He should have made a stand then. After that, what followed was inevitable, as he was warned by the grim smiles of the older women who knew about these things. She was not going to marry suitably, they predicted; she would choose for herself and the man would be an outsider. Marriage was not in question for a long time. She completed her degree, then her agregation, coming second in her year, worked for a time in a school in Lille, discovered she was a hopeless disciplinarian with no gift for teaching, resigned, and returned to Paris, to write and to study.

With this background, how had she managed to meet and fall in love with a widowed, aristocratic, Catholic, conservative army officer, ten years her senior, with a seven-year-old daughter and no money? The psychologist might have made imaginative hypotheses about guilt and self-worth and father-fixations. In the furious reaction of the two families to the wedding in May 1939, her father had thought that she must have chosen Theo in order to cause the maximum uproar. The real reason for the marriage was obvious: passion. This was probably why both sets of relatives were so furious. All the proper considerations for the foundation of a family on which they were united, Protestant and Catholic alike: compatibility of fortune, status, religion and milieu, were being ignored in favour of overwhelming sexual attraction. The fuss was compounded by the haste of the marriage, driven by the sense of impending disaster. Wolff had made no objection and indeed he found his son-in-law an agreeable, well-read, amusing companion, although he seemed neither sufficiently intellectual nor sufficiently worldly for Ariane, to counterbalance his other qualities, or defects. They had had a civil ceremony only and Wolff had taken good care, in the light of all that militated against the success of the marriage, that Ariane’s property was well protected. What else could he do to save her in her happiness, he had thought with a parent’s helpless anguish, looking at her radiantly ugly face.

Where had it gone wrong? Perhaps all the disapproving cousins were correct; sexual passion was a bad basis for a marriage. At all events, a husband who pretends to die and disappears for four years can hardly expect to find his wife unchanged at the end of that time.

‘It’s certainly not your fault,’ Theo said.

‘Yes, let’s leave blame aside, shall we?’

‘Yes. It would be wisest, certainly.’

‘You want to see her?’

Theo surprised himself by saying, ‘I want to hear …’

‘It won’t be soon. She hardly talks, even to me. She only concentrates on the child.’

‘The child? Sabine?’

‘Sabine? Oh, your daughter. No. She’s still at Bonnemort with your aunts, didn’t you know?’

Theo’s relationship with his daughter was evidently not what Wolff’s had been with Ariane, if he did not know where she was living. ‘No, the other one, Suzie they called her.’

‘Who is Suzie?’

‘Don’t you know about her? No, how could you? So much happens in four years.’