Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [76]
Goudsmid named her son Nadav, meaning “generous of heart.” A year and a half after his birth, she and Drewe had a baby daughter, whom they named Atarah, the Hebrew word for “crown.” Drewe bought the children more toys than they would ever have time to play with, drove them to day care, and was gentle with them when they were sick. He was often the only father in the playground, where the nannies dubbed him “the professor.”
When Drewe asked Goudsmid to marry him, she said she needed time to think about it. There was something a little off about him, she thought. He claimed to be obsessed with her but seemed happiest when he was alone, working or reading in his room. Whenever she had friends over, he tended to stay in the background, pouring drinks and keeping the coffeepot going, but she could feel him hovering, and it always came as a relief when he disappeared upstairs. Finally she turned down his marriage proposal: The present arrangement was good enough, she said. Drewe continued to introduce her as his wife.
As she would later describe in sworn testimony, when Goudsmid bought the house on Rotherwick Road, Drewe persuaded her to put it in both their names, and to take out a mortgage for a good deal more than she had intended. He reminded her that they were about to receive £2 million from the elusive John Catch. When the money failed to materialize, he brought in several paintings, purportedly from Catch’s collection, and told her the profits from the sale of the works would make them rich.
One day she looked out the window and saw Drewe crouched in the garden with a vacuum-cleaner bag and a bucket of dirt that he was smearing on a Giacometti painting. When she asked him what on earth he was doing, he said that the painting had been sitting in Catch’s vault for years and looked “too fresh.” Drewe was applying a traditional marketing technique that gave paintings a weathered look and made them easier to sell.
Goudsmid took little interest in Drewe’s work. Their relationship had cooled considerably since they first moved to Rotherwick Road. He was always busy, on the hustle, out and about to restaurants and fancy parties, and she was doing well enough with her own career. He once invited her to a soiree at the Chinese embassy, where he introduced her to the military attaché. It was a dull evening, and she had turned down subsequent invitations.
Drewe began making occasional deposits of thousands of pounds into their joint account, but he also dipped into it heavily, burning through as much as £12,000 a month and covering the frequent overdrafts in dribs and drabs. He explained the expenses as the cost of “entertaining business clients,” but she eventually stopped depositing her salary into the account. They often fought, and she asked him several times to leave. He refused, saying it was best to wait until the children were older.
Goudsmid and Drewe slept in separate rooms and rarely ate together. She would leave the house early in the morning and work late. When he returned from his business meetings, he would shut himself up in his room with his newspapers and books. He had dozens of books on the Mossad and MI5, on science, mysticism, and the occult, and a whole section on the kabbalah. He ordered reading matter by the box-ful and stored the overflow in the garage behind the Bentley.
By the time Nadav turned ten, he was a computer whiz, and Drewe began to spend more time alone with him. Goudsmid would see them in the glow of the terminal with piles of documents scattered around them. Drewe had a supply of scissors and paste, and