The catalog doesn’t list the museum’s phone number, only its address: 54, rue de Monceau 75008 Paris. I copy it down and walk quickly out of the library, trying not to run.
The Musée Konarski lies on the one-way rue de Monceau south of the Parc Monceau, the small white building set back from the street by a courtyard with a locust tree. When I open the door the woman behind the front counter stands up in surprise.
— Monsieur, the museum closes in fifteen minutes.
I explain that I’m not here to visit the museum.
— I came to see if you have a painting I saw in your Catalogue sommaire. It’s by an artist named Eleanor Grafton.
The woman frowns. — I don’t know—
— It was donated by a collector named Broginart.
— Ah, Broginart. We have most of his collection. Let me look.
The woman sits down and I help her spell out Grafton letter by letter into her computer. She makes a few clicks with her mouse.
—Étude de femme nue, 1917. Yes, it’s in our storage.
— It’s not here?
The woman shakes her head.
— We have a small museum, but quite a large collection. Most of it rarely gets displayed.
— Do you have a picture of it?
— Bien sûr. It must be in one of the books—
The woman looks through the books on the shelf behind her, making a clucking noise as she closes each volume. She goes into a back room and comes out with a large black paperback in her hands, smiling triumphantly. She sets the dog-eared book in front of me, the pages already parted to show the picture.
— Voilà.
The image is captioned:
Eleanor GRAFTON (1891–1969) Cat. 537
The Unvanquished (Étude de femme nue), vers 1917.
Huile sur toile
H. 0.73; L. 1.
Don de Henri Broginart
The painting is a series of geometric slabs, the flat plane of the picture broken into shards of varying color — cold grays and blues receding into the background, warmer earth tones surging out. It takes me a moment to make out the subject. A woman standing with one leg forward, a blue cloak draped over one shoulder, the rest of her nude body sculpted in prisms of ochre and sienna. Her face is visible both straight ahead and in profile, the bold line of her nose dividing the two perspectives.
But the face could be anyone. It is only an arrangement of brown and blue planes with a dark triangle where the cheek should be, and a few lines to suggest the brow and jaw and chin. The woman’s hair is modeled in two shards of copper. In one hand she holds a yellow object, thin and narrow, but the form is so simple that it could be anything from a stick to a scepter. Below the picture there is a commentary in French.
A painting by the British artist Eleanor Grafton. Daughter of the sculptress Vivian Soames-Andersson, Grafton was trained at the Slade School of Art in London under the direction of Henry Tonks, and was known as a painter of competent — if unambitious — portraits and landscapes. Grafton was a slow convert to modernist experimentation; she mistrusted the abstract, machine-driven ethos of Futurism and Vorticism developing in prewar London. But in the years preceding 1914 Grafton repeatedly visited Paris and is known to have taken a deep interest in the works presented at the Salon de la Section d’Or, some of which approached Cubism or Orphism with a harmonious palette and classical proportions based on mathematical principles. The experiment was difficult for Grafton, who destroyed preparatory studies in 1914 and again in 1916 before completing this final work. Never entirely satisfied with the result, Grafton abandoned the Cubist method and never returned to it again.
I push the book back across the counter. The librarian looks at me.
— It’s not the right painting?
— No. I mean, yes it is.
— Do you want a copy of the image?
The woman takes the book into a back room and comes back with a photocopy of the page. I thank her and put it in my bag, walking out of the museum without knowing where I’m going.
It couldn’t have been simpler. The picture was started long before Imogen would have been pregnant and the studies were destroyed for the most ordinary reason of all. They weren’t very good. Neither was the final picture. It’d been hard to find because it wasn’t worth displaying. Maybe Broginart wanted the earlier study because it was better, or because he collected modern paintings and thought Eleanor’s experiment might eventually pay off.
I’d been crazy to follow the painting. The letters in Sweden made me think I could find anything, but that had only been dumb luck. Then I’d tricked myself into believing I could solve everything with one piece of evidence. A painting. Of all the things in this world.
— You’re out of your league, I whisper.
I turn right into the Parc Monceau, following a wide path toward a rotunda on the north side. It’s time to admit I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m going after a huge fortune and I’m acting like a freshman researching a term paper. Maybe I should have hired a lawyer or a probate researcher, even if it broke the confidentiality agreement, even if I risked forfeiting my claim. Prichard had told me not to share the trust’s details with anyone, but in listening to him I’d chosen a stranger over my own friends and family. Today is September 3. In five weeks I stand to lose every cent and there’s no one I can turn to.
There are two choices now. I can go back to London and start over. I could even hire someone there. Or I can follow the only evidence I’ve found — Ashley’s letters — and go to northern France. Ashley last saw Imogen in the Somme, about a hundred miles northeast of here. The truth is I don’t want to go back to London empty-handed. And I don’t want to break the agreement when there’s a chance I can find the evidence on my own.
I walk past the rotunda and down the stairs into the métro, riding line 2 to the Gare du Nord. At the SNCF counter I ask for a one-way ticket to Amiens. I lean into the counter’s microphone and repeat the name of the city several times.
— Amiens, I say.
— Orléans?
— Amiens.
The woman lifts her eyebrows and hazards a guess.
— Rennes?
Eventually she understands me. I leave the counter with a ticket on tomorrow’s one o’clock train. At an alimentation générale behind the station I buy a bottle of cheap red wine and uncork it on the sidewalk, pouring it into my water bottle. I’ve wasted a week in Paris. At least I have one night to myself.
23 August 1916
23 August 1916
The Langham Hotel
Marylebone, Central London
They take their dinner in the hotel restaurant. It is the night before Ashley crosses and Imogen would have preferred to eat in private in their room. But Ashley wants to be among a crowd.
— We’ll only have to go upstairs afterwards, he promises.
Most of the other diners are men in khaki or older couples in evening dress. When the waiter puts the menu before her, Imogen is astonished by the richness of the dishes.
— One would think there isn’t a war on.
— Not for those who can pay.
— Darling, I don’t want to eat us into the workhouse—
— You shan’t. Not tonight, anyway.
They eat bowls of potent consommé. They have roast shoulder of mutton in a rich brown onion sauce, served with plates of wax beans and lady cabbage. Ashley remarks that the mutton is dry, and as soon as he says this he wishes he had not. Imogen does not seem to notice. She seems distracted throughout the meal and Ashley does not know if she is nervous or impatient or simply unhappy.