Martin Walker: The Caves of Perigord

“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 wine and two of fizzy water, some yogurt, and a wizened lemon. She would have to start planning her life better than this.

Lydia ate the yogurt, told herself she could put the clothes in the dryer tomorrow and went to bed. Ignoring her bedside copy of The Hittites, she was asleep almost at once. Her last thought was of the oddity of time. The oldest cave paintings, at the Grotte de Villars, had been dated by that legendary prehistorian Abbe Breuil to about thirty thousand years. The carbon dating of the charcoal they used in the Lascaux cave suggested the great paintings had been done seventeen thousand years ago. Which meant fifteen thousand years B.C., she thought. She could never teach herself to use that politically correct term B.C.E., Before the Common Era. So for fifteen thousand years before Lascaux, humans had lived around the valleys of the Vezere and Dordogne rivers, hunted and painted in caves, and carried on doing what their ancestors always had. And then came a the sudden explosion of talent and genius that created the stunning achievement of Lascaux. As the explosion faded, people embarked upon the next seventeen thousand-year march to the present day. The human race launched into agriculture and metals and towns and ships and politics; everything began to change as life seemed to shift into a higher gear. Like a video, thought Lydia, fast-forward. Instead of B.C. and A.D., you might call it B.L. and A.L. Before and After Lascaux. Before and after art.

The first response to Lydia’s e-mails came the next morning as she was sipping coffee at her desk and taking detailed notes on the rock, perched on a chair at her side. Beyond its weight and dimensions, the colors and the shapes, there was not much to say. Not, at least, that could be put into plain words. The bull was in black and dark red, with muted shadings of red and yellow to give depth. There were some other lines, suggestions that the designs continued beyond the edge of the broken rock, but nothing she could begin to describe. And there was a line of three dots, and perhaps part of a fourth on the edge of the rock, equally spaced, in a reasonably straight line. Such patterns had also been found at Lascaux, but nowhere else, from her superficial researches of the previous evening. But there was no reference that she had found to any damage to the caves at Lascaux, no gaps in the drawings where the Manners rock might have been wrenched free.

She sat back, trying to assess whether she responded to the bull as a magnificent but crude drawing, or whether she simply felt awe at something so old, when the phone rang, and she recognized Horst’s voice. He was speaking an English as precise and fluent as her own, with barely a trace of German accent, asking her warmly how she was and sounding much more friendly than one evening of pleasant chatter at a reception would explain. It was soon clear that he was excited by the photographs.

Yes, she still had the rock in her possession, she told him. It was on her desk. No, she had not yet heard from the museum at Les Eyzies, but she felt it possible that it was from Lascaux, even though it was so small. No, her auction house did not intend to put the piece on public sale, but simply to establish whether it was real and where it might have come from.

“I know where it’s from,” said Horst. “It is from Lascaux, the style and detail are unmistakable. But this is different. It is a miniature, by far the smallest of any bull that I have seen and it is not from any cave I know of. This could mean that somebody has found a new cave, with Lascaux-style art. But why would they be so foolish as to approach an auction house if they want to make some money from this? They must have known you wouldn’t put it on open sale. Who is this person who brought it to you, do you know anything about him?”

She described Manners, told Horst of his father and the inheritance, and the possible connection to the Perigord region in 1944, and added, “I don’t think he knows the first thing about cave paintings. He was happy enough to leave the piece in my care, and for me to make inquiries to trace it. He seemed genuine and rather innocent. I don’t think he’s the type to trade in looted goods. And if he were, he would hardly have come to us. But I can quiz him some more when I see him-he’s coming in again on Friday to see what I have found out.”

“If I came over, would you introduce him to me?” Horst asked. There was a sound of rustling down the phone as he leafed through a calendar. “I can change a lecture, put off a student or two, and fly over on Thursday in time to take you to dinner. By then, we should have confirmation from les Eyzies that this comes from an unknown cave.”

“I haven’t got my diary to hand-I’m not sure I’m free on Thursday,” she said quickly. “Perhaps we’d better wait until we do hear from les Eyzies.”