His father-in-law had aged by more than the four years that had passed. His face was grooved rather than wrinkled, and these crevasses had deepened; the faintly pigmented skin around his eyes had darkened in contrast with his pale cheeks. The silver hair smoothed back from his high forehead was sparser, but his detached, observant humour remained.

Neither of them knew how to broach the subject of Ariane.

‘Wonderful news about Strasbourg,’ Pascal Wolff said. Alsace had been liberated by General Leclerc two days earlier.

‘Yes, we should drive them out of France completely in the next month or so.’

The waiter slapped down in front of them two plates: a stew of beans and cabbage. Pascal Wolff picked up his fork and spoke quickly, as if to get it over. ‘You want to know about Ariane.’

‘Yes.’

‘She won’t see you.’

‘Oh.’ This did not surprise him.

‘I didn’t tell her I was meeting you today.’

‘She’s here, in Paris?’

‘For the last two months. Didn’t you know? She’s living with me.’

‘No. I had no way of knowing.’

Silence. Finally Wolff spoke. ‘I don’t know what happened down there. I don’t ask. She certainly won’t tell me. I don’t know what happened between the two of you. All I can say is she is my daughter. I have to support her.’

‘How is she?’

‘Not well. She doesn’t eat and she doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t talk. I’ve tried to send her somewhere out of the war, where she can have a complete rest and recover her equilibrium. She won’t go. I’ve called the doctor. She won’t see him. I’ve called a psychologist. She won’t see him either. Good thing. He would say it was all my fault.’

Perhaps it was all his fault. He had made Ariane his companion and friend since she was five years old, when her mother died. Wolff had little need for the company of women. His sense of self-esteem needed no reinforcement from their admiration and he was too busy to require their skills of making time pass pleasantly. He had married the daughter of a Protestant banking family and handed over to her the care of running their houses and organising their domestic life. When she died, he rapidly discovered that these tasks could be as well fulfilled by good staff and there was really no need for a wife. A year or so after her death, he began a discreet liaison, and continued it for many years, with the widow of an old friend who had no wish to remarry because of the terms of her husband’s will. The relationship, paradoxically intermittent and passionate, suited them both. Nothing about his chilly personality or in his rationally ordered life suggested that he would be a doting father, yet Ariane became more and more necessary to him as she grew older.

He loved her all the more because, unlike her mother, she was not beautiful. She was dark, like him, with heavy eyebrows, a prominent nose, a purposeful chin. Large, both in height and strong build, she was full of energy. She rode and shot and skied and sailed, without fatigue. She was clever, too, and just as with all sports she had a passion to win, so at school she had a drive to excel. She was always among the first in the class and after her baccalaureat, instead of doing what the daughters of all his friends did: tea parties, good works, balls and marriage, all within the tight circle of the Protestant haute bourgeoisie, she entered the Ecole Normale Superieure.