She said to the driver, with gestures, ‘Turn there, it’s quicker.’

He had shrugged and pointed to the car leading the way. When they came to the village, she knew what to do. She put her head down between her knees, so that no one could see her. In the truck they just laughed and the sergeant put his elbow on her back, as if she were an armrest. She could see how, if you let yourself talk to them, you could quite soon be laughing and joking with them, like with any group of lads.

In the car in front Madame hadn’t flinched. She just sat upright, seen by everyone, riding in her own car with the German officer. When they arrived home, she didn’t speak to the major, but she was angry with the lieutenant. Florence didn’t understand what she was saying, of course, but she could see that he wasn’t annoyed. He replied to her and all the soldiers laughed, as they unloaded their bikes.

‘So I’m sure it wasn’t what you think.’

‘What do you think I think?’

‘You think what all men think, what the men who did that terrible thing to her thought. They jumped to wrong conclusions.’

‘And your father?’ he asked, stroking her hair. ‘What happened to him?’

She had relaxed against him. Now he felt her shoulders become rigid beneath his arm and the muscles in her thigh lying alongside his tensed. She got up again, smoothing her hair.

‘There was a gun battle on the track. And he was shot in no the village square, as Mum told you. But there’s more to it than that. It was an ambush. But who ambushed whom? Was it the Resistance ambushing the Germans or the Germans the Resistance? I’ve asked, but no one will ever tell you. He was betrayed, I’m sure.’ He could see the runnel of a tear slide down her cheek. ‘I’d like to know who did it. We got the German, but not the French, the ones who betrayed him.’

She turned away. ‘Goodnight.’

When she had gone, Theo leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes with an enormous sense of release. He observed the irony of receiving reassurance from an old lover about the fidelity of his wife. Florence’s word carried weight. She was devoted to Ariane; the whole household was, except, of course, his daughter. Surely the aunts, Micheline, Florence would not have remained so loyal to her if she really had been the lover of the SS officer, something that could not have been hidden inside the household. And, another irony: Sabine, who detested her stepmother, had added to the evidence to vindicate her, by revealing that Suzie, the child they had sheltered, was Jewish. This was the explanation he had been waiting for.

Chapter Twelve

The case against Ariane was closed. Theo had now convinced himself of her innocence and was determined to see her as soon as possible. The fact that she was reluctant to meet him filled him with urgency, afraid it would soon be too late to put right what had gone so hideously wrong. The unreality of exile had distorted his expectations. After seven months back in France he had come to understand something of the strange life of the Occupation. Ariane’s conduct in that grey world had been beyond reproach, he saw that now. The head-shaving had been an act of drunken violence in the aftermath of liberation by men who had known nothing of her Resistance activities. Their suspicion of someone, especially an outsider, who had quartered the SS for two months, had combined with peasant resentment to produce an unjust act. He had compounded the injustice by his instinctive recoil.