He remembers his way to the square easily, though he has only walked this way once before. There is the building with the small bistro on the first floor.
From a distance, it looks much the same. The fire-engine-red paint, the scattering of ironwork tables and chairs upon the flagstones outside. And there are people, so many people – more, even, than there had been before. It is difficult at first, looking upon this scene, to imagine that these people have experienced war. The same war that has wrung him, torn him, spat him out. Yet, as he draws closer, he sees the chunks of plaster missing from one wall. He sees that the surface of the red paint is chipped and peeling away. His gaze roams the faces. He feels that at any moment he will see her. It seems impossible that she should not be here. This was how he imagined it every time, crouching beneath the hell overhead. Him, lifting her into his arms, climbing the steep, narrow stairs up to the small attic space. The white bed, the light falling across them. But she is not here. All these people, all these faces, yet not that one he seeks.
He will find the patronne: he remembers her. She will be able to tell him something. It is possible that Alice no longer lives here, but she had loved that room. When he had seen her in it, with her meagre but precious possessions about her, he could not imagine her living anywhere else.
Tom almost doesn’t recognize the woman at first. He remembers a strapping Belgesse, ruddy-cheeked, large-bosomed, in the prime of life. He sees, instead, an elderly woman, staggering under the weight of the tray she carries. Something has happened to her face, and her hair, formerly a reddish blonde, is a shock of bone white. Her movements between the tables are pinched and arthritic. Tom is fascinated and appalled, frozen for several moments where he stands watching her. What must a person have experienced to undergo such a change?
It could be that his stillness in the midst of the movement and chatter draws her attention, or that she simply feels his gaze upon her. She turns and looks at him, trying to place him, sifting through memory. Then he sees her face change as she recognizes him.
‘I’m looking for Alice,’ he says. Perhaps his pronunciation is poor, maybe she doesn’t hear him properly, because she backs away from him, shaking her head. He follows her across the room. ‘Alice? Do you know where she is? I’ve come to see her.’
The woman told me that Alice had been murdered. They’d taken a group, fifty men and women, into a clearing in the forest and shot them. They were hostages. There’d been an attack on a German soldier on one of the Metro stations, and that was how they did the sums: one German life was paid for in kind by fifty French. The prison had released the list of names in the papers, to warn off others as much as to notify relatives. The woman had paid out of her own pocket for a site in the cimetière, though she had nothing to bury there.
Fifty lives. Was it selfish to consider hers more valuable than any of those other lives that had been lost? But to me it was infinitely precious. The irony was that the thought of her had kept me alive. That thought had kept me sane. I had believed in her, in the future we would make together, the way other men believe in God.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, after the woman showed me the stone with the dates. And so I went home. I couldn’t paint: I think I may have had a breakdown, the quieter sort, the sort that goes largely unremarked. It took me a long time to remember where it was that I’d last been able to paint – where I had last been happy.
It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together … that time I had not told Kate about. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island. I still barely ate or slept, but, gradually, I began to do a little work.
I met Elodia a month after I arrived. There was a daughter – three years old – a product of a wartime liaison. Her family had chosen to despise her, both for having had the relationship with an Italian and then, perhaps more importantly, for not being able to make him stay and marry her. They’d been thrown out, she and her daughter, and left to fend for themselves.
About a week after I moved in she came to my house to ask if I wanted my laundry done, for a small fee. The child clung to her leg. I didn’t need anything washed, but I found some anyway. Something about her gave me the impression of survival against the odds, even before I knew the story.
It became a twice-weekly thing. I was perfectly capable of doing my own washing, but I came to look forward to her visits. Eventually, she trusted me enough to explain her situation. In a way she reminded me of Alice: her courage, her tenacity.
We married five months later. I know how it must look, how unforgivable a thing, that less than a year after I discovered the love of my life had been killed, I married another woman. But, you see, in a way it made perfect sense. With her gone, I would never marry for love, that much was certain. The only person for me in that way had been Alice. All the same, I was a young, healthy, whole man – at a time when so many had been maimed or killed. And I was so lonely. When I met this young woman, left all alone with her daughter, I wanted to help her.
Elodia understood that what I was offering was friendship, companionship, support. All the things that should be part of a marriage: all except love. I think that suited her well though. You see, she had known love too, and it had let her down. We did grow to love one another in the way that friends do – though it was a love of a different species entirely to what I had felt, and would continue to feel, for Alice. Elodia and I lived together for more than thirty years in almost total harmony, but unpalatable as it may be, I never stopped mourning Alice and what we could have had.
So when the card came, it seemed an impossible thing. I assumed initially that it might be a cruel hoax, from one who had somehow discovered our story.
19 August 1979
To my dearest Tom,
Would you consent to a meeting of old friends? I go by another name now, but I’m still the girl you once knew.
She was dead. I had seen the very stone that marked that fact.
But then I turned it over and saw the photograph on the other side of the postcard: Winnard Cove, Cornwall: watercolour. The shape of the bay and the wych elms exactly as I remembered, though Eversley Hall had been turned into a hotel, and a phalanx of beach umbrellas bristled the lip of the cliff. The writing was the same – or, almost. And she gave an address: not far from where she had been living before. It couldn’t be … yet, incredibly, it was. I knew that it was.