The Girl You Left Behind

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.

26
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 wantsto 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