Rose had no intention of making a purchase. She finally had landed a position—as a secretary, not exactly the teaching job she had been searching for since getting her degree, not exactly well paying, but it was a position nevertheless. She paid her rent, she covered her expenses, and then: well, there was little left. Still, she was glad to be on her own, no longer taking money from Gerhard and Isobel. After she had started working for Mr. Marks, Rose found an apartment in Belsize, a tiny two-room flat at the top of a perilously uneven staircase. The halls smelled like wet wool and she regularly heard the shriek of the baby next door, but the place was all hers. She had a minuscule breakfast table that she was able to situate beneath a small but perfectly suitable window, and an old pair of club chairs that Gerhard and Isobel had given her when they redecorated. It was in one of the armchairs that she would have her tea, balancing a cup and saucer on her knee, even if she was alone, as was most often the case. (Last week her tea offerings vastly improved when she received a small box from Leeds containing a tin of chocolate biscuits, a collection of jellies, and, most wondrously, a small crock containing four eggs nestled in straw. “From the Cohens,” the card said, but Rose immediately recognized Mary’s hand.) What Rose had these days was a surfeit of time, as Gerhard pointed out far too often. For the past month, as the days shortened and edged closer to winter, she had been drawn to this shop week after week, as surely and as inexplicably as the queues that still crisscrossed the city, nearly five years after the war.
Isobel had been true to her word. She had written her childhood friend Douglas Cooper, and he in turn had guided them. Austria had enacted laws on restitution at the end of the war, the so-called Rückstellungsgesetz, which said that all victims were entitled to list and report the loss of property. Gerhard and Rose wrote to the Austrian Federal Monuments Office with a record of all the valuables they could recall from their parents’ home. Months went by, then a year; finally they received word: no matches. The Austrian government was holding thousands of seized artworks in collecting points throughout the country: in a monastery in Mauerbach, in salt mines near Salzburg, storage rooms in the Finance Ministry in Vienna itself. “There are lists,” Douglas had written, thousands upon thousands of items on those lists. “The Austrian government claims the work is heirless; they say they are working on returning what can be returned. They are not releasing the lists.” But Douglas had seen some, and there were no Soutines, nothing that fit The Bellhop’s description.
“But they could be wrong,” Rose said.
Isobel sighed. “They probably are,” she said. “Unconscionable—ignorant, murderous Krauts.”
“Isobel,” chided Gerhard.
“What? They are.”
Douglas told Isobel of a lawyer, a Franz Rudolf Bienenfeld, a Jewish emigré from Vienna, who worked on such issues in London. They met with him. He was a small middle-aged man in a well-cut suit. “There are possibilities,” he said. “We could apply for restitution for interrupted schooling. For both of you.”
“No,” Rose and Gerhard said. On this they agreed.
“They can keep their money,” Gerhard said, arms folded over his chest.
“I want my mother’s painting,” Rose said.
Bienenfeld’s eyes squinted behind round wire spectacles. “It is owed to you,” he said. “It is not their money.”
“I don’t want it,” Gerhard said. Rose stole a glance at her brother. It wasn’t as if she weren’t tempted. But the notion of filing a claim felt like acquiescing. She imagined it displeasing both her parents. So she said nothing at all.
Rose continued to look. The trick was not to narrow one’s focus. Expectations couldn’t be tamped down entirely—that wasn’t realistic, and Rose was, if anything, a realist (even within this fool’s errand). But it was a nameless, shimmery expectation, so light and gossamer thin that it existed as sensation only. She thought about searching when she was taking dictation for Mr. Marks. It was on her mind when Mr. Cohen wrote to her to say that he would be in town on Saturday and was she available to meet for tea? “I’m busy,” she wrote back, thinking of the shop on Old Bond. She thought about looking while swaying in the dim light of the Underground, listening to people grouse about Korea and the National Health Service. I have this, she would think. Searching gave her purpose.
Every item was defined by its negative—the ivory handles on the pair of swords hanging opposite the clocks were too intricate to be the ones her grandfather brought back from Constantinople. The rococo mirror she spotted last month was too small and bright to be her mother’s. Now she turned over a midnight-velvet jewelry case, but this had a soft gold clasp, not silver, and its underside wasn’t nicked as her grandmother’s had been.
She remembered what Isobel had read in the paper: how a former cook of one of the Rothschilds had started a new position and was astounded to see the Vermeer from the baronne’s dressing area hanging in her new employer’s drawing room. In the past two years, Rose had gathered stories from the papers on her own. A Mrs. Arnold had spotted a set of mother-of-pearl nesting boxes inlaid with her mother’s initials in the window of an antique dealer in Paris. Nathan Rosenberg went into a Zurich picture dealer and saw one of his family’s eighteenth-century portraits hanging on the wall. These things did happen.
Rose had reached the far wall of the shop, on which a select number of pictures were hung. Within a beat, she had her answer—registered by the drop in her stomach before her mind could articulate why. There were pastoral scenes—a brook, a picnicking group—and pictures of horses galloping and boys diving. But no portraits.
“That horse couldn’t win a pigs’ race, I tell you.” The fair-haired salesgirl was standing beside Rose, contemplating a picture with her narrow blue eyes.
“I’m sorry?” Rose asked. She was trying to remember when she had last come in: last week or the week before? Had the landscapes been here? Maybe they hadn’t gotten any new paintings in. She should inquire, but she didn’t like to ask questions.
“I’m telling you, look at his legs, yeah? Too short and stocky, out of proportion.”
Rose looked. “Yes,” she admitted. She hadn’t noticed. She had barely registered the horses at all.
“I’m Julie,” the salesgirl said, extending a hand, her small features composed into a genuine smile. Rose had been in the shop enough to know that she smiled often. Even so, Rose was taken aback. She didn’t expect a smile from her—or from most people, really.
“Rose,” she said, and took the girl’s cool hand.
“Nice to finally make your acquaintance,” Julie said. “I told Mr. Bradshaw the picture was no good but he didn’t care. If he could, he’d turn the entire shop into an equestrian palace. What are you looking for? I know it’s something in particular. You’d think I would know by now, but I haven’t a clue.”
“Nothing,” Rose said, blushing. Clearly a lie. Embarrassed, she shifted her gaze to the chess set. It was made out of two different shades of marble, one honey-colored, one dark. Someone had spent a good deal of time carving it. Papi had played chess, hadn’t he? Did he have a chessboard? She couldn’t remember.
“If you tell me,” Julie said, “I could keep an eye for you.”
“I appreciate it, I do, but I’m simply looking.” Rose tried to smile but it felt forced, nothing like the genuine warmth on the salesgirl’s face. “I should get going.”
In the front of the shop, the boy was still contemplating jewelry. As Rose tried to brush past him, he spoke: “Sorry, but may I ask you a question? I’m buying something for my mum. But I don’t know which.” He pointed at two brooches on the counter. Rose registered that the boy had dark, liquid eyes, just like Dirk Bogarde, that movie star that Margaret used to go on about, a similar Brylcreemed wave to his straw-colored hair. “I don’t know anything about these things,” he confessed. “But she’s dark-haired, like you, with a similar complexion.”
“You should try them on!” Julie said with enthusiasm, now beside them.