The Second Signature, Part 2: The Woman at the Window
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Part 2 of 4. Nadia visits the donor, a retired teacher living among unlabelled canvases, and learns who really painted the harbours.
What Nadia needed was a living Halloway, and it was the donor, a retired schoolteacher named Clara Voss, who agreed to meet her.
Clara lived in a narrow flat above a shoe repair shop, surrounded by unlabelled canvases. 'What you've found,' she said, before Nadia had even taken off her coat, 'is the only one she managed to sign.'
It was Margit, Clara explained, who had painted most of the harbours. Edmund had been a gifted salesman and a mediocre painter; it was his name that the galleries wanted, and his name that paid the rent. What Margit got in return was a studio, silence, and a husband who never asked where the pictures came from, because he already knew.
'All she wanted,' Clara said, 'was for one person, someday, to see the M.'
Nadia looked around the flat. 'And these?'
'Hers. The ones he couldn't sell because they weren't harbours. He kept them in the attic and told visitors they were his student work, which was almost funny, because she taught him everything he knew about light.' Clara pulled a sheet off the nearest frame: a woman at a window, painted in the same silver light, with the same impossible patience. 'It's this one I'd save in a fire.'
Nadia stood in front of it for a long time. What struck her first was not the skill, though the skill was obvious. It was the woman's expression: not sad, not patient, but quietly amused, as if she knew something the viewer didn't.
On the bus back to the museum, Nadia drafted a proposal in her head. It wasn't the money that worried her, or even the scandal. What worried her was the man whose office sat at the end of the corridor: the director, Paul Esterhaus, who had built his entire career on Edmund Halloway.