fell asleep, she had a dream that left her shaken when she woke. In it her mother had come to her, and running her fingers through her hair had whispered, ‘Everything is going to be all right, Sophie, I promise you that.’ And, sobbing, Sophie had hugged her so tightly it had felt real. But then when she pulled away from her to wipe her eyes she saw her mother had morphed into her great-aunt Vivienne and though she didn’t say anything there had been this pleading look in her eyes, as though she needed Sophie to help her in some way. And even in her dream something had struck her. The feeling of the not-knowing was the worst part of it all. Not knowing for weeks about Matt’s secret relationship; there was the same not knowing about her aunt. Everyone seemed to just accept she was a traitor and as she looked at her aunt’s face in her dream, she felt this odd pull into the past. As though in finding out what really happened during the war would also help her find her own balance again. She needed everything in her life, including her history, to make sense. Or the future was just an impossible unknown.
9
When Sophie finally opened her eyes in the morning, she caught her breath. The feeling of needing to put things right continued to haunt her while she was awake. This was one thing she could definitely do.
On some level she felt that it was no accident that the photograph had come into her life right now. Just when she needed something to distract her, to anchor her.
She shuffled into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and examined the significance of all the things that had happened. If Sophie hadn’t had her emotional breakdown, she wouldn’t have been in this job. If she hadn’t worked for the trust she wouldn’t have been at the exhibition, and would probably have never seen the photograph. She wouldn’t have taken the time to go to an exhibition when she had been working eighty hours a week, it was uncanny how it all had happened.
Resolving to not spend the whole day just feeling sorry for herself, Sophie threw herself into the research. Starting out from the legal stance that people were innocent until proven guilty, she asked herself what possible reasons anyone might have for leaving the country with a Nazi. To understand her aunt’s motives, first Sophie recognised, once again, that she simply needed to know more about her, and what she was doing during that time. She knew from her gran that Vivienne had been in France, and then a nurse in Cornwall, but that didn’t explain why she was all dressed up, wearing her family crest in London. That had to have been an important meeting.
Sophie continued to read the books she had downloaded about SOE. If she was working from the premise that her aunt was innocent then was it plausible that she somehow could have been working for the British again? That could change everything.
Sophie picked up her phone and looked at the picture of her aunt.
‘What were you doing, Vivienne?’ she asked out loud. ‘Were you really a traitor?’
Sophie continued to bury herself in the research. Hardly eating or sleeping, she spent the whole weekend learning everything she could about SOE, burying her feelings of sadness whenever they came up with a determination to find out the truth. If nothing else she realised she wanted to find out how and where Vivienne had died. Sophie wasn’t sure why this was so important to her, but it was all she could do and think about. And every time she saw the picture of Vivienne from her dream, the face so similar to her mother’s, she felt compelled.
On Sunday night she made a decision. She would definitely take that time off and go down to Cornwall to where the story started. Back to the family estate where Vivienne had grown up, worked as a nurse and had ultimately met the German POW who she’d supposedly run off with.
When she called Jonathan he seemed unsurprised to hear from her. Both she and Matt had mutual friends in the trust, which was how she had known about the job in the first place, and it seemed that the gossip grapevine hadn’t let her down, as news had clearly already spread of her and Matt’s split.