Sabine was frowning too. The trouble with Suzie was that she was almost simple about some matters. She was a good companion. Life had improved enormously since her arrival. Sabine now liked Bonnemort better than either the convent or the village school. But Suzie refused to comprehend certain things, even when they were explained to her. Sabine knew what was happening, not because of anything they had seen, although they had seen enough: they had seen him take her hair, tugging it to pull her round to kiss her, for example. Suzie was right, he was violent and threatening, but Sabine couldn’t make Suzie understand that that was sex. Nor did Suzie have any sense of atmosphere. Sabine remembered at the convent that one of the nuns, Sister Cecile, who had wide blue eyes and a mole on her upper lip from which a single black hair grew, had a crush on Antoinette. Sabine had never known what, if anything, had ever taken place, for she had been too little and too despised to have been informed. Yet she remembered the tension that radiated from each of them. It had been so palpable that Sabine could smell it in the air. And it was the same now at Bonnemort. Suzie couldn’t see or smell or understand anything.

She dropped her hands into her lap and said, ‘I long to be grown up. I can’t wait. Eighteen is old enough. In five years’ time I shall be grown up.’

Suzie could not imagine five years. Would the war still be going on? Or would it all be over and Maman and Papa back from wherever they had been taken? When she thought about her family it was always in the past, so that when she visualised the future, normal development reversed itself and she felt herself shrinking. She hoped that in five years’ time she would be a little girl again, living with Maman and Papa and Rahel in Paris.

‘Why?’ she asked, with real curiosity. ‘What’s so good about being grown up?’

‘You never understand anything,’ Sabine spoke venomously. ‘I want to be grown up so I can have power over other people. That’s what being adult means. When you are a child, people can do things to you, things you don’t want, things that hurt. When I grow up, it’ll be my turn.’

Suzie made no comment, although she pondered what Sabine had said. It was true that people did things to you that you didn’t want, but they did them to Maman and Papa, too, and Madame Ariane, so having things done to you wasn’t a question of being a child. And Sabine had quite enough power already. How much more could she want?

Late one afternoon Sabine was at the sitting-room window watching Madame Ariane leave on horseback, leaning down and lifting the saddle flap to check the girth as she rode out of the farmyard. No sooner had she seen her go than she heard the motor of the major’s car start up in the courtyard. She ran over to the window on the other side of the room.