‘What happened to the doctor?’

‘He was arrested a long time ago, September forty-three it would have been. She’ll tell you. She’s found it hard alone.’

‘I’ll ride over this morning.’

His route led him through the forest. On the opposite ridge Lepech Perdrissou sat on its hilltop around its grassy square, gardens and orchards descending the slopes, cut up by neat stone walls, woodsmoke wavering upwards in the silver air of the early morning. It looked like an illustration from Perrault’s Fairy Tales.

After ringing and knocking and receiving no reply, he walked around the house to the back door which was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing socks rolled at her ankles, a shapeless cardigan and an apron. In his instant of non-recognition, Theo almost made the unforgivable error, but somewhere in the collapsed face a spark of the appealing Madame Maniotte of five years ago remained and he did not ask for her mistress. He greeted her correctly.

She was flustered, ashamed of her dress, her house. ‘Oh, Colonel, I didn’t know …’ She blocked his way, hanging onto the door.

In London they had had no time for pretension under the bombs. Don’t you know there’s a war on? those sarcastic English voices used to demand. He was impatient of the demands of gentility now. ‘I came to offer my condolences, Madame.’

Her mouth twitched, but she was long past tears.

‘May I come in?’ he insisted.

She submitted. ‘You’ll have to come in here, it’s too cold anywhere else.’

They sat in the kitchen, amid an intimate domesticity, the children’s shirts hanging on a clothes horse in front of the stove where the iron was heating, the smell of laundry in their nostrils.

‘It all began with you, really. He helped you leave for England, and then he just carried on, helping others do the same. There was always someone who needed him, even in 1940 before anyone else was a resistant.’ Her tone told him what she thought of such activity. ‘I never liked it.’

The truth was she’d never liked Colonel de Cazalle, either. She’d been happy enough to have him join their tennis parties on summer weekends. In the segregated worlds of the French provinces, the gentry did not often mix with the doctor and the lawyer and the dentist, the notables of the local towns. But the social achievement was the only advantage of his presence, as far as she was concerned. He had a dry humour, made odd remarks. He was like a rebel within the citadel. Not that he ever discussed politics or religion with her, but she was certain that his views were not what they should be. When he remarried it was even worse. His new wife was rich, arrogant, far grander than he ever was, with her cars and her clothes and her furs. And who was she after all? Just the daughter of a businessman, who was a Protestant, or even a Jew, and probably a freemason into the bargain.