tourists threatened to damage the original. But she remembered this trick of the blurred line to suggest movement, and the way that artists would try to follow the shapes of rock on which they drew. If this were a fake, it was a remarkably fine one.
“What do you suggest I do? Take it home to Wiltshire and put it back on the bookcase?”
“No,” said Lydia firmly. “I strongly suggest you leave it with me, and I shall give you a receipt, and ask one or two experts in the field where it might have come from. If your father found it in 1944, there were then very few painted caves. Lascaux was only found in 1940. If it comes from this region, or from the Spanish caves at Altamira, they’ll identify it quickly enough. If not, we’ll have to think again about its provenance. But the style says Lascaux, and so does your father’s estimate about its age. But even if it comes from somewhere altogether different, I don’t think you would be able to sell it, not publicly at least.”
“How long would these consultations take?” he asked. “And how long would you want to keep the rock?”
“I’ll photograph it digitally, and send that with an e-mail to two or three people. I should hear something within a day or two. Just to be sure, I’ll send copies to an expert on the Hagar paintings, and check out one or two more possibles. I’m not an expert on Cro-Magnon man, but I know the people who are.”
“Cro-Magnon, was he the one with the low, thick forehead, the missing link back to the apes?”
“No, absolutely not. Cro-Magnon man had a skull and brain cavity not unlike our own, and in creating these cave paintings he gave us the first recognizable human culture. He replaced-and we are not sure how-Neanderthal man, who did have a low, thick brow. But even his brain capacity was just as big as ours-even bigger, I seem to recall. I’m not even sure we know whether or not the two types could interbreed.” Lydia was suddenly aware that Manners was watching one of her more irritating habits, twisting a lock of her hair around and around a single finger as she talked. She only did it when she was nervous. She dropped her arm to her side and spoke quickly. “Would you like me to give you a receipt for this, or do you want to take it away with you? I’d like to photograph it anyway, if I may.”
He leaned back casually, perched on the table, and for the first time he smiled openly at her. It was a very agreeable smile, with no guile in it. “But if you can’t sell it for me, why would you want to go to all this bother? Why not just refer me to a museum and save yourself the effort?”
“Perhaps I should,” she said, and gave her coolest, most professional smile in return. “I suppose that having come across this, and suspecting what it might be, I feel rather responsible. If it has been wrenched away from a cave wall, I think we ought to try to get it back.”
“Do you feel the same about statues from Egyptian temples and giving the Elgin marbles back to Greece?” His tone was curious, rather than aggressive.
“There are few hard and fast rules about this. The Elgin marbles were bought and exported under the legal rules of the time, and have been better cared for in the British Museum than they might have been in Athens in the past. And that is a case where political issues will probably outweigh any artistic argument. But if somebody in my profession knows something had been taken illegally from a tomb or a temple-or a cave-then we have a sort of ethical code that says we do not deal in it and alert the proper authorities. The laws against trafficking in stolen goods certainly apply to the art world, and there is also a moral consideration, particularly about something such as this.” She gestured at the rock.
“Would all your colleagues here, or at other auction houses, take the same attitude? Or is this a particularly American ethic, to do with fear of lawsuits?”
“I certainly hope my colleagues would take the same view, on either side of the Atlantic. This is not about lawsuits, but about fair dealing,” she said crisply, suddenly wondering whether the whole thing had been some kind of test arranged by her management. “Now, would you like that receipt?”
“Yes, please,” he said. “And I have to be back in town on Friday. If I came in at about midday, perhaps I could take you to lunch?” He smiled again. “You have been helpful above and beyond the call of duty.”
“I’m afraid we tend to be rather busy on Fridays,” she said automatically, pulling a receipt form and a ballpoint pen from the drawer and starting to fill it in. “But I’ll certainly see you here at noon. And if you leave a phone number, I can let you know if some firm information comes back to me before then.”
Lydia took a dozen digital photographs of the rock, and weighed and measured it carefully before asking a janitor to take it up to her office. Then she sent e-mails and the digitalized photos to Professor Horst Vogelstern in Cologne and to the National Museum of Prehistory at les Eyzies in the Dordogne, in the heart of France’s cave region. It had been founded by Denis Peyrony, the French scholar who had first identified the frieze of the horses in the Font-de-Gaume cave, and ever since had been the main center for the study of early man. She marked the museum e-mail for the attention of Clothilde Daunier, a curator renowned for her encyclopedic knowledge of Lascaux and the surrounding caves. Lydia knew her only by reputation. She had heard of Horst as one of the leading authorities on prehistoric art even before she met him at a reception after he had given a lecture at the Courtauld Institute when she had been studying there. As a courtesy, she sent another e-mail to her old professor at the Ashmolean in Oxford. It was not his field, but she thought he might be interested. At least he could confirm that it was not African. She pondered sending more e-mails to some of her classmates who were still working in the field. There was a boring Irishman, now teaching in Australia, who had been interested in cave painting, and that insufferable Californian who had gone into paleoarchaeology. No, she thought firmly. No need to reopen those old connections. She pulled out Ann Sieveking’s
“Should I put that in the storeroom for you, miss?” he asked. Then he looked at it. “That’s special, isn’t it?”
“I think it is, Mr. Woodley. I think it could be very special.” She smiled at him, feeling comfortable with the elderly man.
“Funny how you can always tell the real thing, the quality,” he said, turning her desk lamp to illuminate it more clearly. “Very old, is it?”
“Probably seventeen thousand years old, if my guess is right.”
“Crikey. Funny how you never think of art before the ancient Greeks. But it passes my test, miss.”
“What’s that, Mr. Woodley?”
“I get it now and again. First week I got this job, we had that Rembrandt in, and I got this shiver. I’ll never forget it. I’d never thought much about art before. Never seen much, I suppose. But I got it then, and I got it with that El Greco we had last year, and I’ve got it now.” He shook his head in solemn admiration. “Seventeen thousand years. Makes you think. I suppose that’s what makes us human, making art, just for the beauty of it.”
They looked at it together in silence, feeling the strength and nobility of a long-dead beast, and wondering about the mind and eyes and hands that had crafted it into something more potent than life. Those horns could kill, those haunches could breed, those legs could charge. Mr. Woodley was right to shiver, she thought. Less than two feet square, but it was an awesome beast. She felt a sense of sympathetic terror for whatever distant ancestors had gone up against it with spears and rocks and flint axes. In ennobling the bull, the artist had somehow ennobled the early men who had hunted it.
“You’re quite right, Mr. Woodley,” Lydia said quietly, thinking how foolish she had been that morning, to think of giving up a career that could give her moments such as this. “It’s what makes us human.”
“I’ll take care of it for you, miss. Put it in the storeroom overnight. You’d better get on home.”
She took the tube home to the small flat in Fulham, thinking about the great cave of Lascaux as she opened the door, and how much she would prefer a poster of those bulls of Lascaux on her wall to the insipid Monet print that now greeted her. She did not much like her apartment, given what it was costing her, but duty insisted that her living room and kitchen were always left tidy. Her morning coffee cup and juice glass were now dry on the draining board. She turned on the radio, tuned to the usual Classic FM, and put them away as she tried to identify the music, but it was some generic baroque chamber ensemble and she gave up. Her father would have been ashamed of her, after all the music he had played in her childhood. The small bedroom was as messy as the other rooms were neat, and she shoved tights and jeans and T-shirts and bedclothes into a great pile, and took them down to the communal washing machine in the basement of the converted old house. She had thirty-five minutes before she would have to load them into the dryer. Time to watch TV? To eat? The refrigerator held ketchup, one bottle of
