‘You didn’t tell him about … what we saw in the winepress?’

‘You mean her and the major?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sabine, how could you?’

‘It’s true.’

‘You shouldn’t have done.’

Suzie had been so deeply revolted by the sounds they had heard that she had difficulty in recalling the memory now. What they saw must have meant what Sabine said it meant. She could only remember the dust in her nostrils and under her eyelids, the mist of cobwebs between the beams, the terrible sounds, the hoarse gasping of Lou Moussou struggling to die.

‘But it’s the truth!’

They had been walking along the path of the walls of Lepech Perdrissou. It was six in the evening. Above them in the falling darkness the plane trees held out their gnarled lopped branches like lepers’ hands, amputated and twisted. She had been laughing, dancing along sideways, relishing the memory of that scene, grotesque and anguished, which proved what she knew instinctively: that love was pain. He had often asked her before, ‘Did you ever see them alone together?’ She had understood exactly what he wanted to know and had evaded his questions with vague and irrelevant answers. She did not know why she told him then, when she had kept silent before.

She began to sing a playground song, one she had heard in the mouths of the big boys.

‘It’s only natural, after all,

To take a girl …’

She left the quatrain unfinished, but he had heard those words too, filtering through the open windows of the classroom while he marked books during the recess. Without making any effort to pursue her, he waited until she was within reach to catch her wrist.

‘So you did. You saw them together?’

She pulled away, but his grasp did not relax, and she continued to sing, turning her head away from him.

‘It’s only natural, after all …’

They had already reached the grassy mounds that marked the old gates and they walked between them, taking the road past the walled orchards that surrounded the town. His glance swept the dark and empty road before he struck her, hard. She swerved just in time and the blow caught her, not on the side of the head, which had been his target, but on the neck. She shrieked and swung to the ground, still held at the wrist. Scrambling up, like a dog on a leash, she received the next blow of his closed fist square on the cheek. Involuntary tears sprang to her eyes.

‘Why do you want to know?’ she cried, defiantly. ‘What’s it to you what I saw or what they did?’

At this stage his actions were still familiar, the punishment of a impertinent student. It was she who broke the pattern, who did not submit as she was supposed to do. It was long past that point when she was on the ground with him crouched over her that she said, at last, ‘Yes, I saw them together, walking together, talking together. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it? So now I’ve said it,’ devaluing her confession as she made it. He had not let go of the stick that he had picked up earlier, but his voice was calm, gentle.