‘When shall we move in?’

‘When the war ends,’ she said.

‘No, much sooner than that.’

‘I long for it to be over, for everything to be over. I feel as if this is time out, waiting for victory, rather like the phoney war at the beginning when we were waiting for defeat.’

‘It won’t be any different, Ariane. Don’t expect things suddenly to improve: food in the shops, divisions healed. It’ll take a long time.’

He was fully awake now and climbed out of bed to find his cigarettes. Ariane lifted the covers to welcome his return, shrunken and shivering.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect it. It’s a goal. When we’re there, I may feel that everything else was worth it after all, and not just a terrible waste and sadness.’

‘It can never be worth it, but the purpose will be vindicated.’ He remembered his feeling of self-satisfaction on his drive to Bonnemort in September, the justified son, before he knew that Henri was dead.

‘You don’t understand. You were so clear about what you had to do and you did it. There are people who still think that resistance was wrong.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went to see Madame Maniotte.’

‘You see what Lucien had to live with. He had to hide what he was doing from her. And nothing that has happened since his death has changed her mind.’

‘She said Henri was arrested at the same time as Lucien in forty-three …’

‘No, it was a bit later.’

‘… and you got him out.’

‘I expect she can’t forgive me for that. I can’t blame her. Two are taken and one is saved. It was so random, unjust. Not that Henri reached the end, either.’

‘She was very bitter. She implied that you were somehow able to have Henri released.’

Ariane detached herself from him. ‘She knew, or at least she guessed, what we were doing, she blames me for involving Lucien and at the same time accuses me of collaboration.’

‘There are some who did both,’ said Theo, as if to explain Madame Maniotte’s inconsistency. ‘Tell me, how did you get Henri out?’

‘I collaborated. I paid.’ Ariane was shouting. ‘I would have done almost anything for Henri to be free. If I’d had to sleep with the head of the Gendarmerie in Racines, I’d have done it.’

The risks were always with them. The young men fleeing from compulsory labour service would turn up without credentials. It was impossible to tell if they were genuine or agents provocateurs paid by the police, or worse, the Germans. Henri was cautious. At that stage, he only took boys from the locality who came with a recommendation. He moved his group between several sites, would not let them develop a routine, making it harder for the Germans to find them, and distributed the burden of feeding them between the villages. He found Mr Nikola, the Russian, to train the men and keep them busy.