The Girl You Left Behind, Page 33

  She repeats the words silently in her head before she speaks, trying to make sense of them. 'You want David's name erased from the practice.'

  'Yes.'

  She stares at her knees.

  'I'm sorry. I realize this has come as a shock. But it has to us too.'

  A thought occurs to her. 'And what would happen to my work with the kids?'

  He shakes his head. 'I'm sorry.'

  It is as if the very core of her has frozen. There is a long silence, and when she speaks she does so slowly, her voice unnaturally loud in the silent office. 'So you all decided that because I don't want to just hand over our painting, the painting David bought legitimately years ago, we must be dishonest somehow. And then you want to erase us from his charity and his business. You erase David's name from the building he created.'

  'That's a rather melodramatic way of putting it.' For the first time Sven looks awkward. 'Liv, this is an incredibly difficult situation. But if I side with your case everyone in this company stands to lose their jobs. You know how much we have tied up in the Goldstein building. Solberg Halston cannot survive if they pull out now.'

  He leans forward over the desk. 'Billionaire clients are not exactly thick on the ground. And I have to think about our people.'

  Outside his office someone is saying goodbye. There is a brief burst of laughter. Inside the office the silence is stifling.

  'So if I handed her over, would they keep David's name on the building?'

  'That's something I haven't discussed. Possibly.'

  'Possibly.' Liv digests this. 'And if I say no?'

  Sven taps his pen on the desk.

  'We will dissolve the company and set up a new one.'

  'And the Goldsteins would go with that.'

  'It's possible, yes.'

  'So it doesn't actually matter what I say. This is basically a courtesy call.'

  'I'm sorry, Liv. It's an impossible situation. I'm in an impossible situation.'

  Liv sits there for a moment longer. Then, without a word, she gets up and walks out of Sven's office.

  It is one in the morning. Liv stares at the ceiling, listening to Mo moving around in the spare room, the zipping of a holdall, the heavy thump as it's stacked beside a door. She hears a lavatory flushing, the soft pad of footsteps, then the silence that tells of sleep. She has lain there considering whether to head across the corridor, to try to persuade Mo not to leave, but the words that shuffle themselves in her head refuse to fall into any kind of useful order. She thinks of a half-finished glass building several miles away, the name of whose architect will be buried as deeply as its foundations.

  She reaches over and picks up the mobile phone by her bed. She stares at the little screen in the half-light.

  There are no new messages.

  Loneliness hits her with an almost physical force. The walls around her feel insubstantial, offer no protection against an unfriendly world beyond. This house is not transparent and pure as David had wished: its empty spaces are cold and unfeeling, its clean lines knotted with history, its glass surfaces obscured by the tangled entrails of lives.

  She tries to quell the waves of vague panic. She thinks about Sophie's papers, about a prisoner loaded on to a train. If she shows them to the court, she knows, she might still be able to save the painting for herself.

  And if I do, she thinks, Sophie will be on record for ever as a woman who slept with a German, who betrayed her country as well as her husband. And I will be no better than the townspeople who hung her out to dry.

  Once it is done, it cannot be undone.

  29

  1917

  I no longer wept for home. I could not say how long we had been travelling, for the days and nights merged, and sleep had become a fleeting, sporadic visitor. Some miles outside Mannheim my head had begun to ache, swiftly followed by a fever that left me alternately shivering and fighting the urge to shed what few clothes remained. Liliane sat beside me, wiping my forehead with her skirt, helping me when we stopped. Her face was drawn with tension. 'I'll be better soon,' I kept telling her, forcing myself to believe that this was just a passing cold, the inevitable outcome of the past few days, the chill air, the shock.

  The truck bucked and wheeled around the potholes, the canvas billowed, allowing in spatters of ice-cold rain, and the young soldier's head bobbed, his eyes opening with the bigger jolts and fixing on us with a sudden glare as if to warn us to remain where we should be.

  I dozed against Liliane, and woke periodically, watching the little triangle of canvas that exposed briefly the landscape we had left behind. I watched the bombed and pitted borders give way to more orderly towns, where whole rows of houses existed without visible damage, their black beams strident against white render, their gardens filled with pruned shrubs and well-tended vegetable patches. We passed vast lakes, bustling towns, wound our way through deep forests of fir trees, where the vehicle whined and its tyres struggled for purchase in mud tracks. Liliane and I were given little: cups of water and hunks of black bread, thrown into the back as one would hurl scraps to pigs.

  And then as I grew more feverish I cared less about the lack of food. The pain in my stomach was smothered by other pains; my head, my joints, the back of my neck. My appetite disappeared and Liliane had to urge me to swallow water over my sore throat, reminding me that I must eat while there was food, that I had to stay strong. Everything she said had an edge, as if she always knew far more than she chose to let on about what awaited us. With each stop her eyes widened with anxiety, and even as my thoughts clouded with illness, her fear became infectious.

  When Liliane slept, her face twitched with nightmares. Sometimes she woke clawing at the air and making indistinguishable sounds of anguish. If I could, I reached across to touch her arm, trying to bring her back gently to the land of the waking. Sometimes, staring out at the German landscape, I wondered why I did.

  Since I had discovered we were no longer heading for Ardennes my own faith had begun to desert me. The Kommandant and his deals now seemed a million miles away; my life at the hotel, with its gleaming mahogany bar, my sister and the village where I had grown up, had become dreamlike, as if I had imagined it a long time ago. Our reality was discomfort, cold, pain, ever-present fear, like a buzzing in my head. I tried to focus, to remember Edouard's face, his voice, but even he failed me. I could conjure little pieces of him: the curl of his soft brown hair on his collar, his strong hands, but I could no longer bring them together into a comforting whole. I was more familiar now with Liliane's broken hand resting in my own. I stared at it, with my home-made splints on her bruised fingers, and tried to remind myself that there was a purpose to all this: that the very point of faith was that it must be tested. It became harder, with every mile, to believe this.

  The rain cleared. We stopped in a small village and the young soldier unfolded his long limbs stiffly and climbed out. The engine stalled and we heard Germans talking outside. I wondered, briefly, if I might ask them for some water. My lips were parched, and my limbs feeble.

  Liliane, across from me, sat very still, like a rabbit scenting the air for danger. I tried to think past my throbbing head and gradually became aware of the sounds of a market: the jovial call of traders, the soft-spoken negotiations of women and stallholders. Just for a moment I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that the German accents were French, and that these were the sounds of St Peronne, the backdrop to my childhood. I could picture my sister, her pannier under her arm, picking up tomatoes and aubergines, feeling their weight and gently putting them back. I could almost feel the sun on my face, smell the saucisson, the fromagerie, see myself walking slowly through the stalls. Then the flap lifted and a woman's face appeared.

  It was so startling that I let out an involuntary gasp. She stared at me and for a second I thought she was going to offer us food - but she turned, her pale hand still holding up the canvas - and shouted something in German. Liliane scrambled across the back of the truck and pulled me
with her. 'Cover your head,' she whispered.

  'What?'

  Before she could say anything else, a stone shot through the back and landed a stinging blow on my arm. I glanced down, confused, and another landed, cracking the side of my head. I blinked, and three, four more women appeared, their faces twisted with hate, their fists loaded with stones, rotting potatoes, pieces of wood, whatever missiles came to hand.

  'Huren!'

  Liliane and I huddled in the corner, trying to cover our heads as the armaments rained down on us, my head, my hands stinging at the impact. I was about to shout back at them: why would you do this? What have we done to you? But the hatred in their faces and voices chilled me. These women truly despised us. They would rip us apart, given a chance. Fear rose like bile in my throat. Until that moment I had not felt it as a physical thing, a creature that could shake my sense of who I was, blast my thoughts, loosen my bowel with terror. I prayed - I prayed for them to go, for it all to stop. And then when I dared to glance up I glimpsed the young soldier who had sat in the back. He was standing off to the side and lighting a cigarette, calmly surveying the market square. Then I felt fury.

  The bombardment continued for what was probably minutes but felt like hours. A fragment of brick struck my mouth and I tasted the iron slime of blood on my lip. Liliane didn't cry out, but she flinched in my arms as each missile made contact. I held on to her as if there were nothing else solid in my universe.

  Then suddenly, abruptly, it stopped. My ears ceased ringing and a warm trickle of blood eased into the corner of my eye. I could just make out a conversation outside. Then the engine charged, the young soldier climbed nonchalantly into the back and the vehicle lurched forwards.

  A sob of relief filled my chest. 'Sons of whores,' I whispered in French. Liliane squeezed my hand with her good one. Hearts thumping, we moved, trembling, back on to our benches. As we finally pulled out of the little town, the adrenalin slowly drained from my body and I found myself almost bone-dead with exhaustion. I was afraid to sleep then, afraid of what might come next, but Liliane, her eyes rigidly open, was scanning the tiny patch of landscape visible through the canvas. Some selfish part of me knew she would look out for me, that she would not sleep again. I laid my head on the bench, and as my heartbeat finally returned to normal I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sink into nothingness.

  There was snow at the next stop: a bleak plain with only a small copse and a derelict shed to break the flat landscape. We were hauled out into the dusk and shoved towards the trees, mutely instructed, with the wave of a gun, as to what we should do. There was nothing left in me. Shivering and feverish, I could barely stand. Liliane limped off to the relative privacy of the shed, and as I watched her, the landscape swayed around me. I sank down into the snow, vaguely aware of the men stamping their feet by the truck. Part of me relished the icy cool against my hot legs. I let the cold air settle on my skin, the blood cool in my veins, enjoying the brief sensation of being anchored again to the earth. I looked up at the infinite sky, through which tiny glittering stars were emerging, until I felt dizzy. I made myself recall the nights, so many months ago, when I had believed he might be out there, looking at the same stars. And then, with my finger, I reached down into the crystalline surface and wrote: EDOUARD.

  After a moment, I wrote it again on the other side of me, as if to persuade myself that he was real, somewhere, and that he - and we - had existed. I wrote it, my blue-tinged fingers pressing into the snow, until I had surrounded myself with it. Edouard. Edouard. Edouard. I wrote his name ten, twenty times. It was all I could see. I was in a great ring of Edouards, all dancing up at me. It would be so easy to tip over here, to sit in my Palace of Edouard and let it all go. I leaned back a little and began to laugh.

  Liliane came out from behind the shed and stopped. I saw her staring at me and in her face I saw suddenly the same expression that Helene had once worn, a kind of exhaustion, not from within but from weariness with the world, a fleeting indecision as to whether this was a battle she still had the energy to fight. And something pulled me back.

  'I - I - my skirt is wet,' I said. It was the only sensible thing I could think of to say.

  'It's just snow.' She pulled me up by my arm, brushed off the snow and, with her limping and me swaying, we made our way back past the incurious soldiers and their guns and climbed into the truck.

  Light. Liliane was looking into my eyes, her hand over my mouth. I blinked and involuntarily bucked against her, but she lifted her finger to her lips. She waited until I nodded, to show I understood, and as she removed her hand I realized that the truck had stopped again. We were in a forest. Snow blanketed the ground in piebald patches, stilling movement and stifling sound.

  She pointed at the guard. He was fast asleep, lying across the bench, his head resting on his kit bag. He was snoring, completely vulnerable, his holster visible, several inches of neck bare above his collar. I found my hand reaching involuntarily into my pocket, fingering the shard of glass.

  'Jump,' whispered Liliane.

  'What?'

  'Jump. If we keep to that dip, there, where there is no snow, we will leave no footprints. We can be hours away by the time they wake up.'

  'But we are in Germany.'

  'I speak a little German. We will find our way out.'

  She was animated, filled with conviction. I don't think I had seen her so alive since St Peronne. I blinked at the sleeping soldier, then back at Liliane, who was now carefully lifting the flap, peering out at the blue light.

  'But they will shoot us if they catch us.'

  'They will shoot us if we stay. And if they don't shoot us it will be worse. Come. This is our chance.' She mouthed the word, motioning silently for me to pick up my bag.

  I stood. Peered out at the woods. And stopped. 'I can't.'

  She turned to me. She still carried her broken hand close to her chest, as if fearful anything would brush against it. I could see now in daylight the scratches and bruises on her face where the missiles had caught her the previous day.

  I swallowed. 'What if they are taking me to Edouard?'

  Liliane stared at me. 'Are you insane?' she whispered. 'Come, Sophie. Come. This is our chance.'

  'I can't.'

  She ducked in again, glancing nervously at the sleeping soldier, then grabbed my wrist with her good hand. Her expression was fierce and she spoke as one would to a particularly stupid child. 'Sophie. They are not taking you to Edouard.'

  'The Kommandant said -'

  'He's a German, Sophie! You humiliated him. You revealed him as less of a man! You think he will repay that with kindness?'

  'It's a faint hope, I know. But it's ... all I have left.' As she stared at me, I pulled my bag towards me. 'Look, you go. Take this. Take everything. You can do it.'

  Liliane grabbed the bag and peered out of the rear, thinking. She readied herself as if working out where best to go. I watched the guard nervously, fearful that he would wake.

  'Go.'

  I couldn't understand why she wouldn't move. She turned towards me slowly, in anguish. 'If I escape, they will kill you.'

  'What?'

  'For aiding my escape. They will kill you.'

  'But you can't stay. You were caught distributing resistance material. My position is different.'

  'Sophie. You were the only person who treated me as a human. I cannot have your death on my conscience.'

  'I'll be fine. I always am.'

  Liliane Bethune stared at my dirty clothes, my thin, feverish body, now shivering in the chill morning air. She stood there for the longest time, then sat down heavily, dropping the bag as if she no longer cared who heard it. I looked at her but she averted her eyes. We both jumped as the truck's engine jolted into life. I heard a shout. The truck moved off slowly, bumping over a pothole so that we both banged heavily against the side. The soldier let out a guttural snore, but he did not stir.

  I reached for her arm, hissing, 'Liliane, go. While you can
. You still have time. They will not hear you.'

  But she ignored me. She pushed the bag towards me with her foot and sat down beside the slumbering soldier. She leaned back against the side of the truck and stared into nothing.

  The truck emerged from the forest on to an open road and we travelled the next few miles in silence. In the distance we heard shots, saw other military vehicles. We slowed as we passed a column of men, trudging along in grey, ragged clothes. Their heads were down. They were like spectres, not even like real people. I watched Liliane watching them and felt her presence in the truck like a dead weight. She might have made it, if it were not for me. We might have made it together. As my thoughts gained clarity, I realized I had probably destroyed her last chance to be reunited with her daughter.

  'Liliane -'

  She shook her head, as if she did not want to hear it.

  We drove on. The skies darkened and it began to rain again, a freezing sleet, which bit my skin in droplets as it sliced through the gaps in the roof. My shivering became violent, and with every bump, pain shot through my body as if from a bolt. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her I knew I had done something terrible and selfish. I should have granted her her chance. She was right: I had been fooling myself to think the Kommandant would reward me for what I had done.

  Finally she spoke. 'Sophie?'

  'Yes?' I was so desperate for her to talk to me. I must have sounded pathetically eager.

  She swallowed, her gaze fixed on her shoes. 'If ... if anything happens to me, do you think Helene will look after Edith? I mean, really look after her? Love her?'

  'Of course. Helene could no more fail to love a child than she could ... I don't know - join the Boche.' I tried to smile. I was determined to make myself appear less ill than I felt, to try to reassure her that good might still happen. I shifted on my seat, trying to force myself upright. Every bone in my body hurt as I did so. 'But you mustn't think like that. We will survive this, Liliane, and then you will go home to your daughter. Maybe even within months.'