Vernhes had been taking two classes at once, for history, for which subject he would dictate the topic for the week and check their exercise books for spelling errors. This was his republican method of dealing with the Vichy curriculum, her stepmother had commented, not unsympathetically, when Sabine had complained of the boredom of it. Sabine wrote swiftly and then watched him as he repeated the phrase and waited for the slower pupils, their tongues projecting from between their lips, their pens grasped tightly in their fists, to finish. He read on, but she did not hear. He stood above them very upright, as still as a hovering buzzard, his eyes grey behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. He caught her eye and held her gaze.

‘What was the last phrase, Sabine?’ he asked gently. She jumped, looking hastily at her copy.

‘… led to defeat, full stop,’ she read from the bottom of the page.

He moved forward menacingly. ‘What have you been doing that you have been so left behind? Marie-Jose, please repeat, so that Sabine can catch up with us. Sabine, wait behind at the end of the afternoon for your punishment.’

‘Do you miss your friend?’ Theo asked. He searched for the child’s name. ‘Suzie. It must have been nice having a companion.’

‘No,’ said Sabine, decidedly. ‘I liked it when she was here, but she taught me bad things.’ She was looking away from him, at the rooftops below them. ‘I’m glad she’s gone.’

Theo raised the mallet and struck the wedge, driving it deeper into the circle of wood. ‘I’m surprised. I thought you were supposed to be good friends.’

‘We were. But things happen to change your mind. Anyway, she’s Jewish.’

The cylinder of tree trunk that he was working on suddenly sprang apart, and the metal wedge flew out. ‘Watch it. Stand back.’

‘She was Jewish, was she?’ he said, half to himself. He wondered why he had not guessed at once when he heard Pascal Wolff’s story.

Sabine bent to gather up the split logs.

‘Did you know she was Jewish?’ her father asked her. ‘She was in hiding, was she?’

Sabine hesitated. ‘We all knew, in the end, after the Germans had gone. Your wife told us.’

He ignored the rudeness of her reference to Ariane. She kicked the log pile, stubbing her boot against it repeatedly. ‘The sisters used to say that the Jews were the killers of Christ and we must pray for their conversion. And Sister Barbe once told me …’

Theo tapped the wedge into the next log, gently at first. He supposed that his marriage to Ariane must have affected his views more than he realised. He was surprised how shocked he was to hear what his daughter was saying. Yet it was no more than he had been accustomed to accepting, articulated less childishly, in remarks made by fellow officers. He remembered at their second meeting, at the lunch for her friend the Socialist member of Parliament, Ariane had been lighting a cigarette, jutting her chin forward to meet the proffered light and saying, ‘We Dreyfusards …’ And he recognised then that he had deserted his own kind, who could never admit that Dreyfus was other than a traitor simply because he was a Jew.