‘Yes.’

‘Ah, that takes longer. Up at Bonnemort, that’s where it began, early on. You know the mayor here?’ he asked, leaning forward to pour more tea.

Theo had by now realised that he had found a raconteur. This was probably going to take a long time, but he would get a full story.

‘Not this one now, Vernhes; the old one, Gargaud,’ Nikola continued. ‘He was Petainist through and through. Me, I’m French now. I got my citizenship in thirty-four. But these French quarrels, they mean nothing to me. I’m waiting for Russia to be put right. Gargaud was all for the Marshal and so your family were already against him. I knew what was going on sooner than the others down there in the village. Me, I can tell a Russian Jew when I see one. And I can tell a Polish Jew, too. You know how I can tell? He looks Russian. And the Pole, he looks Polish. Round here they think everyone is foreign. You could come from anywhere, Paris, Marseilles, even Toulouse and you’re still foreign. So when I see a Polish woman and two kids walking up the track to Bonnemort in April 1941, I knew what I was seeing. So that’s when it began.’

He sucked the last of the plum jam off his spoon, turning the bowl face downwards on his tongue like a child, relishing his story.

‘But I wasn’t involved then. It wasn’t until June forty-one that I went along to Henri and said, I know you’re up to something and I want to be in it. That was when Hitler invaded Russia,’ he added helpfully, in case Theo had missed what was happening in Europe as well as at Bonnemort. ‘Now, I don’t like that bastard who’s in charge in Russia. If you ask me, there’s nothing to choose between Stalin and Hitler. But I fought the Germans in the first war, and I wasn’t going to put up with the buggers invading my country without doing something about it. You don’t want to hear this stuff about me,’ he said, now that he had finished talking about himself, ‘but I’m just telling you how I joined the Resistance. June forty-one it was, when Henri put me on to Dr Maniotte. So this is the first Resistance group in Lepech. We’re all legal, quiet, steady. We look after communists and Jews. We make false papers. We keep in contact with others.

‘Now the second group begins. I don’t know when exactly, but by the end of forty-two there was a communist group here. They weren’t locals, mostly town people, boys from far away: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Racines. Group Noix, they called themselves, hard nuts. Communists.’

Suddenly, with terrible noise and violence, he snorted, hawked, chewed his phlegm for a moment and spat with vicious accuracy into the flames, which hissed at him in reply, like a disturbed viper.

‘Did the two groups co-operate at all?’ Theo asked.

Nikola leaned back in his chair and laughed, so that Theo could see his tongue and throat, glistening red against his dark beard. ‘Co-operate? You’re a Frenchman and an army man and you ask if they co-operated? I don’t know how you professional soldiers make an army out of the French. You do, but God knows how. Russians are sheep: they are driven to do everything together. The English are geese: their instincts tell them all to do the same thing at the same time. The Germans are dogs: they obey their master. But the French! Every one of them is an individualist who decides for himself whether to get up in the morning. No, they didn’t co-operate. Don’t tell me you in London thought they would co-operate?’