The Girl You Left Behind

so.’
    Little was known of Monsieur Leville’s
     own affairs, other than that he appeared to suffer from poor health. He was assumed to
     have some kind of private income. He once offered to paint portraits of two of the
     neighbours’ children, but given his strange choice of colours and unconventional
     brushwork, they were not terribly well received.
    Most townspeople agreed privately that they
     preferred the neater brushwork and more lifelike images of Monsieur Blum down by the
     watchmaker’s.
    The email arrives on Christmas Eve.
Okay. So I officially suck at
     predictions. And possibly friendship. But I would really like to see you, if you
     haven’t been using my handed-down skills to build voodoo dolls of me (this is
     entirely possible, I have had some serious headaches lately. If it was you, I offer
     my grudging admiration).
    The thing with Ranic isn’t really
     working out. Turns out sharing a two-bedroom flat with fifteen male Eastern European
     hotel workers isn’t such a blast. Who knew? I got a new place through Gumtree
     with an accountant who has a vampire thing going onand seems to
     think that living with someone like me will give him street cred. I think he’s
     a little disappointed that I haven’t filled his fridge with roadkill and
     offered him a home-grown tattoo. But it’s okay. He has satellite telly and
     it’s two minutes’ walk from the care home so I no longer have an excuse
     to miss Mrs Vincent’s bag change (don’t ask).
    Anyway. I’m really glad you got
     to keep your picture. Truly. And I’m sorry I don’t have a diplomacy
     button. I miss you.
    Mo
    ‘Invite her,’ says Paul, peering
     over her shoulder. ‘Life’s too short, right?’
    She dials the number before she even thinks
     about it.
    ‘So, what are you doing
     tomorrow?’ she says, before Mo can speak.
    ‘Is this a trick question?’
    ‘Do you want to come over?’
    ‘And miss the annual bitchfest that is
     my parents, a faulty remote control and the Christmas edition of the
Radio
     Times
? Are you kidding me?’
    ‘You’re expected at ten.
     I’m cooking for five thousand, apparently. I need potato-based help.’
    ‘I’ll be there.’ Mo
     can’t hide her delight. ‘I may even have got you a present. One that I
     actually bought. Oh. But I have to slope off around six-ish just to do some singing
     stuff for the olds.’
    ‘You
do
have a
     heart.’
    ‘Yeah. Your last skewer must have
     missed.’
    Baby Jean Montpellier died from influenza in
     the last months of the war. Hélène Montpellier went into shock, crying neither
     when the undertaker came to take his little body nor when it was laid in the earth. She
     continued to behave with a semblance of normality, opening the bar of Le Coq Rouge at
     the allotted hours and dismissing all offers of help, but she was, the mayor recalled,
     in his journals of the time, ‘a woman frozen’.
    Édith Béthune, who had silently
     taken over many of Hélène’s responsibilities, describes an afternoon
     several months later when a lean, tired-looking man in uniform arrived at the door, his
     left arm in a sling. Édith was drying glasses, and waited for him to enter, but he
     just stood on the step, gazing in with a strange expression. She offered him a glass of
     water, and then, when he still did not step inside, she had asked, ‘Should I fetch
     Madame Montpellier?’
    ‘Yes, child,’ he had replied,
     bowing his head. His voice had broken slightly as he spoke. ‘Yes.
     Please.’
    She tells of Hélène’s
     faltering steps into the bar, her disbelieving face, and how she had dropped her broom,
     gathered her skirts and hurled herself at him, like a missile, her cries loud enough to
     echo through the open door and down the streets of St Péronne, causing even those
     neighbours hardened by their own losses to look up from whatever they were doing and dab
     their eyes.
    She remembers sitting on the stairs outside
     their bedroom, listening to their muffled sobs as they wept for their lost son. She
     remarks, without self-pity, that despite her fondness for Jean, she herself remained
     dry-eyed. After the death of her mother, she says, she never cried again.
    History records that in all the years that
     Le Coq Rougewas owned and run by the Montpellier family, it closed
     its doors only once: for a three-week period during 1925. Townspeople remember that
     Hélène, Jean-Michel, Mimi and Édith told nobody that they were going away
     but