‘What most of us had assumed,’ Alice said, ‘was that we were being moved on to the camps. That the two groups signified two different locations. Only it wasn’t that. One group was being moved on: the group I was swapped into. We were the ‘fitter’ consignment – those who would be better suited to labour. I was deemed unfit at first, but I was obviously near enough to be swapped with Georgette. It is a matter of small degrees, you understand, among people who have been starved and locked inside for weeks.’
‘What about the other group?’
‘They were taken to be shot, in a wood outside Paris.’
I could not stop thinking about the expression on Alice’s face when she told me of her friends’ fate. In fact, I had hardly been able to bring myself to look at her. The grief and guilt was etched on her face, even after all these years, and in some dilute way it became a grief I now shared – for I had begun to feel I knew them too, through her.
At the same time I was aware of Alice’s strength. She might still carry that pain, just as she carried the pain of twice losing her daughter, but she had not allowed it to destroy her. I remembered my instinct, after Mum died, to stop up my life and let the dust settle over me. I had almost achieved it – would perhaps have done so had Evie not made her revelation. Alice had found it in herself to keep living.
It got me thinking, too: had I ever had a friend I truly loved, as Alice did Étienne and Georgette? There was Mum, of course – I had always thought of her as my best friend – but discounting this, the answer was probably no. I’d had friends, though, and I saw now how much I had enjoyed those afternoons in the Goodge Street pub, listening to the big talkers in the group and laughing at or with them, feeling a warmth spread through me that had to be due to more than the wine.
I had liked to tell myself that they had given me up quickly, when Mum died and I stopped coming, but that wasn’t strictly true. Like someone surfacing from a trance, I could now recall the voicemails left unanswered, the envelopes unopened and filed away. They had tried – and they had persisted longer than I had expected. Eventually I had found myself alone: exactly as I had planned. Now the feeling rose inside me, demanding to be acknowledged. I didn’t want to be alone any longer.