Sabine looked after her in fury. ‘She’s not going to Racines. She never wears that suit to go to Racines. Where’s she going?’ She led the way into the forest in a brooding silence.

Suzie was soon absorbed in her task. Although she had never got over the foreignness of the countryside, and disliked the violence of animal existence, she liked the vegetable side of country life. She was a willing gardener, patiently watering the rows of salads, carrots, leeks and onions, carrying her watering can from the sink or the water-butt to the kitchen garden. She patrolled the orchard throughout the summer watching the fruit ripen until the moment came to gather it, the cherries in July, the peaches in August, the apples in September, the quinces in October. She looked forward to the grape harvest in September and the walnuts in November.

She was particularly good at mushrooming, which she had learned with Papa, walking in the woods near Paris when she was a little girl, reciting the Latin name for each variety they found. He had taught her the landscape and season for each variety: open grassland for field mushrooms with their tender pinky-brown gills; pine woods for morels with their reticulated, bulbous heads; mixed woodland for the sinister, black horns of plenty, and open woodland for prized ceps, with their velvety surface and spongy underside. She had a quick eye and could single out the fungi under the leaves, needles and ivy of the forest floor.

That morning her basket was soon covered with the fat brown caps of ceps. She could hear Sabine moving behind her some distance away, following their customary route. When they turned for home, Sabine’s basket was almost empty. Suzie made no protest as Sabine put her hand into her full basket and transferred some to her own.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Sabine said. ‘We could poison her.’

‘What do you mean?’ She knew quite well what Sabine meant.

‘With mushrooms. Listen, it’s a wonderful idea. No one would ever know.’

‘But why?’

‘We go mushrooming and gather all the worst ones especially for her. We make a ragout, two ragouts, one for her, one for the rest of us. We all eat the mushrooms. She’s ill; we’re well.’

‘But she might die. Some of them are very powerful.’

‘Of course she’ll die. That’s the point. It’s the best way of killing her.’

Sabine became a person obsessed. She talked about her plan whenever she and Suzie were alone, to the exclusion of all other topics, repeating herself single-mindedly. She spent unaccustomed hours in the library, studying the engravings in an old book on fungi, noting the most lethal types.

‘The problem,’ she complained, ‘is that it gives the shape but not the colour. You’ll have to help me, because you’re much better at recognising them than me.’

Suzie, too, was busy, planning her counter-coup. She could not believe that Sabine would carry out her idea, but she could not be sure. If Sabine really made a lethal stew of mushrooms, she, Suzie, would have to tell Micheline that she was afraid she had made a mistake with one of her ceps and then the whole lot would be thrown away. Or she would take Madame Ariane’s dish and drop it on the floor.