‘She said that Henri was in the same network as her husband.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Micheline, please tell me about what you did in the Resistance.’

She was working her way back along the lower row, bending to peer inside the hutches. ‘Look out for that one, it’s the buck. He has a nasty kick. It wasn’t every day, you know. We had the farm to run.’

‘How did Henri get involved?’ That seemed to him now almost the most interesting question.

‘I suppose Madame persuaded him.’

‘Madame?’

‘Madame your wife. Our first guest was a friend of hers, a communist, and she turned to the doctor for help.’

They’d got into it without realising, or at least she had. Henri perhaps knew better what he was doing. He used to have long talks with Madame about the war and the Armistice and what it all meant. But for Micheline, looking after the communist was no different from looking after the old ladies, or Madame, or Sabine, or her sons and the farm workers. The communist, Gauthier he was called, stayed the longest, at least a month before they’d worked out a way for him to leave. He’d turned up just before Christmas in 1940 and they’d hidden him on the top floor of the house. He had seemed happy enough up there, with his papers and all the books Madame Ariane gave him. He’d been professor, Madame Ariane told her, who’d been sacked from his job by the Marshal for being a communist. He used to chat when she brought him his food and he’d been a pleasant enough fellow, though he sometimes made remarks about Madame Ariane being so rich, as if he thought she, Micheline, ought to agree with him. She hadn’t liked that. He was supposed to be a friend of Madame’s, after all. Of course it wasn’t just a question of hiding them, the runaways. They had to be moved on; they had to have papers. She knew that Henri helped to organise all that with the doctor. There was even an arms drop early on. Henri was very excited about it. He disappeared for two days and when he came back, riding in on a lorry by night, he brought guns with him. She had seen them, maybe a hundred or so English Bren guns, when she’d helped him and Madame store them down in the natural caves which were hollowed out of the rocky face of the cliff below the house. For centuries these had been used as barns and had been equipped with heavy wooden doors to keep out the weather. They’d carried them all through the night and hidden them in the storerooms where the Germans had lived last summer. But the guns had gone by then. That was the big event of the first two years of the war. There was no one else doing it then, at least round here. That’s where the trouble began, when the other groups formed up. But that was later.