Page 81 of The Girl You Left Behind
“Is that Olivia Halston?”
A man’s voice.
She hesitates. “Yes?”
“My name is Robert Schiller. I’m the arts correspondent forThe Times.I’m sorry if I’m calling at an inopportune time, but I’m putting together a background piece on this painting of yours, and I was wondering if you—”
“No. No, thank you.” She slams the phone down. She stares at it suspiciously, then removes the receiver from its cradle, afraid that it will ring again. Three times she places the receiver back on the telephone, and each time it rings straightaway. Journalists leave their names and numbers. They sound friendly, ingratiating. They promise fairness, apologize for taking up her time. She sits in the empty house, listening to her heart thumping.
•••
Mo arrives back shortly after 1:00A.M.and finds her in front of the computer, the phone off the hook. She is e-mailing every living expert on French turn-of-the-twentieth-century art.
I was wondering if you knew anything about... ; I am trying to fill in the history of... ;... anything you have, or know—anything at all...
“You want tea?” Mo says, shedding her coat.
“Thanks.” Liv doesn’t look up. Her eyes are sore. She knows she has reached the point where she is merely flicking blindly among Web sites, checking and rechecking her e-mail, but she can’t stop herself. She seeks something, anything, that will help confirm her ownership. And feeling as if she is doing something, no matter how pointless, is better than the alternative.
Mo sits down opposite her in the kitchen and pushes a mug toward her. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
Mo watches her type listlessly, takes a sip of her tea, and then pulls her chair closer to Liv. “Okay. So let’s look at this with my History of Art, BA Hons, head-on. You’ve been through the museum archives? Auction catalogs? Dealers?”
Liv shuts her computer. “I’ve done them all.”
“You said David got the painting from an American woman. Could you not ask her where her mother got it from?”
She shuffles through the papers. “The... other side have already asked her. She doesn’t know. Louanne Baker had it, her daughter found it among her belongings in Barcelona, and then we bought it. That’s all she knows. That’s all she ever bloody needed to know.”
She stares at the copy of the evening paper, its intimations that she and David were somehow wrong, somehow morally deficient to have owned the painting at all. She sees Paul’s face, his eyes on her at the lawyer’s office.
Mo’s voice is uncharacteristically quiet. “You okay?”
“Yes. No. I love this painting, Mo. I really love it. I know it sounds stupid, but the thought of losing her is... It’s like losing part of myself.”
Mo’s eyebrows lift a quarter of an inch.
“I’m sorry. It’s just... finding yourself in the newspapers as public enemy number one, it’s... Oh, bloody hell, Mo, I don’t know what on earth I’m doing. I’m fighting a man who does this for a living and I’m scrabbling around for scraps and I haven’t a bloody clue.” She realizes, humiliated, that she is about to cry.
Mo pulls the folders toward her. “Go outside,” she says. “Go out onto the deck and stare at the sky for ten minutes, and remind yourself that ultimately ours is a meaningless and futile existence and that our little planet will probably be swallowed by a black hole, so none of this will have any point anyway. And I’ll see if I can help.”
Liv sniffs. “But you must be exhausted.”
“Nah. I need to wind down after a shift. This’ll put me to sleep nicely. Go on.” She begins to flick through the folders on the table.
Liv wipes her eyes, pulls on a sweater, and steps outside onto the deck. Out here she feels curiously weightless, in the endless black of night. She gazes down at the vast city spread beneath her and breathes in the cold air. She stretches, feeling the tightness in her shoulders, the tension in her neck. And always, somewhere underneath, the sense that she is missing something, secrets that float just out of sight.
When she walks into the kitchen ten minutes later, Mo is scribbling notes on her legal pad. “Do you remember Mr. Chambers?”
“Chambers?”
“Medieval painting. I’m sure you did that course. I keep thinking about something he said that stuck with me—it’s about the only thing that did. He said that sometimes the history of a painting is not just about a painting. It’s also the history of a family, with all its secrets and transgressions.” Mo taps her pen on the table. “Well, I’m totally out of my depth here, but I’m curious, given that she was living with them when the painting disappeared, whenshedisappeared, and they all seemed pretty close, why there is no evidence anywhere of Sophie’s family.”
•••
Liv sits up into the night, going through the thick files of papers, checking and double-checking. She scans the Internet, her glasses perched on her nose. When she finally finds what she is looking for, shortly after five o’clock, she thanks God for the meticulousness of French civic record keeping. Then she sits back and waits for Mo to wake up.
