He’d hung them together carefully, on the best-lit wall, at the perfect height. The first was a rough pencil sketch, called Mitzy Picking. The subject was squatting inelegantly, with her back to the artist and her knees wide apart, the fabric of a plain skirt draped over them. Her blouse was tucked carelessly into her waistband, and had come out at the back, riding up so that a fragment of skin was showing. It was a drawing of outlines and hasty shading, and yet this small section of her back, the indentation of her spine, was so beautifully rendered that Zach always wanted to put out his hand, brush his thumb along the groove and feel the smooth skin, the hard muscles underneath it. The slight dampness of sweat where the sun warmed her. The girl was apparently sorting some kind of foliage into a wicker basket on the ground between her knees, and as if she felt the viewer’s scrutiny, as if she was half anticipating this uninvited touch on her back, she had inclined her face towards her shoulder so that her ear and the outline of her cheek were visible. Nothing could be seen of her eye except the smallest hint of the lashes beyond the curve of a cheekbone, and yet Zach could feel her awareness, feel how alert she was to whoever was behind her. The viewer, all these years later, or the artist, at the time? The drawing was signed and dated 1938.
The next piece was in black and white chalks on buff-colored paper. It was a portrait of Celeste, Charles Aubrey’s mistress. Celeste-there seemed to be no record of the woman’s surname anywhere-was of French Moroccan descent, and had a honeyed complexion under masses of black hair. The drawing was just of her head and neck, halting at her collarbones, and in that small space it had encapsulated the woman’s anger so intensely that Zach often saw people recoil slightly when they first saw it, as if they expected to be reprimanded for daring to look. Zach often wondered what had put her in such a violent mood, but the fire in her eyes told him that the artist had been on thin ice when he’d chosen that precise moment to draw her. Celeste was beautiful. All of Aubrey’s women had been beautiful, and even when they weren’t conventionally so, he still captured the essence of their allure in his portraits. But there was no ambiguity about Celeste, with her perfectly oval face, huge almond-shaped eyes, and swaths of inky hair. Her face, her expression, were bold, fearless, utterly captivating. Small wonder that she managed to captivate Charles Aubrey for as long as she did. Longer than any other mistress he had.
The third Aubrey picture was always the one he looked at last, so that he could look at it the longest. Delphine, 1938. The artist’s daughter, aged thirteen at the time. He had drawn her from the knees upwards, in pencil again, and she stood with her hands clasped in front of her, wearing a blouse with a sailor collar, her curly hair caught back in a ponytail. She was standing three-quarters turned towards the artist, with her shoulders stiff and set, as if she had just been told to stand up straight. It was like a school photograph, posed for uncomfortably; but the trace of a nervous smile played around the girl’s mouth as if she was startled by the attention, and unexpectedly pleased by it. There was sunlight in her eyes and on her hair, and with a few tiny highlights Aubrey had managed to convey the girl’s uncertainty so clearly that she looked ready to break her pose in the next instant, cover her smile with her hand, and turn her face away shyly. She was diffident, unsure of herself, obedient; Zach loved her with a bewildering force that was partly paternal, protective, and partly something more. Her face was still that of a child, but her expression, her eyes, held traces of the woman she would grow into. She was the very embodiment of adolescence, of a promise newly made, spring waiting to blossom. Zach had spent hours staring at her portrait, wishing he could have known her.
It was a valuable drawing, and if he would only be willing to sell it the wolves might have been held from the door for a while. He even knew to whom he could sell it, the very next day if he decided to. Philip Hart, a fellow Aubrey enthusiast. Zach had outbid him for the drawing at a London auction three years ago, and Philip had been to visit it two or three times a year since then, to see if Zach was ready to sell. But Zach never was. He thought he never would be. Hart had offered him seventeen thousand pounds on his last visit, and for the first time ever, Zach had wavered. Lovely as they were, he’d have taken half that amount for the drawings of Celeste or Mitzy, the other remnants of his ever-shrinking Aubrey stock. But he couldn’t bring himself to part with Delphine. In other sketches of her-and there weren’t many-she was a bony child, a background figure, overshadowed by the sparkling presence of her sister, Élodie, or by bold Celeste. But in this one sketch she was her own self; alive, and on the cusp of everything that was to come. Whatever that may have been. This was the last surviving picture of her that Aubrey had drawn before his catastrophic decision to go and fight on the Continent during the Second World War.
Zach stood and stared at her now, her beautifully rendered hands with the short, blunt nails; the creases in the ribbon holding back her hair. In the bright light of the gallery, Zach’s reflection stared back from the glass, just as visible as the pencil lines behind it. If he concentrated, he could see both at once-his expression overlaying hers, her eyes looking out of his face. He didn’t like what he saw-suddenly his own absorbed, wistful expression made him look older than his thirty-five years; and just as suddenly, he felt it as well. He hadn’t combed his hair yet and it stood up in tufts, and he badly needed a shave. The shadows under his eyes he could do less about. He’d been sleeping badly for weeks, since he’d found out about Elise.
There was a thumping of footsteps and Elise came bustling down the stairs into the gallery from the flat above, swinging through the door on its handle, her face alight, long strands of brown hair flying out behind her.
“Hey! I’ve told you not to swing on the door like that! You’re too big, Els. You’ll pull it off its hinges,” said Zach, catching her up and lifting her away from the door.
“Yes, Dad,” said Elise, any hint of contrition ruined by a wide grin and the shadow of laughter, creeping up on the words. “Can we have breakfast now? I’m just so hungry.”
“Just so hungry? Well, that is serious. Okay. Give me one second.”
“One!” Elise shouted, and then clattered down the remaining steps to the main shop floor, where there was enough space to twirl, arms wide, feet threatening to tangle with each other. Zach watched her for a second and felt his throat tighten. She had been with him for four weeks now, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to cope without her. Elise was six years old, sturdy, healthy, vibrant. She had Zach’s exact shade of brown eyes, but hers were bigger and brighter, the whites whiter, the shape of them in a constant state of flux from wide with amazement or outrage to narrow with laughter or sleep. On Elise, the brown eyes were beautiful. She was wearing purple jeans, torn through at the knees, with a lightweight green blouse open over a pink T-shirt on which a photograph of Gemini, her favorite pony from her riding school, was emblazoned. It was a photo Elise had taken herself, and it wasn’t very good. Gemini had raised his nose towards the camera and laid back his ears, and the flash had caused a lurid flare in one of his eyes, so that, to Zach, he looked bad tempered, oddly elongated, and possibly evil to boot. But Elise loved the T-shirt as much as she loved the pony. The outfit was finished with a bright yellow plastic handbag; mismatched clothes that made Elise look gaudy and delicious, like a multicolored hard candy. Ali would not approve of the outfit, which Elise had assembled herself, but Zach was damned if he was going to have an argument and make her get changed on their last morning together.