simple coffin through a churchyard to a freshly dug grave – a police car speeds past outside, its siren screaming. Through the café windows, I catch a glimpse of flashing blue lights and then they’re gone.
It’s just a momentary vision, but the wake of the noise and the lights swamps me with a sudden wave of panic so powerful that it knocks the breath out of me. I reach for the carafe of water and pour a little into my glass, my hand shaking, as I try to calm myself.
There are times that I do not think about. Moments I have put away in a compartment of my mind which has stayed sealed for years. But now, here in the Café de Flore, amongst the tourists and the chic Parisienne ladies-who-lunch, an image flashes before my eyes, as though someone’s hand has reached inside my head and turned a key, opening that compartment in a split second while I am distracted by thoughts of Mireille and Claire.
In my mind’s eye, I see the flashing blue lights of another police car. This one isn’t speeding past, though. Instead, it’s parked at the gate outside my house. I feel hands reaching out to restrain me, holding me back as I try to run towards a door which stands ajar. I hear the neighbours talking in low voices and I hear the sinister sibilance of the word they use: suicide. It’s a nightmare I’ve had many, many times, ambushed at night by dreams of those flickering blue lights and of running from them, running and running and getting nowhere, from which I wake gasping for breath, with tears running down my cheeks and my heart pounding in my throat.
And every time I wake up and discover that it’s just been a dream.
But it is still not okay. It is never okay.
The waiter sets my salad down in front of me and I pull myself together, trying to summon a smile, shaking my head as he asks whether there is anything more I need. I go through the motions of picking at my lunch. Ordinarily I would devour it, but I have no appetite today. I’m too busy pondering that flash of awareness triggered, no doubt, by the thoughts of my great-grandmother’s death and the passing police car.
And then I realise that alongside the shock of that all-too-vivid image that I’ve suppressed for so many years, there sits another niggling feeling which forms itself into a question in my mind: whose hand was it that reached into my head and opened that locked compartment? I have a feeling that it doesn’t belong to anyone I know. It doesn’t belong to my grandmother Claire, nor to my mother.
As my racing heartbeat slows and I glance around the crowded, noisy café, picturing Mireille and Claire here, half a century before me, I realise that I’m searching for someone else, someone who is missing. The third girl in the photograph.
Where is Vivienne?
1941
Every head in the sewing room turned when Mademoiselle Vannier entered with the new girl. In the momentary silence, as the whirr of the sewing machines paused and the low murmur of snatched conversations stopped, one of the steel pins that Mireille was using to piece together a blouse fell to the floor with a faint patter. She bent, quickly, to pick it up before it could roll into one of the cracks between the boards and be lost: replacements were expensive now that supplies of metal were being channelled into the munitions factories in Germany.
As she straightened up, Mademoiselle Vannier was introducing the new seamstress. ‘Girls, this is Vivienne Giscard. She joins us from an atelier in Lille, where she has gained valuable experience working with chiffon. She will also be helping you, Claire, with trimmings and beadwork. And she’ll be staying upstairs in the apartment. Please help her to feel at home.’
Mireille shifted her work along, making space at the table, and a chair was found for Vivienne, who smiled at her new neighbours as she set her sewing kit down and pulled on a neatly pressed white coat.
Mireille immediately liked the look of this latest addition to their team. She had wide hazel eyes and long, copper-coloured hair which she wore braided into a thick plait to keep it out of the way of her work. It would be good to have a new flatmate, especially now that the other girls had moved on and it was just Mireille and Claire in the