A Place of Safety (18 page)

My dear Miss Maguire,

Henry Buxford sent me a note last week, asking me to write to you about my father’s collection of paintings. I am afraid that I am not going to be able to give you what Henry believes you need. You see, there has never been any kind of inventory of the paintings. At least, I have never seen one.

To understand my ignorance, you would have to understand my mother. She was a remarkable woman. I, of course, knew her only as she was once the great adventure – and tragedy – of her life was over. But its effects never left her, and she devoted the rest of her life to the shell-shocked survivors of her war. She had seen their life in the trenches in close up, you see, and could never forget what it had done to them.

She and I lived together in the house my father had bought her, on the very edge of the City, where the gallery now is. When I was young we had lodgers too. I do not know when my father bought it, although I imagine the deeds must include a date. I can’t remember ever having looked at them myself.

She used to tell me about his paintings when I was a small boy, and how she was keeping them safe for him, for when he returned to her. Even when it became clear that he would not return, she could not bring herself to touch them, let alone unpack them to make any kind of list.

As you must know, he never did return. We think he was probably killed some time before 1918, but obviously after her pregnancy forced her to confess her secret marriage and leave the army nursing service.

She never met any of his family while she was serving in France, and it may be that he had no opportunity to tell them about her before he was killed, which may also
be why no one ever informed her of his death. But I do not know.

She tried to find them, just as she tried to find him, writing to everyone she could think of who might have been able to tell her. After the Second World War was over, she even went over to France to search for clues, but found nothing.

All she ever had were her memories and the paintings themselves. Perhaps in the end it was her sadness that made her leave them untouched, as though they were but a poor substitute for the man she had so greatly loved.

It has been on my conscience that I took my attitude from hers and did not even think to look at the paintings. After I had my stroke, I began to see that we had betrayed his legacy by leaving it in the dark. During my recovery I became obsessed by the need to put that right, although in my almost speechless and semi-paralysed state there was very little I could do.

Young Henry Buxford saved me and took on the burden of my father’s legacy. He even found this place for me to live, where the women who care for us are kind.

He has allowed me to make some kind of peace with my father’s ghost, if that is not too sentimental a way of putting it. Of course, it will only be when the last painting has been unpacked and restored that I will feel completely at ease, but this is the kind of thing that is slow work when it is done properly, as our director Toby Fullwell is doing it.

I am afraid there is nothing more that I can tell you about the paintings or about my father’s intentions for them. All I have ever known is what my mother told me about her magnificent Frenchman, who appeared one day at the dressing station behind the front line, where she was working.

As always, it was appallingly short of every kind of staff, from doctors right down to orderlies. He rolled up his
sleeves and joined in with whatever needed doing. He had no medical training, but he carried stretchers and soil buckets, stoked incinerators, held wounded limbs while the doctors worked on them, which, my mother said, was something most orderlies couldn’t stomach and left to barely trained VADs. Everyone loved him, she used to say, and he did much to restore the reputation of his countrymen in the eyes of the men he served.

There was a great prejudice amongst our forces against the local peasants, you see. There they were, my mother used to tell me, only a mile or two from the hell on earth that was the front line, living their comfortable prosperous little lives and rapaciously overcharging the suffering soldiery for the small comforts they could provide.

But Jean-Pierre Gregoire was not of their kidney. He was heroic in the quiet, unflamboyant way that my mother loved. And, although he was well over fighting age, he was waging the dirty secret war no one could speak of. She said he must have been in his early forties when she first knew him in 1916, and so when she went in search of him in 1949, he would have been seventy-four or five, only ten years younger than I am now. But as I say, she found no trace. Not of him, nor of his family.

I am becoming repetitive. Please forgive me, my dear Miss Maguire, and do let me know if there is any further help that I can give you.

Yours sincerely,

Ivan Gregory