A Place of Hiding

“The pretty lady with the book and the quill,” Ruth said. “She belonged to my grandfather. To his father before him, to his father as well, and to every father before that as far as I know. She was meant to be Guy’s eventually. And I expect he spent all that money to find her. There’s nothi ng else...” Her voi ce altered, and St. James raised his head from the painting to see that behind her round-framed spectacles Ruth Brouard’s eyes were full. “It’s all there’s left now, of them. You see.”


She removed her glasses and, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her heavy sweater, she went to a table that stood between two armchairs at one end of the room. There, she picked up a photograph and returned to them with it. “Here it is,” she said. “You can see it in the picture. Maman gave this to us the night we left because everyone was in it. You can see them there. Grandpère, Grandmère, Tante Esther, Tante Becca, their brandnew husbands, our parents, us. She said, ‘Gardez-la . . .’ ” Ruth seemed to realise she’d gone to another place and time. She switched back to English.

“I beg your pardon. She said, ‘Keep this till we meet again, so you’ll know us when you see us.’ We didn’t know that would never happen. And look. In the photo. There she is above the sideboard. The pretty lady with the book and the quill, where she always was. See the little figures behind her in the distance...all of them busy building that church. Some huge gothic thing that took one hundred years to complete and there she is, sitting there so...well, so serenely. As if she knows something about that church that the rest of us will never be privy to.” Ruth smiled down at the painting fondly although her eyes glistened. “Très cher frère,” she murmured. “Tu n’as jamais oublié.”

St. James had joined Deborah in looking at the photograph as Ruth Brouard spoke. He saw that, indeed, the painting before them on the desk was the same painting that was in the picture, and the photograph itself was the one he’d noticed the last time he was in this room. In it, an extended family gathered round a table for Passover dinner. They all smiled happily at the camera, at peace with a world that would soon destroy them.

“What happened to the painting?”

“We never knew,” Ruth said. “We could only surmise. When the war ended, we waited. We thought for a time that they’d come for us, our parents. We didn’t know, you see. Not at first. Not for quite some time because we kept hoping...Well, children do that, don’t they? It was only later that we found out.”

“That they’d died,” Deborah murmured.

“That they’d died,” Ruth said. “They’d remained in Paris too long. They fled to the south thinking they’d be safe there, and that was the last we heard from them. They’d gone to Lavaurette. But there was no protection from the Vichy, was there? They betrayed the Jews when it was asked of them. They were worse than the Nazis, actually, because after all the Jews were French, the Vichy’s own people.” She reached for the photograph that St. James still held, and she gazed at it as she continued to talk.

“At the end of the war, Guy was twelve, I was nine. It was years before he could go to France and find out what had happened to our family. We knew from the last letter we had that they’d left everything behind but the clothing they could fit into one suitcase each. So the pretty lady with the book and the quill remained, along with the rest of their belongings, in the safekeeping of a neighbour, Didier Bombard. He told Guy that the Nazis came for it all, as property of Jews. But of course he might have been lying. We knew that.”

“How on earth would your brother have found it, then?” Deborah asked. “After all these years?”

“He was a very determined man, my brother. He would have hired as many people as he needed: first to search for it and then to acquire it.”

“International Access,” St. James noted.

Ruth said, “What’s that?”

“It’s where his money went, the money he had transferred out of his account here on Guernsey. It’s a company in England.”

“Ah. So that’s it.” She reached for a small lamp that lit the top of her brother’s desk, and she moved it over, the better to shine more brightly upon the painting. “I expect that’s who found it. It makes sense, doesn’t it, when you think about the enormous collections of art that are bought and sold every day in England. When you talk to them, I imagine they’ll tell you how they tracked this down and who was involved in getting it back for us. Private investigators, most likely. Perhaps a gallery as well. He would have had to buy it back, of course. They wouldn’t have just handed it over to him.”

“But if it’s yours...” Deborah said.

“How could we prove it? We had only that one family photo as proof, and who would look at a photo of a family dinner and decide the picture hanging on the wall in the background is the same as this one?” She gestured to the painting before them on the desk. “We had no other documents. There were no other documents. This had always been in the family—the pretty lady with the book and the quill—and other than this one photo, there was no way to prove it.”