The walk home, about four kilometres through the dark woods with a torch borrowed from Nikola to guide him along the track, had not cleared his head enough to draw any conclusions from the massive Russian epic to which he had just been subjected. The problem lay in separating the significant from the trivial, which returned to his mind with distracting vividness. He had entered their bedroom as quietly as he could. The fire was a crumble of ash. Ariane was asleep with a lamp still burning. She woke up, instantly alert.

‘Theo, where have you been?’

‘I couldn’t let you know. No telephone. With Nikola.’

‘Have you been drinking? Theo, you’re drunk.’

He had fallen into bed in a haze of spirits, having succeeded in removing his clothes, but without any thought of washing.

‘I hope I am not so drunk that I forget everything in the morning.’

‘Forget what?’

But he was already on the edge of a heavy alcoholic slumber and did not reply.

When he woke, the strength of the light penetrating his crusted eyelids told him that it was already mid-morning. The gilded clock in front of the mirror confirmed this by striking eleven. He lifted his head from the pillow and with a groan allowed it to fall back. He closed his eyes again. He had a vision of Nikola out in the wind, chopping his wood, shrugging off the effects of vodka as if it had been no more than water.

The Russian was such an odd mixture of prejudice, shrewdness and emotion that it was hard to interpret his evidence with proper Gallic reason and balance. He must ask Ariane what she made of him.

He went to the kitchen for a bowl of ersatz coffee. Micheline glanced at him and went to her cupboard of preserves.

‘I’ll make my special receipt for what’s wrong with you.’

‘No, thank you, Micheline. I’m not strong enough for it yet. Chicory will be enough.’

‘This will do you much more good.’

She made him drink several glasses of water while she concocted a mixture of raw eggs, beaten with walnut spirits and a ladleful of chicken stock. To his surprise, twenty minutes later he began to feel a little better. He remained seated peacefully in the ladder-backed chair by the fire, watching Micheline moving round the kitchen preparing lunch. She did not talk and neither did he. As his head eased, he thought about the problem of Sabine.

The story that he had heard last night from Nikola appeared to have nothing to do with what had happened to his daughter. Yet he wondered whether a link between the two events, the death of Henri and the attack on the child, might not emerge. When you scraped the surface, you exposed a tissue of conflicts far more complex than you expected.

The kitchen door opened and Florence entered. ‘The schoolmaster’s here. I’ve just lit the fire in the library, so I put him in there. Shall I tell Madame Ariane, or will you see him?’