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Epilogue

Between 1917 and 1922 Anton and Marie Leville lived in a small house close to the edge of a lake in the Swiss town of Montreux. They were a quiet couple, not fond of entertaining, but apparently most content in each others company. Madame Leville worked as a waitress in a local restaurant. She is remembered as efficient and friendly but as someone who did not volunteer conversation A rare quality in a woman, the proprietor would remark, with a sideways look at his wife.

Every evening at a quarter past nine, Anton Leville, a tall, dark-haired man with an oddly shambolic gait, could be seen walking the fifteen minutes to the restaurant, where he would tip his hat through the open door to the manager, then wait outside until his wife emerged. He would hold out his arm, she would take it, and they would walk back together, slowing occasionally to admire the sunset on the lake or a particularly decorative shop window. This, according to their neighbours, was the routine for their every working day and they rarely deviated from it. Occasionally Madame Leville would post parcels, little gifts, to an address in northern France, but apart from that they seemed to have little interest in the wider world.

At weekends the couple tended to remain at home, emerging occasionally to go to a local café where, if it were sunny enough, they would spend several hours playing cards or sitting beside each other in companionable silence, his large hand over her smaller one.

My father would joke to Monsieur Leville that Madame would not blow away on the breeze if he were to release her just for a minute, said Anna Baertschi, who had grown up next door. My father used to tell my mother that he thought it was a little improper, to be hanging on to your wife in public so.

Little was known of Monsieur Levilles 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 watchmakers.

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 havent 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 isnt really working out. Turns out sharing a two-bedroom flat with fifteen male Eastern European hotel workers isnt such a blast. Who knew? I got a new place through Gumtree with an accountant who has a vampire thing going on and seems to think that living with someone like me will give him street cred. I think hes a little disappointed that I havent filled his fridge with roadkill and offered him a home-grown tattoo. But its okay. He has satellite telly and its two minutes walk from the care home so I no longer have an excuse to miss Mrs Vincents bag change dont ask.

Anyway. Im really glad you got to keep your picture. Truly. And Im sorry I dont have a diplomacy button. I miss you.

Mo

Invite her, says Paul, peering over her shoulder. Lifes 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?

Youre expected at ten. Im cooking for five thousand, apparently. I need potato-based help.

Ill be there. Mo cant 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 Hélènes 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 Hélènes 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 Rouge was 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 simply pulled down the shutters, locked the doors and disappeared, leaving an en vacances sign on the door. This had led to no small degree of consternation within the little town, two letters of complaint to the local paper, and a good deal of extra custom for Le Bar Blanc. On the familys return, when asked where she had been, Hélène had replied that they had travelled to Switzerland.

We consider the air there to be particularly good for Hélènes health, Monsieur Montpellier said.

Oh, it certainly is, Hélène replied, with a small smile. Most … restorative.

Madame Louvier is recorded as remarking in her diary that it was one thing for hoteliers to disappear on a whim to foreign countries, without so much as a by-your-leave, but quite another for them to come back looking quite so pleased with themselves about having done so.

I never knew what happened to Sophie and Édouard. I know they were in Montreux up to 1926 but Hélène was the only one in regular contact and she died suddenly in 1934. After that my letters came back marked Return to Sender.

Édith Béthune and Liv have exchanged four letters, trading long-hidden information, filling in the gaps. Liv has begun writing a book about Sophie, having been approached by two publishers. It is, frankly, terrifying, but Paul asks her who is more qualified to write it.

The older womans handwriting is firm for someone of her advanced years, the copperplate evenly spaced and forward-slanting. Liv shifts closer to the bedside light to read it.

I wrote to a neighbour, who said she had heard Édouard had fallen ill, but could offer no evidence. Over the years other such communications led me to believe the worst some remembered him becoming ill, some remembered Sophie as the one whose health failed. Someone said they had just disappeared. Mimi thought she heard her mother say they had gone somewhere warmer. I had moved so many times by then that Sophie would have had no way of contacting me herself.

I know what good sense would have me believe of two frail people whose bodies had been so punished by starvation and imprisonment. But I have always preferred to think that seven, eight years after the war, free of responsibility for anybody else, perhaps they finally felt safe enough to move on, and simply packed up and did so. I prefer to imagine that they were out there, perhaps in sunnier climes, as happy as they had been on our holiday, content in their own company.

Around her the bedroom is even emptier than usual, ready for her move the following week. She will stay in Pauls little flat. She may get her own place, but neither of them seems to be in any hurry to pursue that conversation.

She gazes down at him sleeping beside her, still struck by how handsome he is, the shape of him, the simple joy of having him there. She thinks of something her father had said when he came for Christmas, seeking her out in the kitchen and drying dishes as she washed, while the others played noisy board games in the front room. She had looked up, struck by his uncharacteristic silence.

You know, I think David would have rather liked him. He didnt look at her, but continued with his drying.

She wipes her eyes, as she does often when she thinks about this she is giddily emotional at the moment, and turns back to the letter.

I am an old woman now, so it may not happen in my lifetime, but I believe that one day a whole series of paintings will emerge with unknown provenance, beautiful and strange, their colours unexpected and rich. They will feature a red-haired woman in the shade of a palm tree, or perhaps gazing out into a yellow sun, her face a little older, that hair perhaps streaked with grey, but her smile wide and her eyes full of love.

Liv looks up at the portrait opposite her bed, and the young Sophie gazes back at her, washed with the pale gold of the lamplight. She reads the letter a second time, studying the words, the spaces between them. She thinks back to Édith Béthunes gaze steady and knowing. And then she reads it again.

Hey. Paul rolls over sleepily towards her. He reaches out an arm and pulls her to him. His skin is warm, his breath sweet. What you doing?

Thinking.

That sounds dangerous.

Liv puts the letter down, and burrows under the duvet until she is facing him.

Paul.

Liv.

She smiles. She smiles every time she looks at him. And she takes a little breath. You know how good you are at finding stuff …