Page 86 of The Girl You Left Behind
“We were at the hotel last night,” Liv says. But he doesn’t seem to register. She unrolls a photocopy. “Did your father ever mention this painting?”
He gazes at the girl.
“Sophie,” he says finally.
“Yes,” says Liv, nodding vigorously. “Sophie.” She feels a faint flicker of excitement.
His gaze settles on the image, his eyes sunken and rheumy, impenetrable, as if they carry the joys and sorrows of the ages. He blinks, his wrinkled eyelids closing at half speed, and it is like watching some strange prehistoric creature. Finally he lifts his head. “I cannot tell you. We were not encouraged to speak of her.”
Liv glances at Mo.
“What?”
“Sophie’s name... was not spoken in our house.”
Liv blinks. “But—but she was your aunt, yes? She was married to a great artist.”
“My father never spoke of it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not everything that happens in a family is explicable.”
The room falls silent. Mo looks awkward. Liv tries to shift the subject. “So... do you know much about Monsieur Lefèvre?”
“No. After Sophie disappeared, some paintings were sent to the hotel from a dealer in Paris; this was some time before I was born. As Sophie was not there, Hélène kept two and gave two to my father. He told her he didn’t want them, but after he died, I found them in our attic. They paid for me to live here. This... is a nice place to live. So—maybe I think my relationship with my aunt Sophie was a good one, despite everything.”
His expression softens briefly.
Liv leans forward. “Despite everything?”
The old man’s expression is unreadable. She wonders, briefly, whether he has nodded off. But then he starts to speak. “There was talk... gossip... in St. Péronne that my aunt was a collaborator. This was why my father said we must not discuss her. Easier to act as if she did not exist. Neither my aunt nor my father ever spoke of her when I was growing up.”
“Collaborator? Like a spy?”
He waits a moment before answering. “No. That her relationship with the German occupiers was not... correct.” He looks up at the two women. “It was very painful for our family. If you did not live through these times, if your family did not come from a small town, you cannot understand how it was for us. No letters, no pictures, no photographs. From the moment she was taken away, my aunt ceased to exist for my father. He was”—he sighs—“an unforgiving man. Unfortunately, the rest of her family decided to wipe her from our history, too.”
“Even her sister?”
“Even Hélène.”
Liv is stunned. For so long she has thought of Sophie as one of life’s survivors, her expression triumphant, her adoration of her husband written on her face. She struggles to reconcile her Sophie with the image of this unloved, discarded woman.
There is a world of pain in the old man’s long, weary breath. Liv feels suddenly guilty for having made him revisit it. “I’m so sorry,” she says, not knowing what else to say. She sees now they will get nothing here. No wonder Paul McCafferty had not bothered to come.
The silence stretches. Mo surreptitiously eats a macaron. When Liv looks up, Philippe Bessette is gazing at her. “Thank you for seeing us, monsieur.” She touches his arm. “I find it hard to associate the Sophie you describe with the woman I see. I... have her portrait. I have always loved it.”
He lifts his head a few degrees. He looks at her steadily as Mo translates.
“I honestly thought she looked like someone who knew she was loved. She seemed to have”—she shrugs—“spirit.”
Two nurses appear in the doorway, watching. Behind her, a woman with a trolley looks in impatiently. The smell of food seeps through the doorway.
She stands to leave. But as she does so, Bessette holds up a hand. “Wait,” he says, gesturing toward a bookshelf with an index finger. “The one with the red cover.”
Liv runs her fingers along the spines until he nods. She pulls a battered folder from the bookshelf.
“These are my aunt Sophie’s papers, her correspondance. There is a little about her relationship with Édouard Lefèvre, things they discovered hidden around her room in the hotel. Nothing about your painting, as I recall. But it may give you a clearer picture of her. At a time when her name was being blackened, it revealed my aunt to me... as human. A wonderful human being.”
