Looking back, she saw that the major had chosen his victim from the start, from the moment that he forced her to dine with him, to cut up his food. She had felt him watching her when he was at Bonnemort. Although the family and the troops were forbidden to enter one another’s zones of the house and grounds, the major did not apply the prohibition to himself. He did not actually penetrate the family’s rooms upstairs in the tower, but he roamed freely in other parts of the house. She came across him in the entrance hall, in the farmyard, in the stables. She felt besieged; she hesitated to leave the sitting room; she scanned the garden from the window before going outside.

He finally caught her in the stables early one evening. She could still feel the pleasant chill on her skin, damp from the heat of her ride, as she stepped into the dimness of the barn out of the evening sun. She had walked through the storeroom to the tack room beyond when she heard the sound of a boot on the rock floor. The rivulet of sweat on her back turned to a runnel of ice. She was trapped. She gave no sign of having heard him, hanging up the bridle and humping the saddle onto its pole.

The footsteps rang loudly, on their deliberate approach. She retreated to the furthest end of the room and remained there, frozen like a rabbit in the grass waiting to leap out in a desperate, hopeless run for life. She never made that leap. She didn’t even try. Over and over again, afterwards, she asked herself why she had done nothing, why she had not dodged, run, scuffled, swung her fist. What good was all her resistance if she had not resisted then? She sometimes told herself it was fear: for herself, for the aunts, for the children, above all for Suzie. It was true that she had been afraid; she was always afraid. But during those seconds when action was demanded, it was not calculation of fear and consequences that held her back. It was a recognition of, a submission to, overwhelming power. Every time the memory of that first encounter forced itself upon her, she tried to replay it as it should have been played.

He walked inexorably towards her, blocking her against the wall. Took her neck in his good hand. Kissed her. His face, roughly bearded, luminously pale, with a light sheen of sweat and a strange, sharp smell, like a tainted apple.

She could perhaps tell Theo about that. It was bad enough, but such things happen in war. Occupiers have powers to which the defeated have to submit. What she would never admit to him was the effect that those powers had had on her. She wished she could forget it herself.

She remembered the night of the thunderstorm. She hadn’t been able to sleep. She hadn’t even gone to bed and finally, to escape from the oppressive stuffiness of the house, she had walked outside, sat down on the terrace to smoke a cigarette that she had made of Micheline’s dried herbs. She had inhaled the odd fragrance, listening to the dry boom of the thunder, like distant artillery, watching the curtains of lightning in the sky over the hills to the south. She knew why she had chosen to sit in the German zone of the garden. She could explain it as defiance: by sitting there at night she was recovering her own property, challenging the major’s right to take it from her. In truth the defiance was of another order: defiance of common sense, of caution and of right behaviour. To be there was an invitation, which he accepted.