The Girl You Left Behind (39 page)

I climbed aboard without complaint. This
carriage was smaller, yet they seemed to expect all three hundred women to get into it.
There was some swearing and a few muffled arguments as we attempted to sit. Liliane and
I found a small space on the bench, me sitting at her feet, and I stuffed my bag
underneath it, jamming it in. I regarded that bag with jealous propriety, as if it were
a baby. Someone yelped as a shell burst close enough to make the train rattle.

‘Tell me about Édith,’ she
said, as the train pulled off.

‘She’s in good spirits.’ I
put as much reassurance into my voice as possible. ‘She eats well, sleeps
peacefully, and she and Mimi are now inseparable. She adores the baby, and he adores her
too.’ As I talked, painting a picture of her daughter’s life in St
Péronne, her eyes closed. I could not tell if it was with relief or grief.

‘Is she happy?’

I answered carefully: ‘She is a child.
She wants her
maman
. But she knows she is safe at Le Coq Rouge.’ I could
not tell her more, but that seemed to be enough. I did not tell her about
Édith’s nightmares, about the nights she had sobbed for her mother. Liliane
was not stupid: I suspected she knew those things in her heart already. When I had
finished, she stared out of the window for a long time, lost in thought.

‘And, Sophie, what brought you to
this?’ she asked, eventually turning back to me.

There was probably nobody else in the world
who would understand better than Liliane. I searched her face, fearful even now. But the
prospect of being able to share my burden with another human being was too great a
lure.

I told her. I told her about the
Kommandant
, the night I had gone to his barracks, and the deal I had
offered him. She looked at me for a long time. She didn’t tell me I was a fool, or
that I should not have believed him, or that my failure to do as the
Kommandant
had wished had been likely to bring about my death, if not that of those I loved.

She didn’t say anything at all.

‘I do believe he will keep his side of
things. I do believe he will bring me to Édouard,’ I said, with as much
conviction as I could muster. She reached out her good hand and squeezed mine.

At dusk, in a small forest, the train
ground to a juddering halt. We waited for it to move off again, but this time the
sliding doors opened at the rear, and the occupants, many
of whom had
only just fallen asleep, muttered complaints. I was half dozing and woke to
Liliane’s voice in my ear. ‘Sophie. Wake up. Wake up.’

A German guard stood in the doorway. It took
me a moment to realize he was calling my name. I jumped up, remembering to grab my bag,
and motioned for Liliane to come with me.

‘
Karten
,’ he demanded.
Liliane and I presented our identity cards. He checked our names on a list, and pointed
towards a truck. We heard the disappointed hiss of the other women as the doors slammed
behind us.

Liliane and I were pushed towards the truck.
I felt her lag a little. ‘What?’ I said. Her expression was clouded with
distrust.

‘I don’t like this,’ she
said, glancing behind her, as the train began to move away.

‘It’s good,’ I insisted.
‘I think this means we are being singled out. I think this is the
Kommandant
’s doing.’

‘That is what I don’t
like,’ she said.

‘Also – listen – I cannot hear the
guns. We must be moving away from the Front. This is good, surely?’

We limped to the back of the truck, and I
helped her aboard, scratching the back of my neck. I had begun to itch, detected lice
beneath my clothing. I tried to ignore them. It had to be a good sign that we had been
removed from the train. ‘Have faith,’ I said, and squeezed her arm.
‘If nothing else we have room to move our legs at last.’

A young guard climbed in at the back, and
glared at us. I tried to smile, to reassure him that I was unlikely to attempt to
escape, but he looked at me with disgust, and
placed his rifle
between us like a warning. I realized then that I, too, probably smelt unwashed, that
forced into such close proximity my own hair might soon be crawling with insects, and I
busied myself with searching my clothing and picking out those I found.

The truck pulled away and Liliane winced at
every jolt. Within a few miles she had fallen asleep again, exhausted by pain. My own
head throbbed, and I was grateful that the guns seemed to have stopped.
Have
faith,
I willed us both silently.

We were almost an hour on the open road, the
winter sun slowly dipping behind the distant mountains, the verges glinting with ice
crystals, when the tarpaulin flipped up, revealing a flash of road sign. I must have
been mistaken, I thought. I leaned forward, lifting the edge of the flap so that I might
not miss the next, squinting against the light. And there it was.

Mannheim.

The world seemed to stop around me.

‘Liliane?’ I whispered, and
shook her awake. ‘Liliane. Look out. What do you see?’ The truck had slowed
to make its way around some craters, so as she peered out I knew she must see it.

‘We are meant to be going
south,’ I said. ‘South to Ardennes.’ Now I could see that the shadows
were behind us. We were driving east, and had been for some time. ‘But
Édouard is in Ardennes.’ I couldn’t keep the panic from my voice.
‘I had word that he was there. We were meant to be going south to Ardennes.
South.’

Liliane let the flap drop. When she spoke,
she didn’t
look at me. Her face had leached of the little
colour it had had left. ‘Sophie, we can no longer hear the guns because we have
crossed the Front,’ she said dully. ‘We are going into Germany.’

The train hums with good cheer. A group of
women at the far end of Carriage Fourteen bursts into peals of noisy laughter. A
middle-aged couple in the seats opposite, perhaps on the way home from some celebratory
Christmas trip, have bedecked themselves in tinsel. The racks are bulging with
purchases, the air thick with the scents of seasonal food – ripe cheeses, wine,
expensive chocolate. But for Mo and Liv the journey back to England is subdued. They sit
in the carriage in near silence; Mo’s hangover has lasted all day, and must
apparently be remedied with more small, overpriced bottles of wine. Liv reads and
re-reads her notes, translating word by word with her little English–French dictionary
balanced on her tray-table.

The plight of Sophie Lefèvre has cast a
long shadow over the trip. She feels haunted by the fate of the girl she had always
thought of as glowingly triumphant. Had she really been a collaborator? What had become
of her?

A steward pushes a trolley down the aisle,
offering more drinks and sugary snacks. She is so lost in Sophie’s life that she
barely looks up. The world of absent husbands, of longing, of near starvation and fear
of the Germans seems suddenly more real to her than this one. She smells the woodsmoke
in Le Coq Rouge, hears the sound of feet on the floor. Every time she closes her eyes,
her painting morphs into the terrified face of Sophie
Lefèvre, hauled by soldiers into a waiting truck, disowned by the family she
loved.

The pages are brown, fragile and draw
moisture from her fingertips. There are early letters from Édouard to Sophie, when
he joins the Régiment d’Infanterie and she moves to St Péronne to be
with her sister. Édouard misses her so much, he writes, that some nights he can
barely breathe. He tells her that he conjures her in his head, paints pictures of her in
the cold air. In her writings, Sophie envies her imaginary self, prays for her husband,
scolds him. She calls him
poilu
. The image of them prompted by her words is so
strong, so intimate that, even struggling with her French translation, Liv feels almost
breathless. She runs her finger along the faded script, marvelling that the girl in the
portrait was responsible for these words. Sophie Lefèvre is no longer a seductive
image in a chipped gilded frame: she has become a person, a living, breathing,
three-dimensional being. A woman who talks about laundry, shortages of food, the fit of
her husband’s uniform, her fears and frustrations. She realizes, again, that she
cannot let Sophie’s painting go.

Liv flicks through two sheets. Here the text
is more dense, and interrupted by a formal sepia-tinted photograph of Édouard
Lefèvre, gazing into the middle distance.

October 1914

The Gare du Nord was heaving, a boiling sea of soldiers and weeping women, the
air thick with smoke and steam and the anguished sounds of goodbye. I knew
Édouard wouldn’t want me
to cry. Besides, this
would only be a short separation; all the newspapers said as much.

‘I want to know everything you’re doing,’ I said. ‘Make
lots of sketches for me. And be sure to eat properly. And don’t do
anything stupid, like getting drunk and fighting and getting yourself arrested.
I want you home as quickly as possible.’

He made me promise that Hélène and I would be careful. ‘If you
get wind that the enemy line is moving anywhere towards you, promise me you will
come straight back to Paris.’

When I nodded, he said, ‘Don’t give me that sphinx face, Sophie.
Promise me you will think of yourself first. I will not be able to fight if I
believe you might be in danger.’

‘You know I’m made of strong stuff.’

He glanced behind him at the clock. Somewhere in the distance a train let out a
piercing whistle. Steam, the stench of burned oil, rose around us, briefly
obscuring the crowds on the platform. I reached up to adjust his blue serge
kepi. Then I stood back to look at him. What a man my husband is! A giant among
men. His shoulders so broad in his uniform, half a head taller than anyone else
there. He is such a huge physical presence; to look at him made my heart swell.
I don’t think I believed even then that he was actually leaving.

He had finished a little gouache painting of me the week before. He patted his
top pocket now. ‘I will carry you with me.’

I touched my heart with my hand. ‘And you with me.’ I was secretly
envious that I hadn’t one of him.

I glanced around me. Carriage doors were opening and closing, hands reaching
past us, fingers entwining for the last time.

‘I’m not going to watch you go, Édouard,’ I told him.
‘I shall close my eyes and keep the image of you as you stand before
me.’

He nodded. He understood. ‘Before you go,’ he said
suddenly. And then he swept me to him and kissed me, his mouth pressed against
mine, his big arms pulling me tight, tight to him. I held him, my eyes squeezed
shut, and I breathed him in, absorbing the scent of him, as if I could make that
trace of him last for his entire absence. It was as if only then I believed he
was actually going. My husband was going. And then, when it became too much, I
pushed myself away, my face rigidly composed.

I kept my eyes closed, and gripped his hand, not wanting to see whatever was on
his face, and then I turned swiftly, straight-backed, and pushed my way through
the crowds, away from him.

I don’t know why I didn’t want to see him actually get on the train.
I have regretted it every day since.

It was only when I got home that I reached into my pocket. I found a piece of
paper he must have slipped in there while he held me: a little caricature of the
two of us, him a huge bear in his uniform, grinning, his arm around me, petite
and narrow-waisted, my face straight and solemn, my hair pulled neatly behind my
head. Underneath it he had written, in his looping, cursive script: ‘I
never knew real happiness until you.’

Liv blinks. She places the papers neatly in
the folder. She sits, thinking. Then she unrolls the picture of Sophie Lefèvre,
that smiling, complicit face. How could Monsieur Bessette be right? How could a woman
who adored her husband like that betray him, not just with another man but with an
enemy? It seems incomprehensible. Liv rolls up the photocopy and places her notes back
inside her bag.

Mo pulls off her earphones. ‘So. Half
an hour to St Pancras. Do you think you got what you wanted?’

She shrugs. She cannot speak past the huge
lump that has risen in her throat.

Mo’s hair is scraped back into
jet-black furrows from her face, her cheeks milk pale. ‘You nervous about
tomorrow?’

Liv swallows and flashes a weak smile. She
has thought about almost nothing else for the past six weeks.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Mo
says, as if she has been thinking about it for some time, ‘I don’t think
McCafferty set you up.’

‘What?’

‘I know loads of crappy, mendacious
people. He’s not one of them.’ She picks at a piece of skin on her thumb,
then says, ‘I think Fate just decided to play a really sick joke and dump you both
on opposing sides.’

‘But he didn’t have to come
after my painting.’

Mo lifts an eyebrow.
‘Really?’

Liv stares out of the window as the train
rolls towards London, fighting a new lump in her throat.

Across the table, the couple bedecked in
tinsel are leaning against each other. They have fallen asleep, their hands
entwined.

Later she is not entirely sure what makes
her do it. Mo announces at St Pancras that she is heading over to Ranic’s house,
leaving Liv with instructions not to stay on the Internet all night looking up obscure
restitution cases, and to please stick that Camembert in the fridge before it escapes
and poisons the whole house. Liv stands in the teeming concourse, holding a plastic bag
of stinking cheese and watching the little dark figure as she heads
towards the Underground, a bag slung nonchalantly over her shoulder. There is
something both jaunty and solid in the way Mo talks about Ranic; a sense that something
has shifted for both of them.