Page 104 of The Girl You Left Behind
She repeats the words silently in her head before she speaks, trying to make sense of them. “You want David’s name erased from the practice.”
“Yes.”
She stares at her knees.
“I’m sorry. I realize this has come as a shock. But it has to us, too.”
A thought occurs to her. “And what would happen to my work with the kids?”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
It is as if the very core of her has frozen. There is a long silence, and when she speaks she does so slowly, her voice unnaturally loud in the silent office. “So you all decided that because I don’t want to just hand over our painting, the painting David bought legitimately years ago, we must be dishonest somehow. And then you want to erase us from his charity and his business. You’d erase David’s name from the building he created.”
“That’s a rather melodramatic way of putting it.” For the first time Sven looks awkward. “Liv, this is an incredibly difficult situation. But if I side with your case, everyone in this company stands to lose their jobs. You know how much we have tied up in the Goldstein Building. Solberg Halston cannot survive if they pull out now.”
He leans forward over the desk. “Billionaire clients are not exactly thick on the ground. And I have to think about our people.”
Outside his office someone is saying good-bye. There is a brief burst of laughter. Inside the office the silence is 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 carryall, the heavy thump as it is 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 as 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 onto 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 forever 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
