‘What are you doing?’ she spoke in a whisper, as if Madame Ariane were asleep in the room.

‘I came to fasten the window. It was banging in the wind.’

‘Where is she? Why isn’t she in bed?’

‘I don’t know. She wasn’t here when I got up. Perhaps she’s gone to see that the house or the animals are all right in the storm.’

‘Move up.’ Sabine pushed in beside Suzie and looked out.

‘There’s someone smoking down there,’ she remarked.

‘The guard?’

Sabine did not hear her suggestion under a new fusillade of thunder, much closer. A sheet of lightning ripped through the sky, illuminating the courtyard for two or three seconds with a piercing white light that bleached away all colour, arresting movement, so that the scene resembled a black and white photograph. The smoker in the courtyard was revealed as Madame Ariane, seated on the low stone balustrade that divided the terrace from the cobbles. She was looking out at the storm; behind her, in the open doorway, stood the major. A second later, darkness had returned.

Sabine gripped Suzie’s shoulder. ‘Did you see that? Did you see who it was?’

Suzie was overcome with guilt. If she hadn’t thought it, two days ago, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t come to see what the noise was, Sabine would not have awoken. She had revealed Madame Ariane to Sabine.

She padded back to the dressing room. Sabine remained leaning on the sill, waiting for the next lightning flash. Suzie got back into bed and pulled the sheet over her head. With deliberation she stepped back into Before. She was walking down the wide, dingy stairs of their apartment house in the Marais, holding Maman’s hand in one of hers and in the other clutching Rahel. They were going for a walk to the children’s playground where there was a see-saw that she loved …

The sheet was dragged back and Sabine sat on the pillow beside her, her knees drawn up, her nightgown pulled over them. Her body was rigid with excitement.

‘What were they doing there together in the dark? It was a secret meeting. She’s a collaborator, a traitor.’

Chapter Twenty

The girls were perched in their new vantage point in an unused bedroom on the first floor of the house, in the German zone.

‘What you have to know about the Russians as fighters is that they are inhuman,’ the major was saying. ‘I don’t say subhuman, the term that is so often used. It may be technically correct according to ethnological principles, but it is not the right word in a military context. Subhuman implies a lack of intelligence, as well as a lack of other human qualities, and this misunderstanding may lead military commanders into unwise moves, in the belief that their opponents are stupid.’

At the sight of Madame Ariane and the major sitting together in the dark, Sabine’s interest had switched abruptly from the young soldiers to the major. She now trained her binoculars on him, noting where he was during the time he spent at Bonnemort. As Suzie had done several days earlier, she rapidly became aware that the major stalked Madame Ariane, although her interpretation, expounded to Suzie in long sessions in the loft of the winepress, was that she was leading him, not that he was following her.