Zach stared at Hannah in complete amazement. She waited patiently for him to speak.
“I always said… I always felt that I recognized you. From the first moment I met you.”
“Yes you did. I thought it was a line.”
“No, it wasn’t a line. I did recognize you-you look like Delphine. But I only saw it at certain angles, because I only really know Delphine from certain angles. From the picture of her that I have, that I love… I’ve spent so long studying it, looking at it.” He shook his head incredulously. “Delphine was your grandmother?”
“She was. She came back to Blacknowle during the war, when she finished school. She ended up marrying the farmer’s son, Chris Brock, and the pair of them never left.”
“Nothing was ever written about her. Nobody ever mentioned what happened to her.”
“Well, I expect nobody really cared. She wasn’t a famous artist, after all-and Aubrey was dead. Delphine was only a teenager when the war broke out. I expect nobody was interested in finding her, or talking to her.”
“Is she… still alive?” For a moment, the thought of meeting the girl whose picture he had studied and loved so intensely made Zach’s mouth go dry, but Hannah shook her head.
“No. She died when I was still young. She was only just in her sixties, but she had cancer.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Do you remember her? What was she like?”
“Of course I remember her. She was lovely. Always very kind, thoughtful. And softly spoken-I never once heard her raise her voice. But she was solemn, too. I hardly ever heard her laugh.”
“Well, her sister had died, and then she thought her father had, too, and her mother left her… Losses like that will leave a mark on you, I guess. Weren’t you angry when you found out that Aubrey had been alive all this time? Your great-grandfather? God, I still can’t believe it! It’s… unreal… But weren’t you angry? He was your family, after all.”
“No,” said Hannah lightly, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “I never knew him. I lost nothing when he died.”
“But, on your grandmother’s behalf…”
“Yes, I suppose I should have been. Poor Delphine-she did always miss him, I know that much. But what’s the point of anger when something can’t be undone? No good can come from punishing people so long after the event-Delphine had been dead nearly twenty years before her father followed.”
“Did she ever talk about her mother? About Celeste? Did you ever meet her?”
“No. As far as I know, she never saw her again; certainly not after I was born-as far as I know. She never talked about her, either. It was like she’d died in the war, same as her father.”
“So… the pictures belong to you. As Charles Aubrey’s great-granddaughter. They belong to you now,” said Zach, looking up at Hannah and trying to work out what he felt. He was exhausted. He was overloaded, bewildered, excited. Hannah nodded slowly.
“What will you do?” he asked. At once, Hannah looked uneasy.
“Much more to the point, Zach, what will you do?” Puzzled, Zach didn’t answer.
The night seemed to have started years before, decades even. After a while, Zach went back upstairs to the small bedroom, where all the pictures were waiting. He looked at each and every one of them. Two hundred and seventeen finished works in total. There were pictures of Dimity in her twenties and thirties; in middle age; in old age. The slow, steady passing of her years, recorded a piece at a time in Aubrey’s vibrant sketches and paintings. There were scenes of violence and devastation, of chaos and the brutal, confusing ugliness of war, the likes of which Zach had never known Aubrey produce before. Aubrey, a man inspired above all else by beauty. Already he was cataloging them in his mind, arranging them into an exhibition, drafting the explanatory biographical notes that would accompany each piece. The art world had never known a story like this one, he realized. Everyone would want to come and see these pictures, and hear this story. And he knew, in that instant, that he wanted to be the one to tell it. But, of course, that wasn’t up to him. It was up to the owner of all the pictures. And if she wanted to lock this room and never open it again, then that was her right. The thought gave him a crushing feeling.
There were portraits of Dennis with a multitude of different faces, and Zach studied them all, under the weak light from the solitary bulb overhead. He looked at all of Aubrey’s possessions, the scattered items on the desk, touching each thing gently, reverently. Tubes of oil paint and a bottle of turpentine-the chemical smell that had been so instantly recognizable to him as he’d sat in the darkness earlier, with Rozafa. Beneath some loose papers he found a startling thing. Military ID tags, still threaded onto a stiff and twisted leather bootlace. British, not made of metal like American ones would have been. A round red disk and an octagonal green one, made of some tough fiber, with the name F. R. DENNIS and his regimental details stamped clearly onto the surface of each. Zach ran his fingertips over the lettering. Dennis. I’ve finally found you. You get to have a story now, too. There was bound to be a photo of him somewhere. In some old family album. Zach would be able to see the face that Aubrey had so struggled to imagine.
“Dimity told me once that he never forgave himself,” said Hannah. Zach hadn’t even heard her come into the room.
“For what?”
“Stealing that soldier’s identity. He used him to get home, to get away from the war and make a break for it. Ruined his name by deserting, and denied his family a body, a burial. He had nightmares about it all the time. About the war, and about Dennis.”
“Why are all the Dennis pictures of different men?”
“They’re not. They’re all of him. It was Aubrey’s way of… giving him his life back. He never knew what he looked like, you see. Dennis was already dead when Aubrey found his body and switched their tags. Dead and so badly injured that he had no idea what the lad had looked like in life. This was his way of… paying him back, I think. He tried to give him back his face.”
“The pictures of Dennis that have come up for sale lately… they were so similar, but I knew… I knew there was something different about each one.”
“Yes.” Hannah nodded. “You’re the only one who looked closely enough to see it, it seems. I picked the ones in which he looked most alike. Where Charles had clearly got an image in his mind and had drawn it several times before it shifted. But he never got it one hundred percent the same, because…”
“Because it was a fantasy. He had no model.”
“Yes. It was a risk, putting them up for sale, but they were the only ones that wouldn’t have… raised questions.”
“Why take the risk?”
“We needed money. Dimity to live on, me to… to help Ilir and his family.” Zach considered this for a second.
“That most recent Dennis picture, the one that sold the week before last. That paid for Rozafa and the boy to come over, didn’t it?” he asked, already knowing the answer when Hannah nodded.
“Ilir has been working for me for years, and saving up what I could afford to pay him. He sent some of it to them in France, as well. But when the French authorities started to break up the Paris camps at the beginning of the month, it was too soon. We hadn’t got enough between us. We needed more.” Her eyes were wide and calm, but they were searching, too. She was trying to see how he felt about it all, trying to explain all the secrets, and the lies. To explain her part in it. “I never actually lied to you, Zach,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.
“You wrote fake dates on his pictures, Hannah. That’s forgery. You denied all knowledge of Dennis, and the new pieces that were sold. You lied to me and to the whole bloody world,” he said, realizing only then how much it hurt.