by Karen Swan
‘Yes, but nothing at all – in seventy-three years? Come on.’
Angus shrugged.
‘If nothing else, you’d imagine there must have been plumbing leaks from neighbours – or what about needing to read electricity meters? Or calculate rates?’
Angus paused and considered this. ‘I doubt it has any electricity. If it was abandoned in the war and no one ever sought to get it reconnected, the electricity board is hardly going to go looking for it.’
‘And the rates?’ she persisted stubbornly.
Angus looked back at her, bemused. ‘Well, the apartment clearly hasn’t been extended or altered in that time so I guess everything would have just gradually gone up with inflation. Lilian said it had all been set up by her father-in-law for the payments to be paid quarterly via the notary.’
‘But they said nothing to the family all that time? It’s weird!’
‘No. They were just doing their duty,’ Angus shrugged. ‘They’re not paid to pass comment.’
Flora looked back out of the window. They had crossed the river, and the wide boulevards and bountiful banks of flowers planted in strict formations along the Jardins des Tuileries had been replaced by labyrinthine streets that looped and twisted back on themselves, modest fountains or stand-alone trees populating tiny, dusty squares, metal grilles pushed back against shop walls. The roads narrowed to become one-way only and racks of bikes and scooters littered the kerbs.
She looked on with interest and a foreigner’s eyes. The properties here now commanded handsome prices but the area had only become really fashionable from the 1950s onwards; and for all its bohemian charm, the 14th was a far cry from the opulence of the Napoleonic Haussmann boulevards and town houses in the 16th district where the family now lived.
Their circumstances had clearly changed for the better in the intervening years, she thought as the car drew up outside a building where the render had long since been blackened. A cascade of decorative Juliet balconies scaled the wall, one at every window, but only a couple boasted tended window boxes on them and the paint on the bottle-green main door was dull and split.
Even as she looked up from the street, she could see that the dust on some of the windows was as thick as a net curtain. Flora glanced around at the neighbouring properties as she climbed out – at the bike on one balcony, washing on a collapsible airer on another – those apartments across the street only six metres away and the inhabitants surely able to peer in. Had they really never been curious about the complete absence of life in those rooms? Never questioned the eerie stillness, quietness, darkness that shrouded the apartment at all times?
Angus, eager to reassure himself against Madame Vermeil’s worry that their trip had been wasted, thrust the key into the communal door lock and bounded up the stairs two at a time, Flora’s footsteps a light staccato on the wooden treads behind him. They stopped on the fourth floor outside Apartment 8, the bronze figure on the door dull with age and neglect. Flora bit her lip, suddenly apprehensive. It felt odd to be standing on the threshold of a shuttered apartment that wasn’t theirs, to be the first people through and the family themselves denied.
Angus swore quietly under his breath as the key refused to move in the rusted lock; it took two hands to force it to turn and then his shoulder to the door to push back against the hip-height pile of fliers and post that had accumulated behind it. He squeezed in, telling Flora to wait until he could clear it out of the way and open the door, unimpeded.
A minute, several, dragged past. What was he doing in there?
‘Angus? Is everything OK?’ she called, pushing her face through the gap.
When finally he opened the door a moment later, his cheeks were florid with high excitement. ‘Sorry, I . . . Well, you’ll see. Come in.’ He opened the door wider and darkness spilled out like a cloud of bats. Flora stared into the gloom, Angus’s sharp-suited silhouette already retreating from her and disappearing into the shadows. ‘I’ll just check everything’s clear,’ he called over his shoulder like some TV cop.
She stood rooted to the spot. It was as though the packers had already arrived – pictures were stacked in rows on the floor, twelve, eighteen deep; leather-bound books piled high in leaning towers, and that was just in the hall. She followed Angus, stepping carefully around the collapsed mountain of post, her fingers tripping over the stacked paintings as she wove slowly past – was that a Matisse? – all the while coughing lightly as the stale air sank in her lungs, eyes automatically scouring for treasure: she saw a Napoleon convex mirror, round and topped with eagle motifs. Several hundred euros maybe. Nice but no cigar.
She did a quick estimate – there must be fifty, eighty, paintings in the hallway alone.
A door to the right was already open. Angus must have glanced in; from the sound of his footsteps on the stripped floors, he was tearing through the apartment for a quick look-see before settling in for a more detailed survey.
She peered in, aware of a powdery odour – more books, piles of them, some on the floor, the red and green cloth covers faded to mere tints, the corners fraying and pulling back like shed skin. Swagged curtains in burgundy silk hung as limp as broken bones, the rail coming away from the wall in one corner so that light escaped around the side; papers scattered across a desk.
She looked around the room, trying to see what wasn’t there – her eyes searching for lighter stains on the walls where paintings which might once have hung had now been removed, their absence delineated and marked out. But there was nothing amiss. Shelves laden with books entirely covered two of the walls, the windows a third, and the fourth wall was decorated with an Empire-print wallpaper that had begun to peel in the top corners. A couple of small watercolours of agricultural scenes hung on wire from the picture rails.
She heard the sound of something being scraped across the floors further along; Angus was clearly investigating. She quickly took a few snaps on her phone camera and walked out of the room, back into the hall.
A door in the wall revealed a small cloakroom – there were coats hanging on a rack, some shoes on the floor, and a black fedora on a shelf, the dimple of the finger-pinch almost white with dust. She reached out to touch the sleeve of an opera coat – crushed rose-pink velvet and bordered with a gold brocade; beside it, a woman’s brown tweed belted coat with leather buttons; beside that, a man’s dark grey Crombie coat, one single black hair on the collar.
She walked on, stopping in the doorway of the kitchen. Copper pans, long since oxidized to green, sat nesting one inside the other on a shelf; tea towels, stained and limp, hung from the rail of a grey gas stove with an enamel splashback; a rubber hot-water bottle dangled from a hook, its pleated gills cracked with age. A dainty gold-rimmed tea service with hand-painted burgundy-and-black roses was arranged neatly on a wooden dresser, one teacup missing and a large chip on the side of the milk jug. The handle of a mesh sieve was pushed behind, and held in place by, a copper pipe that ran down the wall; a wooden clothes airer was strung up to the ceiling on blackened rope; there was a well-worn butcher’s block still faintly stained; and a coal scuttle stood half full by a boiler, a misting of coal dust on the wall beside it.
Flora opened the narrow door in the darkest corner of the room, opposite the tall window that faced onto a patch of concrete and the back of the building behind, her eyes watering at the release of the sharp odour trapped within. The larder: she scanned rows of Kilner jars of pickled fruit and vegetables, a thick scummy skin of mould furring the tops of the liquid; a dish of lard; white enamel jars with Sucre and Farine written on them in red; tins of condensed milk; sachets of what she thought were powdered eggs . . . She closed the door again, the odour beginning to catch in the back of her throat.
She walked back out to the hall and towards the large room opposite, stopping in the doorway as she surveyed it in wonder. It was a tableau from another time – grey velvet curtains and pelmets dressed the windows, the walls were lined with duck-egg flocked wallpaper, an ela
borate marble fireplace was topped with an ornate gilded mirror which was as stippled with age spots as an old man’s hand. But it was the stuffed ostrich Flora couldn’t help staring at – it was seven feet tall on spindled legs, and its glassy eyes and open beak gave the impression it was laughing, as though amused by the ivory satin bed-jacket draped insouciantly over its feathered back. Her eyes wandered obediently, professionally, to the finer details of the room: the crystal chandelier, blackamoor lamps, gold candlesticks, Aubusson rug, but it was the ostrich to which they kept returning – it invested the room with whimsy and glamour, bringing to her ear the sounds of long-faded laughter and conversation, the tinkle of crystal and jewels, the crackle of a fire and the sinuous sliding of silk. She could feel the lives that had once pulsed here, the social gaiety that must have been enjoyed in this very room before the horrors of war and then the enduring silence afterwards. She walked over and reached out a hand to touch the bird’s plumage—
‘Flora!’ Angus’s voice was muffled but she caught the tone of it, the slice of excitement. ‘In here.’
‘Coming.’ Her hand dropped down and she crossed the hall into the dining room, a carmine-red salon with twelve chairs pushed around a large rectangular table and dressed with a jacquard cloth. The tabletop was strewn with scattered objets and ornaments – a pair of china swans, Lalique crystal figurines, burnished silverware, balloon decanters . . . Angus was waiting for her, his feet hidden from view by the sheer number of boxes on the floor, and holding in his arms a large framed portrait of a young girl.
‘Stream of consciousness, tell me what you think. What do you see?’
Flora frowned in concentration, taking in the rose tint on the girl’s cheeks, the paleness of her grey eyes, the high sash of her silk dress and the precise undulations of her bonnet. She saw the formal pose – the girl’s body turned slightly away, a closed parasol in her hand – and the stately manse in the background, horses nosing the grass, with softly whipped, sun-tinted clouds in the summer sky, hints of cadmium yellow. ‘It looks like Faucheux to me,’ she said with a breath of amazement.
‘Exactly.’
Faucheux had not been a prolific artist, dying of syphilis when he was only twenty-five, but he had already painted for some of France’s noblest families by the time of his death in 1811 and almost all his works were held in private collections.
‘God, when was the last time a Faucheux came onto the open market?’ she mused as Angus turned the painting around and propped it on a chair by the wall so that they could both look at it. ‘It was the fifties, wasn’t it?’
‘Something like that. I do know for a fact only two others have been sold since the artist’s death.’
Flora felt a spike of excitement. The painting was a good size, handsome, and the rarity factor meant there would be significant buzz around it. ‘What do you think for the reserve?’
Angus tapped his chin, eyes screwed tight. ‘Two hundred and fifty?’
She nodded. ‘I agree. I can think of four buyers off the bat who’d be interested.’
‘And I’ve got some contacts in the States who I know would sit up and beg for this.’
Flora felt her breath quicken. She looked around the room. Even apart from the pieces littering the table, there must be another five dozen paintings stacked in piles against the walls. The sheer volume of art and artefacts was staggering. There was far more, surely, than could ever have been hung on the walls here; the apartment was not grand or built on the lofty scale of the Haussmann town houses. What were they all doing here?
‘What else have you found?’ she asked, wandering over to the nearest lot and beginning to flick through them.
‘A lot of modernism, actually,’ Angus said, watching as she held up an accomplished pastel of a river view. ‘I’ve found a few Picasso sketches, a couple of Cézannes, Matisse, Dalí . . . Nothing standout or important but signed, nonetheless.’
‘Gosh,’ she murmured, remembering the Canaletto in Madame Vermeil’s drawing room. ‘Think we’ll get much for the ostrich?’ she smiled, crouching on her slim haunches and flicking carefully through the next batch of paintings.
He chuckled. ‘Unbelievable, isn’t it?’ he murmured, picking through the contents of a different box. ‘Another world.’
She scanned the batch carefully before sighing and folding her arms over her knees. ‘Anywhere else to check?’
‘Just the bedroom back there. I haven’t looked in yet. Didn’t make it past this bounty. Be my guest.’
Flora slipped from the room and into the bedroom. Like the drawing room, it stood as a memorial to a bygone age; there were no paintings stacked along the walls in here or sculptures on the bed. It was the colour of coral and champagne, with a rosewood dressing table and stool, a mahogany wardrobe and a small (by today’s standards) double bed.
Again, Flora cast a critical eye over the room like a detective at a crime scene. What could she tell from it? That Monsieur Vermeil’s mother had had long dark hair according to the hairbrush set on the dressing table, walked in a cloud of perfume thanks to the cut-crystal spray bottle beside it, and set her face with a swansdown puff. She had been a woman of some means – if not quite the extravagant wealth they enjoyed now – and if the silver brocade gown still draped on a mannequin was anything to go by, a woman of fashion too.
On the floor were her shoes – some feathered, others robed in velvet and satin – and a large crocodile-skin trunk was pushed against the wall. Flora lifted the half-closed lid, jumping back, startled, as a moth fluttered out, its crêpe wings stretching in the new space.
The windows rattled lightly in the breeze, the iron hook-lock only just doing its job. Flora walked over and, after a brief struggle, released the catch. The air inside the entire apartment was stuffy and stale, and she was beginning to feel cloistered, overwhelmed somehow. She closed her eyes with relief as the fresh day blew in.
Leaning on the pretty balcony, she looked out. In the apartment opposite, one floor down, a girl in her twenties was lying on a bed in just her underwear, headphones on and her foot tapping as she watched something on her iPad. She was oblivious to Flora’s stare, just as she’d been oblivious to this treasure trove staring her in the face. On the street below, a small van was trying to get past a guy on a moped who was talking on his mobile; a couple of women with ripped jeans and white sneakers swung their bags as they headed for the river.
Flora turned back into the room, astonished by the difference in light quality now that everything wasn’t filtered through a gauze of dust, and in the fraction of the moment it took to raise her head, she caught something of the original lustre of the coral curtains, the satin thread on the champagne counterpane glistening like a fish slipping through the water.
There was something else too, barely visible – it could almost have been confused for a trick of the light – a thin slip of white peeping out from the mattress, like a pocket handkerchief in a gentleman’s jacket. She walked over and, lifting the mattress just enough to release the weight, pulled free a letter.
Flora felt her curiosity swell, and then her disappointment as she saw it was written in German. Her knowledge of that began and ended with the basic manners of Danke and Guten Tag. She could only make out that the name signed at the end matched the one typeset in grey ink at the top – Birgita Bergurren – and that it had been written on 14 October 1940. The paper had darkened with age to a nicotine tint and there were a few faint coil shapes of rust which must have come from the bed springs. It was so old and so delicate, it was a wonder the letter had survived this long, especially given its precarious hiding place.
Flora looked back under the mattress, checking for other letters or perhaps the envelope to say where it had come from, but there was nothing. She stared again at the paper – it was crinkled, as though it had been crushed in a fist before being smoothed open again. Was that simply the effect of being hidden under a mattress on which people had slept and turned and made love? Or perhaps
something in the letter had upset the reader? A lover’s quarrel?
Why had it been hidden there?
She had to know, not least because it might contain some vital information for the family. If it was important enough to hide, then it must be important, full stop. She folded the letter and slipped it carefully into her pocket. Angus would know someone who could translate it for them.
She straightened the mattress, just as – further down the hall – she heard him dragging something across the floor. ‘Flora!’ he called. ‘I need a hand!’
‘Coming,’ she replied, noticing how her footsteps in the dust traced her path round the room like a deer’s in the snow.
Angus was standing beside a painting he’d propped up on a chair, one hand on his hip, the other on the frame. It was large, but more than that – arrestingly beautiful, showing a woman sitting on a garden bench in a long, vibrant yellow dress, her dark hair caught in swags, her face in profile as a parasol kept her in the shade. Indistinct blooms in lilac and rose clustered behind and a navy ribbon clasped her throat.
Flora stopped in her tracks as she absorbed the deftness of touch with the sable brush, the interplay of shadow and light, the exquisite mastery of texture and form. It was a masterpiece, of that there was no doubt, and she didn’t need to read the name in the bottom right to know who had rendered it.
‘Go on, say it,’ Angus beamed, looking as pleased as punch, closing his eyes. ‘I want to hear those words said out loud.’
Flora crossed her arms and smiled at him. Always so dramatic. ‘Why, Angus,’ she exclaimed wryly, playing along, excited herself. That overdraft was about to be paid off. ‘You appear to be holding a Renoir.’