‘We’ll go to every house between the hospital site and Buisseau,’ said Ben at breakfast on Wednesday. ‘We’ll show them Sam’s picture and ask if they saw him.’
‘Every house?’ Lotti paled.
‘Every single one,’ said Ben. ‘Also in Buisseau itself. People don’t just disappear. Someone must have seen him.’
Since the hospital, Lotti knew that it was hopeless and that they would never find Sam this way. It had been a brave, defiant plan, but all the adults had been right, it was impossible. Ben refused to see it. Well, Lotti could understand that, and she still felt the responsibility of having suggested the plan in the first place, so she would continue to support him, but she felt profoundly weary. After what they had seen yesterday at the hospital, Lotti almost hoped Sam hadn’t survived. To be alive, and look like that …
She tried to shake the image out of her head. It was no good thinking like this, no good at all.
Leaving Federico once again with Sister Monique, Lotti and Ben cycled all day through the countryside between Buisseau and the river, on tiny roads to knock on the door of remote cottages and farmhouses, on tracks down to where labourers worked in the fields, down paths to visit gamekeepers and woodcutters …
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, mademoiselle, have you seen this man?’
‘Monsieur, I am looking for an English soldier …’
People cried, people sighed. People closed doors in their faces, people invited them into their homes. Over cake and grenadine, they showed Lotti and Ben their own photographs and told their own stories, but no one remembered Sam.
They returned to Buisseau in the late afternoon. Ben wanted to continue the search in town, but Lotti couldn’t go on.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said.
Ben was angry with her, and Lotti truly was sorry, but all through the day, as the terrible sad stories of the war piled up, her mind had kept returning to the café in the south-west corner of the main square, which she had glimpsed on Monday when they came off the train.
She wanted, very much, to sit there quietly and remember, and discover if she had the courage to do what she had come to France to do.
*
Lotti left Ben and cycled towards the town centre. When she reached the main square, she dismounted and wheeled her bicycle to the café.
The late-afternoon sun was still warm, and the terrace outside was beginning to fill up. Lotti loitered, suddenly shy, still holding her bicycle.
‘What do you want?’ An elderly waiter came out of the café and barked at her.
‘I’m just looking,’ she stammered.
He gazed at her suspiciously. In the glass of the café window, Lotti caught sight of her reflection and understood. The old shorts and jersey pulled from the Barton jumble pile, already stiff with salt from the Channel crossing and stained with oil from the Sparrowhawk, were thick with dust from the day’s cycling. After a week living on the water, her face was tanned as a sailor’s and she hadn’t had a proper wash since La Belle Ecluse. She looked like an urchin. Uncle Hubert and Aunt Vera would be appalled.
The thought gave Lotti a deep satisfaction.
‘Do you have any pineapple juice?’ she asked the waiter.
‘Not had that since the war,’ he said firmly.
‘Grenadine, then. I’ve got money, I can pay.’
‘We don’t have grenadine either.’
Every café had grenadine, it was one of the most basic things you could ask for, but Lotti didn’t argue. The waiter didn’t want her here, and Lotti wasn’t even sure this was the café she had come to with her parents anyway. It looked similar, but that could just be her memory playing tricks on her. It certainly didn’t feel the same.
Later, though, when she was asleep, she saw that day again clearly in a dream – Mama sitting in the sun in her white dress, Papa in his straw hat, even the glass of pineapple juice. But then the glass exploded and turned into the burnt carcass of an aeroplane. Lotti woke weeping in the small hours and did not go back to sleep.
*
‘Monsieur, I’m sorry to disturb you, this is a picture of my friend’s brother …’
‘What’s that, girl? Give it here, I can’t see, my eyes aren’t what they used to be …’
Lotti and Ben spent all of Thursday knocking on doors through the streets of Buisseau, on foot this time, dragging Federico on the lead, with Ben obstinately optimistic and Lotti privately despairing. By the end of the afternoon, the photograph was in a sorry state, worn thin with handling, the gloss of its surface dulled by strangers’ fingers. Clumsily handled by an old man with poor eyesight, it fell apart. Back at the mission house, Ben tried to repair it, but glue only made it worse. Sam’s face was ripped in two, and completely unrecognisable.
‘You can still tell it’s him,’ Ben insisted. ‘I can still tell it’s him. We can describe him.’
But now Lotti and Sister Angèle and Sister Marianne all said, ‘Enough.’
Ben folded his arms on the table, and laid down his head, and closed his eyes, and didn’t move. He knew that it was hopeless, and that Clara and Captain de Beauchesne and the Reverend Mother had all been right.
Early on Friday, they said goodbye to the mission house sisters and took the train back to the convent, sitting side by side in an empty compartment with Ben’s misery hanging over them like a rain cloud waiting to explode, and Lotti wondered hopelessly, Oh, what are we going to do?
Sister Marianne had telegrammed ahead, and Clara and Sister Monique came to meet them at the St Matthieu station in the convent pony cart. Ben shrank away when Clara tried to hug him. She looked at Lotti, who just shook her head.
‘I am very afraid,’ Lotti whispered, ‘that he is going to break.’
At the convent, Ben made straight for the Sparrowhawk, where he crept into Nathan’s workshop and knelt on the floor by Elsie’s crate.
‘We didn’t find him, Elsie. I’m sorry. We didn’t find him.’
Gently, Elsie shook away her puppies and climbed out of the crate into his lap. Ben put his arms round her and at last, very quietly, began to cry.
Clara and Lotti sat on the roof with Federico, understanding his need for privacy but wanting to stay close.
‘Albert Skinner is in Paris,’ Clara murmured. ‘Captain de Beauchesne sent a telegram.’
‘Skinner!’ Lotti’s heart skipped a beat, then she frowned, confused. ‘What’s he doing in Paris?’
‘I don’t really understand either,’ admitted Clara. ‘I think Henri – I mean Captain de Beauchesne – arranged it with Madame Royère. In his telegram he says he’s trying to deflect him but Lotti, I do think we should go back to England, and the sooner the better really – in the morning. We’ll leave the puppies here and take the Sparrowhawk to a boatyard to fix that awful rattling, and then we’ll get the train home and I will explain to your uncle …’
‘Oh, don’t talk about my uncle!’ Lotti covered her ears with her hands. ‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘Darling, I know you don’t want to go, and I understand, but I promise, when we get back to England, I will do everything I can to help you …’
‘You want to adopt Ben,’ said Lotti, accusingly. ‘Not just help him. You said, when you found us in Calais.’
‘I … Lotti, have you been angry with me all this time?’
‘Yes!’ said Lotti. ‘Mostly I’ve been thinking about Ben, and about … other things. But yes, it did hurt, Clara.’
‘But how can I adopt you, darling, when you have a family already? I promise you this though, I will look after Federico, and I’ll visit you at school as often as I’m allowed. I don’t want you to feel alone again, ever.’
Lotti kissed her, because she could see Clara was upset, but then she pulled away and said, ‘It’s not enough though, not for me. I want so much more from life than that.’
‘Let’s just sit quietly for now, Clara. Let’s not talk about tomorrow. Let’s just think about Ben.’
It very much seemed, in that moment, as if all was lost.
But once again, they had underestimated the dogs.