Page 91 of The Girl You Left Behind
“I’m not going to watch you go, Édouard,” I told you. “I shall close my eyes and keep the image of you as you stand before me.”
And then you swept me to you and kissed me, your mouth pressed against mine, your big arms pulling me tight, tight. I held you, my eyes squeezed shut, and I breathed you in, absorbing the scent of you, as if I could make that trace last for your entire absence. It was as if only then I believed you were actually going. And then, when it became too much, I pushed myself away, my face rigidly composed.
I kept my eyes closed and gripped your hand, not wanting to see whatever was on your face, and then I turned swiftly, straight-backed, and pushed my way through the crowds, away from you.
I don’t know why I didn’t want to see you actually get on the train, Edouard. I have regretted it every day since.
It was only when I got home that I reached into my pocket. I found the piece of paper you must have slipped in there while you held me: a little caricature of the two of us, you a huge bear in your uniform, grinning, your arm around me, petite and narrow-waisted, my face straight and solemn, my hair pulled neatly behind my head. I keep reading your looping, cursive script, until the words are indelible inside me: “I never knew real happiness until you.”
Liv blinks. She places the papers neatly in the folder. She sits, thinking. Then she unrolls the portrait of Sophie Lefèvre, that smiling, complicit face. How could Monsieur Bessette be right? How could a woman who adored her husband like that betray him, not just with another man but with an enemy? It seems incomprehensible. Liv rolls up the photocopy and places her notes back inside her bag.
Mo pulls off her earphones. “So. Half an hour to St. Pancras. Do you think you got what you wanted?”
She shrugs. She cannot speak past the huge lump that has risen in her throat.
Mo’s hair is scraped back into jet-black furrows from her face, her cheeks milk pale. “You nervous about tomorrow?”
Liv swallows and flashes a weak smile. She has thought about almost nothing else for the past six weeks.
“For what it’s worth,” Mo says, as if she has been thinking about it for some time, “I don’t think McCafferty set you up.”
“What?”
“I know loads of crappy, mendacious people. He’s not one of them.” She picks at a piece of skin on her thumb, then says, “I think fate just decided to play a really sick joke and dump you both on opposing sides.”
“But he didn’t have to come after my painting.”
Mo lifts an eyebrow. “Really?”
Liv stares at her, and then gazes out of the window as the train rolls toward London, fighting a new lump in her throat.
Across the table the couple bedecked in tinsel are leaning against each other. They have fallen asleep, their hands entwined.
•••
Later she is not entirely sure what makes her do it. Mo announces at St. Pancras that she is heading over to Ranic’s house, leaving Liv with instructions not to stay on the Internet all night looking up obscure restitution cases, and to please stick that Camembert in the fridge before it escapes and poisons the whole house. Liv stands in the teeming concourse holding a plastic bag of stinking cheese and watching the little dark figure as she heads toward the Underground, a bag slung nonchalantly over her shoulder. There is something both jaunty and newly solid in the way Mo talks about Ranic.
She waits until Mo has vanished into the crowd. The commuters wash around and past her, a stepping-stone in a stream of people. They are all in pairs, arms linked, chatting, casting fond, excited looks at each other, or if alone, head down, determinedly heading home to the person they love.
I never knew real happiness until you.
•••
There is a peculiar quality to the silence in the flat when Jake has gone back to his mother. It is a solid, weighty thing, entirely different from the quiet that occurs when he goes to a friend’s for a few hours. The acute stillness of his home in those hours is, he sometimes thinks, tinged with guilt, a sense of failure. It is weighed down by the knowledge that there is no chance his son will come back for at least four days. Paul finishes clearing up the kitchen (Jake had been making chocolate Krispie cakes—puffed rice is scattered under every kitchen appliance)—then sits, staring at the Sunday paper he picks up each week out of habit, and invariably fails to read.
In the early days after Leonie left he dreaded the early mornings most. He hadn’t known how much he loved the irregular pad of little Jake’s bare feet and the sight of him, his hair standing on end, his eyes half closed, as he appeared in their bedroom and demanded to climb in between them. The exquisite icy chill of his feet; the warm, yeasty scent of his skin; that visceral sense, once his son had burrowed into the middle of their bed, that all was well with the world. And then, after they’d gone, those early months of waking up alone, feeling as if each morning simply heralded another day he would miss of his son’s life. Paul was better at mornings now, but the first few hours after Jake goes back to Leonie still had the power to disarm.
He’ll iron some shirts. Maybe go to the gym, then take a shower, and eat. Those few things will give the evening a shape. A couple of hours of television, maybe a flick through his files, just to make sure everything’s shipshape for the case, and then he’ll sleep.
He’s just finishing the shirts when the telephone rings.
“Hey,” says Janey.
“Who is this?” he says, even though he knows exactly who it is.
“It’s me,” she says, trying to keep the slight affront from her voice. “Janey. Just thought I’d check in and see how we’re fixed for tomorrow.”
“We’re good,” he says. “Sean has been through all the paperwork. The barrister is prepped. We’re as good as we can be.”
