Epilogue
She entered the exhibition space, just two small interconnected rooms, and effected the demeanor of a normal visitor who was interested in all the artworks, not just one.
She paused in front of a Modigliani sketch of a nude woman, forcing herself to contemplate its merits (the harsh lines produced a certain mesmeric quality, she conceded).
A landscape by Soutine was, to her mind, excessively kitschy and childlike, liable to give one nightmares.
Several portraits by an artist of whom she’d never heard—Mo?se Kisling—were actually rather lovely and surprisingly modern, all variations of an archetypal woman (Kisling’s sexual ideal, no doubt) with huge, elongated eyes and a reedlike neck.
The present owner didn’t want to sell, or so she’d been told.
And neither Rebecca Levene nor the exhibition curator was at liberty to divulge his identity.
If only I could get a few minutes in his company, thought Honor with frustration.
I’d talk him around. It wasn’t that presenting the picture to Saul would mean all was forgiven, or even that he’d start speaking to her again.
It would be a tiny gesture, she knew. But it would be something.
A girl with a long black plait and spectacles, wearing a name tag identifying her as museum staff, was talking to a group of visitors a few feet away. Honor waited for their conversation to end, then caught her eye.
“Isn’t that one beautiful?” said the girl, whose tag said Rachel S. “It’s a favorite of mine.”
“I just love it,” said Honor. “I’ve actually got a personal connection to the model. She went on to marry one of my friends.”
Rachel gasped appreciatively. “Gosh! How fascinating, I—”
Honor interrupted her: “I forget, just at this moment, the name of the current owner. Mr.…?”
“I’m afraid we only disclose the names of our lenders with their express permission,” said Rachel apologetically.
“Of course. Rebecca Levene, whose father bought it during the war at a rather good price, is also a friend. I remember she sold it earlier this year. The chap’s name is on the tip of my tongue.” But she could see Rachel’s professionalism was not to be breached.
“It’s a funny thing,” said Rachel. “You knowing the original Gila. Just yesterday we had a school party in, and one of the girls said her mother’s name had been Gila. She’d never come across the name before. Well, it’s hardly commonplace in England, is it?”
“It certainly isn’t,” said Honor. “Was the girl herself English? How old was she?”
“Well, they were advanced-level students—you know, those are the examinations they’re doing now instead of highers—so about seventeen, I imagine. But yes, she was English.”
“Forgive me,” said Honor after a too-long pause, “but I don’t suppose she was called Marya, was she?”
Rachel frowned thoughtfully. “I believe so. Why? She wouldn’t be the daughter of Chagall’s Gila, surely?”
“Probably not,” said Honor. She swallowed; her throat was dry. “Which school was she from, if I may ask?”
“Queen’s College, on Harley Street.”
Saul looked at the girl sitting composedly in Honor’s drawing room, and marveled at her Englishness.
She wore a checked blue-and-white woolen suit, exquisitely well-fitting, yet to his mind far too grown-up.
Pearls were on her ears and throat. Her hair was cut to the nape, with stiff question-mark curls framing her face.
When she spoke, she sounded like an announcer on the wireless.
It had been Mina, appointed as Honor’s ambassador, who came to convey all the facts that Honor had painstakingly verified.
Marya and Gila had been at Transnistria for a month, said Mina, crammed into a filthy barn with hundreds of other terrified souls.
When Gila died from dysentery, a girl named Natalia Yivlinsky, barely in her teens and newly orphaned, took charge of Marya.
They didn’t leave each other’s side, even after they were placed in a ghetto orphanage and, in 1944, sent back to Romania.
In December 1944, the girls, now aged seven and fifteen, boarded a ship bound for Britain, where Natalia had distant relations willing to take them in.
So it was that Marya grew up in some splendor in a house in Marylebone, the doted-upon youngest daughter of a banking family.
All she knew of her beginnings: She was born in the Bukovina and her mother’s name was Gila.
Her adoptive parents, the Barnetts, had tried to trace any surviving family. They concluded there was none.
Saul had wondered if he’d recognize his daughter in some primal sense, responding to the call of blood, or if she’d be a total stranger.
Neither and both, he realized. She was a stranger, of that there was no doubt.
Honor, after welcoming Marya and bringing them tea, had tactfully left them alone.
In fact, she ought to have stayed. A middle-aged man and a young girl could only be uncomfortable in each other’s strange company.
He felt sorry for Marya. Worse, he saw she was sorry for him.
And yet: She was the very image of her mother.
The curve of her nose, the sharp tilt of the eyes, even the shape of her fingernails.
It was all Gila. A feeling of constriction arose in his throat, and he had to look away.
“I’d very much like to meet Natalia,” he said, helping himself to a biscuit.
“It sounds as though you owe her your life.”
Marya nodded gravely and took a small sip of tea. “She’s got two children of her own now. They call me Auntie Riri. They live in Wimbledon. Her husband’s a nice fellow. He works at Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co.”
Saul couldn’t think of anything to say to this. He smiled at her, feeble, helpless.
“Isn’t it strange,” she said, taking the social reins, “that we both came to live in London? By sheer chance.”
“Or perhaps it’s not chance,” offered Saul. “Perhaps it’s bashert—ordained.”
Skepticism crinkled her sensible little brow. “Do you believe in that sort of thing? I’m not sure I do.”
He thought of Jack Shaughnessy, of the violence of his conception and death.
Had the one ensured the other? By extension, was Jack’s disastrous imprint on his own life inescapable, his and Honor’s paths always bound to cross?
“If I’m perfectly honest,” he said, “I’m not sure I do, either. Still, it’s a nice idea, isn’t it?”
After seeing Marya out, Saul went upstairs.
Honor’s bedroom door was open, and he found her sitting at the end of the bed, small black-stockinged feet on the floor.
She looked at him, her ruined-doll face betraying in an instant all her yearning and dread.
A loosening feeling, like ribs unlatching, grazed the inside of his chest.
He sat down next to her. “That didn’t go too badly, I don’t think. Poor girl. What a surprise to land on someone. Yet she behaves with such equanimity. I suppose it’s her upbringing. The English stiff upper lip!”
“No,” said Honor, turning to face him. “No, it’s not that. She gets it from you. Tell me, when in your life have you ever caused a scene? Even after… after everything came out, you didn’t so much as raise your voice.” She smiled. “You’d be calm in an earthquake.”
He smiled back at her. “And you—how are you?”
She glanced down at her lap. “Oh, you know.” What could she say? She felt dangerously on the verge of tears, of begging for forgiveness, of making irretrievable declarations of love—of causing, in short, exactly the sort of scene Saul himself would never cause.
He frowned and opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it.
Honor, bravely, said, “How about a drink?”
Saul stood up and held out his hand. “A drink would be lovely.”
In the spring of 1954, a thirty-one-year-old man called Ronald Macneice—the son-in-law of elusive gangster Albert Cooper—went on trial at the Old Bailey for several counts of fraud and larceny, all relating to his running of illicit baccarat clubs.
The key testimony of Mr. James Sullivan, who was Mr. Macneice’s confidant and erstwhile cell neighbor at Her Majesty’s Prison Brixton, was to be offered in written form.
But this constituted inadmissible hearsay, submitted the defense.
Justice Peregrine Shackleton, presiding, heartily agreed.
The jury found they had no choice but to acquit Mr. Macneice on lack of evidence.
Two weeks later, he was declared a free man and went home to his wife, Kathy, and their two small children.
Shortly thereafter, in a turn of events no one (well, almost no one) connected to the fate and fortune of a notorious crime family, Mina became the proprietress of a fashion emporium.
The aptly named Mina’s, next to Asprey and opposite Finnigans on New Bond Street, carried only the most chic and exclusive labels from Paris and Milan.
For Mina, this meant frequent buying trips, stays at the George V and the Palazzo Parigi, and—for promotional purposes—never being photographed in the same outfit twice.
Her financial backer, a Mr. A. Cooper, left all business decisions to her.
Indeed, he was the very definition of a sleeping partner, his identity known only to Mina herself.
After six months, the shop’s turnover was so high that another Mina’s opened in Knightsbridge.
She found a flat in nearby Belgrave Square: three thousand square feet, on the first floor, and laterally converted across two wedding-cake houses.
Her parents and brothers, back in Billericay, were impressed but not entirely surprised by the levels of swank to which their little Wilhelmina had ascended.
By 1965, every major city in Britain had a Mina’s, as did Palm Beach, Beverly Hills, and Madison Avenue.