The Girl You Left Behind, Page 40

  'Helene stared at me, and I think she could see how serious I was. She pulled me to her, and I have never seen her look more determined. "Edith, the Kommandant is to have this painting. You and I may wish him dead, but we must observe ..." she hesitated "... Sophie's wishes."

  '"You take it."

  '"I cannot. If I do the town will talk, and we cannot risk my own name being destroyed as my sister's was. Besides, Aurelien will guess something is going on. And he must not know the truth. Nobody must know, for her safety and ours. Will you do it?"

  'I had no choice. That afternoon, when Helene gave me the signal, I took the painting under my arm and I walked down the alleyway, through the wasteland and to the woods. It was heavy and the frame dug into my underarm. He was there with another officer. The sight of them with their guns in their hands made my knees knock with fear. When he saw me, he ordered the other man away. I walked through the trees slowly, my feet cold on the icy forest floor. He looked a little unsettled as I approached, and I remember thinking, Good. I hope I unsettle you for ever.

  '"Did you wish to speak with me?" he said.

  'I didn't want to hand it over. I didn't want him to have a single thing. He had already taken the two most precious things in my life. I hated that man. And I think that was when I got the idea. "Aunt Helene says I'm to give this to you.'

  'He took the picture from me, and unwrapped it. He glanced at it, uncertain, and then he turned it over. When he saw what was written on the back, something strange happened to his face. It softened, just for a moment, and his pale blue eyes appeared moist, as if he would cry with gladness.

  '"Danke," he said softly. "Dankeschon."'

  'He turned it over to gaze upon Sophie's face, then reversed it again, reading the words to himself. "Danke," he said softly, to her or me, I wasn't sure.

  'I couldn't bear to see his happiness, his utter relief, when he had ruined any chance of happiness for me. I hated that man more than anyone. He had destroyed everything. And I heard my voice, clear as a bell in the still air. "Sophie died," I said. "She died after we received her instruction to give you the painting. She died of the Spanish flu in the camps."

  'He actually jolted with shock. "What?"

  'I don't know where it came from. I spoke fluently, without fear of what might result. "She died. Because of being taken away. Just after she sent the message to give this to you."

  '"Are you sure?" His voice cracked. "I mean there may have been reports -"

  '"Quite sure. I should probably not have told you. It's a secret."

  'I stood there, my heart like a stone, and I watched him staring at the painting, his face actually ageing, physically sagging with grief, before me.

  '"I hope you like the painting," I said, and then I walked slowly back through the woods towards Le Coq Rouge. I don't believe I was ever afraid of anything again.

  'Herr Kommandant spent another nine months in our town. But he never came to Le Coq Rouge again. I felt it like a victory.'

  The courtroom is silent. The reporters are gazing at Edith Bethune. It is as if history has suddenly come to life here, in this small chamber. The judge's voice, this time, is gentle.

  'Madame. Could you tell us what was written on the back of the painting? It appears to be quite a salient point in this matter. Can you remember it clearly?'

  Edith Bethune looks around her at the packed benches. 'Oh, yes. I remember it very clearly. I remember it because I couldn't work out what it meant. It said, in chalk: 'Pour Herr Kommandant, qui comprendra: pas pris, mais donne.' She pauses. 'To Herr Kommandant, who will understand: not taken, but given.'

  36

  Liv hears the noise rise up, like a cloud of birds, around her. She sees the journalists crowding round the old lady, their pens waving like antennae, the judge talking urgently with the lawyers, banging his gavel in vain. She stares up at the public gallery, at the animated faces, and hears the strange trickle of applause that might be for the old woman or for the truth: she isn't sure.

  Paul is fighting his way through the crowd. When he gets to her he pulls her to him, his head dipped against hers, his voice in her ear. 'She's yours, Liv,' he says, and his voice is thick with relief. 'She's yours.'

  'She lived,' she says, and she is laughing and crying at the same time. 'They found each other.' From his arms, she gazes around her at the chaos, and she is no longer afraid of the crowd. People are smiling, as if this has been a good result; as if she is no longer the enemy. She sees the Lefevre brothers stand to leave, their faces as sombre as coffin-bearers, and is flooded with relief that Sophie will not be returning to France with them. She sees Janey, gathering her things slowly, her face frozen, as if she cannot believe what has just taken place.

  'How about that?' Henry claps a hand on her shoulder, his face wreathed in smiles. 'How about that? No one's even listening to poor old Berger's verdict.'

  'C'mon,' says Paul, placing a protective arm around her shoulders. 'Let's get you out of here.'

  The clerk appears, pushing his way through the sea of people. He stands in front of her, blocking her path, slightly breathless with the effort of his short journey. 'Here, madam,' he says, and hands her the painting. 'I believe this is yours.'

  Liv's fingers close around the gilded frame. She glances down at Sophie, her hair vibrant in the dull light of the court, her smile as inscrutable as ever. 'I think it would be best if we took you out the back way,' the clerk adds, and a security guard appears beside him, propelling them towards the door, already speaking into his walkie-talkie.

  Paul makes as if to step forward, but she puts a hand on his arm, stopping him. 'No,' says Liv. She takes a breath and straightens her shoulders, so that she seems just a little bit taller. 'Not this time. We're going out through the front.'

  Epilogue

  Between 1917 and 1922 Anton and Marie Leville lived in a small house close to the edge of a lake in the Swiss town of Montreux. They were a quiet couple, not fond of entertaining, but apparently most content in each other's company. Madame Leville worked as a waitress in a local restaurant. She is remembered as efficient and friendly but as someone who did not volunteer conversation ('A rare quality in a woman,' the proprietor would remark, with a sideways look at his wife).

  Every evening at a quarter past nine, Anton Leville, a tall, dark-haired man with an oddly shambolic gait, could be seen walking the fifteen minutes to the restaurant, where he would tip his hat through the open door to the manager, then wait outside until his wife emerged. He would hold out his arm, she would take it, and they would walk back together, slowing occasionally to admire the sunset on the lake or a particularly decorative shop window. This, according to their neighbours, was the routine for their every working day and they rarely deviated from it. Occasionally Madame Leville would post parcels, little gifts, to an address in northern France, but apart from that they seemed to have little interest in the wider world.

  At weekends the couple tended to remain at home, emerging occasionally to go to a local cafe where, if it were sunny enough, they would spend several hours playing cards or sitting beside each other in companionable silence, his large hand over her smaller one.

  'My father would joke to Monsieur Leville that Madame would not blow away on the breeze if he were to release her just for a minute,' said Anna Baertschi, who had grown up next door. 'My father used to tell my mother that he thought it was a little improper, to be hanging on to your wife in public so.'

  Little was known of Monsieur Leville's own affairs, other than that he appeared to suffer from poor health. He was assumed to have some kind of private income. He once offered to paint portraits of two of the neighbours' children, but given his strange choice of colours and unconventional brushwork, they were not terribly well received.

  Most townspeople agreed privately that they preferred the neater brushwork and more lifelike images of Monsieur Blum down by the watchmaker's.

  The email arrives on Christmas Eve.

  Okay. So I off
icially suck at predictions. And possibly friendship. But I would really like to see you, if you haven't been using my handed-down skills to build voodoo dolls of me (this is entirely possible, I have had some serious headaches lately. If it was you, I offer my grudging admiration).

  The thing with Ranic isn't really working out. Turns out sharing a two-bedroom flat with fifteen male Eastern European hotel workers isn't such a blast. Who knew? I got a new place through Gumtree with an accountant who has a vampire thing going on and seems to think that living with someone like me will give him street cred. I think he's a little disappointed that I haven't filled his fridge with roadkill and offered him a home-grown tattoo. But it's okay. He has satellite telly and it's two minutes' walk from the care home so I no longer have an excuse to miss Mrs Vincent's bag change (don't ask).

  Anyway. I'm really glad you got to keep your picture. Truly. And I'm sorry I don't have a diplomacy button. I miss you.

  Mo

  'Invite her,' says Paul, peering over her shoulder. 'Life's too short, right?'

  She dials the number before she even thinks about it.

  'So, what are you doing tomorrow?' she says, before Mo can speak.

  'Is this a trick question?'

  'Do you want to come over?'

  'And miss the annual bitchfest that is my parents, a faulty remote control and the Christmas edition of the Radio Times? Are you kidding me?'

  'You're expected at ten. I'm cooking for five thousand, apparently. I need potato-based help.'

  'I'll be there.' Mo can't hide her delight. 'I may even have got you a present. One that I actually bought. Oh. But I have to slope off around six-ish just to do some singing stuff for the olds.'

  'You do have a heart.'

  'Yeah. Your last skewer must have missed.'

  Baby Jean Montpellier died from influenza in the last months of the war. Helene Montpellier went into shock, crying neither when the undertaker came to take his little body nor when it was laid in the earth. She continued to behave with a semblance of normality, opening the bar of Le Coq Rouge at the allotted hours and dismissing all offers of help, but she was, the mayor recalled, in his journals of the time, 'a woman frozen'.

  Edith Bethune, who had silently taken over many of Helene's responsibilities, describes an afternoon several months later when a lean, tired-looking man in uniform arrived at the door, his left arm in a sling. Edith was drying glasses, and waited for him to enter, but he just stood on the step, gazing in with a strange expression. She offered him a glass of water, and then, when he still did not step inside, she had asked, 'Should I fetch Madame Montpellier?'

  'Yes, child,' he had replied, bowing his head. His voice had broken slightly as he spoke. 'Yes. Please.'

  She tells of Helene's faltering steps into the bar, her disbelieving face, and how she had dropped her broom, gathered her skirts and hurled herself at him, like a missile, her cries loud enough to echo through the open door and down the streets of St Peronne, causing even those neighbours hardened by their own losses to look up from whatever they were doing and dab their eyes.

  She remembers sitting on the stairs outside their bedroom, listening to their muffled sobs as they wept for their lost son. She remarks, without self-pity, that despite her fondness for Jean, she herself remained dry-eyed. After the death of her mother, she says, she never cried again.

  History records that in all the years that Le Coq Rouge was owned and run by the Montpellier family, it closed its doors only once: for a three-week period during 1925. Townspeople remember that Helene, Jean-Michel, Mimi and Edith told nobody that they were going away but simply pulled down the shutters, locked the doors and disappeared, leaving an 'en vacances' sign on the door. This had led to no small degree of consternation within the little town, two letters of complaint to the local paper, and a good deal of extra custom for Le Bar Blanc. On the family's return, when asked where she had been, Helene had replied that they had travelled to Switzerland.

  'We consider the air there to be particularly good for Helene's health,' Monsieur Montpellier said.

  'Oh, it certainly is,' Helene replied, with a small smile. 'Most ... restorative.'

  Madame Louvier is recorded as remarking in her diary that it was one thing for hoteliers to disappear on a whim to foreign countries, without so much as a by-your-leave, but quite another for them to come back looking quite so pleased with themselves about having done so.

  I never knew what happened to Sophie and Edouard. I know they were in Montreux up to 1926 but Helene was the only one in regular contact and she died suddenly in 1934. After that my letters came back marked Return to Sender.

  Edith Bethune and Liv have exchanged four letters, trading long-hidden information, filling in the gaps. Liv has begun writing a book about Sophie, having been approached by two publishers. It is, frankly, terrifying, but Paul asks her who is more qualified to write it.

  The older woman's handwriting is firm for someone of her advanced years, the copperplate evenly spaced and forward-slanting. Liv shifts closer to the bedside light to read it.

  I wrote to a neighbour, who said she had heard Edouard had fallen ill, but could offer no evidence. Over the years other such communications led me to believe the worst; some remembered him becoming ill, some remembered Sophie as the one whose health failed. Someone said they had just disappeared. Mimi thought she heard her mother say they had gone somewhere warmer. I had moved so many times by then that Sophie would have had no way of contacting me herself.

  I know what good sense would have me believe of two frail people whose bodies had been so punished by starvation and imprisonment. But I have always preferred to think that seven, eight years after the war, free of responsibility for anybody else, perhaps they finally felt safe enough to move on, and simply packed up and did so. I prefer to imagine that they were out there, perhaps in sunnier climes, as happy as they had been on our holiday, content in their own company.

  Around her the bedroom is even emptier than usual, ready for her move the following week. She will stay in Paul's little flat. She may get her own place, but neither of them seems to be in any hurry to pursue that conversation.

  She gazes down at him sleeping beside her, still struck by how handsome he is, the shape of him, the simple joy of having him there. She thinks of something her father had said when he came for Christmas, seeking her out in the kitchen and drying dishes as she washed, while the others played noisy board games in the front room. She had looked up, struck by his uncharacteristic silence.

  'You know, I think David would have rather liked him.' He didn't look at her, but continued with his drying.

  She wipes her eyes, as she does often when she thinks about this (she is giddily emotional at the moment), and turns back to the letter.

  I am an old woman now, so it may not happen in my lifetime, but I believe that one day a whole series of paintings will emerge with unknown provenance, beautiful and strange, their colours unexpected and rich. They will feature a red-haired woman in the shade of a palm tree, or perhaps gazing out into a yellow sun, her face a little older, that hair perhaps streaked with grey, but her smile wide and her eyes full of love.

  Liv looks up at the portrait opposite her bed, and the young Sophie gazes back at her, washed with the pale gold of the lamplight. She reads the letter a second time, studying the words, the spaces between them. She thinks back to Edith Bethune's gaze: steady and knowing. And then she reads it again.

  'Hey.' Paul rolls over sleepily towards her. He reaches out an arm and pulls her to him. His skin is warm, his breath sweet. 'What you doing?'

  'Thinking.'

  'That sounds dangerous.'

  Liv puts the letter down, and burrows under the duvet until she is facing him.

  'Paul.'

  'Liv.'

  She smiles. She smiles every time she looks at him. And she takes a little breath. 'You know how good you are at finding stuff ...'

  Acknowledgements

  This book owes a gr
eat deal to Helen McPhail's excellent book The Long Silence: civilian life under the German occupation of northern France, 1914-1918, about a largely unrecorded (at least in this country) corner of First World War history.

  I would also like to thank Jeremy Scott, partner at Lipman Karas, for his generous expert help on the issue of restitution, and for answering my many questions with patience. I have had to tweak certain legal points and procedures for the sake of the plot, and any errors or deviations from actual practice are, of course, my own.

  Thanks to my publishers, Penguin, especially Louise Moore, Mari Evans, Clare Bowron, Katya Shipster, Elizabeth Smith, Celine Kelly, Viviane Basset, Raewyn Davies, Rob Leyland and Hazel Orme. Thank you to Guy Sanders for research help beyond the call of duty.

  Thank you to all at Curtis Brown, most especially my agent Sheila Crowley, but also including Jonny Geller, Katie McGowan, Tally Garner, Sam Greenwood, Sven Van Damme, Alice Lutyens, Sophie Harris and Rebecca Ritchie.

  In no particular order, I also wish to thank Steve Doherty, Drew Hazell, Damian Barr, Chris Luckley, my writing 'family' at Writersblock and the astonishingly supportive writers of Twitter. Too many to mention here.

  Most thanks, as ever, to Jim Moyes, and Lizzie and Brian Sanders, and to my family, Saskia, Harry and Lockie - and to Charles Arthur, proofreader, plot-tweaker and long-suffering writers' ear. Now you know what it's like ...

  He just wanted a decent book to read ...

  Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks - the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane's disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company - and change the world.

  We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it'