‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘Some things I don’t know and others are so horrible it’s better for one’s sanity to forget them. What do you want to know?’

‘I want to know everything, of course. I want to know about your Resistance work. I want to know what happened to Lucien Maniotte and to Henri.’

She had been so calm until then that he was astonished when, at his mention of Henri, her eyes filled with tears.

‘I want to know what happened to Henri, too.’ She set her mouth and the tears did not fall. ‘What did they tell you at Bonnemort?’

‘Micheline said he had been executed by the Germans. Then Florence told me there was more to it than that and that I would never find out. Someone else suggested that he had been betrayed.’ He did not mention Vernhes’ suggestions of cowardice and incompetence.

‘Ah, dear Florence is very clever.’ She stretched out her arms, as if pushing something away. ‘We lived in a world of half-knowledge, or false knowledge, propaganda which everyone accepted at first. And not knowing was a principle of safety. The less you knew, the less harm you could do if you were caught. I was only a very minor cog. Lucien and Henri were the important ones.’

‘How did you begin?’

How had it begun? Theo’s departure, without debate, to London, had been so shocking that it had called everything into question. Left to herself, she might have taken longer to reject the Marshal and the policies of Vichy. Theo had crystallised matters for her.

Settling at Bonnemort in 1939 during the phoney war had not been easy. Although the aunts had behaved with immaculate politeness to her, there had been no one with whom she had anything in common. She spent hours every day, whatever the weather, riding around the countryside, sometimes in Henri’s company. He showed her the cross-country routes, the landmarks of pigeon towers, hilltops, stands of trees on the skyline, teaching her to recognise them from every direction. The knowledge had served her well later on. When they passed through remote hamlets with poetic names, where chained dogs barked savagely, men would regard them balefully, not responding to their greetings. She would shudder at the hostility she felt, age-old, its roots beyond the Revolution, in the Jacqueries of the medieval past. He had found her an ancient pair of field glasses, which weighed heavily on her chest when she slung them around her neck. They gave her endless pleasure in watching the bird life from the windows of her tower, or from the terrace in the garden.

For the first week or so after Theo left for England in 1940 she had passionately hoped she was pregnant. If she had a child, she would have a purpose however long the war lasted and a permanent link with him. When that hope bled from her, she was lost for a time. Theo had instructed her during his nocturnal visit to bring his daughter from the convent in Touraine in the occupied zone, home to Bonnemort. Although her meeting with Sabine at the wedding had not been warm, she decided that Theo’s child would have to be a replacement for her own and that living together would be a new beginning for them both. Illusory hope. Sabine was implacably hostile and no effort to please or interest her met with a return of friendship. Sabine gave her the final impulse towards resistance.