One of the canaries, which had been flying about the darkening room from time to time, suddenly landed on Nikola’s head. He reached up and clasped it in his huge hand, absently stroking its exotic feathers while it grasped his fingers as if they were twigs on a tree.

‘God knows if it would have worked. I doubt it. And if it had, we might have been carved up like the guys on the Vercors plateau in July. So we, or some of us, were saved by what happened. Next morning, the SS rolled into Bonnemort.’

Chapter Twenty-seven

Nikola tossed the bird into the air. ‘We need food. We need drink. We need wood. We still have a long way to go. That is, if you want to hear the whole story?’

‘Of course,’ said Theo.

As Nikola had talked the light had gone and the fire had fallen in. The Russian disappeared, still talking, shouting from different points around the house.

‘I come from Orel, a small town between Moscow and Kharkov, you know it? My parents were small shopkeepers, but we had a dacha, two hours’ cart ride out of town. I was born Nikolai Nikolaievich Dekanozovochenko. When I came to France, they don’t use patronymics and they couldn’t pronounce Dekanozovochenko, so they call me Mr Nikola.’

He was outside now, clapping the shutters closed the length of the house, re-entering by the front door, his beard pearled with moisture. ‘A bugger of a night.’

Theo had given up hope of letting Ariane know where he had gone. ‘How did a boy from Orel arrive in Lepech Perdrissou?’ he asked.

‘I was called up into the Tsarist army in the last war. When the Revolution came, I was all for it, but the Bolsheviks didn’t approve of shopkeepers’ sons: class enemy, I was. So then I joined the Whites, and fought against the Reds instead. We damn near won, for a time. But it wasn’t to be and I had to leave my homeland, like you did. You’re back after four years and I’m still waiting.’

He threw logs on the fire and stacked more beside the hearth. From the cupboard he took out two small glasses and a stoppered wine bottle. The liquid, like oily water, undoubtedly home-brewed, slid silkily into the glasses. With an air of formality that contrasted with their tousled surroundings, Nikola handed Theo his glass, and held up his own, looking him directly in the eye.

‘Nasdrovie,’ he said. ‘Sante,’ and threw the spirit down his throat, refilling his glass at once. ‘Now where were we?’

Not until much later, when he had recovered from that night of drinking, a night such as he had never before experienced, even in a Scottish mess on Scapa Flow, did Theo ask himself what the Russian did not tell him that evening. In the inundating flow of words, Nikola appeared so overwhelmingly open, with the solitary man’s eagerness to talk, that it did not occur to Theo that he might be holding details back, from discretion or cunning or embarrassment. Each event recounted seemed to burst out of him under pressure, without a filter. But when he replayed his memory of the evening, Theo recalled, drink after drink, the clear shrewdness of the childlike pale blue eyes.