‘When do you leave?’
‘As soon as we have finished packing. In the next couple of weeks, hopefully.’ Sophie makes a twist of her mouth. ‘We had been planning to leave at some point, but I hadn’t thought it would be quite so … so like rats escaping from a sinking ship. It feels horrible, to be running away. But with the children, you know, I think one cannot be too careful.’ She grimaces. ‘I have family in Czechoslovakia, and it has been very bad there. The Führer does not like us, you see.’
Sophie’s children have already left the city in the company of some of the De Rosiers’ expat friends. Monsieur De Rosier has insisted on staying on for another month. ‘He wanted to tie things up properly,’ Sophie explained. ‘He was loath to leave his employees in the lurch. You know, if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes all those poor people flooding in from the Ardennes, he might never have been persuaded to go.’ Because Monsieur De Rosier, like most other Frenchmen, didn’t believe it would happen. Until the Maginot Line turned out to be as unbreachable as the Titanic was unsinkable.
Monsieur and Madame De Rosier will go south in the hope of catching a boat from Spain to England. In doing so they will join the line of Parisians and northerners that has straggled out of the city for the last few weeks: a maundering procession of men, women, children, animals – cars, bicycles, horse riders and those on foot, pushing wheelbarrows or prams laden with possessions.
Anything Sophie cannot take with her, she gives to Alice. Flanders linen that was once part of her bridal trousseau, a library of books – some of them first editions.
In return, Alice hands over her most valuable possession: a sketch of a woman sitting by a lake: an early Thomas Stafford.
‘I will come and collect it from you,’ Alice tells her, ‘when all of this is over. Look after it for me in the meantime, will you? I’d like to know that it’s safe.’
Sophie studies the drawing closely, and then looks up at Alice with a curious smile. ‘You never cease to surprise me,’ she says. ‘One day, you know, I’m going to force you to tell me all about the real Alice.’
‘The problem is, Sophie, I’m so far now from the person I was before that none of it seems real. It would be like telling a fairy tale.’
Sophie shakes her head. ‘I disagree. I think we carry all of our past selves with us, in tight layers. Somewhere within you is that girl, however many other, new selves you may have grown in the years since. She’s what holds you together, at the very centre.’