‘What do you mean?’

‘Sometime in the summer of forty-two, I was called upon to prove my Aryan credentials. It was after Suzie had come to us, but before the Germans occupied the free zone. I can laugh about it now. They were grotesque, these Vichy people, but it wasn’t funny then.’

The letter from the Prefecture appeared at first glance to be no more than irritating. Just another of the interminable checks on the documents that permitted them to exist. She had left it on her desk without any sense of urgency. Only later when she came to read it carefully did she see, with a lurch of her heart, that it was signed by a Monsieur Cayre of the General Commission for Jewish Questions. Instantly, her imagination created a scene of Suzie wrenched from her, screaming with loneliness, to be deported to the East, while she was imprisoned for her crime of harbouring the racially impure.

During the journey to Racines, by bike, by bus, by train, she rehearsed how she would meet the unknown threat. Suzie’s papers would withstand examination, so she would deny that the child was Jewish, but she must do it without arousing antagonism. She must suppress the personal authority that she had always assumed from her birth, her wealth, her education.

None of those advantages counted now, least of all with this sinister and irrational offshoot of the bureaucracy. To protect Suzie she would be humble, ingratiating, feminine, flattering, servile, whatever was needed.

The figure behind the desk was almost hidden by the barrier of card index boxes which he had erected between him and the public whom he summoned for interview. He wore round, horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie.

‘Madame de Cazalle, I called you here today …’ He avoided her eyes, studying a paper, as if reading a text. ‘Because the law of 2 June 1941 requires every person of the Jewish race in France, in the non-occupied as well as the occupied zone, to register his or her name and place of abode at the Prefecture, in the Jewish index. And you have not done so.’

‘I have not done so?’ She could not prevent herself from stressing the personal pronoun. She had been thinking of Suzie. ‘Why should I do so?’

He took off his spectacles, and revealed his prominent, pale blue eyes. ‘Because, as I understand it, you are Jewish.’

She was impassive, in spite of the rage that welled up within her at being trapped in a position where she could only behave badly. To deny with indignation that she was Jewish implied that she was rejecting a calumny, accepting the idea that to be Jewish was a crime. To ask for the evidence against her seemed to acknowledge the truth of the accusation. To refuse to answer would deny the authority of the horrible little man whom she had to placate.

‘I am not Jewish,’ she said flatly.

‘Ah, many people say that to me at first, but I often find that it is a little matter that they have – somehow – forgotten.’