The Caves of Perigord

by Martin Walker

  “What do you suggest I do? Take it home to Wiltshire and put it back on the bookcase?”

  “No,” said Lydia firmly. “I strongly suggest you leave it with me, and I shall give you a receipt, and ask one or two experts in the field where it might have come from. If your father found it in 1944, there were then very few painted caves. Lascaux was only found in 1940. If it comes from this region, or from the Spanish caves at Altamira, they’ll identify it quickly enough. If not, we’ll have to think again about its provenance. But the style says Lascaux, and so does your father’s estimate about its age. But even if it comes from somewhere altogether different, I don’t think you would be able to sell it, not publicly at least.”

  “How long would these consultations take?” he asked. “And how long would you want to keep the rock?”

  “I’ll photograph it digitally, and send that with an e-mail to two or three people. I should hear something within a day or two. Just to be sure, I’ll send copies to an expert on the Hagar paintings, and check out one or two more possibles. I’m not an expert on Cro-Magnon man, but I know the people who are.”

  “Cro-Magnon, was he the one with the low, thick forehead, the missing link back to the apes?”

  “No, absolutely not. Cro-Magnon man had a skull and brain cavity not unlike our own, and in creating these cave paintings he gave us the first recognizable human culture. He replaced-and we are not sure how-Neanderthal man, who did have a low, thick brow. But even his brain capacity was just as big as ours-even bigger, I seem to recall. I’m not even sure we know whether or not the two types could interbreed.” Lydia was suddenly aware that Manners was watching one of her more irritating habits, twisting a lock of her hair around and around a single finger as she talked. She only did it when she was nervous. She dropped her arm to her side and spoke quickly. “Would you like me to give you a receipt for this, or do you want to take it away with you? I’d like to photograph it anyway, if I may.”

  He leaned back casually, perched on the table, and for the first time he smiled openly at her. It was a very agreeable smile, with no guile in it. “But if you can’t sell it for me, why would you want to go to all this bother? Why not just refer me to a museum and save yourself the effort?”

  “Perhaps I should,” she said, and gave her coolest, most professional smile in return. “I suppose that having come across this, and suspecting what it might be, I feel rather responsible. If it has been wrenched away from a cave wall, I think we ought to try to get it back.”

  “Do you feel the same about statues from Egyptian temples and giving the Elgin marbles back to Greece?” His tone was curious, rather than aggressive.

  “There are few hard and fast rules about this. The Elgin marbles were bought and exported under the legal rules of the time, and have been better cared for in the British Museum than they might have been in Athens in the past. And that is a case where political issues will probably outweigh any artistic argument. But if somebody in my profession knows something had been taken illegally from a tomb or a temple-or a cave-then we have a sort of ethical code that says we do not deal in it and alert the proper authorities. The laws against trafficking in stolen goods certainly apply to the art world, and there is also a moral consideration, particularly about something such as this.” She gestured at the rock.

  “Would all your colleagues here, or at other auction houses, take the same attitude? Or is this a particularly American ethic, to do with fear of lawsuits?”

  “I certainly hope my colleagues would take the same view, on either side of the Atlantic. This is not about lawsuits, but about fair dealing,” she said crisply, suddenly wondering whether the whole thing had been some kind of test arranged by her management. “Now, would you like that receipt?”

  “Yes, please,” he said. “And I have to be back in town on Friday. If I came in at about midday, perhaps I could take you to lunch?” He smiled again. “You have been helpful above and beyond the call of duty.”

  “I’m afraid we tend to be rather busy on Fridays,” she said automatically, pulling a receipt form and a ballpoint pen from the drawer and starting to fill it in. “But I’ll certainly see you here at noon. And if you leave a phone number, I can let you know if some firm information comes back to me before then.”

  Lydia took a dozen digital photographs of the rock, and weighed and measured it carefully before asking a janitor to take it up to her office. Then she sent e-mails and the digitalized photos to Professor Horst Vogelstern in Cologne and to the National Museum of Prehistory at les Eyzies in the Dordogne, in the heart of France’s cave region. It had been founded by Denis Peyrony, the French scholar who had first identified the frieze of the horses in the Font-de-Gaume cave, and ever since had been the main center for the study of early man. She marked the museum e-mail for the attention of Clothilde Daunier, a curator renowned for her encyclopedic knowledge of Lascaux and the surrounding caves. Lydia knew her only by reputation. She had heard of Horst as one of the leading authorities on prehistoric art even before she met him at a reception after he had given a lecture at the Courtauld Institute when she had been studying there. As a courtesy, she sent another e-mail to her old professor at the Ashmolean in Oxford. It was not his field, but she thought he might be interested. At least he could confirm that it was not African. She pondered sending more e-mails to some of her classmates who were still working in the field. There was a boring Irishman, now teaching in Australia, who had been interested in cave painting, and that insufferable Californian who had gone into paleoarchaeology. No, she thought firmly. No need to reopen those old connections. She pulled out Ann Sieveking’s The Cave Artists and Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Dawn of European Art, and increasingly fascinated, she read until the night watchman found her just before ten. She climbed the stairs again to her small office, just to look at it once more. The night watchman followed her, a rather dear ex-serviceman with a carefully tended long white mustache.

  “Should I put that in the storeroom for you, miss?” he asked. Then he looked at it. “That’s special, isn’t it?”

  “I think it is, Mr. Woodley. I think it could be very special.” She smiled at him, feeling comfortable with the elderly man.

  “Funny how you can always tell the real thing, the quality,” he said, turning her desk lamp to illuminate it more clearly. “Very old, is it?”

  “Probably seventeen thousand years old, if my guess is right.”

  “Crikey. Funny how you never think of art before the ancient Greeks. But it passes my test, miss.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Woodley?”

  “I get it now and again. First week I got this job, we had that Rembrandt in, and I got this shiver. I’ll never forget it. I’d never thought much about art before. Never seen much, I suppose. But I got it then, and I got it with that El Greco we had last year, and I’ve got it now.” He shook his head in solemn admiration. “Seventeen thousand years. Makes you think. I suppose that’s what makes us human, making art, just for the beauty of it.”

  They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. Those horns could kill, those haunches could breed, those legs could charge. Mr. Woodley was right to shiver, she thought. Less than two feet square, but it was an awesome beast. She felt a sense of sympathetic terror for whatever distant ancestors had gone up against it with spears and rocks and flint axes. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.

  “You’re quite right, Mr. Woodley,” Lydia said quietly, thinking how foolish she had been that morning, to think of giving up a career that could give her moments such as this. “It’s what makes us human.”

  “I’ll take care of it for you, miss. Put it in the storeroom overnight. You’d better get on home.”

  She took the tube home to the small flat in Fulham, thinking about the great cave of Lascaux as she opened the door
, and how much she would prefer a poster of those bulls of Lascaux on her wall to the insipid Monet print that now greeted her. She did not much like her apartment, given what it was costing her, but duty insisted that her living room and kitchen were always left tidy. Her morning coffee cup and juice glass were now dry on the draining board. She turned on the radio, tuned to the usual Classic FM, and put them away as she tried to identify the music, but it was some generic baroque chamber ensemble and she gave up. Her father would have been ashamed of her, after all the music he had played in her childhood. The small bedroom was as messy as the other rooms were neat, and she shoved tights and jeans and T-shirts and bedclothes into a great pile, and took them down to the communal washing machine in the basement of the converted old house. She had thirty-five minutes before she would have to load them into the dryer. Time to watch TV? To eat? The refrigerator held ketchup, one bottle of wine and two of fizzy water, some yogurt, and a wizened lemon. She would have to start planning her life better than this.

  Lydia ate the yogurt, told herself she could put the clothes in the dryer tomorrow and went to bed. Ignoring her bedside copy of The Hittites, she was asleep almost at once. Her last thought was of the oddity of time. The oldest cave paintings, at the Grotte de Villars, had been dated by that legendary prehistorian Abbe Breuil to about thirty thousand years. The carbon dating of the charcoal they used in the Lascaux cave suggested the great paintings had been done seventeen thousand years ago. Which meant fifteen thousand years B.C., she thought. She could never teach herself to use that politically correct term B.C.E., Before the Common Era. So for fifteen thousand years before Lascaux, humans had lived around the valleys of the Vezere and Dordogne rivers, hunted and painted in caves, and carried on doing what their ancestors always had. And then came a the sudden explosion of talent and genius that created the stunning achievement of Lascaux. As the explosion faded, people embarked upon the next seventeen thousand-year march to the present day. The human race launched into agriculture and metals and towns and ships and politics; everything began to change as life seemed to shift into a higher gear. Like a video, thought Lydia, fast-forward. Instead of B.C. and A.D., you might call it B.L. and A.L. Before and After Lascaux. Before and after art.

  The first response to Lydia’s e-mails came the next morning as she was sipping coffee at her desk and taking detailed notes on the rock, perched on a chair at her side. Beyond its weight and dimensions, the colors and the shapes, there was not much to say. Not, at least, that could be put into plain words. The bull was in black and dark red, with muted shadings of red and yellow to give depth. There were some other lines, suggestions that the designs continued beyond the edge of the broken rock, but nothing she could begin to describe. And there was a line of three dots, and perhaps part of a fourth on the edge of the rock, equally spaced, in a reasonably straight line. Such patterns had also been found at Lascaux, but nowhere else, from her superficial researches of the previous evening. But there was no reference that she had found to any damage to the caves at Lascaux, no gaps in the drawings where the Manners rock might have been wrenched free.

  She sat back, trying to assess whether she responded to the bull as a magnificent but crude drawing, or whether she simply felt awe at something so old, when the phone rang, and she recognized Horst’s voice. He was speaking an English as precise and fluent as her own, with barely a trace of German accent, asking her warmly how she was and sounding much more friendly than one evening of pleasant chatter at a reception would explain. It was soon clear that he was excited by the photographs.

  Yes, she still had the rock in her possession, she told him. It was on her desk. No, she had not yet heard from the museum at Les Eyzies, but she felt it possible that it was from Lascaux, even though it was so small. No, her auction house did not intend to put the piece on public sale, but simply to establish whether it was real and where it might have come from.

  “I know where it’s from,” said Horst. “It is from Lascaux, the style and detail are unmistakable. But this is different. It is a miniature, by far the smallest of any bull that I have seen and it is not from any cave I know of. This could mean that somebody has found a new cave, with Lascaux-style art. But why would they be so foolish as to approach an auction house if they want to make some money from this? They must have known you wouldn’t put it on open sale. Who is this person who brought it to you, do you know anything about him?”

  She described Manners, told Horst of his father and the inheritance, and the possible connection to the Perigord region in 1944, and added, “I don’t think he knows the first thing about cave paintings. He was happy enough to leave the piece in my care, and for me to make inquiries to trace it. He seemed genuine and rather innocent. I don’t think he’s the type to trade in looted goods. And if he were, he would hardly have come to us. But I can quiz him some more when I see him-he’s coming in again on Friday to see what I have found out.”

  “If I came over, would you introduce him to me?” Horst asked. There was a sound of rustling down the phone as he leafed through a calendar. “I can change a lecture, put off a student or two, and fly over on Thursday in time to take you to dinner. By then, we should have confirmation from les Eyzies that this comes from an unknown cave.”

  “I haven’t got my diary to hand-I’m not sure I’m free on Thursday,” she said quickly. “Perhaps we’d better wait until we do hear from les Eyzies.”

  “I’m not giving up the opportunity to see this piece, and Friday morning may be my last chance, if your mystery man decides to take it away with him again. I’ll call you again after I hear from Clothilde at les Eyzies.”

  Within the hour, the Frenchwoman was on the line, more formal and much more cautious than Horst. No, she could not be sure from the photographs she had seen that this was Lascaux work, but it certainly looked interesting. And no, it did not come from any known site. A lot of caves were damaged in places, or eroded, but she knew of no rock scar from which Lydia’s exhibit might come. Then she wanted to know if Lydia or her company had informed anyone else.

  “Only Horst Vogelstern, in Cologne, and Professor Willoughby at Oxford,” said Lydia. “Horst phoned me this morning to suggest that it might come from a new cave, not yet discovered or known about. He seems very excited. He wants to come and see the rock, before the owner comes back on Friday.”

  “Horst and his theories,” sniffed Clothilde. “He is so ambitious to make a big coup and become famous. You know he is trying to persuade people to finance a TV series on prehistoric art. Some theory about an undiscovered cave is the kind of thing he could put into the newspapers and magazines, and then he could make his TV show and write a best-seller and get rich. Horst was a very good researcher, but he gets carried away by his dreams.”

  “It sounds as though you know him well,” Lydia ventured, intrigued by these personal dynamics between scholars.

  “Too well,” snapped Clothilde, and then went on, almost apologetically, as if Lydia were owed some explanation. “He worked with me here at les Eyzies for two years, and we were very good friends. We were very happy. Then it ended. You know how these things are.”

  Lydia supposed she did. Or had once, but not for quite some time. David had been almost a year ago.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea. Look, if this is embarrassing for you I can tell Horst I have put the entire thing in the hands of your museum.”

  “No, not at all. It was all some time ago, and Horst and I are good friends and colleagues. But I do know how much he is driven to succeed, to make the splash. So I have my doubts when he jumps at conclusions about new caves. We have not fully investigated all the old ones. Remember it took many years even in the well-known caves for the right people with the right lighting to see that there were paintings and carvings. The caves are very big, Lydia. The one at Rouffignac has it own railway line inside, you know, and it was only forty years ago that people first realized that there were cave paintings under the walls and ceiling where
the tourists used to carve graffiti.” She paused. “But, Lydia, there is something much more important now,” she said. “You cannot let the owner take this away. We may never see it or hear of it again. This is French national patrimoine, you know, national heritage, like your Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.”

  “Not my Crown Jewels. I’m American.”

  “All right, like your Constitution, or George Washington’s house. It is the oldest thing that makes us what we are. This belongs to France. We shall have to get some legal document over to you to stake a claim, I suppose.”

  “You seem pretty sure it’s genuine, and French,” Lydia said, startled. “I think all that is premature. The owner seems quite happy to leave it in my hands, even when I said that it was my duty to get this item back where it belongs.”

  “Well, he may say that now, but he could change his mind. We have to put this on a proper footing. I want to come to London this week to make a visual identification, and file a statement for our Embassy legal officer. We are checking with the Ministry of Culture in Paris and with the Foreign Ministry. Nobody here at the museum knows the procedure.”

  “I think you all ought to calm down,” Lydia said. “Legal procedure and all that sounds as if you suspect a crime, but the current owner has obviously been acting in good faith. And if it cannot be shown to be stolen property, I’m not sure if the law comes into it. But I’d better check with our own legal department and see what they say. Why don’t we talk again later today or tomorrow, when we both know what the legal position is?”