The Girl You Left Behind

  And then I heard her, her voice breaking into the silence. 'Sophie!' A child's voice, piercing and anguished. 'Sophie! Sophie!' Edith burst through the crowd that had gathered and hurled herself at me and clutched my leg. 'Don't leave. You said you wouldn't leave.'

  It was the most she had said aloud since she had come to us. I swallowed, my eyes filling with tears. I stooped and put my arms around her. How can I leave her? My thoughts blurred, my senses narrowing to the feel of her little hands.

  And then I glanced up and saw how the German soldiers watched her, something speculative in their gaze. I reached up and smoothed her hair. 'Edith, you must stay with Helene and be brave. Your maman and I will come back for you. I promise.'

  She didn't believe me. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  'Nothing bad is going to happen to me. I promise. I am going to see my husband.' I tried to make her believe me, to fill my voice with certainty.

  'No,' she said, her grip tightening. 'No. Please don't leave me.'

  My heart broke. I pleaded silently with my sister. Take her away from here. Don't let her see. Helene prised her fingers from me. She was sobbing now. 'Please don't take my sister,' she said to the soldiers, as she pulled Edith away. 'She does not know her mind. Please don't take my sister. She does not deserve this.' The mayor put his arm around her shoulders, his expression confused, the fight knocked out of him by Aurelien's words.

  'I will be all right, Edith. Be strong,' I called to her, above the noise. Then someone spat at me, and I saw it, a thin, vile trail, upon my sleeve. The crowd jeered. Panic filled me. 'Helene?' I called. 'Helene?'

  German hands propelled me roughly into the back of the truck. I found myself in a dark interior, seated on a wooden bench. A soldier took his place opposite me, his rifle resting in the crook of his elbow. The canvas flap dropped down, and the engine fired into life. The noise swelled, and so did the sound of the crowd, as if this action had unleashed those who wished to abuse me. I wondered briefly if I could throw myself through the small gap, but then I heard, 'Whore!' followed by Edith's thin wail, and the sharp crack of a stone as it hit the side of the truck, causing the soldier to bark out a warning. I flinched as another struck, behind where I was sitting. The German looked at me steadily. The slight smirk in his expression told me of my terrible mistake.

  I sat, my hands pressed together on my bag, and began to shake. As the truck pulled away, I did not try to lift the canvas flap to see out. I did not want to feel the eyes of the town upon me. I did not want to hear their verdict. I sat on the arch of the wheel, and slowly dropped my head into my hands, murmuring, 'Edouard, Edouard, Edouard,' to myself. And: 'I'm sorry.' I'm not sure who I was apologizing to.

  Only when I reached the outskirts of the town did I dare to look up. Through the flapping gap in the canvas, I could just see the red sign of Le Coq Rouge glinting in the winter sun, and the bright blue of Edith's dress on the edge of the crowd. It grew smaller and smaller until finally, like the town, it disappeared.

  PART TWO

  11

  London, 2006

  Liv runs along the river, her bag wedged under her arm, her phone pressed between ear and shoulder. Somewhere around Embankment, the loaded grey skies over London have opened, dumping a near-tropical rainstorm across the centre of the capital, and the traffic sits stationary, the taxis' exhaust pipes steaming, their windows obscured by the breath of their passengers.

  'I know,' she says, for the fifteenth time, her jacket darkened and her hair plastered to her head. 'I know ... Yes, I'm well aware of the terms. I'm just waiting on a couple of payments that -' She ducks into a doorway, pulls a pair of high heels from her handbag and slips them on, staring at her wet pumps as she realizes she has nowhere to put them. 'Yes. Yes, I am ... No, my circumstances haven't changed. Not recently.'

  She ducks out of the doorway and heads back on to the pavement, crossing the road and heading up towards Aldwych, the wet pumps in one hand. A car sends a spray of water over her feet and she stops, staring at its departing wheels in disbelief. 'Are you kidding me?' she yells. And then, 'No, not you, Mr ... Dean. Not you, Dean ... Yes, I do appreciate you're just doing your job. Look,' she says. 'I'll have the payment by Monday. Okay? It's not like I've been late paying before. Okay, once.'

  Another taxi approaches and this time she ducks neatly back into a doorway. 'Yes. I understand, Dean ... I know. It must be very hard for you. Look - I promise you'll have it on Monday ... Yes. Yes, definitely. And I'm sorry about the whole shouting thing ... I hope you get the new job too, Dean.'

  She snaps shut her phone, stuffs it into her handbag, and looks up at the restaurant hoarding. She dips to check her reflection in a car mirror and despairs. There's nothing to be done. She's already forty minutes late.

  Liv smoothes her wet hair from her face, and glances longingly back down the street. Then she takes a breath, pushes open the door of the restaurant and walks in.

  'There she is!' Kristen Solberg stands up from her chair in the middle of the long table and opens her arms to greet her, air-kissing Liv noisily some inches from each side of her face. 'Oh, my goodness, you're drenched!' Her hair is, of course, an immaculate chestnut sheet.

  'Yes. I walked. Not my best decision.'

  'Everybody, this is Liv Halston. She does wonderful things for our charity. And she lives in the most amazing house in London.' Kristen smiles beneficently, then lowers her voice. 'I'll consider myself to have failed if she hasn't been snapped up by some lovely man before Christmas.'

  There is a murmur of greeting. Liv prickles with embarrassment. She forces a smile, deliberately not meeting the eye of any of the people seated around her. Sven looks at her steadily, in his eyes an apology for what is about to come.

  'I saved you a seat,' Kristen says. 'Next to Roger. He's lovely.' She gives Liv a meaningful look as she directs her towards the empty chair. 'You'll love him.'

  They are all couples. Of course they are. Eight of them. And Roger. She feels the women surveying her surreptitiously from behind polite smiles, trying to ascertain whether, as the only single woman there, she is likely to be a threat. It is an expression with which she has become wearyingly familiar. The men glance sideways, checking her out for a different reason. She feels the warm, garlicky blast of Roger's breath as he leans in and pats the chair beside him.

  He holds out a hand. 'Rog. You're very wet.' He manages to make it sound faintly lascivious; the kind of ex-public-schoolboy who finds it impossible to talk to women without introducing a sexual undertow.

  She pulls her jacket across her. 'Yes. Yes, I am.'

  They smile vaguely at each other. He has sparse sandy hair, and the ruddy complexion of someone who spends a lot of time in the country. He pours her a glass of wine. 'So. What do you do then, Liv?' He says her name as if she may have invented it and he is humouring her.

  'Copywriting mainly.'

  'Well. Copywriting.' They both pause. 'Any children?'

  'No. You?'

  'Two. Boys. Both at boarding school. Best place for them, frankly. So ... no children, eh? And no man in the wings. What are you, thirty-something?'

  She swallows, tries to ignore the faint stab of his words. 'Thirty.'

  'You don't want to hang around. Or are you one of those ...' he holds up his fingers to make inverted commas '... career women?'

  'Yes,' she says, and smiles. 'I had my ovaries removed when I last updated my CV. Just to be on the safe side.'

  He gawps at her, then barks a laugh. 'Oh! Funny! Yes. A woman with a sense of humour. Very good ... ovaries ... hah.' His voice tails away. He takes a swig of wine. 'My wife left when she was thirty-nine. Apparently it's a tricky age for the girls.' He downs the rest of his glass and reaches for the bottle to refill it. 'Not too tricky for her, obviously, seeing as she got away with a Puerto Rican called Viktor, the house in France and half my bloody pension. Women ...' He turns to her. 'Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em, eh?' He lifts his arms and fires off an imaginary round of
bullets into the restaurant ceiling.

  It's going to be a long night. Liv keeps smiling, pours herself a second glass of wine, and buries herself in the menu, promising herself that, no matter how persuasive Kristen is next time, she will chew off her own arm rather than agree to go to any kind of dinner party ever again.

  The evening stretches, the couples bitch about people she has never met, the courses come agonizingly slowly. Kristen sends her main back to be redone to her exact specifications. She lets out a weary little sigh, as if the kitchen's failure to put the spinach on the side is the most awful imposition. Sven gazes at her indulgently. Liv sits trapped between the broad back of a man called Martin, whose wife's friend seems determined to monopolize him, and Roger.

  'Bitch,' he says, at one point.

  'I'm sorry?'

  'First it was my nostril hair putting her off. Then my toenails. Always a reason why we couldn't do the old ... you know.' He forms his thumb and finger into an O and slides his other index finger through it. 'Or a headache. No such headaches with old Viktor, eh? Oh, no. I bet she doesn't care how long his ruddy toenails are.' He swigs from his glass. 'Bet they're at it like bloody rabbits.'

  The lamb is congealing on her plate. She puts her knife and fork neatly together.

  'What happened to you, then?'

  She glances up at him, hoping he doesn't mean - but of course he does.

  'Kristen said you were married before. To Sven's business partner.'

  'I was.'

  'Left you, did he?'

  She swallows. Composes her face into a blank. 'In a manner of speaking.'

  Roger shakes his head. 'I don't know. What's wrong with people, these days? Why can't they just be satisfied with what they're given?' He takes a toothpick and digs vigorously into a back molar, pausing to examine his pickings with grim relish.

  Liv looks down the table and meets Kristen's eye. Kristen lifts both brows suggestively, and gives her a surreptitious thumbs-up. Big hit! she mouths.

  'Will you excuse me?' Liv says, pushing back her chair. 'I really need to visit the Ladies.'

  Liv sits in the silent cubicle for as long as she can without someone staging an intervention, listening as several women come in and perform ablutions. She checks for non-existent email and plays Scrabble on her phone. Finally, after scoring 'flux', she gets up, flushes the loo and washes her hands, staring at her reflection with a kind of perverse satisfaction. Her makeup has smudged beneath one eye. She fixes this in the mirror, wondering why she bothers, given that she is about to sit next to Roger again.

  She checks her watch. When can she beg an early-morning meeting and head for home? With luck, Roger will be so drunk by the time she goes back out that he will have forgotten she was even there.

  Liv takes one last look at her reflection, pushes her hair off her face and grimaces at her appearance. What's the point? And then she opens the door.

  'Liv! Liv, come here! I want to tell you something!' Roger is standing, gesticulating wildly. His face is even redder and his hair is standing upright on one side. It's possible that he is, she thinks, half man, half ostrich. She feels a momentary panic at the prospect of having to spend another half-hour in his company. She's used to this: an almost overwhelming physical desire to remove herself, to be out on the dark streets alone; not having to be anyone at all.

  She sits gingerly, like someone prepared to sprint, and drinks another half-glass of wine. 'I really should go,' she says, and there is a wave of protest from the other occupants of the table, as if this is some kind of personal affront. She stays. Her smile is a rictus. She finds herself watching the couples, the domestic cracks becoming visible with each glass of wine. That one dislikes her husband. She rolls her eyes with every second comment he makes. This man is bored with everyone, possibly with his wife. He checks his mobile compulsively beneath the rim of the table. She gazes up at the clock, nods dully at Roger's breathy litany of marital unfairness. She plays a silent game of Dinner Party Bingo. She scores a School Fees and a House Prices. She is on the verge of a Last Year's Holiday In Europe Full House when someone taps her on the shoulder.

  'Excuse me. You have a phone call.'

  Liv spins round. The waitress has pale skin and long dark hair, which opens around her face like a pair of half-drawn curtains. She is beckoning with her notepad. Liv is conscious of a flicker of familiarity.

  'What?'

  'Urgent phone call. I think it's family.'

  Liv hesitates. Family? But it's a sliver of light in a tunnel. 'Oh,' she says. 'Oh, right.'

  'Would you like me to show you the phone?'

  'Urgent phone call,' she mouths at Kristen, and points at the waitress, who points towards the kitchens.

  Kristen's face arranges itself into an expression of exaggerated concern. She stoops to say something to Roger, who glances behind him and reaches out a hand as if to stop her. And then Liv is gone, following the short dark girl through the half-empty restaurant, past the bar and down the wood-panelled corridor.

  After the gloom of the seating area the glare of the kitchen is blinding, the dulled sheen of steel surfaces bouncing light across the room. Two men in white ignore her, passing pans towards a washing-up station. Something is frying, hissing and spitting in a corner; someone speaks rapid-fire Spanish. The girl gestures through a set of swing doors, and suddenly she is in another back lobby, a cloakroom.

  'Where's the phone?' Liv says, when they come to a halt.

  The girl pulls a packet of cigarettes from her apron and lights one. 'What phone?' she says blankly.

  'You said I had a call?'

  'Oh. That. There isn't a phone. You just looked like you needed rescuing.' She inhales, lets out a long sliver of smoke and waits for a moment. 'You don't recognize me, do you? Mo. Mo Stewart.' She sighs, when Liv frowns. 'I was in your course at uni. Renaissance and Italian Painting. And Life Drawing.'

  Liv thinks back to her degree. And suddenly she can see her: the little Goth girl in the corner, near silent in every class, her expression a careful blank, her nails painted a violent, glittering purple. 'Wow. You haven't changed a bit.' This is not a lie. As she says it, she is not entirely sure it's a compliment.

  'You have,' says Mo, examining her. 'You look ... I don't know. Geeky ...'

  'Geeky.'

  'Maybe not geeky. Different. Tired. Mind you, I don't suppose being sat next to Tim Nice But Dim there is a barrel of laughs. What is it? Some kind of singles night?'

  'Just for me, apparently.'

  'Christ. Here.' She hands Liv a cigarette. 'Spark that up, and I'll go out and tell them you've had to leave. Great-aunt with a violent palsy. Or something darker? Aids? Ebola? Any preferences as to the degree of suffering?' She hands Liv the lighter.

  'I don't smoke.'

  'It's not for you. This way I can get two in before Dino notices. Will she want your share of the bill?'

  'Oh. Good point.' Liv scrabbles in her bag for her purse. She feels suddenly light-headed at the prospect of freedom.

  Mo takes the notes, counts them carefully. 'My tip?' she says, straight-faced. She does not appear to be joking.

  Liv blinks, then peels off an extra five-pound note and hands it to her. 'Ta,' says Mo, tucking it into the pocket of her apron. 'Do I look tragic?' She pulls a face of mild disinterest and then, as if accepting that she doesn't have the appropriate facial muscles for concern, disappears back down the corridor.

  Liv is unsure whether to leave or whether she should wait for the girl to return. She gazes around her at the back lobby, at the cheap coats on the rack, the grubby bucket and mop underneath them, and finally sits down on a wooden stool, the cigarette useless in her hand. When she hears footsteps, she stands, but it's a Mediterranean-skinned man, his skull shining in the dim light. The owner? He is holding a glass of amber liquid. 'Here,' he says, offering it to her. And when she protests, he adds, 'For the shock.' He winks and is gone.

  Liv sits and sips the drink. In the distance, through the cl
atter of the kitchen, she can hear Roger's voice lifting in protest, the scraping of chairs. She checks her watch. It is a quarter past eleven. The chefs emerge from the kitchen, pull their coats from the rack and disappear, giving her a faint nod as they pass, as if it's not unusual for a customer to spend twenty minutes nursing a brandy in the staff corridor.

  When Mo reappears she is no longer wearing an apron. She is holding a set of keys, walks past Liv and locks the fire door. 'They've gone,' she says, pulling her black hair back into a knot. 'Your Hot Date said something about wanting to console you. I'd turn your mobile off for a bit.'

  'Thank you,' said Liv. 'That was really very kind.'

  'Not at all. Coffee?'

  The restaurant is empty. Liv stares at the table where she had sat, as the waiter sweeps efficiently around the chairs, then distributes cutlery with the unthinking, metronomic efficiency of someone who has done this a thousand times. Mo primes the coffee machine, and gestures to her to sit. Liv would really rather go home, but understands there is a price to be paid for her freedom, and a brief, slightly stilted conversation about the Good Old Days is probably it.

  'I can't believe they all left so suddenly,' she says, as Mo lights another cigarette.

  'Oh. Someone saw a message on a BlackBerry that she shouldn't have. It all kicked off a bit,' Mo says. 'I don't think business lunches usually involve nipple clamps.'

  'You heard that?'

  'You hear everything in here. Most customers don't stop talking when waiters are around.' She switches on the milk-frother, adding, 'An apron gives you superpowers. It actually makes you pretty much invisible.'

  Liv had not registered Mo's appearance at her table, she thinks uncomfortably. Mo is looking at her with a small smile, as if she can hear her thoughts. 'It's okay. I'm used to being the Great Unnoticed.'

  'So,' says Liv, accepting a coffee. 'What have you been doing?'

  'In the last nearly ten years? Um, this and that. Waitressing suits me. I don't have the ambition for bar work.' She says this deadpan. 'You?'