In the summer of ’39 they had spent their honeymoon here. They had ridden for miles over the hilltop pastures, through the chestnut and oak woods, while he persuaded her that this would be the place for her to come if, or when, war broke out. He never expected her to obey orders like a good army wife; she was too used to her independence. She would live at Bonnemort, or not, as she pleased. And it must have pleased her, for although she went there reluctantly in September ’39, she had stayed. During the phoney war she had sent for her horses and with her car, driver and maid she had established a life of urbs in run. Her chauffeur was soon called up, and the maid, terrified by the filth and savagery of country life, left within weeks. Yet Ariane had remained.

He had taken the precaution of phoning Micheline to warn her of his arrival. The aunts, with Sabine in attendance, waited to greet him beside the fire in the library. As he embraced them, he saw how much they had changed. A thousand years old when he was a small boy, they had, if anything, grown younger as he grew up. Now he realised that Madame Veyrines, Aunt Odette, must be over eighty, and her sister-in-law, Madame de Cazalle, Aunt Marguerite, in her mid-seventies. Although he always thought of them as a pair, ‘the aunts’, they were in truth very different both physically and in character.

Aunt Odette, his grandfather’s sister, was a gentle, accommodating woman with white hair ingeniously constructed into a roll around her head. She had the figure of a feather pillow, sagging and downy; the skin of her cheek as he kissed it had the texture of cashmere, infinitely soft and faintly furred. Aunt Marguerite, Madame de Cazalle, widow of his grandfather’s brother, Geoffroi, was thin and fragile with cropped iron-grey hair and a gentle face, which belied her energetic and managing disposition.

And Sabine was unrecognisable. He had last seen her at Easter 1940, when he had visited her at her convent. She had been a withdrawn and unattractive child, rejecting his inexperienced attempts at arousing her interest. Now she was tall, already developing and obviously uncomfortable with her new body, lumpily crouching by the fire.

His family had always dealt with facts that they did not like by ignoring them. As he had expected, they made no mention of his delay in coming to visit them, nor of the absence of his wife. What happened here? Tell me about my wife, he wanted to say. He could ask the question and knew that they would not be able to reply. The reticence of good manners was as difficult to break through as the deliberate refusal to speak of the political prisoner. He imagined their skulls cracked open to his view, like a walnut shell, to reveal the intricate whorls of the nut inside. But to see inside the shell would not reveal what the brain knew. That was secreted in another form, like the taste of the nut, which could not be sensed by the eye.