Sabine de Cazalle was gathering up her raincoat and bag.

‘We’re being called,’ she said, glad to escape from this outburst of inexplicable emotion.

Rachel Oppenheim said, ‘May I ask if we can make an exchange of seats and sit together for the journey. I have so much I want to ask you.’ She was shocked by Sabine’s refusal to recognise her. Not to acknowledge her in the present was understandable; she herself would not have known Sabine. But to deny the past was another matter.

Sabine hid her reluctance and said with a show of interest, ‘Yes, why not. You can tell me what you recall about Bonnemort in the old days. I have to say, I have an awful memory.’

When they were seated in the narrow, uncomfortable cabin of the Concorde, a glass of champagne in front of each of them, Sabine said, ‘I do now dimly remember that for a while I used to share my lessons with another girl. Suzie, it must have been Suzie. So that was you. I had a very erratic education. I went to a convent before the war, to the village school at Bonnemort, and then a lycee in Paris. There was a short time when I was taught by my stepmother and my aunts.’

‘I remember your aunts very well, Madame de Cazalle and Madame Veyrines, one fat, one thin. And Micheline and Florence. I learned to cook from Micheline.’

‘You did know Bonnemort.’

‘Did you think I was making it up?’

‘No, no, I was simply marvelling at your powers of recall. My own memories of my childhood are very hazy. For me the war was so uneventful that I hardly knew it was happening. I can’t remember a single dramatic incident connected with it. Well, in the depths of the French countryside I suppose it’s not surprising.’

‘I remember everything.’

‘I suppose for you the whole thing was so traumatic.’

‘Yes and no. I lived in fear the whole time, but the real trauma came afterwards, when I understood what had happened to my parents. But even in the depths of the French countryside, the house was occupied by the SS for a time. You don’t remember that? You don’t remember the German major?’

She stopped speaking and took a large mouthful of champagne. She had never before mentioned the major to anyone, not even during her long analysis. The memory of the death of Lou Moussou had lived with her for years, half-suppressed, reviving in her nightmares, making her sweat and cry out until she woke. She had practised forgetting with the rigour of a religious fanatic and for months at a time the past had been submerged by the present and the real. Then without warning it would rise through the waters, to surface in the cry of her own child waking her in the night, or in a dream of drowning in a fountain of blood. Her approach elicited no response.

‘No, not at all,’ Sabine said. ‘Were we really occupied? I don’t remember Ariane speaking of it either. Of course, my experience was the opposite of yours. All through the war I thought my father was dead, then he turned up when it was over, alive again. I never had a good relationship with my father. Correction, I never really had any relationship with my father, so his absence didn’t really affect me much. My stepmother on the other hand was very important to me.’