They were in the salon one afternoon that autumn of 1940, looking at the view over the valley. Micheline and Florence were walking towards the house, carrying up baskets filled with walnuts that had just been harvested.

‘Florence is very beautiful,’ Sabine remarked.

Ariane looked out at Florence, then at Sabine, with curiosity. Nothing Sabine said to her was without motive.

‘Yes,’ she said, in surprise. ‘You’re right. She is beautiful.’

‘My father always thought so, too. I saw him once kiss her neck.’

Why she should accept this story, instantly, as truth, when it was patently told only to wound, she did not know. Nor why it should matter. She had never thought that Theo had lived without women in the years since his wife had died. So why was this information important? Because she suddenly realised that she had no ties. She could resist because she was free.

A week later the letter from Bertrand Gauthier, her Marxist teacher of philosophy, arrived. In cautious language, because of the censorship, he asked for her help in arranging a quiet place where he could recuperate from a recent ‘attack’. He had been dismissed from his post in the first months of the Marshal’s rule, she discovered later. She wrote back at once inviting him to stay for as long as was necessary.

Theo, watching her, listening to her, felt the strength and clarity of her personality, as he had the evening they first met, when she had expounded the evils of Munich. Talking about the war, she had relaxed. He wanted to say, Let’s forget all this; let’s talk about ourselves. Instead he asked, ‘What about Vernhes? Was he involved then?’

‘Vernhes? You know Vernhes?’ She looked alarmed.

‘I’ve met him, yes. I was at Bonnemort last month, you know. He’s the mayor of Lepech Perdrissou now.’

‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she asked.

He offered her one and lit it for her.

She inhaled deeply. ‘Thanks. I don’t smoke much now, because men resent seeing a woman consuming something that they feel they have first call on. But I need it just now.’ Smoke misted his view of her face, blurring her features. ‘Vernhes wasn’t active then. This was in the winter of forty to forty-one and he was a good communist. He wouldn’t do anything without the blessing of the Party.’

She had already met Vernhes, even before Gauthier’s arrival, when she had taken a mutely furious Sabine to register for the new school year at Lepech Perdrissou. Although he kept his party membership a secret, she had recognised him even then as a class antagonist. He had categorised her before she had opened her mouth: a rich bourgeoise, a Catholic, a devotee of the Marshal. The assumptions were implicit in the way he had spoken to her. She had made no attempt to correct him and only hoped he would not be so prejudiced against Sabine as to treat her unkindly. For her own part she had felt, then, an uneasy, distasteful fascination for him. She guessed that he came from a relatively unprivileged background, where a mother had lavished hopes for the fulfilment of her own ambitions on the upbringing of her only son, who was immensely clever, without social graces and with only one sensitivity towards others: the power to recognise a victim.