The Girl You Left Behind (14 page)

I let the significance of her words sink in.
Then I stood and, without a word, I went back down the stairs. I heard her calling my
name, and noted, somewhere deep in a dark place within me, that it came just a little
too late.

Hélène and I worked around each
other in silence that evening. We communicated as little as possible, speaking only to
confirm that, yes, the pie would be ready for seven thirty and, yes, the wine was
uncorked, and that indeed there were four fewer bottles than the previous week.
Aurélien stayed upstairs with the babies. Only Mimi came down and hugged me. I
hugged her back fiercely, breathing in her sweet, childlike smell, feeling her soft skin
against my own. ‘I love you, little Mi,’ I whispered.

She smiled at me from under her long blonde
hair. ‘I love you too, Auntie Sophie,’ she said.

I put my hand into my apron and quickly
popped into her mouth a little strip of cooked pastry I had saved for her earlier. Then,
as she grinned at me, Hélène shepherded her up the stairs to bed.

In contrast to my sister’s and my
mood, the German soldiers seemed curiously cheerful that evening. Nobody complained
about the reduced rations; they seemed not to mind about the reduction in wine. The
Kommandant
alone seemed preoccupied and sombre. He sat alone as the other
officers toasted something and all cheered. I wondered whether Aurélien was
upstairs listening and whether he understood what they were saying.

‘Let’s not argue,’
Hélène said, when we crawled into
bed later. ‘I do
find it exhausting.’ She reached out a hand for mine, and in the near dark I took
it. But we both knew something had changed.

It was Hélène who went to the
market the following morning. Only a few stalls were out, these days, some preserved
meats, some fearsomely expensive eggs and a few vegetables, and an elderly man from La
Vendée who made new undergarments from old fabric. I stayed in the hotel bar,
serving the few customers we had left and trying not to mind that I was evidently still
the subject of some unfriendly discussion.

At about half past ten we became aware of a
commotion outside. I wondered briefly whether it was more prisoners, but
Hélène came rushing in, her hair loose and her eyes wide.

‘You’ll never guess,’ she
said. ‘It’s Liliane.’

My heart began to thump. I dropped the
ashtrays I was cleaning and ran for the door, flanked by the other customers who had
risen as one from their seats. Up the road came Liliane Béthune. She was wearing
her astrakhan coat, but she no longer looked like a Parisian model. She had on nothing
else. Her legs were mottled blue with a mixture of cold and bruising. Her feet were bare
and bloodied, her left eye half closed with swelling. Her hair lay unpinned around her
face and she limped, as if every step were a Sisyphean effort. On each side of her stood
two goading German officers, a group of soldiers following close behind. For once, they
seemed not to mind when we came out to stare.

That beautiful astrakhan coat was grey with
dirt. On
the back of it were not just sticky patches of blood but the
unmistakable smears of phlegm.

As I stared at it, I heard a sob.
‘
Maman! Maman!
’ Behind her, held back by other soldiers, I now
saw Édith, Liliane’s seven-year-old daughter. She sobbed and writhed, trying
to reach past them to her mother, her face contorted. One gripped her arm, not letting
her anywhere close. Another smirked, as if it were amusing. Liliane walked on as if
oblivious, in a private world of pain, her head lowered. As she came past the hotel a
low jeering broke out.

‘See the proud whore now!’

‘Do you think the Germans will still
want you, Liliane?’

‘They’ve tired of her. And good
riddance.’

I could not believe these were my own
countrymen. I gazed around me at the hate-filled faces, the scornful smiles, and when I
could bear it no longer, I pushed through them and ran towards Édith. ‘Give
me the child,’ I demanded. I saw now that the whole town seemed to have come to
watch this spectacle. They were catcalling at Liliane from upstairs windows, from across
the marketplace.

Édith sobbed, her voice pleading.
‘
Maman!
’

‘Give me the child!’ I cried.
‘Or are Germans persecuting little children now too?’

The officer holding her looked behind him
and I saw Herr Kommandant standing by the post office. He said something to the officer
beside him, and after a moment the child was released to me. I swept her into my arms.
‘It’s all right, Édith. You come with me.’ She buried her face in
my shoulder, crying inconsolably, one arm still reaching vainly in the direction of her
mother. I thought I
saw Liliane’s face turn slightly towards
me, but at this distance it was impossible to say.

I carried Édith quickly into the bar,
away from the eyes of the town, away from the sound of the jeering as it picked up
again, away into the back of the hotel where she would hear nothing. The child was
hysterical, and who could blame her? I took her to our bedroom, gave her some water,
then held her in my arms and rocked her. I told her again and again that it would be all
right, we would make it all right, even though I knew we could do nothing of the sort.
She cried until she was exhausted. From her swollen face I guessed she had been crying
much of the night. God only knew what she had seen. Finally she became limp in my arms
and I laid her carefully in my bed, covering her with blankets. Then I made my way
downstairs.

As I walked into the bar, there was silence.
Le Coq Rouge was busier than it had been in weeks, Hélène rushing between the
tables with a loaded tray. I saw the mayor in the doorway, then stared at the faces
before me and realized I no longer knew any of them.

‘Are you satisfied?’ I said, my
voice breaking as I spoke. ‘A child lies upstairs having watched you spit and jeer
at her brutalized mother. People she thought were her friends. Are you proud?’

My sister’s hand landed on my
shoulder. ‘Sophie –’

I shrugged her off. ‘Don’t
Sophie me. You have no idea what you have all done. You think you know everything about
Liliane Béthune. Well, you know nothing. NOTHING!’ I was crying now, tears of
rage. ‘You are all so quick to judge, but just as quick to take what she offers
when it suits you.’

The mayor walked towards me. ‘Sophie,
we should talk.’

‘Oh. You will talk to me now! For
weeks you have looked at me as if I were a bad smell because Monsieur Suel supposedly
believes me to be a traitor and a whore. Me! Who risked everything to bring your
daughter food. You would all believe him rather than me! Well, perhaps I do not want to
talk to you, Monsieur. Knowing what I know, perhaps I would rather talk to Liliane
Béthune!’

I was raging now. I felt unhinged, a
madwoman, as if I gave off sparks. I looked at their stupid faces, their open mouths,
and I shook the restraining hand from my shoulder.

‘Where do you think the
Journal
des Occupés
came from? Do you think the birds dropped it? Do you think it
came by magic carpet?’

Hélène began to bundle me out now.
‘I don’t care! Who do they think was helping them? Liliane helped you! All
of you! Even when you were shitting in her bread, she was helping you!’

I was in the hallway.
Hélène’s face was white, the mayor behind her, pushing me forwards, away
from them.

‘What?’ I protested. ‘Does
the truth make you too uncomfortable? Am I forbidden to speak?’

‘Sit down, Sophie. For God’s
sake, just sit down and shut up.’

‘I don’t know this town any
more. How can you all stand there and yell at her? Even if she had slept with the
Germans, how can you treat another human being so? They spat on her, Hélène,
didn’t you see? They spat all over her. As if she were not human.’

‘I am very sorry for Madame
Béthune,’ the mayor said quietly. ‘But I am not here to discuss her. I
came to talk to you.’

‘I have nothing to say to you,’
I said, wiping at my face with my palms.

The mayor took a deep breath. ‘Sophie.
I have news of your husband.’

It took me a moment to register what he had
said.

He sat down heavily on the stairs beside me.
Hélène still held my hand.

‘It’s not good news, I’m
afraid. When the last prisoners came through this morning, one dropped a message as he
passed the post office. A scrap of paper. My clerk picked it up. It says that
Édouard Lefèvre was among five men sent to the reprisal camp at Ardennes last
month. I’m so sorry, Sophie.’

Édouard Lefèvre, imprisoned, had
been charged with handing a fist-sized piece of bread to a prisoner. He had fought back
fiercely when beaten for it. I almost laughed when I heard: how typical of
Édouard.

But my laughter was short-lived. Every piece
of information that came my way served to increase my fears. The reprisal camp where he
was held was said to be one of the worst: the men slept two hundred to a shed on bare
boards; they lived on watery soup with a few husks of barley and the occasional dead
mouse. They were sent to work stone-breaking or building railways, forced to carry heavy
iron girders on their shoulders for miles. Those who dropped from exhaustion were
punished, beaten or denied rations. Disease was rife and men were shot for the pettiest
misdemeanours.

I took it all in and each of these images
haunted my dreams. ‘He will be all right, won’t he?’ I said to the
mayor.

He patted my hand. ‘We will all pray
for him,’ he said. He sighed deeply as he stood to leave, and his sigh was like a
death sentence.

The mayor visited most days after the
parading of Liliane Béthune. As the truth about her filtered around the town, she
became slowly redrawn in the collective imagination. Lips no longer pursed automatically
at the mention of her name. Someone scrawled the word
‘
héroïne
’ on the market
square in chalk
under cover of darkness, and although it was swiftly removed, we all knew to whom it
referred. A few precious things that had been looted from her house when she was first
arrested mysteriously found their way back.

Of course, there were those who, like
Mesdames Louvier and Durant, would not have believed well of her if she had been seen
throttling Germans with her bare hands. But there were some vague admissions of regret
in our little bar, small kindnesses shown to Édith, in the arrival at Le Coq Rouge
of outgrown clothes or odd pieces of food. Liliane had apparently been sent to a holding
camp at some distance south of our town. She was lucky, the mayor confided, not to have
been shot immediately. He suspected it was only special pleading by one of the officers
that had saved her from a swift execution. ‘But there’s no point in trying
to intervene, Sophie,’ he said. ‘She was caught spying for the French, and I
don’t suppose she’ll be saved for long.’

As for me, I was no longer
persona non
grata
. Not that I particularly cared. I found it hard to feel the same about my
neighbours. Édith stayed glued to my side, like a pale shadow. She ate little and
asked after her mother constantly. I told her truthfully that I didn’t know what
would happen to Liliane, but that she, Édith, would be safe with us. I had taken to
sleeping with her in my old room, to stop her shrieking nightmares waking the two
younger ones. In the evenings, she would creep down to the fourth stair, the nearest
point from which she could see into the kitchen, and we would find her there late at
night when we had finished clearing the kitchen, fast asleep with her thin arms holding
her knees.

My fears for her mother mixed with my fears
for my husband. I spent my days in a silent vortex of worry and exhaustion. Little news
came into the town, and none went out. Somewhere out there he might be starving, lying
sick with fever or being beaten. The mayor received official news of three deaths, two
at the Front, one at a camp near Mons, and heard there was an outbreak of typhoid near
Lille. I took each of these snippets personally.

Perversely, Hélène seemed to
thrive in this atmosphere of grim foreboding. I think that watching me crumble had made
her believe that the worst must have happened. If Édouard, with all his strength
and vitality, faced death, there could be no hope for Jean-Michel, a gentle, bookish
man. He could not have survived, her reasoning went, so she might as well get on with
it. She seemed to grow in strength, urging me to get up when she found me in secret
tears in the beer cellar, forcing me to eat, or singing lullabies to Édith, Mimi
and Jean in a strange, jaunty tone. I was grateful for her strength. I lay at night with
my arms around another woman’s child and wished I never had to think again.

Late in January, Louisa died. That we had
all known it was coming did not make it any easier. Overnight, the mayor and his wife
seemed to age ten years. ‘I tell myself it is a blessing that she will not have to
see the world as it is,’ he said to me, and I nodded. Neither of us believed
it.

The funeral was to take place five days
later. I decided it was not fair to take the children, so I told Hélène she
should go for me; I would take the little ones to the woods behind the old fire station.
Given the severity of the cold,
the Germans had granted the villagers
two hours a day in which to forage in local woods for kindling. I wasn’t convinced
that we would find much: under cover of darkness the trees had long been stripped of any
useful branches. But I needed to be away from the town, away from grief and fear and the
constant scrutiny of either the Germans or my neighbours.

It was a crisp, silent afternoon, and the
sun shone weakly through the skeletal silhouettes of those trees that remained,
seemingly too exhausted to rise more than a few feet from the horizon. It was easy to
look at our landscape, as I did that afternoon, and wonder if the very world was coming
to an end. I walked, conducting a silent conversation with my husband, as I often did,
these days.
Be strong, Édouard. Hold on. Just stay alive and I know we will be
together again.
Édith and Mimi walked in silence at first, flanking me,
their feet crunching on the icy leaves, but then, as we reached the woods, some childish
impulse overtook them and I stopped briefly to watch as they ran towards a rotting
tree-trunk, jumping on and off it, holding hands and giggling. Their shoes would be
scuffed, and their skirts muddied, but I would not deny them that simple
consolation.