The Girl You Left Behind

stifling.
    ‘So if I handed her over, would they
     keep David’s name on the building?’
    ‘That’s something I
     haven’t discussed. Possibly.’
    ‘Possibly.’ Liv digests this.
     ‘And if I say no?’
    Sven taps his pen on the desk.
    ‘We will dissolve the company and set
     up a new one.’
    ‘And the Goldsteins would go with
     that.’
    ‘It’s possible, yes.’
    ‘So it doesn’t actually matter
     what I say. This is basically a courtesy call.’
    ‘I’m sorry, Liv. It’s an
     impossible situation. I’m in an impossible situation.’
    Liv sits there for a moment longer. Then,
     without a word, she gets up and walks out of Sven’s office.
    It is one in the morning. Liv stares at the
     ceiling, listening to Mo moving around in the spare room, the zipping of a holdall, the
     heavy thump as it’s stacked beside a door. She hears a lavatory flushing, the soft
     pad of footsteps, then the silence that tells of sleep. She has lain there considering
     whether to head across the corridor, to try to persuade Mo not to leave, but the words
     that shuffle themselves in her head refuse to fall into any kind of useful order. She
     thinks of a half-finished glass building several miles away, the name of whose architect
     will be buried as deeply as its foundations.
    She reaches over and picks up the mobile
     phone by her bed. She stares at the little screen in the half-light.
    There are no new messages.
    Loneliness hits her with an almost physical
     force. The walls around her feel insubstantial, offer no protection against an
     unfriendly world beyond. This house is not transparent and pure as David had wished: its
     empty spaces are cold and unfeeling, its clean lines knotted with history, its glass
     surfaces obscured by the tangled entrails of lives.
    She tries to quell the waves of vague panic.
     She thinks about Sophie’s papers, about a prisoner loaded on to a train. If she
     shows them to the court, she knows, she might still be able to save the painting for
     herself.
    And if I do, she thinks, Sophie will be on
     record for ever as a woman who slept with a German, who betrayed her country as well as
     her husband. And I will be no better than the townspeople who hung her out to dry.
    Once it is done, it cannot be undone.

29
    1917
    I no longer wept for home. I could not say
     how long we had been travelling, for the days and nights merged, and sleep had become a
     fleeting, sporadic visitor. Some miles outside Mannheim my head had begun to ache,
     swiftly followed by a fever that left me alternately shivering and fighting the urge to
     shed what few clothes remained. Liliane sat beside me, wiping my forehead with her
     skirt, helping me when we stopped. Her face was drawn with tension. ‘I’ll be
     better soon,’ I kept telling her, forcing myself to believe that this was just a
     passing cold, the inevitable outcome of the past few days, the chill air, the shock.
    The truck bucked and wheeled around the
     potholes, the canvas billowed, allowing in spatters of ice-cold rain, and the young
     soldier’s head bobbed, his eyes opening with the bigger jolts and fixing on us
     with a sudden glare as if to warn us to remain where we should be.
    I dozed against Liliane, and woke
     periodically, watching the little triangle of canvas that exposed briefly the landscape
     we had left behind. I watched the bombed and pitted borders give way to more orderly
     towns, where whole rows of houses existed without visible damage, their black beams
     strident against white render, their gardens filledwith pruned
     shrubs and well-tended vegetable patches. We passed vast lakes, bustling towns, wound
     our way through deep forests of fir trees, where the vehicle whined and its tyres
     struggled for purchase in mud tracks. Liliane and I were given little: cups of water and
     hunks of black bread, thrown into the back as one would hurl scraps to pigs.
    And then as I grew more feverish I cared
     less about the lack of food. The pain in my stomach was smothered by other pains; my
     head, my joints, the back of my neck. My appetite disappeared and Liliane had to urge me
     to swallow water over my sore throat, reminding me that I must eat while there was food,
     that I had to stay strong. Everything she said had an edge, as if she always knew far
     more than she chose to let on about what awaited us. With each stop her eyes widened
     with anxiety, and even as my thoughts clouded with illness, her fear became