Suzie had put her hands over her ears. Sabine reached out and pulled at her wrists. ‘And that was just the Milice,’ she said with relish. ‘Down there it’s the Germans.’

‘I don’t know why you’re so pleased about it. You won’t like it if they set fire to your house.’

Sabine stretched out her legs. ‘War is so exciting. I enjoy it so much more than peace. Today has been really good. Now the Allies have landed, there will be real fighting here. Battles in France instead of somewhere else. You wonder what they’ve been doing all this time, in Africa and places like that. Why didn’t they attack here where the Germans are living?’

‘Well, they’ve done it now,’ Suzie said placatingly.

‘Perhaps the Germans have killed Madame Ariane by now.’

‘Listen.’ Suzie held down the branches. They peered out and saw a deer bounding down the hill, the white underside of its tail flashing. ‘Perhaps Micheline is coming back with news.’

If she had hoped that this distraction might divert Sabine from her train of thought, she was disappointed.

‘We might go back and find her body lying in the courtyard,’ Sabine spoke slowly to spin out the pleasure of the fantasy. She slipped her hand under the hem of her dress, tucking it inside the elastic of her knickers. Suzie averted her eyes, hoping that the visit of the Germans was not going to trigger a new bout of murderous imagination in Sabine. The idea of killing her stepmother kept recurring to Sabine and, once her interest in a project was roused, she was obsessive.

‘Perhaps they have tied her up and raped her. Perhaps they have hung her upside down, like the boy from La Tuiliere and have beaten her with sticks. Or with razors, slash, slash, a thousand cuts.’ Sabine rocked herself lovingly.

‘Don’t, don’t.’ Suzie’s voice rose in pain.

Sabine’s was rising too. ‘All right, a single bullet, like shooting a deer. Bang and it falls, still running. A little burned hole in her chest, that’s all. There’s not much blood when you shoot a deer. He might draw out his pistol, the German, and shoot her at close range. Or they could set up a machine gun and dr-dr-dr, stud her with bullets.’

‘She’d be a hero.’

Sabine released a long breath. ‘Who cares? She’d be dead.’

Chapter Sixteen

Sabine fell silent, absorbed in her fantasy of pain; Suzie lapsed into her own dream world, which she visited each night before she went to sleep, the make-believe family of Papa, Maman and Rahel. Rahel was a beautiful American doll, her namesake. She always began by remembering the games she used to play with her, but this time, as often happened, inexorable reality broke into the pliable texture of the dream.

She had left Rahel with Maman the day she was taken away. Rahel the doll always stayed with Maman, when she, Rahel as she was in those days, went to school, keeping her company in the damp basement lodging when they lived in Clermont Ferrand. She did not always go to school, although she might set off as though that were her destination. Her mother was too sick to stand in line and had lost the ingenuity necessary to cope, day by day, with new, unforeseen difficulties. She lay in the semi-darkness, coughing, coughing, while the cockroaches walked boldly across the floor. Rahel could not master the offices that Maman used to visit, but she knew how to obtain their food coupons every month and how to queue at the boulangerie. Money was becoming more and more of a problem; the last of the funds that had reached them from Papa in Paris was almost at an end.