Page 44 of The Girl You Left Behind
She shrugs. “People grow apart.” She cannot tell him this is only half of the reason. These are the things that they do not tell you about losing your husband: that as well as feeling the exhaustion, you will sleep and sleep, and some days even the act of waking up will force your eyelids back down, and that merely getting through each day will feel like a Herculean effort. You will hate your friends, irrationally: Each time someone arrives at your door or crosses the street and hugs you and tells you they are so, so desperately sorry, you look at her, her husband, and their tiny children and are shocked at the ferocity of your envy. How did they get to live and David to die? How did boring, lumpen Richard, with his City friends and his weekend golfing trips and his total lack of interest in anything outside his tiny complacent world, get to live, when David, brilliant, loving, generous, passionate David, had to die? How did hangdog Tim get to reproduce, to bring further generations of little unimaginative Tims into this world, when David’s unexpected mind, his kindness, his kisses had been extinguished forever?
Liv can remember screaming silently in bathrooms and bolting without explanation from crowded rooms, conscious of her own apparent rudeness but unable to stop herself. It had been years before she could view anybody else’s happiness without mourning the loss of her own.
These days, the anger has gone, but she prefers to view domestic satisfaction at a distance, and in people she doesn’t know well, as if happiness were a scientific concept that she is merely pleased to see proven.
She no longer sees the friends she had back then, the Cherrys, the Jasmines. The women who would remember the girl she had been. It was too complicated to explain. And she didn’t particularly like what it said about her.
“Well, I think you should call her. I used to love watching the two of you head out together, the pair of young goddesses that you were.”
“When are you going to call Caroline?” she says, wiping crumbs from the stripped-pine kitchen table and scrubbing at a ring of red wine.
“She won’t talk to me. I left fourteen messages on her mobile phone last night.”
“You need to stop sleeping with other people, Dad.”
“I know.”
“And you need to earn some money.”
“I know.”
“And you need to get dressed. If I were her and came home and saw you like this I’d turn around and walk straight out again.”
“I’m wearing her dressing gown.”
“I guessed.”
“It still carries her scent. What am I supposed to do if she doesn’t come back?”
Liv stills, her expression hardening momentarily. She wonders if her father has any idea what day it is today. Then she looks at the battered man in his woman’s dressing gown, the way his blue veins stand proud on his crepey skin, and turns away to the washing up. “You know what, Dad? I’m not really the person to ask.”
13
The old man lowers himself gingerly into the chair and lets out a sigh, as if crossing the room has been some effort. His son, standing with his hand under his elbow, watches anxiously.
Paul opens his folder. He lays his hands on the desk, feeling Mr. Nowicki’s eyes on him. “Well, I asked you here today because I have some news. When you initially approached me I warned you that I thought this case would be tricky, because of the lack of provenance on your side. As you know, many galleries are reluctant to hand over work without the most solid proof of—”
“I remember the painting clearly.” The old man lifts a hand.
“I know. And you know that the gallery in question was very reluctant to engage with us, despite the holes in their own provenance. This case was complicated by the sharp increase in value of the work in question. And it was particularly hard, given that you had no image we could go on.”
“How am I meant to describe such a drawing perfectly? I was ten when we were forced from our house—ten years old. Could you tell me what was on your parents’ walls when you were ten?”
“No, Mr. Nowicki, I couldn’t.”
“Were we meant to know then that we would never be allowed to go back to our own home? It is ridiculous, this system. Why should I have to prove that something was stolen from us? After all we have been through...”
“Dad, we’ve been over this....” The son, Jason, places a hand on his father’s forearm, and the old man’s lips press together reluctantly, as if he is used to being quelled.
“This is what I wanted to talk to you about,” Paul says. “When we had our meeting in January, you said something to me about your mother’s friendship with a neighbor, Artur Bohmann, who moved to America. I managed to track down his surviving family, in Des Moines. And his granddaughter, Anne-Marie, went through the family albums, and tucked away in one of them she found this.” Paul pulls a sheet of paper from his folder and slides it across the desk to Mr. Nowicki.
It is not a perfect copy, but the black-and-white image is clearly visible. A family sits in the stiff embrace of a tightly upholstered sofa. A woman smiles cautiously, holding a button-eyed baby firmly on her lap. A man with a vast mustache reclines, his arm running along the back. A boy grins broadly, a missing tooth clearly visible. Behind them, on the wall, hangs a painting of a young girl dancing.
“That’s it,” Mr. Nowicki says quietly, an arthritic hand rising to his mouth. “The Degas.”
“I checked it against the image bank, then with the Edgar Degas Foundation. I sent this picture to their lawyers, along with a statement from Artur Bohmann’s daughter saying that she, too, remembered seeing this painting in your parents’ house, and hearing your father discuss how he bought it.”
He pauses. “But that’s not all Anne-Marie remembers. She says that, after your parents fled, Artur Bohmann had gone one night to the apartment to try to collect your family’s remaining valuables. It was only as he was leaving that he saw the painting was missing.”
