‘And what did you see?’

She was only whispering, her strength to shout gone, yet her words were full of venom. ‘They were fucking, fucking.’

As she said it she sobbed. She knew that she had given away a source of power. She endlessly had lived the memory, rehearsed that curious amalgam of agonised sounds in which pain was wrung out with an obsessive pleasure. She had thought that he of all people would understand the significance of what she had heard, but all he wanted to know was when, where, how.

‘Did you see them together often?’ he demanded. ‘Did you hear what they said?’

She lay exhausted on the sodden ground, resigned to telling him. ‘I heard them speaking, but they used German so I didn’t understand. Madame Ariane spoke good German. That’s why he liked her. It wasn’t like yours, with lots of French words in it.’

In part, she had meant to placate him, by complimenting him on his bad German. In part, she wanted to threaten him, by hinting at how much more she had seen. The next blow came without warning. He did not bother to check whether he was unobserved, for they were well away from the village now, the forest closing around the road, arching above it to shut out even the sky.

‘How do you know how well I speak German?’

She wanted to retract then, all of it, for she saw that the patterns of the past were broken and she could not guess what he would do next. His fury was beyond reason. ‘I don’t, really …’

‘Yes, you do. You just said I spoke bad German. There’s only one way you could know that. You spied on me too, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘You do know.’

The punishment for knowing would be more severe than it ever was in class for not knowing. She had been tricked. She should have kept it to herself, as one of her own treasures. And it did her no good; she gained nothing from having pleased him with the story; it had not mitigated his fury. She put up her arm to protect her face, and heard it crack under the blow from his stick.

‘Do you remember,’ she said to Suzie, ‘the time when he was there with the major? The major had his gun out and we thought he had captured him. But he hadn’t. They were talking together in German. You remember that? It was true, wasn’t it?’

Chapter Thirty-two

Unable to face lunch, Theo asked for a bowl of soup on a tray in the library. As he ate, his eye fell on Sabine’s jigsaw on its board, still uncompleted. It was difficult to imagine in what circumstances Sabine had told Vernhes about Ariane and the major. The fact that, according to his wife, Sabine hated her, added another layer of unreliablity to the web of stories. Had Vernhes accepted in good faith a malicious tale fabricated by Sabine?