Page 76 of The Girl You Left Behind
“Paul, perhaps you would like to explain to Mrs. Halston how this claim has come about.”
“Yes,” she says, and her voice is icy. “I’d like to hear.”
She slowly lifts her face, and Paul is looking straight at her. She wonders if he can detect how hard she is vibrating. She feels it must be obvious to everyone; her every breath betrays her.
“Well... I’d like to start with an apology,” he says. “I am conscious that this will have come as a shock. That is unfortunate. The sad fact is that there is no way of going about these things nicely.”
He is looking directly at her. She can feel him waiting for her to acknowledge him, some sign. She grips her knees under the desk, digging her fingernails into the skin to give her something to focus on.
“Nobody wants to take something that legitimately belongs to someone else. And that is not what we’re about. But the fact exists that, way back during wartime, a wrong was done. A painting,The Girl You Left Behind, by Édouard Lefèvre, owned and loved by his wife, was taken and passed into German possession.”
“You don’t know that,” she says.
“Liv.” Henry’s voice contains a warning.
“We have obtained documentary evidence, a diary owned by a neighbor of Madame Lefèvre, that suggests a portrait of the artist’s wife was stolen or obtained coercively by a GermanKommandantliving in the area at the time. Now this case is unusual in that most of the work we do is based on losses suffered in the Second World War, and we believe the initial theft took place during the First World War. But the Hague Convention still applies.”
“So why now?” she says. “Nearly a hundred years after you say it was stolen. Convenient that Monsieur Lefèvre just happens to be worth a whole lot more money now, wouldn’t you say?”
“The value is immaterial.”
“Fine. If the value is immaterial, I’ll compensate you. Right now. You want me to give you what we paid for it? Because I still have the receipt. Will you take that amount and leave me alone?”
The room falls silent.
Henry reaches across and touches her arm. Her knuckles are white where they clutch her pen. “If I may interject,” he says smoothly. “The purpose of this meeting is to offer a number of solutions to the issue and see whether any of them may be acceptable.”
Janey Dickinson exchanges a few whispered words with André Lefèvre. She wears the studied calm of the primary-school teacher. “I have to say here that as far as the Lefèvre family is concerned, the only thing that would be acceptable is the return of their painting,” she says.
“Except it’s not their painting,” says Liv.
“Under the Hague Convention it is,” she says calmly.
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s the law.”
Liv glances up and Paul is staring at her. His expression doesn’t change, but in his eyes there is the hint of an apology. For what? This yelling across a varnished mahogany table? A stolen night? A stolen painting? She is not sure.Don’t look at me, she tells him silently.
“Perhaps... ,” Sean Flaherty says. “Perhaps, as Henry says, we could at least outline some of the possible solutions.”
“Oh, you can outline them,” says Liv.
“There are a number of precedents in such cases. One is that Mrs. Halston is free to extinguish the claim. This means, Mrs. Halston, that you would pay the Lefèvre family the value of the painting and retain it.”
Janey Dickinson doesn’t look up from her pad. “As I have already stated, the family is not interested in money. They want the painting.”
“Oh, right,” says Liv. “You think I’ve never negotiated anything before? That I don’t know an opening salvo?”
“Liv,” Henry says again, “if we could—”
“I know what’s going on here. ‘Oh, no, we don’t want money.’ Until we reach a figure that equals a lottery win. Then, somehow, everyone manages to get over their hurt feelings.”
“Liv... ,” Henry says, quietly.
She lets out a breath. Under the table her hands are shaking.
“There are occasions on which an agreement has been reached to share the painting. In the case of what we call indivisible assets, such as this, it is, admittedly, complicated. But there have been cases where parties have agreed to, if you like, time-share a work of art, or have agreed that they will own it jointly but allow it to be shown in a major gallery. This would, of course, be accompanied by notices informing visitors both of its looted past and the generosity of its previous owners.”
