Review: Vivien Horler

The Last Letters from Villa Clara, by Sarah Steele (Headline Review)

Spanning 60 years, this is a bit of a saga, with all sorts of wonderful elements: the outbreak of war, a long-lost Old Master, a couple of love stories, London at the beginning the Swinging Sixties, two court cases, an Italian villa and a treasure hunt.

On top of all that there’s a handful of memorable characters.

At the centre of the story is Bruce Cato, an accomplished artist who has made a good living painting copies of famous paintings. These are not fakes, he emphasises, but copies, and demand for them comes from filmmakers, people who would like to have a quality copy of a famous picture on their walls, or people who really own famous paintings, but who for security and insurance reasons don’t want to display them.

Another central character is Sir Edwin Viner, a sinister Bond Street gallery owner, who occasionally buys work from Cato.

And then there is a flurry of women, beginning with Leonora Birch who was in love with Bruce, and vice versa, when they were art students in the 1920s. But Bruce won an art scholarship to Rome, and the couple parted.

Now it’s August 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War 2, and Leonora is personal assistant to Sir Edwin. She is also his lover, but the relationship is souring. Sir Edwin is heading to Italy to see a contact who has found a painting he believes might be a long-lost Vermeer, and he is taking Leonora with him.

Unbeknown to Leonora, Sir Edwin’s contact is Bruce Cato, and they will stay in his crumbling but beautiful Tuscan villa. During the few days they are there, Bruce and Leonora rekindle their relationship, but with war around the corner, Leonora says she cannot stay in Italy.

The journey back from Italy to London is fraught, and one of the disasters that befall them is that fascist Italian police seize the potential Old Master. In London Leonora discovers she is pregnant by Sir Edwin, and he, bitter about her ditching him for Bruce, fires her.

But she does own a house in Pimlico, and she becomes the landlady of a boarding house, providing accommodation to a collection of young women.

Fast forward to 1963, and one of them is Margot, a member of the gentry who is cut off without a penny when she bolts, in her ivory silk wedding dress, just hours before her society wedding.

Then we jump to 1989 when we meet Phoebe Cato, Bruce’s beloved niece. Phoebe spent all her teenage summer holidays with Bruce in Tuscany, and in the process has learnt a fair about art. She is the curator of a small museum in London – the Cato Museum of Artifice – dedicated to Bruce’s work.

Phoebe travels to Tuscany to hear Bruce’s bad news: he is ill and has only a month or two to live. The fact she will be his heir is not much of a comfort, as the museum is in financial trouble and the villa is falling apart.

Bruce duly dies, and at the funeral Phoebe meets a formidable art critic and dealer, Margot Stockton, part of the London art world Bruce had loathed. But it turns out she had been invited by Bruce to his funeral, to deliver a letter to Phoebe.

And so Phoebe, with the help of a cast of amazing people, follows a trail Bruce has set for her, and in the process we find out what happened to Leonora, the missing painting and the answers various other puzzles.

While I have described the story chronologically, it is not written like that, and the reader has to pay attention – but it’s worth the effort.

This a great read from an accomplished writer, warm, loving and ultimately satisfying.

• The Last Letters from Villa Clara was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for February.