In the Full Light of the Sun by Clare Clark

Author:Clare Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

When Emmeline told Dora about Julius, Dora gave a high little cry and flung her arms around her before she remembered herself and backed stiffly away. When she thanked Emmeline for her help she sounded like a lady mayoress opening a new hospital ward.

Two days later the Merkur ran the story. The editor gave it a paragraph on the fifth page. Several other Berlin newspapers picked the story up, in particular the claim that Köhler-Schultz and de Vries had agreed jointly to re-examine all thirty-two of the Rachmann paintings, but when both men refused to comment the story rapidly ran out of steam. When Dora told Toller she had contacts, she might be able to find out more, the editor shook his head. The news desk would take care of things from here, he told her. Summer was over and everyone who was anyone was coming back to Berlin. Dora had work to do.

Work, Dora told Emmeline resentfully, that she could do standing on her head. She had taken once again to dropping by in the evenings, the way she had when they first met. Emmeline wished she would not. Dora was unable to sit still, unable to talk about anything but Rachmann and his van Goghs.

‘The vast majority,’ she said, again and again. ‘That’s what the statement said, that he believes the vast majority to be genuine. Not all. And Köhler-Schultz is on Rachmann’s side.’

She did not care what Toller said, she knew the news desk would not investigate the story, not properly anyway. She had no choice, she told Emmeline, but to do it herself. Her old despondency had evaporated, burned out by a harsh, humming freneticism. In her lunch hours she met Anton’s gallery friends and pumped them for information. In the evenings she grilled Emmeline. What did Emmeline know about Rachmann’s habits, his family? She made her go over every one of her encounters with him, and with Gregor, again and again. She wrote it all down. When at last she went upstairs to her own flat she took the stairs two at a time.

‘Oma’s asking for you,’ she told Emmeline one evening. ‘She wants to know why you don’t visit any more.’

‘And what have you told her?’

Dora shrugged. ‘The truth. That I ask you and you don’t come.’

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Isn’t it?’

The next evening Emmeline went upstairs for supper. Everything was different. Even Oma was smaller somehow, shrunken, her bones like teeth beneath her papery skin. Her voice was rough, as though her coughing had scratched away the varnish. Her laugh was a saw rasping through wood.

She was still stubborn. She scowled as Dora told Emmeline about her refusal to allow Frau Becker to bathe her or get her dressed, her insistence on using the lavatory across the landing even though she did not always make it in time. Dora, always so patient, had grown snappish. She scolded the old woman as she ran water into the sink, demanding to know how she was supposed to take care of her when she would not take care of herself.

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