The Girl You Left Behind

who does this for a living and
     I’m scrabbling around for scraps and I haven’t a bloody clue.’ She
     realizes, humiliated, that she is about to cry.
    Mo pulls the folders towards her. ‘Go
     outside,’ she says. ‘Go out on to the deck and stare at the sky for ten
     minutes and remind yourself that ultimately ours is a meaningless and futile existence
     and that our little planet will probably be swallowed by a black hole so that none of
     this will have any point anyway. And I’ll see if I can help.’
    Liv sniffs. ‘But you must be
     exhausted.’
    ‘Nah. I need to wind down after a
     shift. This’ll put me to sleep nicely. Go on.’ She begins to flick through
     the folders on the table.
    Liv wipes her eyes, pulls on a sweater and
     steps outside on to the deck. Out here she feels curiously weightless, in the endless
     black of night. She gazes down at the vast city spread beneath her, and breathes in the
     cold air. She stretches, feeling the tightness in her shoulders, the tension in her
     neck. And always, somewhere underneath, the sense that she is missing something; secrets
     that float just out of sight.
    When she walks into the kitchen ten minutes
     later, Mo is scribbling notes on her legal pad. ‘Do you remember Mr
     Chambers?’
    ‘Chambers?’
    ‘Medieval painting. I’m sure you
     did that course. I keep thinking about something he said that stuck with me – it’s
     about the only thing that did. He said that sometimes the history of a painting is not
     just about a painting. It’s also the history of a family, with all its secrets and
     transgressions.’ Mo taps her pen on the table. ‘Well, I’m totally out
     of my depth here, but I’m curious, given that she was livingwith them when the painting disappeared, when
she
disappeared, and they all
     seemed pretty close, why there is no evidence anywhere of Sophie’s
     family.’
    Liv sits up into the night, going through
     the thick files of papers, checking and double-checking. She scans the Internet, her
     glasses perched on her nose. When she finally finds what she is looking for, shortly
     after five o’clock, she thanks God for the meticulousness of French civic
     record-keeping. Then she sits back and waits for Mo to wake up.
    ‘Is there any way I can tear you away
     from Ranic this weekend?’ she says, as Mo appears in the doorway, bleary-eyed, her
     hair a black crow settling on her shoulders. Without the thick black eyeliner, her face
     seems curiously pink and vulnerable.
    ‘I don’t want to go running,
     thank you. No. Or anything sweaty.’
    ‘You used to speak fluent French,
     right? Do you want to come to Paris with me?’
    Mo makes for the kettle. ‘Is this your
     way of telling me you’ve swung to the other side? Because while I love Paris,
     I’m so not up for lady bits.’
    ‘No. It’s my way of telling you
     that I need your superior abilities as a French speaker to chat up an eighty-year-old
     man.’
    ‘My favourite kind of
     weekend.’
    ‘And I can throw in a crap one-star
     hotel. And maybe a day’s shopping at Galeries Lafayette.
     Window-shopping.’
    Mo turns and squints at her. ‘How can
     I refuse? What time are we leaving?’

22
    She meets Mo at St Pancras at five thirty
     p.m., and at the sight of her, waving laconically, cigarette in hand outside a
     café, she realizes she’s almost shamefully relieved at the prospect of two
     days away. Two days away from the deathly hush of the Glass House. Two days away from
     the telephone, which she has come to view as virtually radioactive: fourteen different
     journalists have left messages of varying friendliness on her answer-phone. Two days
     away from Paul, whose very existence reminds her of everything she has got wrong.
    The previous night she had told Sven her
     plan, and he had said immediately, ‘Can you afford it?’
    ‘I can’t afford anything.
     I’ve remortgaged the house.’
    Sven’s silence was poignant.
    ‘I had to. The law firm wanted
     guarantees.’
    The legal costs are eating everything. The
     barrister alone costs five hundred pounds an hour and he hasn’t yet stood up in
     court. ‘It’ll be fine once the painting is mine again,’ she says
     briskly.
    Outside, London is bathed in an evening
     mist; the sunset shoots orange flares across the dirty-violet sky. ‘I hope I
     didn’t tear you away from anything,’ she says, as they settle into their
     seats.
    ‘Only the Comfort Lodge Monthly
     Sing-a-long.’