want one of these, love?’ said Elaine, sitting down on the sofa with her cup of tea and a plate of homemade vegan flapjacks.
He shook his head.
Jennifer would have berated him for this small rudeness – I think you mean ‘No thank you, darling’ – but Elaine didn’t react. She settled herself with her book and started to munch. She missed being Gwennie, he knew. She missed the farm and the animals, if not the people. Elaine wasn’t a people person – that part of Gwennie had been a complete fabrication, a performance she had struggled to maintain. But the animals – God, she missed those animals! And part of her coping strategy was to stuff her face. She’d put on half a stone in less than a month holed up here.
On one of the balconies, a young woman was watering her plants. She looked nothing like Claire, but every time she appeared, for some reason he thought of her.
How did we get here? Elaine kept saying, as if he could tell her anything she didn’t know. As if there was anything he could do about it. But every time he saw that young woman on her balcony, he thought about Claire and what he had done to her. Not just the physical injury, but the damage he had inflicted by trading on her insecurities, exacerbating them, even, to ensure she wouldn’t have the confidence to take unilateral action but would always come to him first.
Or so he’d gambled.
But he hadn’t bargained on her falling for that bastard.
He’d considered contacting her, telling her the truth about what had happened. Not t
hat the truth would go any way towards excusing his own actions, really, but at least it would be some sort of... reparation, he supposed.
But Claire was back in London, so what purpose would it serve, to put himself at further peril by telling her what she no longer needed to know? What would be the point? She was well out of it. Safely away from the place.
Had he half hoped that she would suss out what was really going on, not so far beneath the surface of that rural idyll, and take action accordingly? If anyone was equipped to tackle it head on, no matter the personal cost, no matter the collateral damage, it was Claire Castleford.
But she had not discovered what was really going on.
And now she was five hundred miles away from Pitfourie.
One person he no longer had to worry about, surely, was Claire Castleford.
Glossary
’at that
aa all
aathing everything
aboot about
ae one
aff off
affa awfully
afore before
ain own
al’ old
an’ a’ as well
awa’ away
aye yes or always
ayeways always
bide stay
bittie bit (of)
bizzum hussy, naughty girl
blaikit baffled
bonnie pretty
brak break
breeks trousers