What a sad little party. Ellie thinks it while she’s standing alone in her kitchen with a tray of food in her hands. Olives and Marcona almonds, a circle of water crackers with some aged Dutch Gouda in the center. There’s nothing wrong with the spread—it’s the sight of those five people standing awkwardly out on her veranda that sets something off in her. They’re nominally here to celebrate her recent lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art and the new edition of her book—Dutch Women Painters in the Golden Age. Two female colleagues from Sydney University, her sister up from the Blue Mountains, an art history graduate student, and an old friend from her boarding school days. Three years back in Sydney and this is all she can drum up. They stand out there with glasses of wine in hand, talking about the upcoming Olympics and watching the rosellas skirl in the treetops. At least the view is good.
She ferries the plate of food out to her guests and tells them the quiche will be a few more minutes. She doesn’t even like quiche, but Kate had insisted and read out their dead mother’s recipe over the phone. How did she become a woman in her sixties who serves ham and cheese quiche to people she’s holding captive? The gathering was Kate’s idea, but Ellie did all the inviting and organizing and now she feels certain it was an imposition. Drive an hour or two on your weekend, catch a ferry over to Scotland Island, drink some cabernet, admire my view and my accomplishments. She heads back inside on the pretext of more wine. As she goes in, she hears Michael, her graduate student, trying to strike up a conversation with her sister. Kate is a retired actuary and competitive bridge player. It begins and ends with a tentative So are you into art as well? because Kate either doesn’t hear him or ignores him entirely, already narrating one of the rosella sorties as the birds swoop down from a treetop to the tray of seeds attached to the railing. Ellie closes the sliding glass door as Michael looks down into the glassy bay. The two art historians have colonized the other end of the veranda, their backs to the view, arms folded, deep in speculation, or perhaps airing the latest campus scandal.
She sometimes wonders whether she bought this house with exile in mind. Perched among blue gums and overgrown sedge at the head of a sandstone gully, the house rises to a view of Pittwater on stilts. She bought it three years ago after fleeing her failed marriage in London and receiving a job offer from Sydney University. Everyone, her Realtor included, had tried to talk her out of the purchase. He’d called Scotland Island the little piece of Sydney paradise nobody wanted to buy. But she’d changed her life to accommodate the ferry ride and hour-long commute to the city, adjusted her teaching schedule so that she went to campus only twice a week. Most of the time she loves the isolation. And the house itself—cathedral ceilings and a wall of glass overlooking the bay—always buoys her spirits. On sunny mornings, she likes to stand out on the veranda in her robe with a pair of field binoculars and observe the waterways and shorelines, the estuaries and coppery mangrove creeks that flow in from Towlers Bay. The airy, stoic house and its impractical location remind her daily that nobody has any claims on her. She has broken free. And yet here she is with an exact replica of a social life out on her veranda, but not the thing itself.
She’s back in the kitchen when the wall-mounted phone rings. Her first thought is that it’s the chair of her department, sending along his apologies, but instead it’s Max Culkins, the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, calling from the airport. He’s on his way to Beijing to speak at a conference. Even though she’s curating an exhibition on seventeenth-century Dutch women painters that’s opening next month at the gallery, she didn’t invite Max to her gathering. He’s an old-school art dandy in a pinstriped suit, a medieval Asia specialist who still calls himself an orientalist. Ellie had pictured him and her sister together in the same room and decided against inviting him. One less collision of worlds.
He’s a little breathless on the phone and Ellie thinks of his nervous habit of wetting his lips with his tongue. It’s a tic that punctuates his lectures on clan art of the Ming dynasty. “I’m boarding soon, but I wanted to share the good news. I tracked down the current owner of At the Edge of a Wood through some old colleagues at the Met. I telephoned early this morning and asked for the loan directly. Just like that, as if I were asking for cab fare.”
She feels her chest tighten, like someone is pushing the heel of their hand between her shoulder blades. She swallows and lets the silence gather for a few seconds. The quiche is burning in the oven—she can smell it, but she’s unable to move. She says, “That’s marvelous news,” but it comes after a long pause and the tone is all wrong. Her mind goes blank. Outside, her old schoolmate has taken up the binoculars and is scanning the bay.
A month ago, Ellie learned that a small private collection in the Netherlands had recently purchased the painting and was willing to loan it for the exhibition. It was due to arrive later in the week. The loan was proof, she felt sure, of Marty de Groot’s passing, of an estate sale, that perhaps a widow had finally gotten that grimly beautiful harbinger off the bedroom wall. For a month she’s felt relieved, grateful. How is it possible, she thinks, that Max Culkins has not seen the registrar’s paper trail for the Dutch loan of the same painting? Then she sees an image of Max walking to the podium without his lecture notes, or the missing button from his shirt cuff, or the times he’s called her Ella.
Max says, “I talked you and the gallery up quite a bit and then the chap insisted that he handle all the arrangements at his end. You have to love American philanthropy!”
Ellie coughs away from the phone to steady her voice. She is about to enlighten Max—she’s certain of it for a lingering second—that two paintings of the same name, from two different hemispheres, are on their way to his museum. She might call it a baffling mix-up. But instead she says, “And who is this generous fellow?”
“A Mr. Martijn de Groot from Manhattan.”
Ellie does the math: somewhere in his eighties, unless there’s a male heir with the same name. Through the glass doors she watches as the bay silvers with scales of afternoon sunlight.
“Goes by Marty—a brash sort, but very generous, if you ask me. The picture’s been in his family for centuries. Remarkable, really.”
The carbonized smell of the quiche makes her feel light-headed. Max says something that she doesn’t quite hear—it’s muffled by a boarding announcement at the airport—then he comes back in, as if through static: “… apparently the painting is already bequeathed to the Met. They’re just waiting for the old codger to die. But this is the best part, Ellie. Marty de Groot insists on bringing the painting himself. He’ll be flying out with it sometime before we open. Isn’t that something?”
She feels her throat thickening with dread.
Max says, “Speaking of flying, I should head over to my gate. I’ll be in touch from Beijing.”
Because she’s terrified of what her voice might sound like, she hums a goodbye and hangs up the phone. Her kitchen floor is plummeting for a few seconds, an elevator in free fall. She thinks, I have invited ruin back into my life. She stares dumbly at the oracle of the old rotary dial telephone, as if it might unring. She’s been gone long enough that Kate comes bustling in from the veranda to lend a hand. “You’re hopeless,” she says in a bright, cheery voice. “You went in search of wine and now you’re standing there like a lobotomy patient. Ooh, smells like a house fire in here. What have you done to poor old mum’s quiche?”
Ellie is jolted into action and opens the oven door. The quiche is smoking and charred beyond recognition. Kate nudges her out of the way, slips on an oven mitt, and pulls it out onto the stovetop. “You really know how to charm your guests,” she says. Then she opens the kitchen window to let out some of the smoke. “No fear,” she says, crossing to the fridge. “I saw some smoked salmon in here. We’ll serve that up.” When she pulls the packet of salmon from the refrigerator she finally turns to see Ellie’s ashen face. “What’s wrong? You look like you need smelling salts.”
Ellie says, “I’m getting a terrible migraine. I can barely see.”
Kate’s face washes with sisterly affection and concern. She touches Ellie’s forehead with her wrist, as if checking for a fever. Their mother’s migraines were burdensome acts of God that they both resented as girls, but Ellie’s—which came on during puberty—were treated with tenderness and precision. Kate used to black out the windows of the old house with blankets if Ellie had an attack when she was back from boarding school. She used to make cold compresses and cups of tea and bring them to Ellie in the darkness of their shared bedroom. Kate says, “Go lie down and I’ll bring you some medicine. I’ll handle your guests and get them on the four o’clock ferry.”
Ellie is shocked by the panic burning in her chest and hands and face. There’s something jagged and electrical about it. The aura of a migraine, that first pulse of recognition, is nothing compared to this. She nods and says, “You’ve always looked after me, Kate. I’m sorry I’ve spent most of my life on the other side of the world.” Kate kisses her cheek and sternly points her toward the back of the house.
Ellie walks toward her bedroom, goes inside, and closes the door. She sits on the bed and looks out the window, obstructed from her guests out on the veranda. A dozen yachts belly out with their spinnakers across the bay, dashing down toward Palm Beach on a steady breeze. Her mind seems to resist the immediate puzzle for a moment and so she finds herself thinking of her father. Whenever she watches the sailboats unfurl or the fishing trawlers come into the bay after a night’s catch she thinks about him. He’s been dead since before she was forty, but to this day the sound of halyards plinking on metal mastheads, especially at night, brings him back. There he is sleeping in his eighteen-foot ketch, anchored in the Parramatta River just to avoid the domestic claims of his wife and two daughters. Their hatchet-shaped lot in Balmain gave onto a view of the navy yards and industrial docks and she remembers the sight of her father’s boat amid the hulking silhouettes of frigates and cargo ships. The darkness pulsed with the sound of ship generators and she always wondered how he could sleep through the night with all that racket. That noise was infinitely preferable, apparently, to the sound of young girls bickering or a wife calling out in her sleep.
She’s incredulous that both paintings have coexisted for nearly half a century—a planet and its orbiting moon. Over the years, a few other de Vos paintings have been discovered, one of them authenticated by Ellie, but At the Edge of a Wood has remained the crown jewel. The private collection in Leiden had agreed to loan not only it but also another de Vos landscape she has never seen. She wonders if that one is a fake as well. While she listens to the sound of Kate corralling the guests with good humor and smoked salmon she replays in her mind the late 1950s in New York. A panicked escape, then the big push into the straight and narrow. After her dissertation was accepted by her department and some of her papers begun to be published, she took a post teaching at University College London. She had tenure in her early thirties, having walked away from the New York underworld of runners and pickers and dealers as if from a burning house, incredulous and grateful to emerge unscathed.
She didn’t know all the circumstances of the painting’s return, but she knew that Gabriel had both the copy and the original as of late 1958. In December of that year, Marty de Groot reached out to the public—or the forgers and thieves—like a mogul with a kidnapped child, placing a full-page appeal in the Sunday Times and offering a reward of seventy-five thousand dollars. The painting wasn’t worth much more than that at the time. She was already in Europe when the ad appeared, and she heard about it months later. Because the painting had never been sold or exhibited, she assumed that the fake had been quietly destroyed or kept as a memento in the de Groot attic. But now, as she watches a yacht come about in a strong gust, she considers all the possibilities, follows them like the branches of some sprawling equation.
One proof entails visions of Gabriel fleeing the country with his reward to live in exile, in Morocco or Brazil, wearing a rumpled cream linen suit. Another version sees him spending years in a Rikers Island jail cell, extradited and disgraced, before teaching art appreciation to pensioners at night school. For a decade after the incident, she’d been so busy constructing a new life for herself and projecting onto Gabriel’s unknown fate that she’d either ignored or denied a rather obvious and elegant solution: Gabriel returns the original painting to Marty de Groot, collects the reward, keeps the fake, and sits on it until, forty-two years later, he’s cash-strapped and desperate to sell. He finds a small private museum in Leiden, thinking Marty de Groot is probably dead and the scandal forgotten. It has the audacity and simplicity of mathematical truth. And if it is true, she can’t help admiring the calculated restraint of Gabriel sitting on the painting all this time.
* * *
She doesn’t leave the island until Wednesday, when she has to teach and the courier is due to arrive at the museum with the Leiden paintings. Whatever she does next, she feels certain this is the beginning of how it all ends. She barely eats, drinks too much wine, falls asleep out on the veranda in a deck chair. Her dreams are lifted from a Fellini film—full of ticking clocks, abandoned houses, inscrutable strangers, doors loosed from their hinges. She is forever hearing the sound of turbines, of jets coming in to land.
Early one morning she wakes in a panic and decides to send Max Culkins an e-mail. She wishes she hadn’t incriminated herself by saying marvelous news on the phone to him. He will soon discover the paper trail—not to mention the paintings—and wonder why she hadn’t told him.
Dear Max,
Hope you’re enjoying the conference in China. I’m embarrassed to say that I was a bit out of it the other night when you called. People were over and I was distracted. Anyway, somehow we seem to have two copies of the same de Vos coming to the gallery for the exhibition. A double-up on the New York picture. No idea how that happened … but I’ll get to the bottom of it. Probably a faulty attribution out of Leiden. By the way, Leiden also claims to have another de Vos landscape. So we’ll see. Anyway, let me know if you want to strategize.
Best—
Ellie
After she sends the e-mail, she wonders if the word strategize is too cold and calculating. She waits to see what will happen next. Max never responds directly, but later that day she gets e-mails from the curatorial staff that suggest they are all in the know. One e-mail from Mandy, the registrar, has a subject line that reads “The Same Painting Twice.” The body reads: I think Max wants to tread lightly in case rumour of a forgery gets out before the exhibition opens. Also, the poor old sod’s retiring next year, so everything is hush-hush. We’re under strict instructions not to let on we know anything with either of the lenders. Max says he’ll handle it personally when he gets back from China.
Ellie has bought herself some time, recovered from the ridiculous use of the word marvelous, but now there’s the looming matter of Marty de Groot crossing the international date line. She morbidly tries to conjure the worst of the headlines if she’s exposed. The national papers might go with something restrained like “Feminist Art Scholar Forges Her Way to Prominence,” while her hometown tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, would settle for “Art Maven Uncovered as Crook.”
She has visions of federal police—she doesn’t know why they’re federal—showing up to a lecture she’s giving on Frans Hals. They wait at the back of the auditorium until she’s done, politely escorting her across the quadrangle without handcuffs. Or she sees herself being called into a meeting with her faculty dean and a plainclothes detective. She finds herself dialing up her modem to connect to Internet legal advice sites, conducting searches in the middle of the night, researching the statute of limitations and international extradition treaties and case history for forgeries. There’s no reason to be concerned about a criminal case, but she feels hollowed out by the specter of Marty de Groot’s arrival.
The threat of being found out makes her want to take stock, to peer into the corners of her life for broader deceits. Is she a fundamentally flawed person? She fixates on small lapses, as if they might reveal something larger. Unanswered e-mails, promising students she could have given more attention to, art reviews she’s published that could have been more evenhanded. She tries to uncover a bread-crumb trail of moral failure, a trail that perhaps began with her forgery, or even before, with the shoplifting excursions at boarding school. But the trail peters out after 1957. The truth is she became tirelessly disciplined and scrupulous as an academic; she forever felt the aftermath of her decision to copy the painting for money, experienced the fact of having been spared as viscerally as survivor’s guilt. She was always trying to make amends. Her art-dealing ex-husband, Sebastian, liked to make gentle fun of her at dinner parties, because in two decades he’d never seen her speed or jaywalk or take a shortcut on her taxes. What’s happened to that convict blood of yours, he would chide, and she would smile demurely and think about her undeniable role in the theft of a landmark painting.
* * *
As she casts about for evidence of her flawed character, she happens upon something unexpected. At the edges of her carefully managed life, at the center of her thin social circles, is a kind of shocking loneliness. It’s been there for years, even back in England. Up until now she’d thought there was liberation in solitude. She could stay in town after lectures, go see a foreign film at the Dendy, and not worry about bumping into ex-lovers or lapsed friends while eating a large popcorn in the glimmering desolation of a weekday matinee. Until Sunday afternoon, she’d thought that was real freedom. Now it seems to her like a narrow and stingy way to live.
Then she recalls the solo sightseeing trips she’s done over the last three years, the tours of the old stomping grounds. A gleeful tourist in her own haunted homeland. How to explain those? The pub in Balmain where her father held court, the family lot down by the navy yards. Her first year back, she roamed the city as if struck by nostalgia. She’s at a loss to explain the dozen or so trips she made across the harbor, shadowing her father’s ferry routes to Manly and the Taronga Zoo. This was a man who barely knew she breathed the same air that he did. The one time her father let her ride along in the wheelhouse of the South Steyne she got terribly seasick and clutched her sketchbook the whole time. This was before the nuns and the priests, before the onslaught of puberty. During the summer the harbor smelled of kelp and iodine and she couldn’t wait to get off the boat in Manly. She snuck off for a quick swim in the roped-off area beside the terminal and a lightning tour of the shark aquarium and the Fun Pier. She’d taken some money from her mother’s bedside table (had the moral failures started as far back as that?) and was determined to put it to good use. Half an hour later she emerged from the Ghost Train breathless with fear and hurrying back to make the scheduled departure of her father’s boat. She stood on the dock in her damp swimsuit as the South Steyne pulled away, the water churning and foaming in the ferry’s wake. It was two hours before his boat returned. She sat patiently and watched bare-chested boys dive for coins from the giant wooden pylons. Her father never mentioned the incident, but she never forgot the sense that the world—and her father—was indifferent to her actions and inclinations. The clocks didn’t stop running just because something struck her fancy. He never asked her to ride along again.
All this floats about her—another time and city. A lifetime has elapsed but this is where things began, where the lamps were lit and the curtains drawn. Ellie the forger took root somewhere here, but where? The old house in Balmain with its bullnose veranda and loose-framed windows was leveled years ago, a brick cube of apartments in its place, a rogue banana tree and a flaming jacaranda the only visible reminders of that time. Everything has moved on, but she has come back in search of the brooding teenage girl who smelled like acetone. The past is more alive to her than the present, she realizes, and the thought is suffocating. The invitation to curate the exhibition for the Art Gallery of New South Wales was supposed to be her way forward, the beginning of widening her circle of friends and acquaintances, of rejoining the ranks of the living. Instead, it’s become the way back to the wreckage of the past.
* * *
On Wednesday afternoon, after delivering a lecture on Judith Leyster, Ellie receives a phone call from the art gallery, letting her know that the Dutch courier has arrived at Mascot airport with the two paintings from Leiden. She estimates there are about twenty-four hours before the packing cases are opened and her forgery is carefully removed. Over the past few months, as the paintings for the exhibition have trickled in from the lenders, the protocol has been perfected—the museum van with security guards and the collections registrar meets the courier, the cases are delivered to the museum for safekeeping, the courier is taken to his or her hotel, and everyone reconvenes the next day for the opening, allowing the paintings time to warm back up to room temperature after many hours in the hold of a plane. She tells the curatorial assistant that she’ll come over to meet the courier and to expect her shortly. Normally, she waits until the opening of the cases to meet the couriers. These people are usually curators or conservators from the lending institution and they arrive harried and jet-lagged, riffling through binders of paperwork and eager to be off the clock for the first time in days. But because they have personally overseen the packing at the other end, Ellie knows they have intimate knowledge of the paintings inside. She wants to see for herself what the Dutch courier knows.
Usually she leaves her car in the faculty parking lot and takes the train to the St. James station for the short walk through the Domain, but today she bustles out onto King Street to find a taxi. The city streets have taken on a mineral sheen after a downpour and everything smells of iron. While she waits for a cab heading in the right direction she reminds herself to take note of the light, the flush of pink over in the west. She’s forever telling her students to notice the light, but for three days she’s seen nothing around her. She hails a cab and climbs in. Something about the Olympics and the city’s state of readiness has been in the papers, and the taxi driver delivers a monologue about the city being caught with its pants down around its ankles. She looks out the window and notices the sections of Cleveland Street gone to rot, the filigreed metal balconies of the shambling terraces like rusted lacework, the grimy tiled pub facades, the windows of the Lebanese restaurants filmed with grease. This is old Sydney, her father’s town of grit and mildew. The driver is talking about the general lack of courtesy in the early days of the twenty-first century as they near the gallery. She has him go around the back to the loading dock and pays the fare.
A handful of store men are milling around the loading dock in dustcoats. The museum employs two full-time packers, two installation technicians, and a carpenter. They all work for Quentin La Forge, a meticulous man in his sixties who calls himself Chief Handler. Everyone else calls him Q. When Ellie arrives, she finds him sitting in his glassed-in office, bifocals perched on his head, dunking biscuits into a cup of tea and picking through the newspaper. Over the past year, while the exhibit has slowly fallen into place, Ellie has learned to kiss the papal ring of the shippers and handlers. They mean the difference between timeliness and inexplicable delay. She brings them Mars bars and hands out movie passes when one of them has a birthday. In her planner, she’s written down their full names, mobile phone numbers, and birthdays. Q’s office is a fortress of industrial-green filing cabinets and laminated diagrams on the walls that chart the Dynamic Cushioning Curve or the insulation properties of various woods and polymers. Q is roughly Ellie’s age but of another time—a man of pressed handkerchiefs and pomade who smells of wood glue. He wears a navy dustcoat with his monogrammed initials above a pocket crammed with mechanical pencils.
She plunks down in the cracked swivel chair in front of his neatly arranged desk. He looks up, nods, takes a soggy bite from a dunked Scotch finger biscuit.
“So they’re in transit?” she says, trying to keep her voice steady.
“What’s in transit? Venus? I need a few more specifics, love.”
She knows better than to broach a delivery schedule without the requisite three minutes of chitchat. But as they sit there the paintings are en route, she thinks, clearing customs or wending through traffic. She pictures her forgery like some embezzled diamond, sitting snug inside its vapor barrier, encased in layers of glassine and plywood.
She says, “The ones from Leiden.”
Chewing, Q says, “Yeah, Mandy and a few of the guards went to meet the Dutch chappie at the airport.” He says this with a casualness she finds infuriating. A Caravaggio could come into Mascot and he’d dunk his biscuits and prefer to talk about the weather, horse racing, the footy, really anything but the actual purpose of his job. He could be packing and unpacking plastic souvenirs for all his apparent curiosity. Early on, she’d made the mistake of transposing this apathy to the work itself and remembers her first time watching him build a custom packing case. It was a thing of beauty—every joint, batten, and corner pad perfectly made and aligned, his little wooden trolley of brass fixtures and trunk handles and his hot-melt glue gun at his side as he worked with a headlamp. He listened to the Goldberg Variations while he worked patiently for hours, his attendants fetching him certain chisels and fine-toothed files and cups of tea.
It’s also clear to her from his lack of interest that he’s not in the loop about a potential forgery coming through his loading dock. Ellie has spent her life around museums and knows that the curatorial staff and packers are vaguely suspicious of each other. The curators and Max Culkins have kept the news from the men in dustcoats.
She wants to ask him what the ETA is, but instead she asks, “How are the grandkids?”
“Yeah, good, took the whole tribe to Bondi on the weekend. We all ate fish and chips at the Icebergs and I even conned one of the boys into a swim.”
“Bit cold, isn’t it?”
“Rubbish. Gets the heart pumping.”
This small talk goes on for a few excruciating minutes. Ellie notices that Q rarely asks about her weekends and plans, as if her island hermitage and childless, divorcée status makes her life inscrutable and a bit unsightly. After a while, the carpenter—a quiet man named Ed—comes into the office to report the arrival of the van from the airport. Q nods and picks up the telephone on his desk and calls upstairs to the head of conservation to announce the news. He says, “The cases are here with the Dutchman.” He hangs up the phone, drains his cup of tea, and stands behind his desk. He pats down his dustcoat, checking the pockets, then remembers the bifocals resting above his forehead. He lowers them into place, squinting into the lenses as they suddenly magnify his pale brown eyes. On the side of a filing cabinet hangs a clipboard with the receiving checklist and the signature pages. Q grabs it on the way out and Ellie follows along.
The van has reversed and beeped into the loading bay and two guards get out to open up the rear cargo doors. Mandy, the registrar, is the next to get out, and then a scruffy, long-haired man with a goatee and a tattoo on one forearm emerges in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a small backpack and a bulging manila envelope. Ellie is standing beside the handlers and she hears Q say to his men, “Our courier looks like he’s out on parole from Long Bay.” The men laugh quietly. Ellie crosses behind the van to get a better look and sees two identical wooden cases, each with caution labels in multiple languages. Mandy and the courier come up the stairs and she introduces him as Hendrik Klapp. He shakes hands with everyone.
“How was the flight?” Ellie asks.
“About six hours too long,” he says, opening his envelope of papers.
Q steps forward to assert his domain. “Hendrik, what’s your affiliation with the private museum in Leiden?”
“I oversee handling there, among other things.”
“Excellent. So you know how these cases were put together? Perhaps you have some diagrams?”
“I made them and packed the art myself,” Hendrik says. “Down to the last nail.”
Q looks at his underlings, gives them a stagey wink. “I do hope there are no nails.”
“Of course. I was using an expression.”
The hostility between Hendrik and Q is immediate.
Hendrik says, “Even though the cases are about one hundred pounds each, I recommend using a hydraulic hand truck to remove them from the vehicle. The cases are fitted with skids on the bottom.”
With his backpack, surly disposition, and his pale, gaunt face, Hendrik looks like he’s auditioning for a film role as a Dutch hacker. Ellie suspects he doesn’t mean to sound arrogant or bossy; it’s just the curse of a certain nonnative English speaker, a kind of mechanical efficiency that comes off as rude. But she also knows Q and his men aren’t making any such calculations or allowances. Hendrik has become a scab on the knee of a Wednesday afternoon and they’re eager to pick at it.
Ed goes to fetch the hand truck while the packer and the framer get inside the van to slide the cases to the rear. The ramp is perfectly level with the dock so that Ed can easily snug the tines of the hand truck beneath the cases, between the wooden skids. He lifts each case six inches from the ground and rolls it onto the dock. Normal practice is to leave the packing crates in the exhibition space overnight and then open them in the courier’s presence for immediate hanging. But water damage to a skylight and ongoing repairs has meant that none of the exhibition space is available yet. All of the paintings will hang in storage until the gallery is ready. Ellie explains all this to Hendrik as the crates are wheeled toward the storage room. He stares at her, a look of incomprehension on his face.
Ellie can see from the outside of the cases, from the carefully planed corners and the countersunk brass screws and the barcode stickers, that these are exceptionally well made. Q is accustomed to receiving cases that sometimes look like they’ve been dropped from a height. She watches as he walks around the cases warily, like he’s sizing up an unknown dog. Hendrik stands back with his bundle of papers. Ellie can tell that Q is impressed with the workmanship of the cases but also a little riled.
Abruptly, Hendrik says, “This is highly unusual, not putting them in the gallery space.”
“We did notify your institution of the delay,” Q says.
Hendrik looks down at his paperwork. “Well, I will need signatures of receipt and also to know of the security detail for the overnight period.” He looks up at a clock on the wall. “I will return at this time tomorrow.”
Ellie wishes, for his own sake, that he could stop sounding like a German spy from a World War II movie. Q takes the paperwork and a pen from Hendrik and studies the receipt under one of the lights. After a moment, he says, “We’ll have to make some amendments to this, if that’s all right. For starters, we won’t know what’s in these cases until tomorrow. Could be two boxes of rocks for all we know. So this part here where it lists the painting descriptions and asks for a signature, we’ll have to change the wording to the cases with the barcodes you’ve provided. We’ll sign the rest after we open our presents tomorrow. How does that sound?”
“That will be fine.”
Q continues to flip through the bundle of papers. “Good. And we have our own condition report we’ll use tomorrow. In addition to the Leiden one.”
“Naturally.”
It occurs to Ellie that these loans are never quite received with gratitude at the loading dock. It’s always just another crate to unpack.
Q makes a few wording changes to the receipt form and both he and Hendrik initial the changes before signing. Mandy takes a copy of the paperwork and heads upstairs, but not before giving Ellie a knowing glance.
Turning to Ellie, Hendrik asks, “Is it possible to use your fax machine to send this to Leiden?”
“Of course,” Ellie says. “I’ll take you upstairs to the office. You can also speak to the head of security if you like.”
“That would be perfect.” Hendrik turns one more time in the direction of his packing cases and then says to Q and his men, “Gentlemen, I will see you all tomorrow.”
As they walk out of the shipping and receiving area Ellie can feel the men watching them leave. She knows there will be impersonations of Hendrik at the pub in a couple of hours, that he’ll be added to Q’s ledger of foreign upstarts who didn’t show him the proper respect.
Hendrik faxes his forms to Leiden with some country code help from one of the admins. Then Ellie takes him to meet the head of security, who suffers him with the same impatience as Q. Satisfied with the outcome and checking things off his prepared list, Hendrik says that he’s ready to go to the hotel and could he order a taxi.
“We’re putting you up at a small hotel in the Rocks, an old part of Sydney right on the water. I’d be happy to take you down there, if you’re up for a walk. Do you have other luggage in the van?”
“This is it,” he says, gesturing to his backpack slung over one shoulder.
Ellie estimates that he couldn’t have more than a change of clothes in there.
“How long are you staying?”
“Just a few days. Not really enough to do any sightseeing.”
“Have you been to Australia before?”
“Never.”
“I’ll give you a short list of must-sees in the city.”
She leads him out under the arched ceilings and skylights to the main entrance and they head down toward the botanical gardens. It’s only a little after four but already nearing dusk. A heavy bank of clouds has formed in the west. Through the trees, Ellie watches as a sunburst streaks through and turns the harbor from slate to sapphire and back again. She remembers how much she likes the city in winter. The pale sunshine in the mornings, the bouts of rain, the strange rockeries of sandstone and ferns along the waterfront, the smell of moss that always makes her think of grottoes and her early Arcadian landscapes. She misses painting, feels its absence like a great loss. They walk between flowerbeds of hibiscus and golden banksia and she wonders how the gardens look to Hendrik, to a Dutchman accustomed to tulips and teahouses nestled in pristine woodlands. She spent time in the Netherlands teaching and researching over the years and remembers the Dutch with fondness. She also recalls their sturdy, unflappable manner and their occasional brusqueness.
They pass through a palm grove where grey-headed flying foxes hang below the fronds, ravaging pods and fruit and dropping seeds on the leaves below. Other bats are taking off above the trees to forage for the night, beating their leathery wings into a sudden flurry. Hendrik stops walking and cranes up. Ellie was gone long enough from Australia to see it through his eyes—a colony of southern vampires marauding in the treetops. At the museum, Ellie’s heard talk of some relocation program in the works, of predawn noise disturbance to stop the bats from roosting. They continue walking, past hoop pines and swamp mahoganies that were planted in the early 1800s, a fact Ellie would never share with a European visitor. The Amsterdam house she lived in for a summer researching Sara de Vos was four hundred years old, with the original gable clock still installed and working.
They talk about Dutch museums and cities, but Ellie doesn’t let on she once lived in Amsterdam, for fear of an inquisition. By the time they pass out of the lower gardens, dusk has hardened the shadows between the office towers and there’s an exodus of commuters streaming down toward Circular Quay. Hendrik strides along with his backpack, Sydney’s jewels—harbor, opera house, bridge—laid out neatly for his consideration, all of them in a single line of sight.
Ellie says, “It’s very generous of your museum to make this loan.”
“The Hofje van Foort is trying to widen its reputation.”
His breath punches behind the formal Dutch name and she assumes it’s to assert his authority. Or perhaps he thinks she’s nervous about the pronunciation. All the Dutch she knows is strictly academic and used for parsing monographs; even during her time in Holland she found it hard to find locals who would speak Dutch with her. The running joke with her colleagues was that Dutch taxi drivers—often driving black Mercedes in dark suits, like embassy chauffeurs—spoke better English than the Australian expats.
Hendrik says, “It’s good press for us. I assume we’ll be featured in your program?”
“Prominently,” Ellie says. A beat later, she asks, “When did your gallery acquire the paintings?”
“My employer bought the funeral scene some years ago but kept it a secret. Mr. van Foort wanted a second de Vos before showing the pair. It was like he wanted a couple to arrive at the same dinner party together.”
“How romantic,” she says. “And when did he purchase At the Edge of a Wood?”
“It came on the market recently.” Hendrik suddenly seems evasive, looking down at his feet.
She pictures a much older Gabriel in a shabby raincoat in Leiden, sitting in a café with a yellowed espionage novel and a forgery wrapped in brown paper, killing time before his appointment at the private gallery. She doesn’t want to sound like she’s prying, so she changes her tactic. Casually, she says, “I’m so surprised about the new discovery … a funeral scene, you say?”
“Yes,” he says, “Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession. An outdoor scene, painted in 1637.”
“Another outdoor scene? I don’t know of anything for de Vos after 1636.”
“Ah, yes, well, you might have to revise your book.”
This sounds like a dig, but it’s hard to tell. If she asks him whether he’s read her book about seventeenth-century Dutch women painters she risks sounding vain. Instead, she asks, “Where was it found?”
“Mr. van Foort keeps those details to himself. Trade secrets. I like to think it’s something like Coco Chanel’s old suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris because that would be straight from a Disney movie!” He says this with sudden glee, as if he’s landed a joke that’s inside her cultural tent. Another thing she recalls about her Dutch friends is that they were listening to pop music a decade beyond its prime.
Ellie says, “Well, Paris would make more sense than Cincinnati, which is where two other de Vos paintings have ended up.”
Without expression, he says, “You believe she stopped painting in 1636.” It’s not a question so much as a statement of her fallacy.
They’re walking through the bustle of Circular Quay during rush hour. Ferries are filling up as she leads him across the grain of pedestrian traffic. A few buskers are performing along the handrail by the water, including a troupe of painted Aboriginal dancers. The city is built for tourists, Ellie thinks. When they get into a clearing, she says, “From a few letters and archival documents we know that Sara de Vos was raised in Amsterdam, the daughter of a landscape painter but she trained in still life. She married a landscape painter from Haarlem, lived with her husband and child for some years near the Kalverstraat. The child, a daughter, died young, possibly from the plague. We don’t have death records for either Sara or the husband. The guild records are mostly destroyed for that period but we know from court dockets and auction receipts that the couple was going bankrupt after the daughter’s death. Her name was Kathrijn. She’s buried in a pauper’s grave behind a church in Amsterdam. Sorry, I’m prattling…”
Hendrik looks at her for the first time in several minutes. In the falling dark, it’s hard for her to tell whether it’s smugness or knowing when he says, “But no graves for the parents have been found … so de Vos could have lived another twenty years and painted many more works?”
“Technically that’s true. Though I’ve always suspected At the Edge of a Wood was the high-water mark. It might have tapered off after that.”
“This new painting might throw that into doubt.”
“If it’s really hers.”
“Well, you are the expert and will have to judge for yourself. But your theory may need some revising.”
In a burst of vindictiveness, she imagines adding that, by the way, not only is the new landscape probably a misattribution, but also I’m pretty sure your At the Edge of a Wood is a fake I painted in my midtwenties.
But they’re already on the outskirts of the Rocks and she gets distracted by the rowdiness of the pubs overflowing with office workers, some of them spilling out onto the street. Ellie points to the Russell Hotel, a stone building with a turret that hugs the corner. It’s not flash by any means, but cozy, within budget, and in the thick of things. It’s where they put all the couriers; the VIPs stay at one of the five stars at the other end of the quay. They go inside and stand for a moment in the quaintly shabby Victorian lobby.
Ellie says, “Everything should be set up under the gallery’s account.” She takes a business card from her purse. “Call me if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” Hendrik says.
“I hope you get some sleep. We’ll send a taxi for you in the morning. Shall we say eleven?”
Hendrik looks at his watch and shakes his head. “Forgot to change my watch. Apparently I’m still in the Netherlands. Yes, eleven will be fine.”
Ellie says good night and walks out onto the street. The thought of taking a taxi or train back to the university and the long drive to Pittwater exhausts her. She strolls along the quay and contemplates her options. On a whim, she heads inside the InterContinental and crosses the vaulted atrium lounge, the interior of the old treasury building, and stands at the front desk. The impulsiveness of it shocks her. A corner room with a view will cost her close to four hundred dollars, but she produces her credit card unflinchingly. The desk clerk is young, Asian, and beautiful, and Ellie’s surprised by how easily she lies to the woman, telling her she’s just arrived from London and her luggage is delayed. The woman tells her that the concierge would be happy to arrange some clothes bought on her behalf if she phones down with her sizes. Ellie thanks her and takes the room key. She already knows she’ll order room service and request a new blouse in the morning before heading back to the gallery for the case opening.
* * *
At the gallery the next day, Hendrik oversees the opening with a set of blueprints in his hands, as if he’s built two miniature houses instead of two wooden boxes. He asks for a reading of the relative humidity before they begin the unpacking. Q obliges and gets to work on the bolting system with a hand wrench. He’s a stickler for manual wrenches and drills, resorts to power tools only in a pinch. Ellie stands watching in her new blouse behind a yellow line, shoulder to shoulder with a handful of dubious curatorial staff and conservators. Word of the potential forgery has dashed their hopes that the other painting is a newly discovered work in the de Vos oeuvre. And there’s still no official word from Max Culkins in China on how he intends to handle the delicate situation.
As Q begins to dismantle the first case, it becomes apparent that the boxes themselves are works of art. When he removes the foam-padded face board, Ellie sees the architecture as a cross-section—corner pads, a thick band of foam on the bottom, an inner case of half-inch plywood cradled at the center. Q removes the inner case and places it on a stainless-steel table. By now, Hendrik has been summoned to his side. In a rare act of humility, Q asks Hendrik if he’d like to do the honors of opening the first inner case—the equivalent of washing the man’s feet. Apparently, in the span of five minutes, Hendrik has been elevated to the status of respected peer. Hendrik accepts, lamenting the fact that he couldn’t bring his own tools on the plane. He crosses to Q’s workbench and selects a small hammer, a chisel, and a specially designed cutter. Q raises the worktable to the appropriate height and Hendrik begins to chisel along the glued seam of the inner case. He taps away gently at the plywood corners and pries the case open to reveal another layer of polyethylene. Hendrik takes out the wrapped painting—about two foot square plus the frame—and lays it flat.
As the foam and wood and tape are all peeled away, Ellie can feel her cheeks flush. She remembers in vivid detail how she made the fake, how she built up one layer at a time. She knows the tints and textures as if she’d created them yesterday—the impasto of the tree bark, the luminous underglow of the frozen river, the bone-white of the girl’s left hand against the blue-white of the snow. She also remembers the way she mishandled the bright yellows in the skaters’ scarves. In the late 1950s, very few in the conservation world knew about lead-tin yellow, a pigment favored by Dutch Masters that produces metallic soaps over time. To capture the bright, gritty texture, she’d mixed sand with synthetic chrome yellow, a mistake that has weighed on her ever since lead-tin yellow was rediscovered in the conservation journals. A kind of technical remorse.
Eventually, Hendrik holds At the Edge of a Wood up for all to see. Ellie steps in front of the yellow line and Q permits it. The painting is propped at a slight angle and the staff members are allowed to approach it as the lights are dimmed for better viewing. She takes in the painting from a distance of three feet. Her youthful habit of consuming a picture just inches from its aromatic surface died a long time ago. Sebastian, when they were first dating, had once called it an affectation and she could never bring herself to do it again. His offhanded comment should have been a sign of future cruelties and standards of perfection, but instead she’d quickly agreed with his assessment and was grateful for his candor. She stares at the canvas, her feet anchored in place, afraid to come closer. All these years later, it strikes her that she’d dutifully copied everything that gave the original movement and life. She’d fogged it with antique varnish to create the illusion of age, but somehow she still managed to capture the breathing presence of Sara herself.
Q has no apparent interest in the painting itself and has already turned to the other packing case. The curators are urged to stand again behind the yellow line, for reasons that Ellie can’t discern. She doesn’t risk disobeying Q, so the five of them—three with Ph.D.s—get back behind the line and wait to be invited forward again. Now Q and Hendrik work in unison, the younger deferring to the older, then the borrower deferring to the lender in some obscure packers’ ritual. They lift the inner case out—it appears to be about the same size as At the Edge of a Wood—and lay it flat under the lights. As they unwrap the foam and glassine, the first edges of frame become visible—gilded and rippled, a Florentine reframing of the eighteenth century. Q looks up at the staff and nods for them to come forward. As art experts, each in their own right, Ellie suspects that none of them will talk about what they see until they’ve absorbed it, until they’ve had a chance to develop serious opinions or doubts about the potential fake and the new attribution. For all they know Marty de Groot is the one bringing the forgery.
Ellie notices Hendrik watching her as she moves closer to the painting. A dozen funeral-goers tramp down a hill from a slate-roofed church, its windows blackened against the pall of midwinter. Village children clamber along the frozen riverbank, apart from their parents, flanking the procession with several gamboling dogs. A few villagers stand on the ice, stilled by the harbinger of a child’s coffin. The river and the woods and the clouds are unmistakably Sara’s, but the whole scene is painted from above, as if from a steeple or treetop. She’s seeing this from a height, Ellie thinks, and it lends the scene an air of detachment, the perspective of an indifferent God. Before she’s finished taking it in fully, Hendrik is standing beside her, sounding rather pleased with himself. “Dated 1637 and signed in the lower left corner.”