by John Boyne
Throughout their childhoods and adolescences, William Montignac had doted on both his sons but, like a monarch who has provided an heir and a spare, he concentrated most of his time and affection on Henry, who was the elder by two and a half years, and left Peter to the care of his mother.
Henry was taught to hunt and to manage the estates. He was encouraged to read all of William Montignac’s favourite volumes from his library, to sit in on the meetings he had with his lawyers and estate managers while he was a teenager. The Montignac minions knew that they had to show deference to the heir presumptive, who showed an aptitude for his learning as well as a pleasant disposition and cheerful nature. William wanted him to be tough and harsh, but these were characteristics that were not part of the boy’s character. He hoped that he would excel at sports but he turned out to be merely adequate and had no taste whatsoever for the hunt. As he reached his late teenage years William Montignac found himself increasingly disappointed that his son was not more like him. Even his looks disappointed him, for Henry didn’t have the distinctive dark hair and eyes of the Montignacs, but rather the paler skin and blonde hair of his maternal grandparents. Still, for all his disappointment, William believed in tradition and knew that his son was an honourable boy and would be a worthy heir when the time came.
However, events at Leyville were to overshadow that.
In the spring of 1905 a couple of young French housemaids were employed by Margaret Richmond’s predecessor at Leyville and one of them—Nathalie Reims—caught the eye of Henry Montignac. Like him, she had thick blonde hair and pale eyes but she was shy and found it difficult to make eye contact with any of her new English masters, particularly the handsome young man who seemed to be always watching her and would appear as if from nowhere whenever she went for walks around the estate.
Over the course of a year of illicit meetings and secret conversations the two fell in love and Henry informed his parents that they were to be married. For several months the house was thrown into chaos as the French maids were despatched back to their homes just south of Paris while Henry was placed under virtual house arrest. William Montignac refused to countenance the marriage and even locked his son into his room at one point for almost three weeks as he tried to make him see sense. When the dispute between them finally became violent, Henry was banished from Leyville and moved to France, where he married his paramour within a few days.
Naturally, he was quickly disinherited and Peter Montignac then found himself in the unexpected position of first son and heir. Had his grandfather not been so violently opposed to the marriage, however, not only would Owen Montignac’s parents have lived, but they would have ended up as master and mistress of Leyville, and he would have been master in turn after his father’s death.
The house and the fortune, therefore, rightly belonged to him.
‘Haven’t you always made me feel welcome there,’ repeated Montignac in a quiet voice, as if he was trying out the words for himself just to hear how ridiculous and selfish they really were.
‘Don’t say we haven’t,’ said Stella defensively, who had no idea of what he was thinking. ‘My father always made it clear to us that you had as much right to be there as any of us.’
‘That was guilt, I imagine,’ said Montignac.
Stella stared at him. ‘Whatever happened between your father and our grandfather is nothing to do with either of us,’ she said, trying to keep calm. ‘We shouldn’t let it come between us after … after all that we’ve been through. And it’s certainly not why Father didn’t leave Leyville to you.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ she said, raising her voice now. ‘If he had any negative feelings towards you, then why would he have taken you in in the first place? Why would he have brought you up and given you a good education? He could have let you stay in France. He could have just let you fend for yourself.’
‘I had family there too,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have starved.’
‘He offered you a better life.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Montignac, who suspected a lot more about his uncle’s reasons for disinheriting him than she did.
‘We were always told to treat you like a brother, and that’s what we did,’ she insisted, looking to be on the verge of tears now and with this line he could hold back no longer.
‘Really, Stella?’ he asked, dumbfounded by her ability to rewrite history. ‘Just like a brother! Are you seriously saying that to me? After all this time? That you treated me just like a brother?’
Stella swallowed nervously and looked away. ‘I’m not getting into all of that, Owen,’ she said, brushing past him.
‘No, I didn’t think you’d want to.’
‘You’re obviously not in any mood to have a civilized conversation so perhaps I should just leave you alone for now.’
‘Yes, I think you should,’ he replied, watching as she picked up her coat and shopping bags.
‘I just want to say this,’ she said, turning back to him and he was surprised by how the appearance of tears in her eyes could still pull at his heartstrings. ‘My home is your home. There is no distinction in my eyes. It should have been Andrew’s, it might have been yours, it happens to be mine. And if you turn your back on your home, then it’s like you’re turning your back on me,’ she added in a softer tone. ‘And I don’t want that. I don’t want that at all.’
‘I don’t want it either,’ he muttered, turning away so as not to have to look her in the eyes.
She reached across and touched his arm but she took him by surprise and he recoiled, as if he had just been struck by an electrical charge.
‘After all we’ve been through, after all we’ve survived, Owen,’ she said, laying a stress on the words, ‘it would be ridiculous for us to fall out now.’ She hesitated before adding, ‘Just think how much worse things could have been. If it hadn’t been for Margaret.’
Montignac breathed in heavily, wanting her to leave now; he didn’t want any more part of this conversation.
‘I have to get back to work,’ he said. ‘We’ll speak soon, though.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘And you’ll make an effort with Raymond?’
‘I’ll make an effort with him,’ said Montignac. ‘For your sake, not for his.’
‘That’s all I ask. He’s really a very nice chap when you get to know him.’
Montignac felt an irresistible urge to laugh but hid it carefully. There was nothing more to be said between them and Stella reached forwards and brushed her lips casually against his cheek, holding them there for a moment, breathing in the scent of him before turning around and leaving the shop without looking back.
‘That your sister?’ asked Jason Parsons, coming up beside him now and watching her disappear down the street.
‘My cousin,’ said Montignac, watching too.
Jason let out a low whistle of appreciation. ‘She’s a bit special, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘No offence, like,’ he added quickly, noticing the look of irritation on his employer’s face.
‘Don’t we have a wall to clear?’ asked Montignac, brushing past him before the urge to hit his assistant became too strong.
10
MONTIGNAC STAYED IN THE gallery later than usual that night; the prospect of returning home to the empty flat in Bedford Place and trying to concoct a scheme to escape the clutches of Nicholas Delfy not being an attractive one. The work on the new additions had been completed successfully and he’d already managed to sell two pieces in the afternoon and interested a private collector over the phone in another, which meant that he wouldn’t have to look at the hideous creation for any longer than necessary.
A few regular customers had been lingering later in the day and had tried to engage him in a conversation about an artist’s exhibition that had just opened at a rival gallery along the street, but he was unusually taciturn.
‘Have you seen i
t yet?’ asked one lady, who had spent many thousands of pounds in the Threadbare Gallery and displayed no traces of discernment whatsoever.
‘I dropped in yesterday morning,’ said Montignac.
‘I didn’t care for it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they’re doing giving the artist so much space. I can’t see any of it selling, can you? The things you bring in here are so much more interesting. So different. So challenging, don’t you agree?’
‘Absolutely,’ Montignac said, although for him the only real challenge lay in resisting the urge to take a pair of scissors and destroy every one of them before they could decrease the aesthetic value of the world any further.
‘Of course the exhibition I’m most excited by will be the Cézanne,’ she continued.
‘Yes, I’ve heard about that,’ said Montignac; Arthur Hamilton from the Clarion Gallery next door had already told him how a dozen or so paintings from the exhibition were coming to his gallery for some restoration work before joining the touring collection, and he hoped to get a private viewing.
After Jason Parsons left at six o’clock he locked the door from the inside and went back to his desk, pouring himself a glass of whisky from a bottle he kept locked away in the bottom drawer and began work on the ledger he kept, recording all transactions made during the month. His stomach started to rumble as he had barely eaten all day. Lunch had been disturbed by Stella’s visit and by the time she left he had looked at the sandwich that his assistant had brought for him and found that his appetite was gone; he regretted having thrown it away now as the thought of drinking on an empty stomach only increased his depression.
This was mind-numbing work and it always took him an hour or two to balance all the receipts for sundry expenses against the bankings, but his employer, Mrs Conliffe, examined them herself on a monthly basis and made sure that every pound, shilling and halfpenny was accounted for. On this occasion, however, he quite enjoyed the monotony of the job as it kept his mind off the various problems which were threatening him at the time.
The debt to Nicholas Delfy of fifty thousand pounds, ten grand of which had to be paid off within the month.
The loss of Leyville, its associated capital, landownings, income and rent, all of which rightly belonged to him.
Stella’s relationship with that fool Raymond Davis and her absurd idea about marrying him. Issue of that marriage would leave him ever further away from his rightful inheritance and the life he wanted to live. But he shouldn’t care about any of that, he thought bitterly in his mind, because he’d always be welcome in her home.
He considered making his way to a noisy bar in the West End, somewhere he could slip in unnoticed to a table in the corner and drown his sorrows over an evening’s drinking, but the thought of spending yet more money and waking with a hangover was too much for him. He thought about gambling, numbing the pain of these hours with the brief hope of victory at the tables or around the baize but that too seemed like it might only make matters worse. His mind drifted to the idea of a woman but his body was left behind; it had been weeks, in fact, since he had enjoyed any physical comfort but the idea was of little interest to him now. He had to do something, he realized. Something that might fix all his problems at once.
There was a tap on the door and he snapped out of it but didn’t look up, assuming it was some customer checking to see whether they were still open or not and who would go away when it was clear that no one was there. He had turned off most of the lights at the front of the gallery, but some of the lamps around his desk were still on and were probably sending a ghostly signal to the street outside.
The door rattled again and he raised his head irritably, standing up to get a better look at who was out there.
‘We’re closed,’ he shouted out, seeing a man in a hat and overcoat standing on the darkened street outside. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
‘Mr Montignac?’ called the voice from outside. ‘Owen, is that you?’
His heart skipped a beat for a moment, wondering whether Delfy had sent someone to convince him of the urgency of his repayments but the outline of the figure—regular height, regular build, smartly dressed—not to mention the politeness of the question was enough to convince him that this wasn’t the case. He looked around nervously all the same, wondering whether it would make sense to slip out the back door.
‘Who is it?’ he shouted, trying to think of a reason why anyone would be calling on him at this time of night.
The voice called out a name but it was drowned out by a passing car so he stood up from his desk and walked cautiously through the gallery towards the door. The street light outside was broken, which made it difficult for him to make out the visitor’s face.
‘It’s Gareth Bentley, Owen,’ he said as the gallery manager came into sight; he bobbed his head back and forth enthusiastically, removing his hat and grinning pleasantly. ‘We met last night, do you remember?’
Montignac nodded his head, recalling the young man who had shared his taxi home the night before. The eagerness of the boy. His desperation to escape from an enslaved existence. The way his eyes had lit up in excitement at even the possibility of being offered a job. He’d spent so much of the day worrying about the fifty thousand pounds and the meeting with Stella that Gareth had slipped his mind entirely.
‘Of course I remember you,’ he said, unlocking the door and opening it, a spider welcoming a fly into his web. ‘Come inside, why don’t you?’
FOUR
1
THE APPOINTMENT WAS FOR eleven o’clock and Montignac arrived at the dilapidated office building ten minutes early but didn’t go to the door just yet. Instead he hovered on the street outside, smoking a cigarette in the bright August sunlight until, wary of being spotted by someone looking down from the window above, he moved quickly down a side alley and out of sight. He felt uncomfortable here, a noisy part of London he normally never visited, where poorly dressed children rushed past him on the street and where the smell of cooking emanating from the closely packed houses was overwhelming.
The initial contact had come through a young man who had visited the Threadbare the previous afternoon with a collection of watercolours he was interested in selling; they were rather good, Montignac had thought, and he had therefore been forced to turn them down as they would only seem out of place among the other masterpieces on display in the gallery. To his surprise, the young man didn’t seem particularly disappointed by his failure to sell the pictures and Montignac asked him a few questions about the technique he had employed in one of them which made it quite clear that he hadn’t painted them at all and didn’t even understand some of the terms that he was using.
‘There’s a lot of galleries on this street, isn’t there?’ asked the vendor, who identified himself as Tom Sweeney.
‘Well yes,’ said Montignac, resisting the urge to laugh. ‘That’s what Cork Street is all about. It’s the commercial centre of London’s art world.’
‘The security must be top notch around here then,’ said Sweeney.
‘Well not really,’ he replied. ‘There’s never really any trouble. We don’t have many bobbies coming down to check on us anyway.’
‘And that gallery next door,’ said Sweeney. ‘I read that they’ll be housing some Cézanne paintings there soon?’
‘For a brief period, yes. There’s a rather good restoration team who work out of the Clarion and they’re going to be working on the paintings before they join a national tour. Are you an admirer?’
‘Sure,’ he replied, with an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. ‘Isn’t everyone?’
Montignac narrowed his eyes, recognizing a fishing expedition when he saw one. ‘Can I ask you a question, Mr Sweeney?’ he said and the young man nodded. ‘Who actually painted those pictures you’re carrying?’
Sweeney opened his mouth to protest but then seemed disinterested in pursuing the deception. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was just asked to bring them here and see whether yo
u would be interested in them, that’s all.’
‘Interested in the paintings?’
‘Interested in assisting a collector.’
Montignac paused for a moment to consider this before leading him through the gallery to his desk and indicating that he should sit down. ‘I’m always happy to help out a serious collector in any way that I can,’ he said quietly.
‘My employer is an extremely serious collector,’ said Sweeney.
‘And who is your employer?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep that private for now,’ he replied.
‘Of course. But why don’t you tell me what it is I can do for him? Are these his paintings?’ he asked, nodding at the watercolours which Sweeney had placed on the floor now, leaning against Montignac’s desk. ‘Is he an artist as well as a collector?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never seen him with a paintbrush in his hands and to be honest I doubt it,’ he replied with a slight smile, as if the idea of his employer engaged in something like that struck him as faintly ludicrous.
‘Perhaps he’d like to come down to the gallery himself some day and look at our pieces,’ suggested Montignac.
‘Actually, he’s already been here,’ said Sweeney. ‘He spent a few hours here during the week. I believe he made a thorough assessment of all the work on display.’
‘I see,’ said Montignac, racking his memory to recall whether or not there had been any suspicious or noticeable people present in the gallery recently but he could remember no one out of the ordinary.
‘From what he told me he was quite surprised by what he discovered here.’
‘In what way?’
‘The fact that everything you seem to sell is, in his words you understand, utter rubbish.’
Montignac smiled and gave an unembarrassed shrug. ‘We specialize in that, Mr Sweeney. But you’ll also find that this is among the most expensive and profitable galleries on Cork Street. Is your employer interested in a private viewing perhaps, so that he can purchase a few pieces himself? Their values do stand an excellent chance of escalating over future years.’