The Girl You Left Behind

victories, a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors, little
     floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation and fear.
    ‘You met the new
Kommandant
,
     then?’ The mayor was seated at one of the tables near the window. As I brought him
     some coffee, he motioned to me to sit down. More than anyone else’s, his life, I
     often thought, had been intolerable since the occupation: he had spent his time in a
     constant state of negotiation with the Germans to grant the town what it needed, but
     periodically they had taken him hostage to force recalcitrant townspeople to do their
     bidding.
    ‘It was not a formal
     introduction,’ I said, placing the cup in front of him.
    He tilted his head towards me, his voice
     low. ‘HerrBecker has been sent back to Germany to run one of
     the reprisal camps. Apparently there were inconsistencies in his
     book-keeping.’
    ‘That’s no surprise. He is the
     only man in Occupied France who has doubled in weight in two years.’ I was joking,
     but my feelings at his departure were mixed. On the one hand Becker had been harsh, his
     punishments excessive, born out of insecurity and a fear that his men would not think
     him strong enough. But he had been too stupid – blind to many of the town’s acts
     of resistance – to cultivate any relationships that might have helped his cause.
    ‘So, what do you think?’
    ‘Of the new
Kommandant
? I
     don’t know. He could have been worse, I suppose. He didn’t pull the house
     apart, where Becker might have, just to show his strength. But …’ I wrinkled
     my nose ‘… he’s clever. We might have to be extra careful.’
    ‘As ever, Madame Lefèvre, your
     thoughts are in harmony with my own.’ He smiled at me, but not with his eyes. I
     remembered when the mayor had been a jolly, blustering man, famous for his bonhomie:
     he’d had the loudest voice at any town gathering.
    ‘Anything coming in this
     week?’
    ‘I believe there will be some bacon.
     And coffee. Very little butter. I hope to have the exact rations later today.’
    We gazed out of the window. Old René
     had reached the church. He stopped to talk to the priest. It was not hard to guess what
     they were discussing. When the priest began to laugh, and René bent double for the
     fourth time, I couldn’t suppress a giggle.
    ‘Any news from your husband?’
    I turned back to the mayor. ‘Not since
     August, when I had a postcard. He was near Amiens. He didn’t say much.’
I think of you day and night,
the postcard had said, in his beautiful loopy
     scrawl.
You are my lodestar in this world of madness.
I had lain awake for two
     nights worrying after I had received it, until Hélène had pointed out that
     ‘this world of madness’ might equally apply to a world in which one lived on
     black bread so hard it required a billhook to cut it, and kept pigs in a bread oven.
    ‘The last I received from my eldest
     son came nearly three months ago. They were pushing forward towards Cambrai. Spirits
     good, he said.’
    ‘I hope they are still good. How is
     Louisa?’
    ‘Not too bad, thank you.’ His
     youngest daughter had been born with a palsy; she failed to thrive, could eat only
     certain foods and, at eleven, was frequently ill. Keeping her well was a preoccupation
     of our little town. If there was milk or any dried vegetable to be had, a little spare
     usually found its way to the mayor’s house.
    ‘When she is strong again, tell her
     Mimi was asking after her. Hélène is sewing a doll for her that is to be the
     exact twin of Mimi’s own. She asked that they might be sisters.’
    The mayor patted her hand. ‘You girls
     are too kind. I thank God that you returned here when you could have stayed in the
     safety of Paris.’
    ‘Pah. There is no guarantee that the
     Boche won’t be marching down the Champs-Élysées before long. And
     besides, I could not leave Hélène alone here.’
    ‘She would not have survived this
     without you. Youhave grown into such a fine young woman. Paris was
     good for you.’
    ‘My husband is good for me.’
    ‘Then God save him. God save us
     all.’ The mayor smiled, placed his hat on his head and stood up to leave.
    St Péronne, where the Bessette family
     had run Le Coq Rouge for generations, had been among the first towns to fall to the
     Germans in the autumn of 1914. Hélène and I, our parents long dead and our
     husbands at the Front, had determined to keep the hotel going.