The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

Jesse turned to her smiling. ‘I was just trying to remember what I was doing this Thursday. Actually, I think I’m free and would be delighted to help. Perhaps we should meet sometime before to go over the menus and timings? Maybe tomorrow?’

  ‘That would be fantastic.’ Annie smiled gratefully.

  Looking at Jesse’s back as he stirred the sauce, she saw him as if for the first time. She liked the way that he navigated the cramped kitchen with the neat steps of a dancer, moving gracefully in the small space between the stove and the fridge. She liked his rhythmic stirring, beating and whisking, the way the muscles in his wrist and his right arm flexed. She wondered idly what he would be like in bed, then, blushing slightly, returned to her omelette.

  ‘Can you pass the asparagus?’ Annie asked. Carefully, Jesse passed the uncooked spears to her. Placing them on the table, his hand accidentally brushed against hers and they both felt a tiny current pass between them. Annie looked down at his long fingers with pale freckles sprinkled over the backs of his hands. She tried to imagine his caress. Would it be gentle?

  Jesse looked at Annie, at the soft pale down that started just below her right ear and ran to the nape of her long neck. Through her T-shirt he could see a shoulder blade and an elegant right arm. Would her skin feel soft beneath that T-shirt, would she shudder slightly if he ran his hand down her spine to the base of her back? Would she like the back of her neck kissed?

  Annie sprinkled salt on the boiling water and tipped in the asparagus. She could hear Jesse’s breath, shallow and slightly irregular. Glancing upwards she saw his mouth and almost feminine lips, pale pink, slightly parted showing straight white teeth. What would that mouth feel like on mine, on my neck? she wondered, as the asparagus tossed in the bubbling water.

  At just that time, Jesse was caught up in his own fantasy and, tasting the sauce to test for seasoning, he imagined running his tongue down between Annie’s breasts towards her legs.

  He continued to beat his sauce, never taking his eyes off the back of Annie’s neck. Aware that his breathing was uneven and shallow, he took two deep breaths.

  ‘I think that’s probably okay,’ Annie said, without turning to face him.

  ‘I got carried away – do you think it’s done?’ Jesse held out the saucepan.

  Annie looked at the pale whipped sauce, and then, dipping a little finger into its glossy depths, she licked it slowly and looked at him.

  Jesse swallowed, willing himself to stay upright, willing himself not to take her into his arms and kiss her.

  ‘It’s good,’ Annie said. She turned back to the asparagus and, spearing one with a sharp paring knife, decided that they were perfect, al dente. Taking the saucepan, she stepped over to the sink and drained the asparagus. The steam rose and covered her face in a gentle mist. What was she doing flirting with this man? She knew he had feelings for her – was she being unkind or had something changed?

  Forcing herself back to the task in hand, Annie put a small frying pan on to the stove and, folding freshly chopped chives, thyme and parsley with a splash of cream into the batter, she gave her omelette mix a last whisk. Then Annie lined her large bowl of onion soup with wafer-thin slices of baguette covered with Gruyère, mozzarella and parmesan and placed that under the grill for a few minutes.

  ‘Supper in five minutes exactly,’ she called out.

  Jesse took four plates out of the oven and set them on the table.

  Pouring the eggs into the smoking pan, Annie waited till tiny golden bubbles formed before gently arranging the asparagus on the batter, making acid-green chevrons against the deep-yellow base. The recipe suggested flipping the omelette over, but Annie decided to leave it flat and at the very last moment quickly chopped a ruby-red chilli and sprinkled tiny diamonds of fieriness over the surface.

  During dinner she was glad that Jesse sat diagonally opposite her and it was not possible to touch him or even look at him too closely. Cutting the omelette into four pieces, Annie put each slice on a plate. There was silence as each took their first mouthful. The creamy egg, the hot chilli and al dente asparagus were in perfect harmony. Annie thought the next course was not quite right – the onions in the soup were a tiny bit sweet – but Jesse thought that they complemented the melted cheese. There was applause for the jacquard chicken and its checked deep-red-and-white jacket. Though Evie promised she couldn’t eat another mouthful, she finished her sole Colbert in silence, not wanting to waste the collision in her mouth of soft pillowy layers of sole surround by breadcrumbed crust perfumed with the sauce. Agatha moaned slightly as she bit through the crispy outer layer of fish and felt the warm butter ooze into her mouth.

  ‘This is better than . . .’ She blushed a deep red when everyone laughed with her.

  Later, when they had polished off a pie made with poached fruit, raisins, pine nuts and candied lemons topped with whipped sugared cream, Annie and her guests sat around the table nursing Louis’s favourite, a hot chocolate, so thick that Evie ate hers with a spoon.

  ‘Anyone who can make food taste this good should be tied to a stove,’ Agatha said.

  ‘That would be my dream,’ Annie admitted.

  Later, Annie offered Evie her bed, saying she was happy to sleep on the sofa. Secretly she wanted her mother behind the only door in the apartment so that she and Jesse could be left alone. Agatha left to catch the last train, Jesse stayed to help wash up. When the last dish was done, he gently took Annie’s face between his large freckled hands and kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘I am going to go now,’ he said. ‘But not for long.’

  Picking up his jacket and scarf, he let himself out of the studio and Annie listened as he took the stairs in great bounds.

  Unable to sleep, Annie sat at the kitchen table and, laying her face sideways on the scrubbed wooden surface, closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of the grain of the wood pressing into her left cheek.

  Chapter 26

  Trichcombe Abufel stared out of his kitchen window and on to the communal gardens. He had bought this small attic flat thirty years earlier and watched the neighbourhood change from a diverse multicultural area to a homogenised pool of wealthy white bankers and their families. Looking down into the garden below he could see five almost identical blonde women in black shorts, starved to a pre-pubescent body weight, each Botoxed so their faces resembled smooth marble statues, doing calisthenics with a large and muscled black trainer. It was rather nice, Trichcombe thought as he stared at the dark-skinned man, to see a dab of colour. Trichcombe did not want to move from his home, but unless something changed in his professional life, penury would soon force him out of this apartment and into the suburbs. Maybe he would have to go back to Wales – he shuddered at the thought.

  Wrenching himself away from the scene below, Trichcombe turned back to his desk and ‘the problem’. Since meeting the young woman in the British Museum and catching a glimpse of that sketch, Trichcombe had the certain feeling that ‘it’ had been found. It had taken Trichcombe many years to painstakingly stitch together a provenance for Watteau’s great missing work, The Improbability of Love. Using a combination of printed material, unpublished records, his personal archive and data stored at national and international museums, Trichcombe established an almost unbroken line of ownership. He knew the painting was made in 1703 in Paris and that the subject was most probably a beautiful actress, Charlotte Desmares, who went by the stage name of Colette. Watteau’s undiluted passion for the woman was reported in several contemporary accounts and for a period of seven months her face popped up in nearly every sketch and in many other oil paintings.

  After Watteau’s untimely tragic early death from consumption in 1721, the painting was left to his friend Jean de Julienne and thenceforward its provenance was one of the most fascinating Trichcombe had ever uncovered. Was there another picture owned by such a string of illustrious and interesting patrons? Trichcombe was not, however, particularly interested in the painting’s early history or even in the wor
k itself. It was the period between 1929 and the present day that occupied most of his attention. He found out that the painting had disappeared from the Royal Collection during the First World War (possibly stolen) but had reappeared in a saleroom in Berlin in 1929, when a man called Ezra Winkleman had bought it for fifty Marks. Trichcombe did not have to search Google or Who’s Who: he knew that Ezra was Memling Winkleman’s father.

  In the last few days, the art world grapevine had started buzzing with news that the Winklemans had ‘lost’ a small Watteau; they had called everyone whom they kept on a retainer and though Trichcombe was perhaps the only expert who wasn’t employed by the family any more, he had fielded several calls.

  Trichcombe thought back to the auburn-haired woman in the British Museum and her sketch. Some sixth sense honed by years of looking and thinking about works of art suggested that the painting was in her possession. He was fairly sure, from her reaction, that she wasn’t an expert and probably didn’t realise how valuable or important it was; he hoped to enlighten her long before anyone else.

  Sitting at his desk, Trichcombe looked again at the photocopy of the engraving of The Improbability of Love. The picture was important in many ways: its subject matter, the juxtaposition of hope and despair, encapsulated the feelings of requited and unrequited love. Its lightness of touch, the speed, dexterity and apparent simplicity of its conception pointed to a new style of painting, encouraged generations of later painters to loosen up, let go and express themselves. And of course this work was also the father, mother and mistress of the Rococo movement. But above all, it was also capable of inspiring love.

  Trichcombe got up and walked back into the kitchen. Below him the ladies were stretching, their trainer pausing briefly at each body to pull and push their limbs into ever more outlandish shapes. Trichcombe wasn’t really watching them; he was trying to put together everything he knew and those things he couldn’t explain about the Winkleman business. He was hoping that this time he had found the means for revenge.

  Scholarship had taught Trichcombe many lessons but perhaps the most important was patience. He had learned to wait for information to unfold and to let clues emerge when he was least expecting them. Learning and discovering were not linear processes but webs of insane matrices, layers of disparate unconnected facts accrued over the years that would suddenly coalesce. His great discoveries – finding the Cimabue altarpiece in a saleroom in Pewsey, and Raphael’s Madonna of the Camellia in the back passage of a boys’ school – were part happy coincidence (being there) and part knowledge: the years of looking at other works, studying the tiny brushstrokes of each artist and, above all, knowing what was missing and where it was last seen. A scholar, Trichcombe often thought, was just a detective: he was one of the greatest.

  Memling had been the first person to spot his particular talent; he retained Trichcombe on a princely salary. It was rare to find someone who combined knowledge with a single-minded passion for painting. For the first seven years, Trichcombe’s apparent lack of a personal life, his willingness to work all hours, to travel at a moment’s notice, was an enormous advantage. Memling sent the young man all over the world to evaluate new purchases and to root around minor salerooms. Together they became the Duveen and Berenson of their era.

  Trichcombe’s single-minded mania had certain disadvantages: most of Winkleman’s employees worked for a salary and were happy to go home at night and to turn a blind eye to any inconsistences. Their jobs were ultimately just the means to the end of the business of living. For Trichcombe, a man with no dependants and no outside hobbies, his job was his life, and while others took pride in their partners or children, he was dedicated to paintings, their study, their history, their provenance.

  An increasingly tense situation between employer and employee finally erupted when Memling suddenly unearthed a lost work by Boucher. Memling refused to say where it had come from. For him, it was a simple, highly lucrative transaction. For Trichcombe it was essential to establish the painting’s history. Staying up for seven nights in a row, Trichcombe established a history of ownership that stopped suddenly in 1943 in Berlin with a member of a family later annihilated at Auschwitz. Memling refused to say how he came by the work. Two months later a similar case appeared when Memling returned from a trip to Bavaria with a Canaletto, a Barocci and a Klimt. Again, Memling brushed aside his employee’s demand for paperwork. At that time, few were interested in the morality behind restitution of works stolen during the war. Vendors and buyers were happy with vague chains of ownership. Memling liked to claim that his paintings came from ‘a nobleman’ or ‘a titled lady’. No one quibbled.

  As time went on Trichcombe’s unease grew. How could Memling consistently produce undiscovered great masterpieces from nowhere? Most had good provenances and secure chains of titles, but some had literally appeared from thin air. He was aware of the great fluidity in the art market following the war; the rock-bottom prices as owning art paled into insignificance next to rebuilding lives. But as wealth and stability increased during the 1960s, bargains and rarities were harder to come by. How then did Winkleman keep producing masterpieces?

  Memling found Trichcombe’s interrogations increasingly irksome. It came to a head one day in 1972 when Trichcombe saw a small painting by Watteau on Memling’s desk. Measuring eighteen by twenty-four inches, it showed a couple watched over by a clown. Even Trichcombe, who had not been touched by another human being for thirty-seven years, felt the naked power of this painting. There was something so exquisitely moving and heartfelt about the look of the lover lying on the grass looking at the girl, something mournful about the clown’s disposition and his long, languid face, and something so wilful and vivacious about the girl enjoying absolute power over her suitors’ emotions.

  Suddenly, Trichcombe had to know about this picture; it tipped his curiosity over the edge. But Memling said it was personal and not for sale, so did not concern his employee. Trichcombe persisted, and insisted on trawling through office records and chains of title. The following morning, he arrived at the office to find all his belongings in a box on the front step. The receptionist handed him an envelope containing £1,000 cash. It was not a simple dismissal: from that day onwards Memling used his considerable power to discredit Trichcombe at every corner and the scholar never succeeded in securing a senior post at a museum or as a private curator or in a gallery. He lived off minuscule earnings from his books and scholarly articles. Occasionally he discovered a drawing or an oil sketch in a provincial saleroom and sold that on but he never earned enough money to buy anything significant. As a young man, his great passion had been a love of art; for the last forty-two years, Trichcombe’s driving ambition was to unmask Memling Winkleman. From the moment that he witnessed Memling with the Watteau, back in 1972, Trichcombe knew that its value to Memling was far above and beyond money and emotion. For reasons he had yet to prove, this picture was the key to his future and to Memling’s downfall.

  Trichcombe spent years piecing together the history of the Watteau; all he needed was to find the picture itself. He had almost given up hope until seeing images of the work at the British Museum. There was only one last piece of the jigsaw to put in place: the fate of the last owners, Memling’s parents. The old Berlin sales records of 1929 had an address for the family: Trichcombe decided to go to Schwedenstrasse 14 off Friedrichstadt to see what was left.

  In his newly formed office in Holborn, Vlad watched, in real time, money pouring into his current account. There was a spike in tin trades and during the morning, before he had even got out of bed, Vlad had made £67 million, bringing his week’s total to £127 million. According to the terms of his exile, the Office of Central Control was to receive at least 30 per cent of any profit Vlad made. Almost in spite of his best efforts, the price of tin kept rising and Vlad had to constantly stoke the fire of Central Control’s demands. In the last nine days Vlad had had to transfer £24 million anonymously into one of its many accounts. If, for any reason
, he did not want to use a bank transfer (and sometimes the Leader disliked this method) or if Vlad had decided that an object was a better proxy, he had to deposit the item at the holding house in Surrey.

  The week before, unable to contain his curiosity, Vlad had personally delivered a diamond the size of an eyeball to Crawley Place, Godalming, Surrey. Arriving at the outer perimeter of the estate, Vlad was greeted by three Russian men dressed in black. Asked to get out of the car, he was frisked thoroughly, his car was searched and, with a specially generated password printed on a scrap of paper, he had been allowed to proceed to the second gate. At the next gate, several hundred yards away, he was frisked again and issued with another password. This elaborate procedure was repeated four times before he reached a nondescript red-brick house with highly manicured lawns and a raked gravel drive. The wide wheels of Vlad’s Maybach car left ugly track marks on the neat patterns.

  A disembodied female voice rang out of nowhere instructing Vlad to go to the front door. As Vlad approached it swung open. Nervously he went inside. The outer door looked normal enough but once inside, Vlad realised that he was now in an airtight metal box. I could be crushed like a tin can and no one would know, he thought. The same voice told him to stand completely still. A formation of infrared beams danced around his body. ‘You are being scanned,’ the voice told him unnecessarily. Another door opened. Vlad walked through. ‘Put your hand on the pad and look up,’ the voice instructed. Having placed his hand on a sensor and turned his eye to the ceiling, a metal panel slid back and Vlad walked into another box. This one was considerably larger, nearly the size of the whole downstairs of the house.

  ‘The bricks and windows are a shell to make this place resemble a house,’ the voice said, apparently reading Vlad’s mind. ‘The British intelligence know exactly what it is, but they don’t yet know how to break into it. Nor does anyone else.’