The Paris Secret

by Karen Swan

  A polite cough made her turn. Jacques Vermeil was standing by the door.

  ‘Pardon, I did not wish to disturb you.’

  She rose to standing. ‘Oh, no. It’s quite all right.’

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  ‘Please do,’ she smiled, motioning towards the artworks arranged around the room.

  Jacques walked in, a polite but hesitant smile on his face as he scanned the multitudes of paintings that now stretched up to the ceiling and over every wall. ‘Good grief. There are . . . so many.’

  ‘Yes,’ Flora replied, feeling uncomfortable. They both understood the subtext to his words. So many paintings, so many families . . .

  ‘It shouldn’t be a surprise. You gave that presentation the day after we unlocked the door. You flicked through all the pictures with us and yet . . .’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘To actually see them all. Here. It feels more. It feels worse.’

  ‘Monsieur Vermeil—’

  He turned round to her. ‘Jacques, please. We have been through this . . . this ordeal together. We are friends now, are we not?’

  Flora gulped. Oh God. Like she wasn’t feeling guilty enough. ‘Jacques,’ she said quietly, trying to smile. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am. I wish we had never—’

  He shook his head, beginning to pace. ‘The truth had to come out some day.’ He nodded, stopping to look up at a fine Canet mountain scene, high on the opposite wall, his hands folded behind his back. ‘Who knows? Perhaps it will turn out to be for the best this way. I never saw a picture of my father before this weekend. Can you imagine?’

  She shook her head. She definitely couldn’t imagine that.

  ‘It goes without saying I wish he had not been what he . . . was. But, speaking as a child, wanting to know about his father . . . ?’ He shrugged. ‘My mother would shut down whenever I even raised his name. She said it was too painful for her to think of the past.’ He raised his eyebrows and shared with her a doubting look. ‘But my mother is still alive and she does not need to lie to me any more. There’s still time. I can finally ask my questions and learn the truth about my father from the person who knew him best.’

  Flora didn’t hold out much hope that it would be a happy story. Notwithstanding his links to the Third Reich, he’d been a poor husband too, she thought, thinking back to the letter she’d found – Jacques’ aunt’s advice that his mother stick with Franz, ignore his philanderings, have a child. Have Jacques.

  ‘Has she . . . has she said anything to you yet?’ Flora enquired, hesitant.

  He gave a bemused smile. ‘No. God, no. Not yet. My mother is a strong woman, Flora, but this has shaken her profoundly. I do not think she ever thought she would have to look me in the eye and tell me the truth about what my father was. She wanted me to be proud of him, to respect him.’ He fell silent for a minute, as though the effort of speaking was simply too much, his feet shuffling over the floor in tiny steps as he looked at the multitude of paintings that had been other people’s joys, had been stolen from them or sold under duress, the threat of the labour camps hanging above their heads like a swinging scythe.

  She watched him, saw how his eyes flitted over the paintings with evident pain.

  ‘I don’t doubt that everything she did, changing our name, breaking from my father and his past – she did it to protect me. She wanted there to be no darkness in my life, no shadows. I suppose that is the legacy of a war, is it not? The survivors reach for the light.’

  Flora thought of all the mirrors in the Paris town house – there was no hiding there. In that home, you had to look at yourself, from every angle.

  ‘And maybe she was right. Maybe it was better not knowing. If I could step back into last week and change events, I would. But I never dreamed this was what lay in my history. For all these years I wanted more – I wanted more knowledge, I wanted him. I resented my mother for not being him, for being there when he was not. I was her only child and she herself a grieving, young widow – she poured all her love and hopes into me and I, in turn, found her love for me a burden.’

  He looked at the floor.

  ‘I perhaps have not been the son she deserved. Not kind enough. Not here enough. I escaped to Paris at my first opportunity.’ He shrugged. ‘But I am here now and the truth is with us. It is here in this room.’ He held out his hands. ‘Every one of these paintings has a story, a history. And my father is the one that binds them all. He is the dark thread that links them together.’ He turned to face Flora. ‘So my mother will talk to me, she will answer my questions. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but one day soon I will learn the full truth and I will face it with the courage my father lacked.’

  ‘I want to help you in any way I can, Jacques.’

  He smiled, turning to face her square on. ‘Good. Because I have decided what to do. Will you join us for drinks in the study at seven o’clock this evening? I have asked my family to make sure they are all in. There is something important I would like to say.’

  ‘O-of course.’ Oh God, no. Not another family meeting . . . ‘Actually, I haven’t met your mother yet. I feel I should introduce myself. It’s strange being here in her house, not having met her.’

  ‘And you shall, this evening. My mother is not so steady on her legs any more. She spends most of her days in her bedroom now.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m pleased you will join us,’ he smiled, turning to leave. ‘But I should warn you, my mother is from a different generation, rather formal. We tend to dress up for dinner.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Right. No problem,’ she nodded. ‘Sh-should I wear anything in particular?’

  ‘With that face?’ he smiled, tapping the door frame with one hand. ‘Just a pretty dress.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Flora stood by the cottage door and stared up at the house, feeling weak with nerves. It looked almost more imposing in the dark, its vast shadow pooling over the lawn, the pin lights on the balconies at every window throwing up plumes of light like an opera stage set. She had heard the car doors slamming earlier as everyone had come home in staggered arrivals – Lilian first, her high voice carrying as she was greeted by two small pugs on the drive, then Xavier (she guessed) silent apart from his heavy tread on the gravel. Finally Natascha, on her phone and laughing as she almost fell from the car, lurching precariously across the gravel in heels.

  Flora had slipped away from the flower room, and the main house, at 6 p.m. when the ground floor had fallen silent, taking her opportunity to race barefoot across the lawn, back to the relative safety of the pool cottage when everyone was upstairs.

  But now, now she had to go back up there. She had to meet Magda, Jacques’ formidable mother – his word, even scarier in a French accent – and she had to endure Natascha’s stares, Xavier’s silences. It would be the first time she’d seen them since she’d put a bomb under their family’s history.

  With trepidation, she walked up the lawn, past the spotlit cypress and eucalyptus trees, her shoes in her hand again. All she had to do was listen to Jacques’ announcement, a drink in her hand, and then she could go again. She wasn’t staying for dinner. She could be back in the cottage in half an hour with any luck.

  She walked onto the terrace and through a set of open French doors which gave onto the wide hallway decked with marble statues. No one was around. Every door leading off it was shut and she had no idea which one was the kitchen, the drawing room, even the front door.

  Remembering that her shoes were still in her hand, she balanced herself against the door frame, and put them on. She was fiddling with the ankle strap when a door halfway down opened and Natascha walked out.

  Natascha didn’t notice her. She was walking in the opposite direction towards the stairs but Flora froze at the sight of her nonetheless, not least because Natascha was not in what anyone would call formal dress. In fact, she was wearing a white onesie.

  Flora looked down at her own outfit in horror – a black- and-white gi
ngham dress with a low, square neck and cinched waist. Alone it was just a sundress, but she had taken it up several notches by pairing it with her red suede heels and red lipstick for some old-school Bardot glamour. It wasn’t a grand look by any means but then she hadn’t packed for grand. She’d packed for work, and hopefully some downtime in the sun.

  She looked down the length of the lawn . . . She could still race back to the cottage and change again. There was still time. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt. She could blame the traffic. Ha!

  No.

  Oh God. What cou—?

  ‘Ah! Elle est ici, monsieur,’ Genevieve said, stepping out of the same room and catching sight of Flora frozen in the French doors. She smiled and beckoned for her to come forward.

  Flora listened to the sound of her own footsteps echoing on the black-and-white marble floor as she walked. Her entrance may as well have been announced with a trumpet fanfare. Naturally, everyone was looking straight at her as she rounded the door.

  Jacques was standing by a fireplace in a cream dinner jacket, Lilian and a tiny but very stout woman sitting opposite each other in blue silk occasional chairs, a small dog in the older woman’s lap, another at her feet. Both women were wearing tights and had had their hair done. Flora, with her bare legs and girlish gingham, felt almost beachy by comparison.

  Where was Xavier? Still upstairs? Her eyes searched for him but he was nowhere that she could see as she walked into the room under the fearsome appraisal of Magda Vermeil (or rather, Von Taschelt).

  ‘Flora, I would like you to meet my mother, Magda,’ Jacques said, walking forwards and pressing his cheek to hers, once on each side. Could he feel her trembling, she wondered?

  ‘Enchantée, madame,’ Flora said, having to resist the urge to curtsey. This woman might have been married to a Nazi – or at the very least, a Nazi sympathizer – but she had an air about her that was almost regal. Jacques had been right – formidable was the word. She was old but not weak, not diminished and Flora knew she was being intensely scrutinized.

  There was a sudden commotion behind her and Flora turned to see Natascha flouncing back in, wearing a Saint Laurent smoking and heels, no shirt underneath – little wonder she’d changed so quickly. She stopped dead at the sight of Flora, before pointedly looking over at her father. ‘Better?’

  ‘Barely,’ he murmured with a tut.

  It was then that Flora noticed Xavier standing at the back of the room. He was pouring himself a drink from a bar in the recess – no wonder she hadn’t seen him. He was dressed fairly similarly to his sister in a black dinner suit, although he had remembered his shirt, which a tiny voice in her head somewhere, treacherously, thought was a shame. He made no move to suggest he was aware of her presence, or if he was, that he much cared. She looked away again, her attention back on his sister.

  ‘Well, Granny, I see you’ve met Flora,’ Natascha said, managing to place a stress on Flora’s name that conveyed her feelings perfectly, as she sauntered into the room and perched on the arm of her grandmother’s chair.

  ‘We were just about to become acquainted,’ Magda replied, her small black eyes – like currants in a doughy face – never leaving Flora.

  ‘We are very fortunate to have someone of Flora’s calibre working on the collection for us,’ Lilian said, addressing her comment to Magda as though she was slightly deaf. ‘And Flora’s father was the chief auctioneer at Christie’s London – he brought the hammer down on the Sunflowers, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Flora smiled, grateful as Jacques placed a glass of champagne in her hand.

  ‘So art is your family business,’ Magda said in a chilly voice. ‘Like ours.’

  Flora stared at her, knowing what she was doing. Magda wanted Flora to call her out – to say no, her family were nothing like theirs. She wanted to see the judgement in Flora’s eyes, to finally encounter the contempt that she knew was her due.

  Instead Flora just smiled. Whatever Franz had done, Jacques wasn’t his father, that much was clear to her. He was a good man, a doctor.

  Jacques walked round to the fireplace again and picked up his tumbler that he’d left on the mantel. ‘I’m glad that we’re all here. I wanted to talk to you about what I’ve decided to do.’

  ‘About what, Papa?’ Natascha asked, lying back on the arm of the chair, her jacket gaping dangerously open.

  ‘Our next steps as a family.’

  ‘Then why’s she here?’ Natascha demanded, sitting bolt upright – jacket crisis immediately averted – and stabbing an accusing finger towards Flora, who in reply, took a step back.

  ‘Because Flora is central to my plans.’ Jacques replied calmly. ‘Won’t you sit down, Flora?’ he smiled, indicating the sofa opposite.

  Flora hesitantly took her seat, painfully aware that Xavier had now come further into the room and was standing right behind her, his drink in his hand.

  ‘It would be no exaggeration to say that these past few days have been the worst of my life,’ he began haltingly. ‘The shame I feel is like a weight pressing on my chest, crushing me. Crushing us all. Ever since we learned the terrible truth, I have asked myself repeatedly – how did we not know? How did I not suspect for all those years the darkness in our past? Is it who we are? You?’ He looked at his son. ‘You?’ He looked at his daughter. ‘It has made me sick to my stomach to see the way you have all been treated, as though it was you who signed those papers, or stood over those poor people with a gun in your hands.’ He closed his eyes, falling silent for a moment. Flora slid her gaze round the room, noticing how Lilian was staring up at her husband with genuine concern; even Natascha’s customary scowl had melted away, her eyes round and sad when they weren’t slitted with scorn. Magda’s eyes, on the other hand, were clamped firmly shut, her chin thrust forwards and her hands stroking the snoring dog in her lap.

  ‘I wish this truth were a lie. I would do anything to make it different, but what happened back then, we cannot change. I know that. Our knowing the truth, finally, of our own family’s role in those dark years, doesn’t change what happened. But it does change us, our focus, because there is something we can do now. We can repent, openly, for the world to see. We can join with their dismay, let them know we share it too.’

  Lilian looked anxious. ‘But how, Jacques?’

  ‘We give the paintings back.’

  ‘We what?’ Natascha spluttered. ‘No!’ But there followed a silence and stare from her father, so severe that she sat back again and lowered her gaze.

  Flora was feeling a panic of her own, but for very different reasons. Tracing all those heirs, to give the paintings back? She’d be here for years!

  ‘Flora, this is why we need you. You have already shown us how diligent you are in your work, how determined you are to do the right thing—’

  Magda harrumphed.

  Flora scanned his face, looking for sarcasm, but there was none. Just calm appeal.

  ‘This is why I want no one else working on this but you. Those transactions were never made in true faith. They were made in fear, terror, desperation, false hope. I want no part in it.’

  ‘Jacques,’ she began. ‘I’m flattered. And this is a noble idea. I have so much respect for you for even considering it, but it’s not going to be as easy as simply finding the previous owners and handing the pieces back. The Germans were meticulous in their paperwork, they went over and above to ensure that everything looked like a legal sale – it will be almost impossible for us to ascertain which deals were made under duress and which weren’t.’ She blinked. ‘But even if we can establish which were the forged deals – those that were effectively armed robbery by the SS, as you say – tracing the heirs will be a mammoth task. So many of the people who sold these paintings will have died in the camps, and divesting their estates were last-ditch attempts at trading assets for freedom. Those that did make it would have moved city, moved country, changed their names . . . Unless a sale is disputed or an artwork registered with the
Art Loss Register, finding those heirs will be like pointing at stars in the sky.’

  Jacques nodded, listening to her with due consideration. ‘I hear what you’re saying and I have a proposal for streamlining the process. We draw a line from 1938, the time of the Austrian Anschluss. As you say, after that date, we have no way of knowing whether a brokered sale was genuine or made under pressure, as part of a flee bargain. Anything that was sold to my father before 1938 I think we can more safely consider to be a deal that was made with free will on both sides. Those items I want to sell at auction.

  ‘The others – everything sold to my father after 1938 – I want us to try to trace the names of the previous owners where possible, return the items to their heirs. Where we can’t, we will have to take the provenance at face value – that the sale to my father was undertaken freely – and sell them at auction too.’ He raised his hand for silence as Natascha opened her mouth to speak (or rather, complain). ‘Once your commission, Flora, and that of the sales house has been deducted from the final value, I want all the monies to be put towards a new fund that we will set up to benefit the children of refugees.’

  An astonished silence inflated in the room.

  ‘They will call it blood money,’ Magda said, her bitterness piercing her voice. ‘They will not take it.’

  Her every word was thrown like a stone on the ground.

  ‘I disagree. We will show France that we are not monsters, we were as ignorant of the facts as anyone. We cannot change what happened, but we can show our regret and humility and our desire to atone for what my father has done. Because what was done may have been done with our name, but not in it. We are not Von Taschelt. I am not him.’

  Magda looked away, long before Jacques turned his head and looked at Flora. ‘Will you help us? I have already placed an advert in the LAPADA bulletin, asking people who believe they may be the rightful heirs to contact us.’