‘“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 Édith Béthune. 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?’
Édith Béthune 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 donné
.’ She pauses.
‘To Herr Kommandant, who will understand: not taken, but given.’
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 Lefèvre 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.’
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 café 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 officially 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. Hélène 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’.
Édith Béthune, who had silently
taken over many of Hélène’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. Édith 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 Hélène’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 Péronne, 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
Hélène, Jean-Michel, Mimi and Édith 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, Hélène had replied that they had travelled to
Switzerland.
‘We consider the air there to be
particularly good for Hélène’s health,’ Monsieur Montpellier
said.
‘Oh, it certainly is,’
Hélène 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 Édouard. I know they were in
Montreux up to 1926 but Hélène was the only one in regular contact and
she died suddenly in 1934. After that my letters came back marked Return to
Sender.
Édith Béthune 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 Édouard 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 Édith Béthune’s gaze: steady and knowing. And then she
reads it again.