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 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 family’s 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 Hélène’s 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 woman’s 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 Paul’s little flat. She may get her own place, but neither of them seems to be in any hurry to pursue that conversation.