The Girl You Left Behind

away in the thick heat, him
     beaming as if he had acquired some great treasure, holding the painting as reverently as
     he would hold Liv later that evening. ‘This should be your wedding present,’
     he had said. ‘Seeing as I never gave you anything.’
    ‘I thought you didn’t want
     anything interrupting the clean lines of your walls,’ she had teased.
    They had stopped in the busy street, and
     held it up to view it again. She remembers the taut, sunburned skin at the back of her
     neck, the fine dusty sheen on her arms. The hot Barcelona streets, the afternoon sun
     reflected in his eyes. ‘I think we can break the rules for something we
     love.’
    ‘So you and David bought that
     painting in good faith, yes?’ says Kristen. She pauses to swat the hand of a
     teenager scrabbling among the contents of the fridge. ‘No. No chocolate mousse.
     You won’t eat supper.’
    ‘Yes. I even managed to dig out the
     receipt.’ She had it in her handbag: a piece of tattered paper, torn from the back
     of a journal
. Received with thanks for portrait, poss called The Girl You Left
     Behind. 300 francs – Marianne Baker (Ms).
    ‘So it’s yours. You bought it,
     you have the receipt. Surely that’s the end of it. Tasmin? Will you tell George
     it’s supper in ten minutes?’
    ‘You’d think. And the woman we
     got it from said her mother’d had it for half a century. She wasn’t even
     going to sell it to us – she was going to give it to us. David insisted on paying
     her.’
    ‘Well, the whole thing is frankly
     ridiculous.’ Kristen stops mixing the salad and throws up her hands. ‘I
     mean, where does it end? If you bought a house and someone stole the land in the land
     grabs of the Middle Ages, does that mean some day someone’s going to claim your
     house back too? Do we have to give back my diamond ring because it might have been taken
     from the wrong bit ofAfrica? It was the First World War, for
     goodness’ sake. Nearly a hundred years ago. The legal system is going too
     far.’
    Liv sits back in her chair. She had called
     Sven that afternoon, trembling with shock, and he had told her to come over that
     evening. He had been reassuringly calm when she had told him about the letter, had
     actually shrugged as he read it. ‘It’s probably a new variation on the
     ambulance-chasing thing. It all sounds very unlikely. I’ll check it out – but I
     wouldn’t worry. You’ve got a receipt, you bought it legally, so I’m
     guessing there’s no way this could stand up in a court of law.’
    Kristen deposits the bowl of salad on the
     table. ‘Who is this artist anyway? Do you like olives?’
    ‘His name is Édouard
     Lefèvre, apparently. But it’s not signed. And yes. Thank you.’
    ‘I meant to tell you … after
     the last time we spoke.’ Kristen looks up at her daughter, shepherds her towards
     the door. ‘Go on, Tasmin. I need some mummy time.’
    Liv waits as, with a disgruntled backwards
     look, Tasmin slopes out of the room. ‘It’s Rog.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘I have bad news.’ She winces,
     leans forward over the table. Takes a deep, theatrical breath. ‘I wanted to tell
     you last week but I couldn’t work out what to say. You see, he did think you were
     terribly nice, but I’m afraid you’re not … well … he
     says you’re not his type.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘He really wants
     someone … younger. I’m so sorry. I just thought you should know the
     truth. I couldn’t bear the idea of you sitting there waiting for him to
     call.’
    Liv is trying to straighten her face when
     Sven enters the room. He is holding a page of scribbled notes. ‘I just got off the
     phone with a friend of mine at Sotheby’s. So … the bad news is that TARP
     is a well-respected organization. They trace works that have been stolen, but
     increasingly they’re doing the tougher stuff, works that disappeared during
     wartime. They’ve returned some quite high-profile pieces in the last few years,
     some from national collections. It appears to be a growth area.’
    ‘But
The Girl
isn’t a
     high-profile work of art. She’s just a little oil painting we picked up on our
     honeymoon.’
    ‘Well … that’s true to
     an extent. Liv, did you look up this Lefèvre chap after you got the
     letter?’
    It was the first thing she had done. A minor
     member of the Impressionist school at the turn of the last century. There was one
     sepia-tinted photograph of a big man with