The Girl You Left Behind

glimpse her too
     often.
    ‘Did Édouard do it?’
    ‘Yes. When we were married.’
    ‘I’ve never seen his paintings.
     It’s … not what I expected.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Well – it’s strange. The
     colours are strange. He has put green and blue in your skin. People don’t have
     green and blue skin! And look – it’s messy. He has not kept within the
     lines.’
    ‘Aurélien, come here.’ I
     walked to the window. ‘Look at my face. What do you see?’
    ‘A gargoyle.’
    I cuffed him. ‘No. Look – really look.
     At the colours of my skin.’
    ‘You’re just pale.’
    ‘Look harder – under my eyes, in the
     hollows of my throat. Don’t tell me what you expect to see. Really look. And then
     tell me what colours you actually see.’
    My brother stared at my throat. His gaze
     travelled slowly around my face. ‘I see blue,’ he said, ‘under your
     eyes. Blue and purple. And, yes, green running down your neck. And orange.
Alors
– call the doctor! Your face is a million different colours. You are
     a clown!’
    ‘We are all clowns,’ I said.
     ‘Édouard just sees it more clearly than everyone else.’
    Aurélien raced upstairs to inspect
     himself in the looking-glass and torment himself about the blues and purples he would no
     doubt find. Not that he needed much excuse, these days. He was sweet on at least two
     girls and spentmuch time shaving his soft, juvenile skin with our
     father’s blunt old cut-throat razor in a vain attempt to hasten the process of
     ageing.
    ‘It’s lovely,’
     Hélène said, standing back to look at it.
    ‘But …’
    ‘But what?’
    ‘It is a risk to have it up at all.
     When the Germans went through Lille, they burned art they considered subversive.
     Édouard’s painting is … very different. How do you know they
     won’t destroy it?’
    She worried, Hélène. She worried
     about Édouard’s paintings and our brother’s temper; she worried about
     the letters and diary entries I wrote on scraps of paper and stuffed into holes in the
     beams. ‘I want it down here, where I can see it. Don’t worry – the rest are
     safe in Paris.’
    She didn’t look convinced.
    ‘I want colour, Hélène. I
     want
life.
I don’t want to look at Napoleon or Papa’s stupid
     pictures of mournful dogs. And I won’t let
them
–’ I nodded outside
     to where off-duty German soldiers were smoking by the town fountain ‘– decide what
     I may look at in my own home.’
    Hélène shook her head, as if I
     were a fool she might have to indulge. And then she went to serve Madame Louvier and
     Madame Durant who, although they had often observed that my chicory coffee tasted as if
     it had come from the sewer, had arrived to hear the story of the pig-baby.
    Hélène and I shared a bed that
     night, flanking Mimi and Jean. Sometimes it was so cold, even in October, that we feared
     we would find them frozen solid in their nightclothes,so we all
     huddled up together. It was late, but I knew my sister was awake. The moonlight shone
     through the gap in the curtains, and I could just see her eyes, wide open, fixed on a
     distant point. I guessed that she was wondering where her husband was at that very
     moment, whether he was warm, billeted somewhere like our home, or freezing in a trench,
     gazing up at the same moon.
    In the far distance a muffled boom told of
     some far-off battle.
    ‘Sophie?’
    ‘Yes?’ We spoke in the quietest
     of whispers.
    ‘Do you ever wonder what it will be
     like … if they do not come back?’
    I lay there in the darkness.
    ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Because I
     know they will come back. And I do not want the Germans to have gleaned even one more
     minute of fear from me.’
    ‘I do,’ she said.
     ‘Sometimes I forget what he looks like. I gaze at his photograph, and I
     can’t remember anything.’
    ‘It’s because you look at it so
     often. Sometimes I think we wear our photographs out by looking at them.’
    ‘But I can’t remember anything –
     how he smells, how his voice sounds. I can’t remember how he feels beside me.
     It’s as if he never existed. And then I think, What if this is it? What if he
     never comes back? What if we are to spend the rest of our lives like this, our every
     move determined by men who hate us? And I’m not sure … I’m not
     sure I can …’
    I propped myself up on one elbow and reached
     over Mimi and Jean to take my sister’s hand. ‘Yes, you can,’ I