‘You know a great deal about him.’

‘I know even more, if you’d care to hear it. I know about his mother and sisters, his school friends, about his neighbours, the Jewish family whom he denounced, and about his war in the East. I sat night after night watching him and the lieutenant eat and drink and talk. You learn a lot that way.’

‘Was he happy to be in France, sitting at your table, eating your food?’

‘No. The lieutenant was. He was glad of the respite. He judged that the time would come again for fighting and he was happy to wait for it. The major was humiliated to be left with the job of rounding up terrorists when his regiment was at the front in Normandy. He was an arrogant, angry, impatient man.’ Her tone was detached, without hatred or affection. ‘I sat with them every evening but I didn’t eat. Did they tell you that? It was a stupid idea. Someone, one of the refugees from Paris, left me a copy of Vercors’ novel The Silence of the Sea. I only remembered it after they had arrived, and I realised that not only had I spoken to them, I had used their language. I had failed to meet the standard of resistance from the first moment. So although I spoke to them, I wouldn’t eat with them. It wasn’t a very good idea, but it was all I could think of.’

‘How did they take it?’

‘Oh, the major used it to draw a little lesson on French decadence. He was a perverse idealist. I never saw his ideals in action, but I heard enough about duty, faith and honour. He functioned in an abstract universe, because in reality he was entirely without awareness of others. Most people were outside the circle in which his idealism operated, so nothing was due to them. He spoke of Jews and Slavs as if they were diseases to be wiped out to cleanse the world. We French did not quite come into that category, although our persistence in not understanding what was good for us exasperated him. When I think about what he did at Lepech, shooting Henri, hanging the other maquisards, I realise that he was applying a Russian solution to a French problem. It’s what they did all the time over there.’

‘Did you see him again, after he told you they were leaving?’

She sighed, a resigned release of air that at last they had reached the point when she had to tell.

‘Yes, but – you must believe me – not alive.’

‘Tell me what happened, exactly what happened,’ he repeated. ‘How did you find him? Was he lying in the courtyard where Petignat found him?’ They were walking again, blindly, simply patrolling up and down the avenues of walnut trees.

‘No, no he wasn’t.’ She spoke slowly, forcing herself to explain. ‘We put him there.’

‘Why did you move him? What was the point?’