Sabine looked sulky at the way her provocation had been turned against her. Suzie had no problem about lying. She would lie and lie and lie again, spin any tale, if it would be believed and save her. Her fear was that her interrogators would step immediately beyond lie and truth, and that violence would descend impartially, on liar and truth-teller, guilty and innocent alike.

Chapter Twenty-two

Suzie and Sabine were cycling back from mass in Lepech Perdrissou. The aunts, who made the expedition in the donkey cart, their one outing of the week, always remained behind to lunch with the cure, leaving the girls to ride home by themselves.

Mass had been an occasion of fear for Suzie when she arrived at Bonnemort, heightened by the physical as well as spiritual preparations that Micheline insisted upon. She would wash the girls’ hair on Saturday evening, and lay out their best dresses, newly ironed. Suzie had been terrified of exposure through ignorance, and had no one to ask what she should do, for Madame Ariane did not attend mass. Suzie would therefore cultivate her blankest expression, practised in Clermont Ferrand when she was looking after Maman, which usually made adults think she was a little stupid, or even deaf. In this way she did not have to reply to such questions as, ‘When is your saint’s day, dear?’ or ‘When did you make your first communion, my child?’ The method had worked with the cure who, soon after her first appearance in church with the Cazalle family, ceased to make enquiries about her knowledge and origins. The first time that she attended mass she had been astonished at what they were doing, a Shabbat dinner performed for a Christian audience every Sunday. Now she was used to it, sitting, standing and kneeling automatically, moving her lips in time to Sabine’s responses.

The sun was almost at its peak and the road shimmered in front of them in the heat. Ahead, in the centre of the road, lay a tangle of rope which, when they reached it, suddenly thrashed itself into a paroxysm, coiling and recoiling, twisting and writhing in their path. Suzie yelped in disgust, swerving widely and riding on. Sabine braked and put her foot to the ground to look back.

‘It’s two snakes,’ she shouted. ‘Stop, stop, Suzie. Come and see.’

Suzie drew up, but would not go back.

‘They’re fighting, wrestling, killing one another,’ Sabine reported, walking closer, springing back as the live skein leaped like a single creature. ‘No, they’re fucking.’

‘It’s probably shedding its skin,’ Suzie suggested, when Sabine came alongside her.

‘No, there were too many, a whole knot of them. They were vipers, too. I saw the V mark on their heads: V for viper, V for victory.’ She began to chant, faster, as she put on a spurt and overtook Suzie. ‘V for viper, V for victory,’ she sang.

Suzie made no effort to catch her up, pedalling despondently behind. Sabine’s spirits had been manically cheerful since the parade at Lavallade two days earlier. She refused to admit this expedition as evidence of Madame Ariane’s innocence or good faith. They had been sitting in the winepress the previous evening to discuss the question of Madame Ariane and the major. ‘It’s nothing to do with the Resistance,’ she had explained to Suzie. ‘It’s sex, sex, sex.’