Mid-February brought a cold snap hard enough to freeze the smaller canals, and Jo walked to the Jordaan rather than take the tram, glad of an excuse to think before she arrived somewhere she’d have to perform certainty she didn’t fully have. The reauthorisation file needed a restoration history for the loan paperwork regardless of anything else going on; that was the reason she could put in writing. The other reason travelled with her unwritten, the way most of her real reasons had for weeks now.
Els Bakker’s studio occupied the ground floor of a narrow house in the Jordaan, windows angled north the way every serious restorer’s windows were angled, and it smelled, the moment Jo stepped through the door, of turpentine, linseed and something mineral underneath both of them that took her a half-second longer than it should have to place.
Fresh oil paint. Not old, not curing,…
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