Chapter Three

Theo was walking across the Concorde Bridge late at night, his head sunk forward between his shoulders, his eyes on the rhythmical reappearance of his toecaps. He stopped in mid-crossing to look upriver. The surface of the water, puckered by the light rain, was just visible, a greyer, liquid variant of the ambient darkness. He had made no progress in the two months since his visit to Bonnemort. The obvious course was to confront Ariane. Time and again he unscrewed his pen to begin a letter to her and found that no words would flow with the ink. Rage, disgust, indignation, injury still dominated his thoughts. They would have to meet; at the very least, justice demanded that Ariane be allowed a hearing. But not yet, not yet.

In the meantime, he had written long letters of condolence to Micheline and Florence, but had had no reply, nor had he expected any. It occurred to him that he should announce his return, his resurrection, to his daughter, and so he wrote to explain his disappearance four years ago, his eagerness to see her again, ‘when the war is over, as it soon must be.’ He wrote to his great-aunts; when time permitted, he would give himself the pleasure of visiting them at Bonnemort. From them he received letters of joy at his return from death and exile, with no reference to Ariane. No sign of any kind had come from his wife.

It was one of the commonest situations in the world, he told himself: the husband away at the wars, the wife finding solace for loneliness and hardship. It happened all the time, on every side, in every war, in all ages. But its being usual did not make it forgivable. This was the result of marrying someone he hardly knew, from an alien background. It could only lead to disaster, as his family and friends had warned him at the time. She was everything he was not: urban, Protestant and rich. He would have said, until he met her, that she was everything he disliked in a woman.

When he left for London in July 1940, they had been married for a year, and had not lived together since the start of the war in September ’39. The war that had separated them had originally brought them together. They had met in ’38, just after Munich, in that odd period when, for an instant, those holding opposing political views were united in shame. He had been prepared for war, at last, and was infuriated at having it torn away from him, with a dishonourable peace offered as a triumphant alternative. His reaction cut him off from many of his friends, whose passionate relief he could not share.

‘Life’s so simple for you, Theo,’ they said, forgetting, as he often did himself, his daughter’s existence. ‘You have no family, no responsibilities. You’re just a soldier.’

One evening that autumn at a dinner of anti-Munich sentiment, he joined a group of people who would never normally have met around a table, to lament and foretell disaster. There he had met Ariane Wolff.