The Girl You Left Behind (42 page)

He lifts his head. ‘“Nothing she
can do”. The Germans have invaded the artist’s wife’s hotel, forced
her to cook for them. She has the enemy actually in her home, and she is utterly
powerless. All compelling stuff. But this is not the only evidence. A search of the
Lefèvre archive unearthed a letter written by Sophie Lefèvre to her husband.
It apparently never reached him, but I believe that will prove irrelevant.’

He holds up the paper, as if struggling to
see it in the light.

‘Herr Kommandant is not as foolish as Beckenbauer but unnerves me more. He
stares at your portrait of me and I want to tell him he has no right. That
painting, above all others, belongs to you and me. Do you know the most peculiar
thing, Édouard? He actually admires your work. He knows of it, knows that
of the
Matisse School, of Weber and Purrmann. How strange it
has been to find myself defending your superior brushwork to a German
Kommandant!

But I refuse to take it down, no matter what Hélène says. It reminds
me of you, and of a time when we were happy together. It reminds me that
humankind is capable of love and beauty as well as destruction.

I pray for your safe and swift return, my dearest.

Yours ever, Sophie’

‘“That painting, above all
others, belongs to you and me.”’

Jenks lets that hang in the air. ‘So,
this letter, found long after her death, tells us that the painting meant an awful lot
to the artist’s wife. It also tells us pretty conclusively that a German
Kommandant
had his eye on it. Not only that, but that he had a good idea of
the market as a whole. He was, if you like, an
aficionado
.’ He rolls out
the word, emphasizing each syllable, as if it were the first time he had used it.

‘And here, the looting of the First
World War would seem to be a precursor to that of the Second. Here we have educated
German officers, knowing what they want, knowing what may hold value, and earmarking it
–’

‘Objection.’ Angela Silver,
Liv’s QC, is on her feet. ‘There is a vast difference between somebody
admiring a painting and having knowledge of the artist, and actually taking it. My
learned friend has not provided any evidence whatsoever that the
Kommandant
took the painting, simply that he admired it, and that he ate his meals in the hotel
where Madame Lefèvre lived. All of these things are circumstantial.’

The judge mutters,
‘Sustained.’

Christopher Jenks wipes his brow. ‘I am
simply attempting to paint a picture, if you like, of life within the town of St
Péronne in 1916. It’s impossible to understand how a painting might be taken
into somebody’s custody without understanding the climate of the time, and how the
Germans had
carte blanche
to
requisition
,
or
take what they
liked, from any house that they chose.’

‘Objection.’ Angela Silver
studies her notes. ‘Irrelevant. There is no evidence to suggest that this painting
was requisitioned.’

‘Sustained. Keep to the point, Mr
Jenks.’

‘Merely trying, again,
to … paint a picture, my lord.’

‘Leave the painting to Lefèvre,
if you will, Mr Jenks.’ There is a low murmur of laughter around the
courtroom.

‘I mean to demonstrate that there were
many valuable items requisitioned by German troops that went unrecorded, just as they
were not “paid for”, as promised by the German leaders of the time. I
mention the general climate for such behaviour because it is our contention that
The
Girl You Left Behind
was one such item.’

‘“He stares at your portrait of
me and I want to tell him he has no right.”’ Well, it is our case, Your
Honour, that Kommandant Friedrich Hencken felt he had every right indeed. And that this
painting did not leave German possession for another thirty years.’

Paul looks at Liv. She looks away.

She concentrates on the image of Sophie
Lefèvre
. Fools
, she seems to say, her impenetrable gaze appearing to
take in every person there.

Yes
, thinks Liv.
Yes, we
are.

They adjourn at half past three. Angela
Silver is eating a sandwich in her chambers. Her wig lies on the table beside her, and a
mug of tea stands on her desk. Henry sits opposite.

They tell her that the first day had gone as
they had expected. But the tang of tension hangs in the atmosphere, like salt in the air
miles from the coast. Liv shuffles her photocopied pile of translations as Henry turns
to Angela.

‘Liv, didn’t you say that when
you spoke to Sophie’s nephew, he mentioned something about her being disgraced? I
wondered whether it would be worth pursuing that line.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she
says. They are both looking at her expectantly.

Silver finishes her mouthful before she
speaks. ‘Well, if she was disgraced, doesn’t that suggest her relationship
with the
Kommandant
might have been consensual? The thing is, if we can prove
that it was, if we can suggest that she was having an extra-marital affair with a German
soldier, we can also claim the portrait might have been a gift. It wouldn’t be
beyond the realms of possibility that someone in the throes of a love affair would give
her lover a portrait of herself.’

‘But Sophie wouldn’t,’ Liv
says.

‘We don’t know that,’ says
Henry. ‘You told me that after her disappearance the family never spoke of her
again. Surely if she was blameless, they would have wanted to remember her. Instead she
seems to be cloaked in some sort of shame.’

‘I don’t think she could have had
a consensual relationship with the
Kommandant
. Look at this postcard.’
Liv reopens her file. ‘“You are my lodestar in this world of madness.”
That’s three months before she is supposed to have had this
“collaboration”. It hardly sounds like a husband and wife who don’t
love each other, does it?’

‘That’s certainly a husband who
loves his wife, yes,’ says Henry. ‘But we have no idea whether she returned
that love. She could have been madly in love with a German soldier at this time. She
could have been lonely or misguided. Just because she loved her husband, it
doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of falling in love with someone else once
he’d gone away.’

Liv pushes her hair back from her face.
‘It feels horrible,’ she says, ‘like blackening her name.’

‘Her name is already blackened. Her
family don’t have a decent word to say about her.’

‘I don’t want to use her
nephew’s words against her,’ she says. ‘He’s the only one who
seems to care about her. I’m just – I’m just not convinced we’ve got
the full story.’

‘The full story is unimportant.’
Angela Silver screws up her sandwich box and throws it neatly into the wastepaper bin.
‘Look, Mrs Halston, if you can prove that she and the
Kommandant
had an
affair it will wholly improve your chances of retaining the painting. As long as the
other side can suggest the painting was stolen, or obtained coercively, it weakens your
case.’ She wipes her hands, and replaces the wig on her head. ‘This is
hardball. And you can bet the other side are playing that way. Ultimately, it’s
about this: how badly do you want to keep this painting?’

Liv sits at the table, her own sandwich
untouched as the two lawyers get up to leave. She stares at the notes in front of her.
She cannot tarnish Sophie’s memory. But she cannot let her painting go. More
importantly, she cannot let Paul win. ‘I’ll take another look,’ she
says.

I am not afraid, although it is strange to have them here, eating and talking,
under our very roof. They are largely polite, solicitous almost. And I do
believe Herr Kommandant will not tolerate any misdemeanors on the men’s
part. So our uneasy truce has begun … 

The odd thing is that Herr Kommandant is a cultured man. He knows of Matisse! Of
Weber and Purrmann! Can you imagine how strange it is to discuss the finer
points of your brushwork with a German?

We have eaten well tonight. Herr Kommandant came into the kitchen and instructed
us to eat the leftover fish. Little Jean cried when it was finished. I pray that
you have food enough, wherever you are …

Liv reads and re-reads these fragments,
trying to fill in the spaces between her words. It is hard to find a chronology –
Sophie’s writings are on stray scraps of paper, and in places the ink has faded –
but there is a definite thawing in her relationship with Friedrich Hencken. She hints at
long discussions, random kindnesses, that he keeps giving them food. Surely Sophie would
not have discussed art or accepted meals from someone she considered a beast.

The more she reads, the closer she feels to
the author of these scraps. She reads the tale of the pig-baby, translating it twice to
make sure she has read it right, and wants
to cheer at its outcome.
She refers back to her court copies, Madame Louvier’s sniffy descriptions of the
girl’s disobedience, her courage, her good heart. Her spirit seems to leap from
the page. She wishes, briefly, she could talk to Paul about it.

She closes the folder carefully. And then
she looks guiltily to the side of her desk, where she keeps the papers she did not show
Henry.

The Kommandant’s eyes are intense, shrewd, and yet somehow veiled, as if
designed to hide his true feelings. I was afraid that he might be able to see my
own crumbling composure.

The rest of the paper is missing, ripped
away, or perhaps broken off with age.

‘I will dance with you, Herr Kommandant,’ I said. ‘But only in
the kitchen.’

And then there is the scrap of paper, in
handwriting that is not Sophie’s. ‘Once it is done,’ it reads, simply,
‘it cannot be undone.’ The first time she read it, Liv’s heart had
dropped somewhere to her feet.

She reads and re-reads the words, pictures a
woman locked in a secretive embrace with a man supposed to be her enemy. And then she
closes the folder and tucks it carefully back under her pile of papers.

‘How many today?’

‘Four,’ she says, handing over
the day’s haul of poison-pen letters. Henry has told her not to open anything with
handwriting she does not recognize. His staff will do it, and
report any that are threatening. She tries to be sanguine about this new development,
but secretly she flinches every time she sees an unfamiliar letter now; the idea that
all this unfocused hate is out there, just waiting for a target. She can no longer type
‘The Girl You Left Behind’ into a search engine. There were once two
historical references but now there are web versions of newspaper reports from across
the globe, reproduced by interest groups, and Internet chat-rooms discussing her and
Paul’s apparent selfishness, their inherent disregard for what is right. The words
spring out like blows
: Looted. Stolen. Robbed. Bitch.

Twice, someone has posted dog excrement
through the letterbox in the lobby.

There was only one protester this morning, a
dishevelled middle-aged woman in a blue mackintosh, who insisted on handing her another
home-made leaflet about the Holocaust. ‘This is really nothing to do with me or
this case,’ Liv had said, thrusting it back at her.

‘If you do nothing you are
complicit.’ The woman’s face was hewn by fury.

Henry had pulled her away.
‘There’s no point in engaging,’ he had said. Oddly, that hadn’t
lessened her vague sense of guilt.

Those are the overt signs of disapproval.
There are less obvious outcomes from the ongoing court case. The neighbours no longer
say a cheery hello, but nod and look at their shoes as they pass. There have been no
invitations through her door since the case was revealed in the newspapers. Not to
dinner, a private view, or one of the architectural events
that she
was habitually invited to, even if she usually refused. At first she thought all this
was coincidence; now she is starting to wonder.

The newspapers report her outfit each day,
describing her as ‘sombre’, sometimes ‘understated’ and always
‘blonde’. Their appetite for all aspects of the case seems endless. She does
not know if anyone has tried to reach her for comment: her telephone has been unplugged
for days.

She gazes along the packed benches at the
Lefèvres, their faces closed and seemingly set in expressions of resigned
belligerence, just as they were on the first day. She wonders what they feel when they
hear how Sophie was cast out from her family, alone, unloved. Do they feel differently
about her now? Or do they not register her presence at the heart of this, just seeing
the pound signs?

Paul sits each day at the far end of the
bench. She doesn’t look at him but she feels his presence like an electrical
pulse.

Christopher Jenks takes the floor. He will,
he tells the court, outline the latest piece of evidence that
The Girl You Left
Behind
is, in fact, looted art. It is an unusual case, he says, in that
investigations suggest the portrait was obtained by tainted means, not once but twice.
The word ‘tainted’ never fails to make her wince.

‘The current owners of the painting,
the Halstons, purchased it from the estate of one Louanne Baker. “The Fearless
Miss Baker”, as she was known, was a war reporter in 1945, one of a select few
such women. There are newspaper cuttings from the
New York Register
that detail
her presence at Dachau at the end of the Second
World War. They
provide a vivid record of her presence as Allied troops liberated the camp.’

Liv watches the male reporters scribbling
intently. ‘Second World War stuff,’ Henry had murmured, as they sat down.
‘The press love a Nazi.’ Two days previously she had sworn two of them were
playing Hangman.