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It is hard to believe that it has been more than a year since I first arrived here in Paris. Sometimes my dreams of that passage are so vivid it feels as if, were I to open my eyes, I would find myself back at the station, so crowded, so cacophonous. On that train, every carriage crammed, or anxiously searching at the other end for the right boat. Hearing the click of the cabin door behind us, as the reality of what we were doing suddenly hit me.
We woke early, Oskar and I, and went up on deck to watch in the dawn for the first glimpse of France. As we had agreed, we did not acknowledge each other in the line to have our passports stamped. There was some part of me not just anxious but convinced someone was going to stop us. The police? A private detective? My father himself? I was not quite sure.
It was late afternoon, the city a smear of lights through a grimy window, as the boat-train began to slow and we neared the Gare du Nord. From time to time, I made a point of conspicuously twiddling on my finger the phony wedding ring Oskar had bought me from a pawn shop in Holborn.
Paris! I could not believe it, really. It all felt too easy. It was almost dismaying to imagine that this freedom had always been mine to reach out and grasp.
“You see?” Oskar had asked me, the glow from a streetlamp falling through the taxi window and illuminating the curve of his mouth, “I told you it would be fine.” I smiled back, returning the squeeze of his hand. I tried not to imagine my father’s fury, my mother’s bewilderment, attempting to maintain the self-belief I had felt in the moment I met Oskar. I wondered if it had occurred to him that I might still be a virgin, that this would be the first time I had ever spent the night in bed with a man.
I was intensely conscious that this was just one of the many things Oskar did not know about me yet.
Chapter 2
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
The day after our first supervision with Alice Long, I returned to my college room from a morning lecture to find a note under my door. My father had called and someone had jotted down a message from him: he was passing through town today on his way back from East Anglia and would be waiting to meet me for lunch at Browns at one o’clock. I checked my wristwatch. It was 12:45.
This was very much par for the course with Dad. Turning up unannounced. Expecting me to drop whatever plans I might have and meet him.
As a child, I idolized my father. He was handsome. He was stylish (the cars, the tailored blazers, the monogrammed silver hip flask: Q. M. for Quentin Lambert). He was conspicuously charming, with a considered opinion about everything (wine, art, London restaurants). He was also, it turned out, a deeply unreliable serial philanderer.
As we were being shown to our seats, Dad immediately started flirting with the waitress, trying to upgrade our table. I sighed inwardly. It was one of the things I had told Caroline about my father, his obsession with always trying to get a window table, a better table, the best table. A performance I had to endure every time we dined together. A chance to demonstrate his powers of persuasion. A way of drawing attention to himself.
We ended up—the two of us—at a six-seat table by the window, looking out on Trumpington Street.
Once we were settled and had ordered our drinks, the first thing he asked about was the car. Running okay, was she? I was taking good care of her, he hoped. Like a dream, I told him. Waxing her every week. It was a big symbol of my relationship with my father, that car. He’d bought it the day I received my Cambridge acceptance letter. On one hand, it had been an extravagantly generous gesture, one I suspected he could not really afford. On the other hand, it was also a massive pain in the backside. Finding somewhere safe to park it. Never knowing on cold mornings if it would start. Having a car at all in a place where I was never more than a ten-minute walk from anywhere else I wanted to be. When I had tried to explain all this to Caroline, she had asked me why I did not just sell it. She had a point. She also did not know my father.
The next thing Dad asked was how my studies were going. He wanted to know all about my dissertation, my supervisor. Although I had not mentioned this to Alice Long, it was actually my father—an art dealer himself—who had first got me interested in the Surrealists, when he took me to the Oskar Erlich retrospective in London a few years back, and who had suggested the 1938 Paris Surrealist Exhibition might provide an interesting topic for a dissertation. He had also encouraged me to think about my chosen topic in career terms, as a chance to establish myself as the expert in some corner of art history no one else seemed very interested in.
Over our starters, Dad explained why he’d been in East Anglia (a house clearance just beyond Norwich—he was there to value things on behalf of the family, make sure nothing valuable accidentally got sold for a song, or if it did, that it was to him). He had popped into Longhurst on the way back to see Philip Willoughby. There were a few things at the house that Philip had wanted him to value. He had, as usual, stayed in the Green Room, the bedroom he always stayed in at Longhurst, and which by some weird tradition Harry’s mother also now always put me in. This was the sort of thing that delighted Dad, and that he was always trying to shoehorn into conversation.
They were pretty formulaic, these catch-ups of ours. He asked about Mum, I asked about his latest girlfriend (these were of quite a specific type, usually, divorced blondes who drove convertibles and owned boutiques in the Cotswolds). He would tell a work-related story in which he was right about something and everyone else wrong and then (a glass of wine in) grill me on whether I was making the most of Cambridge, moving in the right circles, meeting the right sort of people.
He had, once or twice, actually used that phrase the right circles. “Do you mean posh people, Dad?” I had asked him. “Or do you just mean rich people?”
“I mean the kind of people who can give you a leg up in life,” he had replied. “Especially if you are serious about getting into my line of work. People who own art, people who buy it.”
As we were waiting for our mains to arrive, he asked if I had been invited to Harry Willoughby’s twenty-first, at Longhurst.
Every time we met, Dad asked me about Harry. Not about any of my new friends here, whose names he stubbornly refused to remember. Always it was Harry he wanted to know about. If we saw much of each other. If we were still close. If he had a girlfriend. No, was always the answer to this last question, because never have I met anyone in my life more focused on their future political career than Harry, anyone who showed less interest in romantic entanglements of any kind. It sometimes felt that the only reason Harry even had friends was because he thought it was the sort of thing a future prime minister ought to have.
“Of course I’ve been invited,” I said. It would have been embarrassing had I not, given how long I had known Harry, the connection between our fathers, the fact that we were in the same college.
It was not until the end of our meal that Dad revealed he had a favor to ask. Over dessert, I told him I was popping down to London the next week to look up some things in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute—Alice Long had suggested that their extensive holdings of exhibition catalogue clippings might hold something useful on the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition.
“The Witt?” he said. That was handy. There were a couple of paintings that Philip Willoughby was planning to sell and had asked him to establish the provenance of—who had owned them when, who had bought them where, the sort of paper trail that played such an important part in establishing a painting’s authenticity.
With its archive of millions of photographs, reproductions, and clippings documenting the work of tens of thousands of artists, the Witt Library was as valuable a resource for art dealers as it was for scholars—once you had gotten used to its somewhat complicated filing system. The thing that was especially helpful for my father’s purposes being that among the library’s holdings are thousands of pictures taken by the Witt’s own librarians, who from the 1920s until the 1970s were periodically sent around to the great houses of England with cameras to record their art collections. To Cliveden. To Longleat. To Longhurst.
Which meant there was one simple, surefire way of establishing that a painting had been in the possession of the Willoughbys when the Witt’s librarians visited with their cameras in 1961. The downside being that someone had to go through all those green fabric-covered folders of hundreds of unsorted grainy black-and-white photographs and find the ones of the specific paintings in question.
Would I mind, if I was down at the Witt, my father asked, just checking a few things for him? He would make a note of what he wanted me to look for, the names of the paintings, the dates.
“Of course,” I heard myself saying.
“There might be some cash in it for you,” he added.
“Fine,” I said. “Sure. Since I’m down there anyway.”