The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Read online

  —Here it is.

  Ashley squints, but he sees only a beam of gnarled wood.

  —The sexton said this is a perfectly typical fourteenth-century church. But even a typical church has its bits of interest.

  She steps off the chair.

  —Your turn, she says. Stand up.

  Ashley takes the candle and holds it up to the beam. He sees the carvings now, thrown into sharp relief by shadows cast under the flame. They are crosses. Carved long ago upon the seasoned oak, there are square Greek crosses and Latin crucifixes, some finely wrought, others hewn crudely against the grain.

  —Crusaders, Ashley murmurs.

  Imogen repeats to Ashley what the sexton told her in the afternoon. She says that hundreds of years ago crusaders stopped at this very spot before they sailed for Constantinople. They knelt and prayed here, she says, and they heard a priest tell them they would go to God if they fell. They stood on a chair and carved the crosses before walking out of their last English church.

  Ashley runs his hands along the indentations. Behind him Imogen draws a pocketknife from her bag and unfolds the blade. Ashley had not seen the knife until now.

  —You’re damned theatrical, he says. You shan’t carve in that.

  —It’s for you, Ashley.

  —You’re joking.

  Imogen shakes her head. —They were told they were Christ’s own army and still they stopped to carve these crosses, so that they would return.

  —You’re mad. You shan’t carve in that.

  —I want you to do it. Don’t you see, Ashley? It’s because they didn’t give a damn for God or heaven. They wished to see their wives and homes again. They wanted to drink and stay out all night as we have. That was why they carved. That they would come back.

  —I can’t do that.

  —I will do it for you, Imogen says, if you will not.

  She drags another chair across the stone floor and rests it beside his. Imogen steps on the chair and plunges the knife into the beam, and with both hands she hacks up and down against the grain.

  —Imogen, Ashley pleads. For God’s sake, it’s historical—

  —We are bloody history!

  She jerks the knife back and forth across the wood to make the horizontal bar of the cross. For a moment Imogen pauses and there is only the quick panting of her breath. Ashley puts his hand on the thin ivory knife handle. They begin to carve together, slowly at first, then with real effort.

  —You’ll come back, she says. I can’t have been given you only to lose you so quickly.

  Ashley takes his hand off the knife. He looks at Imogen.

  —The war can’t last forever. They’re making a big push, I could be home by spring. We’ll go straight to the Valais and watch the snow melt down the mountains—

  Imogen says nothing. She makes a few careful marks to finish the carving, fluting the ends of each cross. Then she lifts the candle closer to the beam to inspect her work. She blows the shavings from the carving and cleans the hollows with the blade.

  Ashley grins. —You know, most of these fellows probably never came back.

  Imogen refolds the pocketknife.

  —It occurred to me. But you could be a better sport.

  —Don’t be cross. I was a good sport.

  They step down and Ashley replaces the chairs. Imogen stands in the doorway holding the candle. She looks away from the flame, her expression clouded.

  —By the way, Ashley asks, how did you know the door would be open? Was that destiny again?

  Imogen blows out the candle.

  —No, she says. I bribed the sexton.

  THE PICTURE

  On their way back to Stockholm Karin and Christian drop me off at Arlanda Airport. I visit the ticket counter of several airlines, where I learn that the next flight to Paris costs nearly two hundred euros, far more than I ought to spend. Before I left California I transferred all of my savings into an account I could draw from in Europe; it added up to only $1,800 and I’ll have to make it last. But the flight leaves soon and I can’t waste time staying in Stockholm. I buy the ticket.

  A few hours later I’m underground in the Paris métro, following dense crowds through tunnels of glazed white tile. Even after studying the system map for several minutes, I get on the wrong train at Opéra and don’t realize my mistake for a few stops. I switch trains at Bonne Nouvelle and take a seat, trying to steady my hand as I write in my notebook, the train bumping on into the night.

  QUESTIONS

  1. Who is M. Broginart?

  2. What was in the larger picture and what happened to it?

  My hostel lies on a quiet street in the Fifteenth Arrondissement. The lobby is also the bar and it seems like half the guests are drinking here tonight. I check in with the bartender. He hands me the key to my bunkroom and a slick visitors’ map of the city printed by Galeries Lafayette.

  I sit on my bunk and unfold the map, my eyes following the sweep of the Seine around the city, the two islands in the center, the Left Bank where the boulevard Saint-Germain meets the boulevard Saint-Michel. All my life I’ve wanted to come to Paris. I think of the years of French classes, the suitcase full of yellowed Gallimard paperbacks in my father’s garage. I fold up the map and go to the hostel’s computer beside the bar.

  For the next two hours I look up libraries and archives. By the end of the night I have seven places marked in ink on my map. The bartender winks at the girls sitting beside me.

  —Look at this guy. Just got into town, he’s already mapped out which bars he’s hitting. Where are you going first?

  —The Bibliothèque Nationale.

  I start early the next morning, but Broginart is not an easy man to trace. There’s nothing on him at the Bibliothèque Nationale: not in the catalogs or the digital library, nor in any of the dozens of books I call up on prominent Parisian collectors. At the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève I spend hours under its soaring cast-iron columns, paging through gallery catalogs, reading the letters of painters and sculptors from the 1910s and 1920s. Broginart’s name appears nowhere. I move on to the specialist libraries, the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Pompidou Center, the Médiathèque of the École des Beaux-Arts. After four days of research I know the names of the famous Paris galleries, the collectors who bought their paintings, the major salons and exhibitions. I know nothing about Broginart.

  The nights go better than the days. At six o’clock each evening I leave the libraries and buy a bottle of wine or beer from the nearest grocery, walking the streets until I don’t worry anymore, until I can’t think about anything but the city itself.

  Because I love everything in Paris. The enamel green color of the water fountains. The brown fold-up seats on the subway cars that the accordion players sit on, old men in fraying pin-striped suits who play to no one but me, the melody coming in and out as the train crosses the Seine at Austerlitz. The cups of café allongé I drink on the café terrace each morning, one euro and twenty cents.

  My third night I’m in the Jardin du Luxembourg at dusk and a short man approaches me with a friendly smile. He tells me his name is Mohammed and he’s a native of Casablanca. He wears a dirty sweater, blue jeans and white basketball shoes with no laces. We talk in French and English. Mohammed knows the best places to sleep on the riverbank and where to get the best couscous in Paris for three euros a plate, but only on Sundays.

  —You will be the only British there, Mohammed says. But if you come with me, it’s no problem.

  —I’m American.

  Mohammed nods sagely. —Et qu’est-ce que tu fais à Paris?

  —Je cherche un tableau de l’artiste Eleanor Grafton. Let me know if you see it—

  —You can go to Le Louvre, Mohammed says. There are thousands of paintings there. Tonight is Wednesday, it’s open late. And it’s always warm and dry inside.

  I walk through the backstreets of Odéon to the Louvre. Everywhere in the museum I imagine Eleanor’s painting, even though I don’t know what it lo
oks like. In the rows of gilded frames in the Denon wing, it’s always at the end of the hallway, the last picture in the gallery. Because I see Imogen everywhere here. In the cold stare of the Grande Odalisque, or underground in the shadowed brickwork of the Medieval Louvre; in the gallery for the blind beneath the stairs where you’re allowed to feel the statues, to recognize faces by the contours of their features, the hard lines of the nose and chin. Even the dark-haired girl standing before me in line at the museum café. She might look just like her, but I’d never know it.

  The next day I follow a different track. At daybreak I ride the métro to visit 28 rue Pigalle, the address of the dealer Moisse where Broginart bought Eleanor’s paints. The building now houses a small grocery store. I cross the boulevard de Clichy and wander around Montmartre, but all the artists have been gone for decades, replaced by hordes of summer tourists. I take the métro back to the Left Bank. At the Magasin Sennelier on the Quai Voltaire the clerk has never heard of Moisse, but he directs me to another shop on the rue Soufflot where the old man behind the counter squints at the receipt and frowns.

  —Moisse. Very famous couleurs. They’ve been gone a long time.

  —Were they good paints?

  The man shrugs. —I never saw them. But they were supposed to be very good. Moisse started at the Maison Édouard, and they mixed the best colors in Paris. Manet used them, Caillebotte, everyone—

  —Would they be worth buying from overseas?

  —Comment?

  —Were they good enough to order from another country?

  —Of course. Once a painter has his colors, he doesn’t want to use different ones.

  I thank the man, walking out the door. The bell chimes behind me. Suddenly I turn around and walk back in.

  —Have you heard of a collector named Broginart?

  —Qui?

  —Broginart.

  The man shakes his head.

  —Non.

  I start west along the quai toward the Bibliothèque Nationale. It’s a long walk but I need time to think. There must be a thread I still haven’t followed, a piece of evidence that could unravel everything if I tugged hard enough. But which piece of evidence?

  When I get to the library my research flits from topic to topic. I read about pigments and linseed oil, the grinding of colors and manufacture of tube paint in France; I flip through the catalog from the 1920 Salon des Indépendants. But I feel like I’m circling my goal instead of getting closer. So I study the catalogs of Paris museums and galleries, searching for collections of early twentieth-century paintings. Some of the smaller museums may not have listed their collections online. I call up a stack of catalogs and flip through the indices one by one. Then I see the name. GRAFTON, Eleanor . . . 39

  I turn to page 39. The entry is brief.

  GRAFTON, Eleanor

  The Unvanquished (Étude de femme nue), vers 1917. Huile sur toile. 733 x 1000. Don de Henri Broginart

  The front page of the catalog says Musée Konarski: Catalogue sommaire des collections. I skim the introduction. The museum is housed in the former home of Ludwik Konarski, a poet from Warsaw who migrated to Paris in 1909. Konarski befriended many painters at La Ruche, an artists’ residence in the Passage de Dantzig where Konarski bought the paintings that would be the cornerstone of his collection.

  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 th
ings 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

  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.