PART THREE

Autumn-Winter, 1942/3

Robin Morris was late leaving his office for lunch. He was due to meet Dick Cannerley in the bar at a quarter to one, and it was already five past by the time he managed to find a taxi.

All morning he had been in an emergency meeting. The Minister and his civil servant arrived in a state of near-panic at half past eight, having received an intercept of a German communication presuming France was on the point of declaring war on Britain.

Taxis swooped towards the building like black ticking birds; the marbled floors rang to the sound of respectably hurrying footsteps; the oak doors of the committee room ground back and forth on their iron hinges.

Morris and his senior officer. Sir Oliver Cresswell, presented the details of their own scrambled re-investigations with an air of ordered calm. Sir Oliver soothed the panting Minister and read each hastily ordered update brought into the meeting with no more than the detached interest he might give to an unfamiliar wine list.

"Our position," he said, 'is that whatever Monsieur Laval may or may not wish to do, it is still Marshal Petain who is the head of state, and if he compromises his neutrality, then his government is no longer credible."

"Bloody nonsense!" said the Minister.

"It hasn't been credible since the start, and it's not Petain who's in charge. It's Laval. The tail's wagging the dog, in case you didn't know.

Don't forget that French forces have already fought with the Germans in Africa."

"Not side by side, Minister," said Sir Oliver.

"Against a common enemy I concede, but not literally side by side."

"Comes to the same thing."

"It is admittedly a ... political distinction."

The Minister, rather admirably in Morris's view, did not rise to this provocation, but became more specific in what he required from Sir Oliver and his colleagues.

"I can assure you," said Sir Oliver, 'that our chaps in the field have so far not missed a trick. Of course I do accept that the principal motive among the French people and their government is the avoidance of civil disorder, and I'm sure also that your own political analysis of Monsieur Laval's ambitions is a fair one. After all, if he believes that a German Europe with France in the position, shall we say, of consort or dauphin offers the only chance of a non-Bolshevist future, then it would make sense for him to offer armed assistance to his ally. The Germans are not, in our assessment, likely to accept his terms, however. Our understanding is that in return for French armed co-operation he has asked for a reinstatement of the 1914 frontiers with Germany."

"I can make the judgements," said the Minister.

"It's the information we're short of at the moment, particularly on the French side."

Morris shifted on his unyielding mahogany chair and neatly shaded in his own name on the distribution list of the most recent report.

"I can assure you. Minister," said Sir Oliver, 'that our endeavours are focused even more keenly on Vichy than on the Occupier. As far as the interpretation of events is concerned, there are well-established procedures, and I'm sure you would accept that a degree of processing of the raw material by ourselves is inevitable if we're not to swamp the ministry with detail." He coughed and braced his shoulders.

"Now I wonder if we could look forward a little to how we might best cooperate in the coming months. Morris has prepared a short paper which he'd now like to read to you."

Morris had received a telephone call from Sir Oliver at two o'clock that morning to tell him that he had better come up with something convincing. By six o'clock he had completed a paper he hoped was at least plausible. He had barely had time to bath and shave before putting on the new chalk-stripe suit he had had made by Cannerley's tailor. Its heavy jacket gave him an air of confident formality as he began with an assessment of the quality of information received, and went on to speculate on the procedures that might be necessary as the war developed.

"The German success in beating off the Canadian raid at Dieppe was greeted with enormous relief by the French populace. Our early reports last year on Marshal Petain's preparations for defence against Allied invasion from the Bay of Biscay and from the Mediterranean were, as you know, subsequently borne out by military observation. Naturally, as the tide of war begins to run the Allied way, the fear of invasion from the Mediterranean may appear more acute both to the Occupier and the Occupied. Our reports at the moment, however, indicate no cause for concern."

"Concern?" The Minister looked unbelieving.

"No concern that German unease might lead to any precipitate action inside France. Going into the Free Zone, for instance."

The Minister grunted, "Consort, dauphin bloody concubine more like," but said no more, which allowed Morris to give a detailed, practical analysis of future requirements in what, following departmental practice, he referred to as 'the field'. As he slumped back against the seat of the taxi and watched the November leaves wheeling about the damp streets, Morris had the feeling of having escaped intact. The Minister's private secretary had fixed him with a nakedly sceptical look throughout the reading of his paper, which had twice caused him to lose his place and stammer.

For the rest, he felt he had earned Sir Oliver's sotto "Well done, Morris', delivered in the lobby at the end of the meeting.

"I'd just about given you up," said Cannerley, as Morris panted up the broad staircase, over the polished landing and into the bar.

"What'll it be? Sherry?"

"Thank you." Morris found his hand was trembling a little as Cannerley gave him the fiddly little glass.

"Bloody chaos back at the factory."

He glanced round the bar whose walls were hung with oil portraits of distinguished, and some less distinguished, old members, before confiding in a lowered voice: "They're convinced Laval's about to declare war on the Allies." Cannerley laughed.

"It would certainly be the logical outcome of his beliefs. Shall we go down? We're in the supper room I hope you don't mind. It was either that or take pot luck at the long table, and the club bores are out in force.

They appear to be indestructible. We need another Blitz, but rather better aimed this time."

"How's Celia?" Morris asked as the waiter placed a carafe of the club claret between them on the table.

"Very well, thank you."

"And the wedding plans?"

"God, Robin, you're worse than her mother. The wedding's postponed. I'm not sure I'm quite ready for marriage yet."

"You mean you haven't finished playing the field?"

"That's a rather vulgar way of putting it, if I may say so," said Cannerley.

"I do find that the hostilities have engendered a certain ... largesse among one's female acquaintance. Don't you?"

Morris had not. He shrugged.

"The shadow of death, I presume. Timor mortis conturbat me."

"Potted shrimps," said Cannerley, to the waiter.

"Hell of a price. I don't know where they get them from. But do have them, Robin, if you'd like to." He pushed back a tumbling lick of fair hair from his forehead. Morris's menu had no prices on it, and he felt inhibited.

"No, I'll have the ..." He scanned the menu for something modest.

"Sardine salad to start with. Do you remember-that girl we met on the train from Edinburgh?"

"Och aye," said Cannerley, 'the Scots lass. Thereby hangs a tale. Do you know what happened?" He leaned forward.

"You know we managed to recruit a G Section man over there? Fowler? He was supposed to get the girl to run a little errand, pass on a bit of misleading information.

In return he was going to offer some sort of gen about the whereabouts of her boyfriend."

Morris nodded.

"It's all gone rather haywire. Fowler had to get the hell out of the area. It was all getting a bit hot, apparently. He's only just managed to renew contact."

"I thought she was only going to be there for a short time."

"Apparently the bloody girl refuses to come-home."

"Why?" said Morris.

"God knows. It's all a typical G Section cock-up."

"Does it matter, her still being there?"

"Not to us. In fact it's rather to our advantage because it gives Fowler a second bite of the cherry. But I imagine G Section are hopping about a bit." Morris laughed.

"Anyway, I'm seeing something of a friend of hers at the moment," he said.

"A girl called Sally. They used to share a flat."

"What's she like?" said Cannerley as the food arrived.

"She's rather nice. Delightful in fact. Trouble is, she's all moony about some naval commander."

"God," said Cannerley, "I haven't had potted shrimps since before the war. They used to do them at Goodwood."

Since the hand of the clock had passed two by the time they finished eating, they were permitted to take a match from the box in the silver stand and light a cigar to go with the thin, sour coffee. Their conversation returned on a slow loop to where it had begun.

"I think it's very unlikely that Laval could pull off a declaration of war," said Cannerley, 'although I'm quite certain he'd like to."

"Why are you sure he couldn't do it?"

"Because he would try to link it with some sort of deal, and the Germans have never been interested in any sort of collaboration with Vichy."

"They let them police the Occupied Zone."

"It saves them the trouble. They allow Vichy to have the semblance of autonomy because it helps keep public order, but the Germans haven't seriously collaborated on a single issue. And even if they won the war they'd completely disregard all the sycophancy of Laval."

"No place at the top table?"

Cannerley laughed.

"They'd be a hundred yards below the salt. Not even in the same trading zone."

In a brief pause that followed, Morris said, "I'm sorry about your father. I saw the obituary."

Cannerley's face clouded.

"Yes, yes. Thank you. I sometimes feel ... I don't know, it's more than just a death."

"Are you all right? You look terrible."

"Yes." Cannerley laughed.

"Yes, I'm fine. Are you playing at the weekend?"

"Yes. Worplesdon. Foursomes. I'm rather looking forward to it." Later, they stood on the broad stone steps of the old, grey building and wrapped their coats about them as they peered this way and that in the dim afternoon, looking for the yellow lamp of a taxi.

Morris was thinking what London would be like under German occupation: sentries on guard outside the National Gallery, the Foreign Office requisitioned as the headquarters of some insane Nazi project, people scurrying through the streets to their shameful accommodations, a farcical shadow government, headed by Lord Halifax, sequestered in some genteel town in Cheltenham, perhaps, or Leamington Spa. What providence of leadership, of geography, of political will, what desperate days of hungover young men staggering to their flimsy planes on all-grass airfields had so narrowly turned away the catastrophe? He shuddered as the November wind came gusting down the narrow street from St. Martin's Lane.

In France Charlotte rose gently from the deepest levels of her sleep to find the reflected branches of the almost leafless chestnut tree undulating in watery shadow on the bare wall of her bedroom. Outside, the wind of autumn was hissing in the last dry leaves; the sound was not, despite anything the poet might have said, like sobbing violins, but like the muffled percussion of riveted cymbals. Charlotte climbed out of bed, washed, dressed and went down the bare back stairs of the Domaine to the kitchen. The metal handles of the cupboard doors were cold to her touch; the large, flagged room held for the first time the prospect of winter. Charlotte was not displeased by it; after a Highland childhood she had never feared the rigours of the season, though she did wonder how a house the size of the Domaine was heated. She could light a fire in her bedroom in the evenings, and since Levade seldom emerged from his studio, a permanently stoked blaze in the large, marble-surrounded grate would do for him. The rest of the unused rooms would have to be shut up and left to freeze.

That was her view, at any rate, and she would not be afraid to express it. Since arriving at the Domaine, she had learned that the quality Levade most seemed to value was frankness. His honesty about himself had prompted in her a reciprocal candour, and nothing would be gained by saying less than she meant. The only trick with Levade was to pick the right moment, not to trouble him when he was distracted by work.

When she heard his slippered footstep on the sprung floor of the dining room she made some tea and took it into him. His face was white, and there were grey smudges round the sockets of his eyes; his skin, she thought, was oddly expressive and changeable for someone of his age. His head hung still over the blue bowl of tea she placed in front of him, and she could sense the awful weight of sleeplessness suggested by his heavy movements. He would be better in an hour or so, when he had drunk more tea, smoked cigarettes and walked in the grounds of the house.

He lifted his head.

"I've been thinking, Madame Guilbert. I think perhaps we know each other well enough now, you and I, for you to come to my studio sometimes in the afternoon."

Charlotte's reply was made incoherent by her surprise and by her uncertainty about what he wanted: she did not know whether Dominique Guilbert would thank him for the privilege, ask for more money or indignantly to refuse any such idea. Levade smiled at her evident confusion.

"I just need a little help with tidying my papers to begin with. I suppose the room could do with cleaning as well. It must be two years since I let the last girl in there."

"I see," said Charlotte.

"That'll be fine."

As she recovered her balance, Levade said, "Of course there are other things you might help me with."

Before Charlotte could discover what these might be, the telephone rang in the hall and Levade indicated by a nod of his head that she should answer it.

"Dominique!" It was Julien, in an excited state.

"They've done it.

They've done it, they've broken through, they've overrun us, they've '

"Julien, what are you ' " Now it's all-out war. No more Petain, no more deals, this is it.

They're here in Lavaurette, they're everywhere."

"Do you mean they've - ' " Yes, they poured through the line last night, whole divisions, they've taken over the entire country. They're heading down to the sea to protect the coast, but they're leaving their soldiers everywhere. We're going to have our own little German in charge. Come and see, Dominique. Come on." Charlotte ran back into the dining room to tell Levade, who shook his head and swore.

"I want to go to the village," said Charlotte.

"Do you mind if I ' " No, go on."

In Lavaurette, everyone seemed to be on the street, murmuring in closed groups or looking in silent horror at the convoy of German motor vehicles that had pulled in along the side of the Avenue Gambetta. A small boy marched up and down in front of them with exaggerated goose steps until rescued by his mother. Charlotte found Julien surrounded by gesticulating people, who included two familiar to her from the Cafe du Centre the quiet schoolmaster Claude Benech and Roudil, the veteran of Verdun who had placed his trust in the Marshal. For the first time since she had known him, Julien seemed to have lost control of himself; he was berating the other two men and pointing at the parked German lorries.

Charlotte knew with a panicky conviction that she must stop him at once. She ran into the knot of people and grabbed his elbow; Julien glanced sideways at her, then carried on his tirade. He was shouting at Roudil, some insulting words about Petain.

Charlotte took his arm again.

"Julien, you must come with me. You're needed at the Domaine. You must come now." Julien looked at her once and pushed her hand away. Roudil's lined and weathered face had set horribly still; then his lower lip began to tremble, and large shameful tears rolled out from his closed eyes.

"As for you," said Julien, turning to Benech.

"You ' He got no further. Charlotte reached up to him and clamped her mouth over his. She wrapped her arms tight around him and squeezed as hard as she could. When she felt Julien's body slacken a little, she let go. With her lips still close to his, she said, "You must come now.

Your father needs you. Do you understand?"

Across Julien's gradually sobering face there ran successive expressions of surprise, alarm and furtive schoolboy pleasure. At least he understood, Charlotte thought, as he coughed, collected himself, and apologised briefly to Roudil, who was wiping his cheeks with a handkerchief. Julien and Charlotte walked up the hill, unspeaking flinching beneath the curious eyes that followed them.

Two or three times Julien began to speak, then checked himself.

"I've been foolish, Dominique," he finally brought himself to say.

"I must thank you for stopping me when you did."

Up in the square, in front of the Hotel de Ville, they sat on a bench and looked down. They could still see the German convoy, half a dozen troop-carrying lorries with canvas lashed over supporting hoops, an armoured car and a requisitioned black Citroen of the kind, Charlotte recalled, Monsieur Chollet had been working on in Clermont. German soldiers were sitting on the sandy roadside drinking from enamel cups while their junior officers went in search of provisions. Charlotte watched Julien's face but did not dare to speak. He rested his chin in his hands, then shook his head.

"Perhaps this is a good thing, I don't know. Perhaps ..." He shrugged.

"At least it now means we're all in it together, there must now be a general, unified resistance ... And yet, I just can't believe it to see those men in uniform, those stupid farm boys and factory hands from Hanover or Bavaria or wherever it is they come from, here in Lavaurette ..

Somehow in Paris it seemed different.

It was easier to think of it as diplomacy that had gone wrong and to see the German troops as just a new and rather impatient kind of police. You could see it all as just another political mistake-God knows, we'd got used to those. But here, they look so alien ... " He shook his head.

Charlotte felt very much for him in his confusion and in the frustrated sense he seemed to have that all of this could somehow have been avoided.

"We must be very careful. Octave," she said.

"I know. And, by the way, you called me by a different name just now. When you kissed me."

"I know. It would have been foolish to call you "Octave" in front of people who know that's not your name."

Julien looked at her, narrowing his eyes, not into their usual candid smile but into something more perplexed.

"You're a remarkable woman, aren't you, Madame Guilbert? Very decisive."

"When I was sixteen I had a school report that said I was too passive." Julien let out a great snort of laughter.

"Passive! My God."

"Anyway," said Charlotte.

"Someone must take control in these circumstances."

"I liked it when you kissed me."

"It was nothing."

"What do you mean?"

"It was political."

Julien's full smile came out.

"I see. And it would take a comparable emergency for it to be repeated?"

"At least."

There was a pause, and Julien looked down at the ground, sketching patterns in the dust with the rim of his shoe. He said, "Do you remember when you first decided to stay, and you said you felt the real action had not begun?"

"Yes."

"What do you feel now?"

"I feel this is it," said Charlotte.

"But I don't feel downhearted. I think the enemy is now out in the open, and that's a good place for him to be where you have him in full sight." Julien pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one.

"I know the Germans will try to squeeze us, they'll try to make us work for them in some way. And there'll be a war here in the south. Some people won't like that, they'll put the keeping of order above everything."

"But you want to see fighting?"

"Of course I do. And you couldn't say we've been hasty. It's two and a half years since we were invaded." He smiled.

"You look worried."

"Yes," said Charlotte.

"I was just thinking of all that quiet work you've done from your office the times you've telephoned me at the Domaine or left a message with Cesar's mother, all the calls from the wireless operator, the times you've spoken to the Communists yes, don't look surprised, I know you've had no choice from time to time and all this without once giving a glimmer of how you truly felt. I hate to think that all your work might be spoiled by one foolish outburst."

"It's not true that I've given no indication of what I think. I was always honest about the failings of Vichy. Then, when I started this activity I thought it would look suspicious if I suddenly changed my tune. So it's become a double bluff."

"But you've got to do something about this morning. That was too much." Julien laid his hand on hers.

"You're right. I shall go to the Cafe du Centre this evening and I shall confuse them. I'll say that on balance we have no choice but to co-operate with the Germans. I shall use the word " realistic"."

"Good."

"Why don't you come too?" Julien looked into Charlotte's face.

"Servant girls don't go out to bars. And I'm a married woman."

"I know, but after this morning everyone will think we're sleeping together anyway."

"So are you saying we might as well?"

"No, I didn't say that, I ' " Listen, Julien - I'm going to call you that this one time. You're a wonderful friend to me. I've never had a friend like this before. I can't tell you how much it's meant to me over these last few weeks.

It's not just that we're co-operating professionally, as it were, we'd be friends anyway. Don't you feel that?" Charlotte's voice was eager and loaded.

"Yes." Julien did not sound nearly as sure.

"Yes, of course, Dominique."

Then why does he look so hurt? Charlotte thought, as she removed his hand from hers and gave it back to him. She said, "I must go back to the Domaine. I have work to do. Will you telephone this evening and let me know if anything happens?" Charlotte walked down to where she had left her bicycle, outside Madame Galliot's ironmongery, and on the way she went past the war memorial and its chiselled Marianne, with her seasick expression and her eyes dazzled by the list of names on which she stood. On the Avenue Gambetta the German lorries had started their engines and were beginning to move off in a loud, turning line to the south. Claude Benech was puzzled by developments. He had not expected to see German soldiers on the streets of Lavaurette. Their presence suggested either that the Occupier felt at liberty to override Marshal Petain at any time it suited him or that there was a threat of Allied success to the south that made defence of the French ports imperative. He could believe neither of these possibilities. Of one thing he was quite sure, however: the German occupation of the whole country increased the chances of Communist disorder.

There would be hotheads, like Julien Levade perhaps, and other more sinister Bolshevists, who would try to turn this new development to the advantage of their long-held wish to undermine the traditional France.

Benech had thought a good deal about politics in the last year or so, and had grown quite confident of his analyses and predictions. If he was right, it would mean that a man such as himself, a patriot, would need to become firmer and more vigilant. Of course, that did not mean he had to be ponderous or crude: he would carry on as normal, and what could be more normal than a visit to the Cafe du Centre?

Irene Galliot greeted him with her minimal politeness as she swayed through the bar on her way to the dining room. Benech's eyes hung on the sight of her tightly-skirted rump as she smacked the swing doors open with her hip, bending a little forward to keep the four plates of food she carried away from her clean white blouse and, in doing so, inadvertently granting Benech a glimpse of her smooth cleavage, whose shadow was abbreviated by a prim yet suggestive line of white lace. Then she was gone, and Benech turned sadly back to the bar, where Gayral pushed over his drink.

The wireless was playing on a high shelf, a song of inappropriate frivolity about an absconding postman.

Benech inveigled himself into a conversation with a group of other men, who included Roudil and Julien Levade. Their talk was soft and depressed. Benech noticed how solicitous Julien was towards Roudil, bringing him coffee from the bar and inquiring about his building business.

The quiet mood of the room was violently interrupted by the sound of Marshal Petain on the wireless, swiftly turned to maximum volume by Gayral. The dozen people in the bar stopped what they were doing to listen to the old man's girlish voice with its dry, hesitant cough. Drinks were held half-way from the table. Irene Galliot froze in the doorway with a pile of empty plates. Roudil's ancient eyes looked up imploringly to the wireless as though he might actually see the face of the great soldier who had understood the plight of men such as himself in the furnace of Verdun, who had been their saviour then.

At the end of his hopeful, patriotic and unapologetic address, Petain played the Marseillaise. The sound of the reluctant, rumbling march filled Benech with a cool certainty. Roudil, he noticed, covered his face with his hands. The emotions provoked by the music were evidently powerful: even Julien Levade appeared to be struggling to contain some turbulent inner conflict. Once a week, after she had cleared breakfast and seen Levade safely into his studio. Charlotte took over the bathroom for the morning.

The wood-burning stove that heated the water generally did so well enough for one deep bath, in which she washed her hair with a powerful concoction from the recesses of Madame Galliot's shop.

As she lay in the water. Charlotte tried to prepare herself for what Mirabel might say to her. Until the Germans arrived her existence, apart from visits to Andre and Jacob, had been free from risk.

Presumably that would now change; she would have to see what Mirabel thought.

He had cancelled their first meeting some weeks earlier, but, according to Julien, was more insistent than ever that they meet this time.

Perhaps he would order her to return home, and she would plead with him that she could still be useful in France. Even if he insisted, it was still open to her to refuse: she could simply not turn up at the appointed time for the plane. It would mean that G Section would disown and dismiss her, but she had no longterm ambitions with them. It was not as if she would be in any more danger, because they could offer her no protection in France anyway.

What they would not like about it was the thought of what she knew and that the longer she was there the more possible it was that she would be caught and interrogated. The German presence in the Free Zone made it more likely, but the truth was that she had little to tell. G Section's tactic of minimum information had worked well: she did not know Mirabel's assumed name, his real name or where to find him. She thought she could convince him that for the time being, at least, she was more of an asset than a risk. What excited her about the rendezvous was her hope, amounting almost to a belief that Mirabel, with his superior connections, would know where Gregory was hiding.

When she had roughly dried her hair, she set about re-dyeing the roots, where the natural colours were starting to show through. She wore gloves to protect her hands and worked the dye in with a paint brush borrowed from Levade's studio. She was two thirds of the way through Antoinette's bottle; as she upended it into her gloved palm, she thought of the steamy shop and wondered how Antoinette was managing up in the rainy mountains with Gilberte and her fortnightly visitor from Clermont Ferrand.

Charlotte peered into the blue-framed mirror above the basin and saw the reflection of her anxious brown eyes. She smiled at herself, instinctively turning to a better angle beneath the harsh light.

There were days when she scarcely thought of Peter Gregory, days when she convinced herself that he did not exist and that her memory of him was false; yet she still believed that only she could give him back his life and that only he could plausibly join her future to her past. She had had time to inspect the feeling from every angle, to imagine, even wish for, its diminution, but while her mind offered many choices about emotions and their value-how much they should be honoured, how much resisted, how changeable they could be, how naturally mortal-her intellectual conviction remained stable. Now she was going to find him. As she stood, naked from the waist up, inspecting herself in the mirror, Charlotte was stirred from her reverie by the sudden conviction that someone was watching her. Covering herself with a towel, she grabbed the door of the little bathroom and pulled it open. The corridor was empty.

That afternoon, her dulled hair wrapped beneath a scarf, she was sweeping the long corridor of the first floor when the door to Levade's studio swung open.

"Madame Guilbert? Would you care to come in for a moment?" Charlotte followed him into the studio, broom in hand.

"What do you think of that?" said Levade, indicating the canvas on the easel. There was a picture of a woman in a green silk skirt whom Charlotte recognised as his model, Anne-Marie. He had caught her expression of slightly timid seriousness; he had made her look like an intellectual person, a teacher or philosopher, yet had depicted her bare-breasted in a green silk skirt and set her in an imagined room whose dimensions were surreal.

"It's wonderful," said Charlotte. She did not think it wonderful, though she recognised it as the work of someone who was good at what he did.

"What do you like about it?" Levade stood with his arms crossed. He was for once wearing shoes, and had a jacket over his habitual untucked shirt.

"I just like the girl. Anne-Marie. I like the way you've painted her."

"The likeness?" It was difficult to see how he managed to load the simple word with intense scorn.

"I'm afraid so. Look at her pale skin. And the way her eyes are almondshaped yet not narrow, the centre so large and open. It's beautiful. I've never seen that in a woman before."

Levade sighed.

"What about the skin?"

"It's lovely. The paleness. But not white or deathly - it still looks healthy." Levade gazed at the picture in silence.

"It's no good at all," he said. He went over to a small circular table and lit a cigarette.

"As a matter of fact, I don't care. Anne-Marie is merely an exercise for me. There's something of her I'm trying to get right. Do you know what it is?" Charlotte looked at the painting again. There was no doubt that the eye was drawn, willingly or otherwise, to Anne-Marie's breasts, whose exposure was the more obvious for the background against which the figure was set.

"It's her arms," said Levade.

"The skin on her arms. That's why I asked her to be my model. She was working in a cafe not far from here, and I stopped there one day last year. It was summer and her arms were bare. She leaned across me to put down a plate and I was transfixed by the colour and texture of them." He shook his head and flicked the ash of his cigarette on to the floor, then went and stood in front of a small table on which were some religious statues and a candle.

He gazed back at the painting with an expression of resigned distaste.

"The arms are very good," said Charlotte.

"But perhaps one's eye is drawn away from them too much."

"Does it worry you, the nudity? Even after so many statues and classical models? After Michelangelo and Ingres and ' " I don't really think it's that kind of picture."

"You think it's lascivious?"

"Not completely, because there are other things happening. But a little bit, yes."

"Put that broom down." Levade walked over to the window and gazed up at the thick woods that fringed the gardens to the north. His lined face looked older than his lean body in the mild, clear light of the afternoon.

"Sit down." He thrust his arm towards the bed, and Charlotte perched herself, trying to look relaxed. Levade stayed standing by the window.

She watched his half-turned face carefully: the thudding artery in the neck, the wizened Adam's apple dragging up between the flaps of skin on his throat as he spoke again.

"Have you heard any news of your husband?"

Charlotte felt repelled by Levade, but reluctant to admit that her repulsion was not absolute.

"No. Nothing."

"Do you love him? Do you miss him?"

"No. There's another man I love."

"What's his name?"

"Pierre."

Levade turned into the room.

"Tell me about him."

Charlotte hesitated for a second, but the temptation was too great. It occurred to her as she spoke how long she had carried the unshared weight of her feeling for Gregory; her waking and many of her sleeping hours had been filled with this sullen, secret ache. As she started to find words, the feelings formed themselves and rushed in through her abandoned discretion.

She felt the emotions surge up and animate her movements; her hands were clawing at the air, rotating, and there was a flush rising in her neck, creeping over her jaw. In the most emotional moments of the story she still watched Levade's eyes, to see if he was listening, and she saw that his head did not move, that his eyes did not leave her, and she felt the radiance of his interest. She was shocked when he said, "I don't believe you."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I believe the pain and the passion, but I don't believe this Pierre is a what was it, airman from Rennes. I think he's English, as are you, Madame." Charlotte swallowed and looked down to her hands, now stilled and resting in her lap.

"Does it matter?" she said.

Levade pursed his lips and shook his head.

"Not in the least. The rest of the story is true, I imagine."

"I came to France to find him. Everything I told you about how much I miss him, how I fear for his life all the feelings of love I described, all those are true."

"I don't think someone could invent those, Madame Guilbert. Shall I continue to call you that?"

Charlotte sighed.

"You may as well call me Dominique."

"But why? Why another false name? It's no better than Madame Guilbert."

"But even Julien only calls me Dominique."

"It would be our secret, the sign of our confidence. If you wish." He turned his back to her again and looked out of the window.

There was a long silence, which Charlotte was surprised to hear broken at last by the sound of her own voice.

"Charlotte."

"Charlotte."

She nodded. It was the first time she had heard her name for many weeks, and its intimacy was tender.

"And this Pierre," said Levade, clearing papers from an armchair so he could sit in it.

"Did you make love many times? Did it surprise you?"

"Yes. I didn't realise it was like that. There didn't seem to be enough hours in the day. When I thought it was finished, even when he was saying goodbye it would begin again. He couldn't leave the flat, he would sink to his knees and start to pull at my clothes, and I was desperate, as though we hadn't been doing it all day, as though we'd -never done it before. It was terrible. I didn't know if other people also

... whether ..." Levade said nothing. Charlotte had a sudden fear that instead of sympathising with her anguish he was, in a voyeuristic way, enjoying the thought of her making love to Gregory.

She looked down at her lap, then up at him again. It was too late to withdraw her trust.

"I was frightened. I was really frightened. I wanted to devour him in some way. Yet my feeling for him was so gentle. I so much wanted to help him, to bring him back to health and life, to undo all the harm that had been done to him. What we did was awful, wonderful I don't know what you'd call it. But that wasn't why I came here to find him. I came because I loved him, because the feeling was ... transcendent."

"And he spoke to some weakness in you."

"Of course he did. Why should I be ashamed of that? Not every woman would have felt what I felt. I'm sure it was my weaknesses and faults, my own wounds he touched. That's why I so passionately loved him.

That's why I can't let go, because I believe there's no one else who could do that."

Levade breathed out a long, quiet sigh, which gave no indication of what he thought. He watched Charlotte as she struggled to control her agitation. She looked up, red-eyed and resentful at his detachment.

"Don't you have anything to say?"

"Yes. Tell me how you thought it would end. What did you imagine your lives would become? Did you think you would stay together until one of you died? That he would never be able to leave the house until you had made love one more time? That your passion would dwindle into some companionable friendship?"

"None of these things. It was enough to be with him, to have his company. It was almost enough that he was alive, even if I was not with him."

"And you truly never thought about a future?"

"I never did. Though I admit that may have been because I wouldn't let myself. A wise woman doesn't indulge such fantasies about a fighter pilot in a war."

"And you're a wise woman."

She did not hear if there was a question in his voice.

"I doubt it," she said.

"Are you wise enough to know that the problems of lovers seem to everyone else in the world, especially to their friends, like comic self-indulgence, like the antics of fretful children?"

"Yes, I suppose I do know that." Charlotte's voice was grudging.

"But listen. If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand and you say. No, maybe not, it's just a bore to my friends. What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die?"

Charlotte was flushed and excited.

"Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?" Levade smiled as he stood up and crossed to the table where he had left his cigarettes.

"The lifelong love that young romantic Frenchwomen dream about and perhaps most English girls as well, though maybe not you that ideal they think so unattainable is in fact rather commonplace. I know hundreds of men and women who loved each other all their lives and died in that same condition. The feelings you describe are more unusual."

"What do you mean?"

"The passion, that thing people call " merely physical", is perhaps rarer than what they refer to as lasting love. Rarer, and therefore perhaps more valuable."

"But it wasn't just that, it was more, it was--"

" Of course it was. That's the difficulty."

Charlotte felt Levade was on her side, but still she resented it.

"I suppose you have a long experience of all these things," she said.

"Long and sinful," he said, pushing his hand through his hair.

"I came here to escape from it."

He had moved across to the bed, where he sat down, at the other end from Charlotte. He turned to face her.

"I lived in Paris. Most of my life I lived there. I suppose we were all trying to forget what we had seen."

"Seen where?"

"In the War."

The features of her own father came up brightly in Charlotte's mind, and she turned her eyes away from Levade's old, knowing face. She did not want to hear him, and the word that had stopped her ears was "War'.

There was something that revolted her. She would not confront it. She watched Levade's lips moving, heard his thin voice, weighted with grotesque experience and the awful compromises that he must have made, but she did not take in what he said. Words like Verdun, generation of my friends, slid off her mind like mercury running over polished glass.

Only when Levade began to talk about his life in Paris, after the war, did the meaning of what he said begin to bite and register.

He appeared to be saying that he and his friends had indulged themselves because their faith in civilisation had been torn up and ploughed into the septic mud of the Western Front: they did what they liked because none of it amounted to anything. It seemed that what Levade was telling her, in his oblique way, was that he had become obsessed by women and been able to indulge himself without any practical or philosophical reserve.

"At the time of its peak it had become a compulsion. I remember in a butcher's queue in the rue des Acacias seeing a young woman standing behind me waiting to be served. She had a pinkness in the skin of her face I hadn't seen before. I couldn't drag my eyes from her. It was an area of such delicate colour that I had to have her, to touch her.

I followed her home."

"Did you sleep with her?"

"Yes. I can remember nothing else about her, whether she was tall or short, fat or thin, only that pink skin."

"Was it that easy to persuade her?"

"Yes. It always was. If you asked. If you could be bothered to try. It was these details of women that drew me to them. Sometimes it was a particular woman, sometimes I felt this passion for the entire sex. I would see a girl in a restaurant and the line of her thigh beneath her skirt would be enough. The fall of hair on a woman's forehead, the set of dark brown eyes."

There was something almost chaste in the fervour with which Levade spoke; his gaze was fixed on the far wall, over Charlotte's shoulder.

"Did you fall in love with all these different women?"

He looked back to her face.

"That's not a phrase I ever used. What I felt was more pressing, more urgent than what I take that expression to mean."

"But were none of these women different from the others? Didn't you form a lasting attachment to any of them?"

"The question of endurance wasn't important. What I had found was a kind of paradise, an attainable paradise. I had to see how it would end."

"Did it make you happy?" Charlotte found that curiosity kept any edge of surprise or disapproval from her voice.

"Yes. For a while." For the first time in their conversation Levade appeared to smile; at least his mouth expanded and rose at the corners before falling. He got off the bed and straightened his back a little stiffly.

"I understand your anguish, Madame. Everyone in your position thinks there is some uniquely unfair, tormenting aspect to her dilemma. For you it is the fact that in time of war so many men die. It seems selfish of you to worry about your Pierre and you can't tell people about him. But, secretly, you believe that you love him more than any other woman loves her missing lover.

Don't you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You're not allowed to say that, but that's what you think. If only this, if only that. If only the one you loved didn't live so far away.

The married man who has fallen in love with a young girl can't tell his wife, his greatest confidante, and he can't tell his friends because they might disapprove. It's so unfair, he thinks. But every one of these situations has its own particular unfairness."

"There's something else that troubles me," said Charlotte.

"It's the shortness of the time we had together only a few weeks. Can something valid have come from that?"

Levade shook his head.

"You worry that he won't want you if you meet again?"

"Some days I do. He had to learn French to come here. He had to go to lessons with some French woman in London, and he used to make me speak French to him, too, so he could practise."

"You think he used you just to learn the language so he could go on this new assignment?"

"Sometimes I think that. He wanted this assignment because he wanted danger.

I think he wanted to die."

Levade was strolling round the studio. He picked up a book from the table and began to flick through the pages.

"We did discuss it once," said Charlotte, 'the question of his learning French. But the terrible thing is I can't remember what he said. I've tried and tried but I just can't remember."

"I think perhaps you should try not to think about that." Charlotte thought Levade's voice had lost its priestly tone and regained a note of sympathy. She looked up to where he had taken his position in front of the easel; he had started to scrape a little area of paint with a palette knife. Charlotte found herself once more gazing at Anne-Marie's breasts.

"Would you like to pose for me one day, do you think?"

Despite her misgivings. Charlotte was flattered.

"Do you mean like that?" She pointed to Annemarie.

"I don't know. I hadn't thought about it. Probably not."

"Well, maybe. Let's see."

She was relieved, but also a little affronted. What's wrong with my breasts? she found herself thinking. They could not be more beautiful than Anne-Marie's, it was true, but Gregory had always said that...

Levade suddenly turned and strode across the room to where a dozen paintings were leaning against the wall. He pulled one out and thrust it into Charlotte's hands.

"Look at that."

Following directions from Julien, Charlotte met Mirabel in an old white stone farmhouse, an hour's bicycle ride from Lavaurette. At the end of the track that led to it was a roadside calvary turned green with moss and lichen; along the rutted way were the mashed leaves and rotting fruit of an overhanging horse chestnut. The house was bare, with a vast white marble staircase rising from the hall to a straight single passageway above, off which opened half a dozen large rooms, each with bare boards and distempered plaster.

Mirabel showed Charlotte to the last room on the right, in which were two boat beds. As she walked in, her echoing footsteps told Charlotte that the floor was the ceiling of the room below.

In English, with a slight Midlands accent, Mirabel said, "Welcome, Daniele. It's nice to see a friendly face. Sit yourself down."

Charlotte perched with her knees together on the edge of the bed.

Mirabel walked round the room. He was a tall man with curly, light brown hair (almost a case for dyeing. Charlotte thought) and a worried expression. He was wearing corduroy trousers and a workman's blue canvas jacket. He had an enormously broad back, yet delicate fingers, she noticed, with which he made soft gestures as he spoke.

"Now I'm not sure exactly what your plans are, but I've been asked to pass on a request. I'm sorry I couldn't meet you before. I was unavoidably detained." Mirabel coughed.

"To put it more bluntly, it was bloody dangerous. I had to get out."

"If it's about going back, I--"

" Hang on. Listen to me."

There was something masterful about him, but he seemed preoccupied presumably with the cares of his position. He also seemed nervous.

"I think they're on to us again," he said.

"Who? The Germans?"

"No. Some crazed French group."

He looked out of the window for a moment, then seemed to collect himself.

"How good is your French?" he said.

"I can pass for French. For a while. Or on the telephone."

"It'd be all right for a brief message then?"

"Certainly."

Mirabel did not speak. He walked around a little more. Charlotte said conversationally, "What about you?"

"What?"

"Your French."

"I'm bilingual. Like most of us. My mother was French."

Mirabel was standing by the window, looking over a fallen tree in the garden. Eventually he said, "You're looking for someone, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly that. You have another reason for being here."

Charlotte was sufficiently alarmed to remember her training. Minimum information.

"No," she said.

"I have no other purpose." It occurred to her that she had no way of knowing if this Mirabel was who he said he was: it was Julien who had told her where to come, and although she was sure of Julien, it was possible that this man was not the real Mirabel. After all, if he was bilingual, why might he not be French, a Vichy policeman, with one English parent from whom he had learned the language, right down to the slight Midlands accent?

Mirabel looked at her with a weary and slightly superior smile on his face.

"All right. Read this." He gave Charlotte a piece of paper on which was scribbled a single name and a street address; beneath them were a map reference, a date and a time.

Charlotte looked up. Mirabel said, "Can you memorise that?"

"I already have."

"The address is in Limoges. I want you to go there. Ask for the name. Then give him the other details. It's one of ours. It's details of a drop. You must say that you were sent by Frederic. Got that? It's very important. Otherwise they won't believe you. Frederic."

"That's it?"

"That's all."

"Well, that's easy enough."

Mirabel looked at Charlotte suspiciously.

"Don't you want anything..

I mean, can I help you at all?"

"No, it looks quite straightforward."

Charlotte thought for a moment.

"I thought you were going to order me home."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I didn't take my plane. I'm not supposed to be here any more."

"I don't know anything about that. In any case, we need all the people we can get."

"Will you tell them that? Tell the people in London that you need me?"

"I'll see. But in return I want you not to speak to anyone about what I've just asked you. Don't mention it to Octave."

"Why not?"

"Just don't." Mirabel's voice was loud in the bare room. He controlled himself.

"Then I might have news for you. About the person you're looking for. We should keep in touch."

Charlotte breathed in deeply to still the hammering in her chest. She said quietly, "I don't know how to reach you."

"Don't worry about that," said Mirabel.

"You deliver the message safe and sound and I'll be back in touch with you." Charlotte knew she should say nothing, but could not stop herself. In a quiet voice she said, "Do you really know where he is?"

Mirabel looked her in the eye.

"Yes, love," he said.

"I know where he is."

Good morning. Mademoiselle Bobotte. You're looking very well.

Getting some early nights for a change, I dare say." Julien Levade moved briskly across the hallway, inhaling the familiar smell of tobacco and wood polish which today had a new element, possibly of lavender, though less a woman's scent than the kind of vigorous alcohol a man might rub into his flayed pores after shaving.

"Coffee, Monsieur Levade?"

"Is that what you call it? If you insist." Julien was safely round the bend in the stairs.

He sat at his desk and looked over the cobbled courtyard to the street door. Some fat Nazi squatted like a brooding toad in the best house in Lavaurette, requisitioned for the purpose; his country was in ruins, invaded from without, betrayed from within; his work was temporarily stalled for lack of funds; yet he felt an optimistic tremor as he looked across to where the low winter sun struck into the windows of the apartment building opposite.

He opened the half-dozen letters waiting on his desk, hung up his jacket behind the door and went over to his drawing board. He was satisfied that his conversion would work, though who would stay in this hotel, what nationality they would be and when it would open for business he had no idea.

It was not like the numberless hotels du Pare, du Lion d'or or des voyageurs, with their gold letters on black marble nameplates, their fusty dining rooms, swirling cress soup and long damp corridors of failed plumbing and doubtful assignations: it would be bold and simple; it would glory in the stripped-down elements of which it was made, and there would be no attempt to smother the stone flags with hectares of hatched parquet, to box in the beams and cover the ceiling with flowered paper. The walls would be whitewashed, the furniture plain, though he hoped the richness of the textiles and the efficiency of the heating system he had planned, the great boiler sunk into a former solitary cell below ground, would take away any lingering air of the penitential.

It would open, perhaps, in 1946. The mayor of Lavaurette would come, and there would be a party from Paris as well, the senior men in the parent company and their wives. On the first evening there would be speeches; the builders would be thanked and there would be a toast to the former abbot, driven up for the day from the old people's home. Julien would be in his dinner jacket, moving among the guests, modestly declining their congratulations; he would now be living back in Paris, with Weil, his old boss, reinstated at the head of the company. Weil's French citizenship, which had been revoked by Vichy, would naturally have been restored by the righteous and democratic government that followed.

Julien gazed at the floor plan of the bedrooms. Drawing was the part he liked best. The finished building was not worse, necessarily, than the plan, but it was always different; between the idea and the achieved reality the process of construction made a contribution of its own, so that what emerged invariably lacked the magnificent, beguiling, complex purity of the idea.

Poor Weil, Julien thought: how he had loved his work and his life in the city. He could picture him vividly, with his fair hair, and his quick eyes lighting up a fraction before his companion's at some irony, some gossip he had picked up at lunch in one of the restaurants he patronised on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. How proud he was though silently: he would have thought it trite to say so of being French; how much he valued strolling through the sumptuous capital and its self-advertising landmarks of enlightenment the Place de la Concorde, the Boulevard de la Republique. Now he was stripped of his job and his assets, forced to report daily to some surly prefect in the sixth arrondissement, and to wear on the lapel of his prized camel overcoat a cloth yellow star decorated with the word "Jew'. Julien was sure it would eventually be all right for men such as Weil. How could it not be? They must be patient; they must wait for the English and the Americans and for people such as himself who would clear a path for the friendly invaders.

There was a knock at the door, and Pauline Bobotte came in with the small white china cup of coffee.

She lingered by the desk. Julien looked up at her powdery pink face, framed by the chestnut-coloured hair she wore clipped close to her head in shiny waves. She ran a finger along the edge of Julien's desk.

"So, Monsieur Levade. The enemy is at the gate."

"He's in the house. Mademoiselle Bobotte. He's been there for a long time, if only you had eyes to see."

"Oh, I have eyes all right. I have eyes in the back of my head, my mother used to say." She gave a small laugh.

"Nothing passes me by, I promise you."

"I'm sure it doesn't. Mademoiselle Bobotte. You're a marvel. They say you can speak to three people at once on your telephone exchange."

"People exaggerate." Pauline Bobotte looked pleased.

"But they do tell me you've found a new lady love. Your father's servant-girl if that's the right word."

"Oh, do they? I wonder why they say that." Julien had expected some comment and wanted to find out the current state of gossip.

"Apparently she kissed you, right out in front of a crowd, the day the Germans came."

"The emotion of the moment, I imagine, Mademoiselle. We were all a little distraught. I expect she wanted reassurance."

"Reassurance! That's a funny word for it. They said you looked as pleased as anything."

"Politeness, mere politeness, I assure you. One does one's best in these circumstances."

"Anyway, I thought you had a fiancee in Paris, Monsieur Levade."

"Oh, did you? I thought it was Lyon. You should really ask Pauline Benoit. She seems to know more about my personal life than I do."

Pauline Bobotte pouted at the mention of the other Pauline.

"Anyway," she said, 'you'd better be careful if you're going to carry on with a maid like that. People will talk."

'"People"

" said Julien.

"Well, you'd better go and stop these " people", Mademoiselle Bobotte. Unless by doing so you think you might become one of them. Madame Guilbert is a married woman whose brave husband was taken prisoner in May 1940 and is being held by the enemy. She's utterly devoted to him.

It would be not only immoral but quite unpatriotic of me to harbour any sort of amorous intention towards her. I see my role as protective." Pauline Bobotte grunted.

"She's pretty, though."

"Is she? I suppose in a way she's elegant. For a servant-girl. I hadn't really noticed."

"So why were you kissing her?"

"I didn't kiss her. She kissed me. I told you. She was overwrought."

"But why should she ' " Enough, Bobotte! Back to your switchboard, please. I have important work to do." Julien handed her his empty cup, and Pauline Bobotte made her way unhappily to the door, where she paused as though to speak again but was forestalled by the sound of the telephone downstairs.

"Oh, Dominique," said Julien out loud when she had gone.

"What am I going to do about you?"

He put his feet up on the desk and started to indulge a fantasy in which he contrived to invite Dominique to spend a night at the hotel with him before it opened. They would go to the largest room at the end of the western elevation, the one with the view down towards the river. The bed was unslept in, the sheets were of linen and new from their brown paper packing; the bath had never been filled. The bathroom itself was fragrant with the scent of gardenia, and the fixtures and taps were boldly modern, all chrome with porcelain insets. He would have ordered new clothes for her from Paris a skirt, a suit perhaps, which he would help her on with. In the long intimacy of the night he would go beneath the layers of her acquired identities to find the English girl, and discover what it was that moved her, what it was that filled her eyes with that earnest and entrancing light. At lunch-time Julien went to see the Duguay boys. Mlle Cariteau ushered him into the kitchen and poured him a glass of wine; her manner was as brisk and assured as usual, but her eyes were worried.

"I don't like to let the boys downstairs at all now," she said.

"It's very hard on them being shut up on the second floor, but I just can't take the chance. I've asked Maman to spend more time with them while I'm at work so they don't get lonely."

Julien found Andre and Jacob in a small bedroom at the back of the house.

"I've brought something for you," he said.

"I got them in a secondhand shop in a town I went to the other day. I hope you like them."

From his pocket he produced six lead soldiers whose bright Napoleonic uniforms were starting to flake away. The boys grasped them eagerly. Julien fought a prim urge to tell them that they should say thank you. Then he saw the excitement in their eyes and remembered that they had probably not seen a toy since leaving their parents' house.

Jacob had difficulty in making one of his soldiers stand up; it was a useless figure locked into some ceremonial salute and the base was warped. Jacob nevertheless chuckled with pleasure. Andre's response was more equivocal; he was annoyed that the sword had broken from one of his men and said he could not make much of an army with only three soldiers.

Julien remembered Andre's old lightness, the way he had skipped everywhere, and saw that he had lost it. He had become a sullen little boy; his clothes were getting too small for him and his hair hung down into his eyes. He seemed dissatisfied and to be looking for reasons to complain. Then, when Julien was at the door, on his way out, Andre suddenly began to leap up and down by his side, grabbing his arm, saying, "Thank you, thank you," and barking like a dog. Back in the kitchen, Julien found Sylvie Cariteau preparing to return to the post-office.

"They seem all right, don't they?" he said.

'as well as they can be."

"Listen, Sylvie, you do understand, don't you, how things have changed? When Andre and Jacob first came here, you could have given any number of excuses to the gendarmerie, who'd probably have connived with you way. Now it's different. They're taking Jews from everywhere, foreign, French, it doesn't matter. The Government is trying to bargain with the ^otas, but they're cooperating. Now you're running a real risk. If they find Andre and Jacob they'll punish you too."

"I know," said Sylvie.

"But I can't turn them out now. It's Maman I worry about more. She doesn't really understand."

"But is she safe? She won't tell?"

"No, I don't think so. I've tried to make it clear to her. And she's become r rid. of the boys. One thing I don't understand, Julien. Where do they take these people?"

"They go to Paris first, where they're put on trains."

"Trains?"

"Yes. To Poland, I've been told."

"And what happens there?"

"In theory they work. They put them in work camps."

"In theory?"

"In fact ... If they wanted them to work they would send them to Germany, not Poland. I don't know. There are rumours. These people are not like us." 0n his way back to his office, Julien came across Claude Benech on the Avenue Gambetta. He hesitated for a moment, then remembered the promise of duplicity he had made to Charlotte and held out his hand in greeting. Benech took it briefly and hurried on.

Benech would have rather not met Julien Levade at this moment; he was on his way to an assignation, and although it was perfectly proper, he didn't want to be questioned about his movements.

A couple of days earlier he had received a cyclostyled letter beginning Dear Patriot' beneath the double-headed axe of Vichy and the triple motto Work, Family and Fatherland. It invited him to present himself at an address in a back street of Lavaurette where he could learn of an opportunity to serve his country. A minute or so before two o'clock Benech knocked at a thin blue door in a dark street optimistically called the Rue des Rosiers. No rose bush had forced its way up here for many years, Benech thought as he waited for an answer; it was an area of the village, between the garage and the factory, that he barely knew.

The door opened on to a gloomy hallway with a circular table at the foot of the stairs on which a black telephone was ringing. Whoever had opened the door was standing behind it in order to let Benech pass, and it was not until he was standing inside that he turned and saw a large man wearing a shiny, padded leather jacket with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

The man led the way up the stairs, ignoring the raucous telephone. The room at the front of the house was bare except for a large deal table, spotted with white paint, and three hard chairs. The shutters were closed and the room was lit by an electric bulb that hung from the ceiling. In its light Benech could see the other man more clearly: he was in his middle thirties, with black curly hair, sideburns and thick eyebrows. He was solidly made but was starting to run to fat; his belly turned the buckle of his belt halfway down towards the floor: he looked like someone who had been a footballer or boxer, and then let go.

"You can call me Clovis." His tongue whistled on the final consonant; his accent was from the south-east.

"You're Monsieur Benech?"

Benech nodded. He felt a little unsure of this man. He had expected something more formal flags, a uniform and he was not certain that the Director of his school would approve of his being there. The telephone rang on doggedly downstairs.

Clovis lit another cigarette and pushed the packet across the table to Benech, who shook his head.

"I'm touring round the area to recruit for an organisation," Clovis began.

"It's due to be launched officially in January, so there's no time to lose. This is a political party, but I'm not concerned with politics. I'm looking for volunteers for the security force that will go with it. The aim of the force is to maintain order while political reform goes through."

Benech licked his lips.

"I'm not sure. I don't want to belong to anything that's not part of the Marshal's vision of France."

Clovis laughed, the deep, companionable sound Benech had often heard and envied among the men in the Cafe du Centre.

"There's no need to worry. Monsieur, this is a particular project of Monsieur Laval himself. He's to be the president of the organisation." Benech sat forward in his chair.

"Really?"

"Absolutely. The party will aim to unify all the different patriotic groups in the country. The security organisation will be open to all volunteers. It will have a youth section for boys and girls. But what I'm talking about are permanent staff", people we can rely on."

Clovis was cleverer than he looked, Benech thought. Perhaps he could forgive the informality of his reception if this scheme had emanated from Vichy, from the brain of Monsieur Laval, and "with the blessing therefore of the Marshal himself.

'... just a couple of questions about your beliefs. They're bound to ask you," Clovis was saying.

"Who is the most serious enemy of the true France?"

"The Communists," said Benech '... and the English," he added quickly, fearing that his first answer might not have been correct.

Clovis nodded and smiled. He pushed a piece of paper across the table.

"Read this. It's the oath of allegiance you'll be required to take." Benech read: "I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy ..." It was phrased a little more strongly than he would have liked, but it was in essence the oath he had waited for all his life.

"It's fine."

As Clovis raised his hand to his face to pull the cigarette from his lips, Benech noticed the numerous nicks and scars on his huge, thick fingers; there was something both soothing and stimulating about this man, he felt.

Clovis put his hand into a drawer above his thighs. Such was the size of his grasp that Benech did not see what he had taken out and laid on the table until he removed his hand with a flourish.

"Have you ever used one of these?"

Having been excused by reason of his asthma from military service, Benech had neither used, nor even previously seen from close quarters, a handgun. The packed, stubby handle and the long, gleaming barrel, sent a frisson through him; he felt something starting to be explained, some long-held injustice beginning at last to be put right.

"If you prove your worth, if you do what you're told, you'll get one of these," said Clovis.

"You're lucky. Most of the volunteers are being told to stuff their holsters with paper. You'll get a uniform as well khaki shirt, black tie and beret. You provide dark blue trousers and jacket. Do you want to hear more?" The telephone in the hallway stopped ringing and it was suddenly quiet in the room. Benech felt Clevis's powerful, mocking eyes on him and knew that such an opportunity might never come to him again.

"Yes," he said, 'yes, I do."

All round the Domaine the darkness was cold and thick; through the night the wind had rushed and relented, softened and hurried on, hurling the rain against the bolted shutters. Levade shivered as he took a piece of paper from the desk in his studio and pulled the lit candle nearer to him. For someone concerned with making pictures he had ugly handwriting, distorted by the urgency with which he wrote. 21 November 1942 .04.45h.

Man is alone in the world. A woman expects a baby, but that baby in particular, that character? No. She does not even know what sex it will be, would not recognise a photograph of it when grown. And in death there is eternal isolation. That will be my Hell. I am afraid of dying, but I know my fear is a sin. By language men have made a show of congregation or society, because the individual is not born with language but learns to navigate with its means, which have been developed and bequeathed by dead men. This sense of being part of something greater is in fact an illusion. A man and woman may live together all their lives and still know little of the essence of the other.

They rarely surprise each other, because what is essential to each is never communicated.

Like language, art struggles with what is common, to disturb the individual habit of perception and, by disturbing it, to enable men to see what has been lived and seen by others. By upsetting, therefore, it tries to soothe, because it hopes to free each person from the tyranny of solitude.

No child born knows the world he is entering, and at the moment of his birth he is a stranger to his parents. When he dies, many years later, there may be regrets among those left behind that they never knew him better, but he is forgotten almost as soon as he dies because there is no time for others to puzzle out his life. After a few years he will be referred to once or twice by a grandchild, then by no one at all.

Unknown at the moment of birth, unknown after death. This weight of solitude! A being unknown.

And yet, if I believe in God, I am known. On the tombs of the English soldiers, the ones too fragmented to have a name, I remember that they wrote "Known unto God'. By this they meant that here was a man, who did once have arms and legs and a father and a mother, but they could not find all the parts of him least of all his name.

God will know me, even as I cannot know myself. If He created me, then He has lived with me. He knows the nature of my temptations and the manner of my failing. So I am not alone. I have for my companion the creator of the world. At the hour of my death I would wish to be 'known unto God'.

Charlotte had pushed the jagged grey pyramid of oyster shells to one side and was cutting into a plump Bresse chicken. She had ordered a whole one and was undaunted by its size, or by the steaming pot of fresh parsley sauce. From the mound of mashed potatoes on her plate a narrow trickle of butter ran into the margins of the oily vinaigrette that dressed the mountainous green salad. She tore off half a baguette, slit it lengthwise, plastered it with ripe camembert the waiter had slipped on to her side plate, and made a xxging sandwich. As she sucked the fat meniscus from a balloon of Burgundy, a remote jangling forced itself closer until the sound filled her, A - and the dinner vanished. She was, as usual, incredulous, and wished she had a watch against which to double-check the claim of the violent alarm clock. Seven o'clock? It was dark; it couldn't be more than four or five. Reluctantly, she remembered that this was what she always thought, and that every morning the hands of the sullen Louis XVI clock in the dining room, mendaciously . png in its absurd lacquered cabinet, pointed out her mistake.

The day proceeded as it had begun, cold and dispiriting, until noon, i) pounds there was a call from Julien. The wireless operator had heard a coded message on the BBC and Mirabel had confirmed the codes: there was to be a drop on Thursday. Mirabel would not himself be there, and had entrusted them to pick up and store what was landed. They were expecting supplies, ^)is and explosives. It was to be the biggest drop of the war so far, and jeered London's expectation that, with the Germans in the former Free the action would become increasingly open. Julien sounded almost frantic with excitement, and Charlotte wondered what Pauline Bobotte would make of the news as she worked away with her busy plugs and handset. Julien thought it a good idea for Dominique to come into Lavaurette for dinner that evening to discuss 'tactics'. Charlotte knew the ^de tactical refinement to determine would be whether she or Cesar rode her more decrepit bicycle, but was persuaded to accept, as Julien must have known she would be, by his use of the word 'dinner'.

Wearing both of Dominique's jumpers under her coat, her hair beneath her scarf, Charlotte set out on her bicycle, lowering her head against the flat J^jft of rain.

Good evening, Madame. Monsieur Levade told me he was expecting "(1. A horrible night to be out, isn't it?" Yes," said Charlotte, a little put out that she had got no further than two steps into the hall before Pauline Benoit's door opened.

"Though you look, though you're going out yourself."

Yes, indeed. I have no choice," said Madame Benoit.

"Duty calls."

Charlotte did not bother to think what she might mean; she was hungry, J the prospect of even Madame Gayral's cuisine in all its scorched uncertainty was enough to put other thoughts from her mind as she hurried up the stairs to Julien's apartment.

Julien sat her down in front of the fire and poured her a glass of wine. He seemed to find it hard to settle, but kept getting up and going off into different room on some urgent but undisclosed business. Charlotte ascribed this nervousness to his worry about the imminent drop. He re-entered the room for perhaps the fourth or fifth time and filled her glass again.

"So, Dominique. You all set for Thursday?"

"Yes, Octave. Quite ready, thank you."

"For God's sake call me Julien when we're alone. I can't bear this stupid Octave thing."

"I apologise. I thought... All right. Julien."

"Does my father know you're going?"

Charlotte crossed her legs and settled back a little further into the armchair.

"I imagine so. He's given me the whole day off. Your father seems to know a good deal about me."

"Well, I can assure you it wasn't me who told him. I've been absolutely ' " Relax, Julien. I wasn't accusing you. Your father seems interested in certain aspects of my life, though not what I might be doing tomorrow.

For instance, he's guessed that I'm Scottish, or English as he calls it, but I don't think he has any curiosity about why I'm staying in Lavaurette. Or perhaps he was just too tactful to ask."

"So what are these " aspects"?" said Julien.

"Personal things. He knows my name, for instance."

"Your real name?" A look of intense anxiety passed over Julien's face, which Charlotte presumed to spring from a worry about security.

"Yes."

"And why did you tell him?"

"I was lonely." She was glad Mr. Jackson could not hear this abject excuse. Julien nodded and made to speak, then stopped as though on reflection he considered this a reasonable explanation. He sighed and stood up.

Charlotte watched as he walked across the floor to the dresser to collect the wine bottle. In the tall, echoing room, with its austere furniture and pale colours, he looked for a moment vulnerable, a solitary man set against the background of his imagination.

"You drink too much," said Charlotte, meaning to break his introspection.

"Probably." He rolled his eyes as though she was always nagging him and smiled; it seemed to work.

"Have you booked a table?" said Charlotte.

"No. We're having dinner here. Hadn't you noticed the smell?"

"I did notice something," said Charlotte.

"I thought it kinder not to mention it."

Julien drank more and more wine and Charlotte had to hold her hand over her own glass when he tried to refill it. He talked about the weather and how it could affect the operation; he muttered about Gastinel, whom he no longer bothered to refer to as "Auguste', and cursed him for losing interest.

"Typical little shopkeeper just worried about filling his own till," he said as he cleared the soup plates and brought in a china dish with slices of pink meat in gravy which he claimed were veal he had acquired from a friend of a friend. He had hardly begun to eat before he lit a cigarette.

"How do you manage to look so clean always?" he said abruptly.

"It's a wonder if I do. The stove that heats the wood takes about three days to warm up the tank. I only have one bath a week.

Otherwise I wash in cold water."

"You could use the public baths," said Julien.

"That's what I do."

"I didn't know there were any."

"Behind the Place de 1" Eglise. They're in an old school building. They're very popular these days because fuel's so short."

"I'll bear it in mind."

"You don't look as though you need it. You look like the kind of woman who's always fresh and sweet-smelling, a little dab of scent behind the ears.. Let me smell."

He went over to where Charlotte sat and nuzzled his face into her neck, inhaling deeply.

"I knew it," he said, 'delicious."

Charlotte pushed him away.

"You're drunk, Julien."

"Not really." It was true; the dramatic amount of alcohol he swallowed seemed to have almost no effect on him except perhaps to make him slightly more affectionate: Charlotte sometimes wondered why he bothered.

Julien pulled up a loose chair next to Charlotte and reached out to her. He looked down at where his hands had imprisoned hers, then up into her face.

His dark eyes were, Charlotte conceded, undeniably beautiful.

"We've been through some things, haven't we, Dominique? Whatever happens to us now, I think we'll remember."

"Yes," said Charlotte, 'though sometimes I feel guilty about having enjoyed it so much."

"Exactly," said Julien.

"As though we can't be taking it seriously. I think that's the point I'm trying to make. You think I'm your friend, and I am. You think that because we laugh together and work together then that limits the kind of friendship we can have. I don't think so. I don't think romance needs to be solemn.

You can laugh with someone and still sleep with them."

"Of course, but-' " I want to sleep with you, Dominique."

"Julien! I don't think you can just ask a woman straight out like that."

"Why not?"

Charlotte did not know why not.

Julien said.

"Suppose there's a German ambush on Thursday night and we get killed by our fat German and his troops, mown down by machine guns. We would never know what it was like and, and ..."

"It's a bit unlikely," said Charlotte.

"Well, maybe ... I hope so. But wouldn't you like to anyhow?"

"It's not a question of what I would like to do, it's a question of what is right."

"But would you like to?"

"There would be worse things, I imagine." She squeezed Julien's hands.

"I do like you, Julien, I promise you. I like you without reservation. But there's another man."

"It's not quite without reservation, then."

"Not quite."

She leaned over and wrapped her arms round him. Julien laid his head on her shoulder, then raised his face to hers. Charlotte kissed him and, feeling his tongue slide between her lips, expected some violent retribution for her infidelity. Nothing in fact stopped her from kissing Julien and allowing him to run his hands over her; nothing except the fear that she was leading him on too far. She disengaged herself, reluctantly.

"I won't sleep with you, Julien. Now I don't know if you want to go on kissing me or -whether that would make things worse."

"I think perhaps it would make things worse."

Julien stood up, ran his hand through his hair and, with an effort of selfdiscipline that seemed to weigh down his body, cleared the half-finished plates and took them out of the room.

Peter Gregory was standing in the Mayor's parlour. The Mayor was in his nightshirt, dishevelled and unwilling. Gregory was desperate.

"I need papers to get out of France."

"How will you go?"

"Spain."

"Do you have money?"

"Yes. I take trains. I can't walk very far."

"But you'll have to walk across the Pyrenees."

"Then my leg ... better."

The Mayor shook his head.

"It's a very long way. I've never been that far myself. I've never been further than Toulouse. You won't make it.

Not with the way you speak French. And if I give you an identity card with the name of our commune on it, then it's not only you but we who'll end up in trouble." Once, Gregory had not much cared if he saw England again. Now it seemed to him to be the only thing he wanted; and, if he didn't make it, then to die in the attempt would be an almost equally gratifying outcome.

If only he had told Charlotte on the night he left. If only he had gone back, broken into the flat, woken her and told her how much he loved her. He twisted the ring on his finger, round and round. He would not move from the Mayor's house. There was no particular reason to trust the shaky line of sympathisers, beginning with the vet, that had brought him there, but he had no other grounds of hope.

"Monsieur, I would like to help, but I must put the well-being of the commune first."

Gregory did not really understand. Although the Mayor was disparaging about Gregory's French, it did not occur to him to adjust his own speech in any way: he rattled away, gurgling, self-righteous, idiomatic.

The door opened and a woman came into the parlour: the Mayor's wife in a long nightdress, her hair beneath a cotton cap, her face dramatically white. She looked at Gregory, crouched against the sofa, his leg at an angle obviously troubling him. In his midnight fatigue and in the enclosure of his pain he looked out to her and tried to summon up a remnant of flirtatious charm. God knows what I must look like, he thought, in Jacques's old clothes how thin, how red-eyed. It's pathetic.

It was his only chance. He smiled at the woman and began his laborious, ungrammatical explanation once again. He adorned the story with smiles and shrugs which he hoped were winning. The woman left the room abruptly and Gregory stopped talking. His mouth now tasted of defeat and words could not form in it.

The Mayor looked at him, coughed and nodded. He, too, was silent.

Gregory again cursed his inability to speak the language: if only he had talked more with Charlotte when she offered. The thought of her gave him a new resolve.

He calculated the practicalities. He would walk by night, steal food. They would give him a map. When he came to the Pyrenees he would trust to luck; if he could not find a guide he would follow the compass ... It was not possible.

The woman returned with a tray on which was a bottle of spirit and three glasses. She poured one and handed it to Gregory. He thanked her warmly. As he raised the small glass to his lips, he thought of Leslie Brind taking down the glass yard from above the bar at the Rose and Crown. The fellowship of these men, foolish, drunk as they were, was not a reason to die but could be another reason to live. The liquor on his tongue freed the words and, thinking of these men, he began once more.

"You imbecile!" the woman screamed, and Gregory was stunned by her fury. Her face was so twisted by anger and indignation that it took him a moment to see that she was talking to her husband.

"Give this man a card! If you delay one moment longer I'll pack my bag and leave you."

"But, my dear, I must think about the commune."

"If you're not man enough to take responsibility for your actions in the town then God knows why you're Mayor. You're certainly not the man I married. Give me the cards."

"There aren't any here. They're at the Mairie."

"Then you will get one first thing in the morning."

"But he'll need a photograph." The Mayor's fleshy face was set about with anxiety.

Gregory had recognised the word 'photograph' and was rummaging in his pocket.

"Notes for pilots' by Wing Commander H. S. Verity DSO, DFC. He knew it by heart: " You should carry a standard escape kit, some purses of French money, a gun or two, and thermos flask of hot coffee or what you will.

Empty your pockets of anything of interest to the Hun, but carry with you some small photographs of yourself in civilian clothes. These may be attached to false identity papers. Change your linen before flying, as dirty shirts have a bad effect on wounds. The Lysander is a warm aeroplane, and I always wore a pair of shoes rather than flying boots.

If you have to walk across the Pyrenees you might as well do it in comfort." Gregory handed the Mayor two photographs.

The painting that Levade had thrust at Charlotte was the only one he still had from the best period of his work. He had kept it back when he sold the others, from some suspicion developing even at the time that the inlets in his mind had moved into a favourable but temporary conjunction that never come again. Charlotte looked at it for several minutes; by the time she had finished she was less sure what it was she had seen than when she began. There was a square in a French town, painted in a clear and representational manner; the colouring was flat, the shadows thrown by the buildings were hardedged: there was no deliquescence of form or colour as in an Impressionist painting; on the contrary, the technique was so realistic that it drew attention to itself.

But against this assertiveness there was an element of mystery: the square was deserted, a clock on the church showed twenty to four, as though this blank hour of the afternoon were significant. Two figures in a side street faced in different directions, apparently trapped by yfle melancholy misunderstanding. The picture was suffused with a sadness that was both particular and irresistibly suggestive. What gripped Charlotte was the sense of being strongly moved by a mysterious emotion, yet having the release of that feeling repeatedly closed by the ambiguity of the image. In the days after she had seen it, Charlotte thought that perhaps what made it so affecting was that Levade had given the impression of seeing through the surface of the world into the deeper reality: he had unpicked one's natural assumptions of the way things looked and reassembled them in a different way; then, as one tried to adjust to this altered, truer state, the constituents of the picture once more unravelled.

It was an entrancing feeling that Levade had evoked, but it was not reassuring; the powerful yearning, brought on by the immediate certainty that he had disclosed something profound, was frustrated by a metaphysical limitation. Perhaps there was an element of truth he had not been able to find. Perhaps he had reached a point beyond which it was not possible to go.

When she asked him why he no longer painted in this way, he sighed.

"It's simple," he said.

"It's because I no longer dream. As a young man I painted in a very traditional way. Before the war I had a studio with some other people in the rue Carpeaux. We'd see what Picasso and the others were doing, and although I thought it was important I couldn't find my own version of it, my own language. I kept on painting in the style of artists I admired, Courbet, or Degas, then later like the early Matisse. When I returned to Paris after the war everything seemed to have changed. Suddenly I found I wanted to paint quite differently, and the subjects suggested to me the way they should be treated. They seemed to come to me more or less complete in dreams. At least, I didn't puzzle over how I should treat them, I just had to record them, as they were."

Charlotte was sitting, once more at Levade's invitation, on the bed in his studio.

"And these dreams that came to you, were they of places you knew, or were they imagined?"

"Most of them are the places of my childhood. It was as though there were a landscape inside my head which I'd forgotten, and it was restored to me bit by bit each night. Perhaps it was the effect of the war in some way. I would wake up each morning and find that another small piece of myself had been rescued and returned to me, though of course, it now looked different.

In the passage of time it had become more charged. My dreams seemed to capture the full meaning - something that had not been apparent at the time."

"How long did this go on?" said Charlotte.

"For about five years. No more than that. All the good paintings I've done were in that small period. After that, something shifted, something changed. Although the process seemed to be spontaneous, I think there was also an element of will. I spent many hours at the easel there was that sort of self-discipline but apart from that I was unaware of any intellectual effort, although I suspect it was more than I realised at the time. When you're painting at that pitch of concentration, your mind is partly passive, you're in a state in which you surrender to the impulses you feel, but there's something active as well. You're making sure at the very least that the impulses stay in the right constellation. There's push and pull; even letting go is quite a conscious act. The fact that you're not aware of the active part doesn't make it any less demanding.

Many painters become worn down by their efforts Derain, for instance, in my view.

Perhaps in the end that's what happened to me. I experienced it as a loss of these spontaneous dreams, but maybe I was really just exhausted." Levade coughed and gave one of his quickly vanishing smiles.

"So now I just put paint on canvas. The skin of a waitress's arm."

"It must be frustrating."

"Of course. I think about it all the time. Painting was my life and it failed me. I was bound to wonder why. And the solitude has given me time to puzzle over it." Charlotte pushed her shoes off and sat back against the bolster, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms round them. Levade had spoken quite unguardedly, with a fluency that must have derived from having gone over the question so often in his mind.

"Have you talked to Julien about this?"

"Yes." Levade sat on a little stool he kept in front of the easel.

"It was difficult at first because I hadn't seen him since I left his mother and I thought he might not want to know me. But he's a very forgiving man. He has a remarkable temperament. In the end I told him everything. When he first came to live in Lavaurette he used to come here for dinner every night. He cooked and then we'd talk for hours.

Then I think he found a woman."

"Who was that?" Charlotte's voice was even.

"He didn't tell me her name. Some woman in the village. He never stays with them long."

"Like his father."

"I think he has some difficulties. The difference is that he would like to be faithful, so he's always disappointed by himself."

"But you didn't want to be?"

"Not until I married Julien's mother, then I did try."

"And what was it about Julien's mother, out of all the other women?"

"It was a dream. I'd known her for five years. She worked in a baker's on the Boulevard de Rochechouart. I used to see her almost every day, and her brother knew a lot of people who were friends of mine. She was older than me, not very beautiful, a rather stout bourgeoise. Her father had a number of shops, they were quite well-to-do. Then one night I had an overwhelming dream of being in love with her. I awoke in the morning and found it was true. I was sick with the feeling. When I told you the other day that I didn't use the expression of being in love I should have excluded this one instance. I took flowers to the shop, I followed her in the street. I was distraught, yet I had a sense of inner conviction that this was the woman I had to be with. The dream was not a vision or a fragment, it was the statement of a reality. I couldn't properly remember from that day on what I had felt before. I couldn't imagine what it had been like not being in love with her."

"What went wrong?"

"I suppose it was the war. Julien was born in 1913 and the next year I was mobilised. I came home on leave from time to time, but it was difficult. The life I was living at the front was impossible to reconcile with what was asked of me at home. I knew it was changing me inside. I felt it was destroying me." Levade's voice was hard and emphatic. Charlotte felt he wanted to disclose more to her of what had happened to him.

"And yet," he said, more ruminatively this time, 'it was the making in some way of my painting. I left Julien's mother in 1922 and it was then that my dreams began. But without the four years at the Front. I don't know." Charlotte looked out of the window and saw that it was dark.

"I should go and make dinner," she said.

Levade did not answer; he seemed to be lost in recollection.

"Yes," he said eventually.

"If you like. Perhaps you could bring something up here on a tray." After dinner Levade closed the shutters in his studio, handed Charlotte cigarettes, two glasses and a bottle of Armagnac "How did you find this house?" said Charlotte.

"A friend of Kahnweiler's. The picture dealer. It belonged to a family with several children but none of them wanted it or could afford it." Charlotte put some more wood on the fire, then sat down in the room's only comfortable seat, a battered, rush-seated armchair. She thought for a moment of winter nights in the Highlands. Before it was somehow taken from her, there had in her childhood been a period of perfect contentment. She must have been very young indeed, yet the experience of it was still real in her mind: a sense of secure order in which the details of domestic life, the taste of redcurrants from the cage in the garden, the sound of a bicycle bell, the smell of paraffin with which her daily chore was to fill the heaters in the hall, the first frisson of hot water as she lowered herself into the bath in a cold but steam-filled room; and the lanes along which she walked these had been of an enchantment that was complete, not tainted by comparison or loss.

And these remembered details would have amounted to nothing without love. For some short time at least. Charlotte recognised with a shock, there must have been harmony between herself and her parents.

She had forgotten this brief childish paradise.

Levade took a glass and sat in the wicker chair by the window. He began to talk about his life in Paris. Then he told Charlotte about a house he had once lived in by the sea. It was summer time. Julien, aged about twelve, was packed off by his mother on the train from Paris to be met by Levade at the local station. The village had been inhabited by fishermen and their families for centuries and had yet to acquire a proper hotel. The house to which Levade took Julien was behind a small bay with pink cliffs topped by fir trees. There were upturned boats and lobster pots, tended by the fishermen whose boots left ugly imprints on the sand; no visitors from Paris had ever been before, and they were regarded by the people of the village with puzzled indifference.

Levade's whitewashed cottage had a terrace that overlooked the sea; inside, it was bare and simple, with two bedrooms and a small garden at the back. A girl from the village came in every day to clean and make lunch from whatever fish she had bought from her grandfather's early boat on the way.

In the evening, Levade took Julien by the hand and led him across the sandy village square with a wind-battered larch, to the Pension that was housed in a squat brick building with bright blue shutters. Various friends from Paris were staying, also painters, some with small children in sailor clothes and sun-hats, some with their mistresses, and two men who dumbfounded the servant-girls by sharing a singlebedded room. All day Levade worked out of doors, sitting on the top of the cliff with an easel or walking round the headland with a sketch book.

Sometimes he would take a boat and row out of the bay, looking back at the tenacious grey village on the hillside, watching Julien's sunburnt face as his trailed fingers split the surface of the dark water.

Occasionally there would be telephone messages from Paris, uncomprehendingly relayed by the woman on the switchboard; once a telegram boy arrived on the beach; but these urgent communications seemed no more than gestures from a forgotten world.

The reality was only in the swinging glass-panelled doors of the dining room at night, the snail's line of sand from the children's canvas shoes and the cream cheeses they ate with such glee for dessert, while their parents smoked cigars or persevered with the smaller limbs of lobsters; it was in the simple faces of the waitresses and the indulgent smile of the widow who owned the Pension. As the summer wore on, the composition of the party changed and its numbers gradually diminished, but Levade felt there was no reason ever to go home.

Each night he dreamed, sometimes useless stories, sometimes mere projections of the day that had gone, but also of buildings and cities, of landscapes given back to him from his past, now fully understood and released by the visit of his imagination. He painted with devotion, and the stretch of his mental energy did not deplete him but left his other senses stimulated and serene. He had formed an understanding with one of the girls in the Pension; he gave her books and presents; he talked to her, and in return she was a lover in whom the desire to please seemed limitless.

"I think of it often," said Levade, who was now lying on the bed.

"Sometimes I can almost recapture it, but not quite. I can't find the exact reality of it."

For all that she was interested by what Levade had said, Charlotte could not help a certain minister of the kirk reaction. Who had been looking after Julien when Levade was busy with his little girlfriend?

What sort of durable Eden was it that saw children as little more than picturesque?

She said, "Do you think all paradises are lost, that that's their nature?"

"I wouldn't say lost," said Levade, 'but they must be in the past. What is present can't be imagined, and imagination is the only faculty we have for apprehending beauty."

He stood up and walked over to the brass-topped table to refill his glass.

"Isn't that your problem. Mademoiselle? You have lost something, perhaps two things, two states of feeling. You don't wish to admit it, but perhaps there has been in one of them at least your love affair a diminution of your pain. If you admit that, then you're saying that the ecstasy was not as important as you thought, and since this was the feeling by which you organised your life, you can't afford to confess that." Charlotte said nothing. She did not know if Levade was right, but she felt a wish to hurt him, to expose his egocentricity in some damaging way. She said,

"I'm surprised you set such store by dreams.

They seem an unlikely guide. I remember a colleague of my father's, a psychologist, describing dreams to me once as " neural waste"." Levade laughed, a disconcerting sight that involved him throwing back his head so the sinews of his neck stood out.

"People always make fine phrases when they're frightened. I remember Proust, at his most desperate to break through the bonds of time, writing something like " reality is the waste-product of experience"." Levade laughed so hard that he had to put down his glass.

"Did you like Proust?" said Charlotte.

"Yes, I thought it was a funny book. But I was young when I read it. I think there's a copy in the house somewhere."

"Funny?" said Charlotte.

"I suppose it's funny," she lied. She thought it was the most tragic book she had ever read.

"I think of it as sad as well. The loss of any hope of happiness through love, the disillusion ... ' " Perhaps," said Levade.

"Anyway, I don't arrange my life through dreams. I hope for them, I pray for them to help my painting. But I arrange my life through God." On Wednesday, the day before the parachute drop of arms and stores was due.

Charlotte went into Lavaurette to buy food. Outside Madame Galliot's she remembered that they also needed candles and, as she leaned her bicycle against the shop, she saw the caped, official figure of Bernard attaching a piece of paper to the wall. Walking behind him to go into Madame Galliot's, Charlotte could not resist looking over his shoulder.

The poster showed a man drowning, lifting up his hands for help; in the foreground were shown the figures of de Gaulle and Churchill, with friendly arms round the shoulders of a sinister Jewish figure in a coat with a astrakhan collar.

"Remember Mers el Kebir! Remember Dunkirk!" read the black, smeared letters. 'Don't let's throw it away Now!"

Bernard was staring at the poster in some puzzlement as he smoothed it down with his hands, though Charlotte thought it unlikely it could be the first he had heard of how the British fleet had sunk the French in the Algerian port of Mers el Kebir rather than let it fall into the hands of the Germans.

When he saw her, Bernard shrugged. He uncurled another cartoon poster of a handsome Frenchman with chiselled cheekbones and improbably fair hair, lifting by the collar a wicked, unshaved Israelite with grotesque hooked nose and showing him the door of a building labelled 'France'.

At this moment a small, bald man with a raincoat and wire-rimmed basses climbed out of a black car and came over to inspect Bernard's work. Charlotte had never seen him before in Lavaurette. He had a self-important m and wore polished shoes that seemed to come from a big city.

When he had inspected the poster, he turned to Bernard.

"Who's this?" he said, pointing at Charlotte.

"Madame Guilbert."

Charlotte held out her hand, but the bald man kept his by his side. He looked her slowly up and down, walked round to look at her in profile, then marched off without speaking back to his car.

"Who was that extraordinary man?"

Bernard shrugged.

"He's called Pichon. The Government's sent him down from Paris. He's travelling round."

"Is he a policeman or what?"

"He says he's from something called the Inquiry and Control Section. Don't ask me what that is. Says he's helping the local mayors interpret all the new rules. In fact, he just sticks his nose in."

Charlotte looked back at the posters. The odd thing about Lavaurette, she thought as she went past Bernard into Madame Galliot's shop, was that although on the surface it seemed a tranquil, inward-looking place with its municipal monuments, its empty shops and sleepy squares, it was in fact the site of continuous activity and secret meetings, of numbered postboxes, hidden boys, propaganda and smiling public deceit.

Perhaps the Germans were right to leave a local commandant behind. When she went back to her room in the Domaine she found that a piece of paper had been slid beneath the door. It was a note from Levade which he must have put there while she was out.

Wednesday.05 .15h. On realising that his love for Gilberte has gone: "Of the state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long-drawn-out torture for me, nothing survived. For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief." Time Regained, page 9.

When Charlotte read it she thought that her teenage reading of Proust had left her with only cliches, and that she had not really understood the book at all. She resolved to think no more of it or of the unstable ecstasies it described. At midnight Claude Benech felt for the first time the stout and pimply handle of a firearm against the soft skin of his palm. He laid it on a pile of school exercise books he was marking. What he had to do in order to acquire it had, in the end, been simple: a matter of intelligent observation and knowing whom to inform. Benech felt his loyalty quicken and intensify in proportion to his new responsibilities. The gun on the table made him see the agony of his country in a clear light: it was time for action, it was time for the great majority of decent people like himself to fight for what they believed in. All his life he had patiently endured the triumphs of the undeserving, seen little men preferred to him, and he had stood quietly by because he believed in order. That was his passion, that was a proper and traditional belief; but order was not everlasting, it had no natural rights: from time to time true men must fight for it.

He lifted the gun again and weighed it in his hand. Its presence made him want to use it.

In the big house on the hill in Lavaurette Gerd Lindemann was reading orders delivered that afternoon by motorbike. The terse yet bureaucratic style of the papers was an affront to him. Until the winter of 1939 he had worked as a dramatic critic on a newspaper and had taken pride in the fact that his notices, while short and given little prominence by the editor, were always immaculately written: to be comprehensive in 350 words required a particular eloquence.

Lindemann's views on drama were more definite than his views on anything else. He had allowed himself to be left in this unimportant village, this under-sized town in the middle of nothing, through his inability to get himself posted anywhere more interesting. He was not the gauleiter of Julien Levade's imagining, but a reluctant infantry officer promoted to middle rank by virtue of his education and the losses on the Eastern Front.

And he was aware that many of the men under his command were not the swaggering, blue-eyed youths who so impressed the French by their arrogance and their self-discipline when they took control of the traumatised country in 1940. The half-dozen soldiers billeted in the attic of the house were surly, small and no longer young. None of them would have been in such an inconsequential place as Lavaurette were it not for the rail connections with the main lines that made the village both a useful junction and a possible target of resistance sabotage not that there had been any notable activity in the area, Lindemann had been informed. He went to the fireplace and rang the bell. He enjoyed this feudal procedure and relished the look of fear in the eyes of the little servant-girl who scuttled into the room a minute later.

"More coffee," he said in his workable French. He had barely been able to finish the first pot of whatever it was she had brought, but something would have to keep him alert as he waded through the sheaf of orders. The military strategy was clear enough: get men in large numbers down to the southern coast to defend against Allied attacks from North Africa. This had meant over-running the Free Zone, but the tactic was to leave as few men as possible to administer it before the arrival of the SS, so the greatest number possible could remain in active units. It was important to encourage the French to do as much work as they could, and Lindemann's orders suggested ways of achieving this. Laval would launch his Milice in January, and in return for offering their help to the Occupier Laval would, as usual, ask for German collaboration in the matter of boundaries, prisoners of war, payments and so on. The request, as usual, would be declined.

Lindemann smiled. This Milice would consist presumably of various thugs and convicts given early parole, of young hooligans worried that they might otherwise be transported to Germany as part of Laval's eight-for-one exchange system for prisoners taken in the brief fight of May, 1940. Lindemann could not imagine that anyone else would want to join, but he might have to use these people, so he had better not prejudge them.

To have power over the lives of people was a seductive feeling to someone whose previous influence had been limited to suggesting whether his readers might or might not enjoy a new production of Faust.

Lindemann was enough of a psychologist to relish assigning tasks to men under his command according to his own ideas of their abilities and limitations. It was irksome to him, however, that, in addition to his straightforward administrative role, he was now also required to participate in non-military projects. The occupation of the Free Zone gave much easier access to the large number of Jewish refugees the French had obligingly detained in camps there, as well as to the French Jews who already lived there or had fled from the North. Lindemann was required by his orders to supervise the joining of two trains at Lavaurette and to supply a quota of Jews from the region of which he was nominally in charge.

These people were to be transported to Paris and onwards to some unspecified destination in Poland. The official line was that they were going to be working in camps, just like the young gentile Frenchmen whom Laval was swapping for French prisoners of war.

However, it had occurred to Lindemann that if work was the purpose, they would hardly be transporting old people, pregnant women and large numbers of children, and he was rather surprised by the willing acquiescence of the French government and police in the scheme.

Perhaps the ever-optimistic Monsieur Laval was hoping for some concession on sovereignty in return for his help.

Lindemann found this part of his task slightly absurd. The girl came back with the coffee. Was she Jewish?

"Wait." He looked at her. She was small, dark. She could be. But most of the French were like that not as bad as the Poles, but not as fine as the Swedes or Danes.

"All right. You can go."

How was he supposed to find all these people? What if they were only halfJewish? Apparently Vichy had offered racial definitions which were even stricter than those issued by the Nazi Commission for Jewish Affairs in Paris. A man called Pichon, sent from Vichy on a tour of the region to help the local prefectures, had volunteered to help. Lindemann shook his head.

He couldn't decide about this.

At the same time, Peter Gregory was standing in a doorway in a narrow street just behind the harbour at Marseille. Rain was dripping from the stone lintel above his head. A misunderstanding over trains had brought him into a city which a few weeks earlier might have offered him some hope of escape, but was now the centre of German military operations. He had his eye on a house diagonally across the street, but he could not move for the amount of activity all round. His back and shoulders were aching from the three hours he had spent concealed beneath a train in the goods' yard, having observed that the Gestapo control at the station exit appeared to be questioning all travellers. The tenuous line of sympathisers that had kept him going from the site of his crash to the Mayor's house and on for four more days towards the Pyrenees had been broken by his mistake with the train.

Having managed to escape from the goods' yard over a brick wall, Gregory walked for a mile until he found himself in an apparently unpopulated area. He spotted a cafe through whose windows he could see only empty tables and went in; a barman was moving a greasy cloth back and forth over the counter. Gregory stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth to muffle his voice.

"Telephone," he said in an abrupt way he hoped would discourage conversation, and the man jerked his head towards the back of the room. In a dark alcove next to a narrow door marked 'we' he dialled a number in Clermont-Ferrand. He had never been happy with the vet's diagnosis of his

'fractured' leg, and the exertions of the last four days, culminating in the walk from the station, had produced an excruciating friction in the shin, as though parts of the bone were rubbing together.

He bit his lower lip as he heard the telephone let out its desperate, single peal in the distant mountains of the Massif Central.

The voice of a garage owner, wakened from a wine-heavy sleep, came on the line. Gregory went through the passwords he had been taught in London and hoped his accent would be comprehensible to "Hercule'. In the long and painful exchange that followed, Gregory found it almost impossible to understand what Monsieur Chollet was saying.

Eventually, he extracted from him an address in Marseille which he repeated and checked as many times as he dared until he heard Chollet's patience become exhausted.

"Thank you, Monsieur," Gregory said.

"Goodbye."

"There was a woman looking for you. In the summer."

"What?"

"An English woman."

"Did she leave a message?"

"No. Goodbye."

Gregory put down the receiver. An English woman. How Charlotte would hate being called that. He leaned for a moment on the top of the telephone, and tears presumably from the pain in his leg blurred his vision.

Now at midnight, one hour later, he was waiting in the doorway. He would get into this house. The English woman. He smiled. Whatever it took, he was going to get in.

It was midnight when Andre Duguay sat up in bed and called out his mother's name. There was nothing soft or tender about the call; it was a sound of primitive panic, the expression of a fear that had been rising and working slowly in his mind for several weeks and had finally found utterance in a response to the pictures shown to him in his dream.

Madame Duguay's face was not clear, but then it was not seen objectively in Andre's mind even when he was awake. Yet in the dream he was with her, and he saw those dark features, the face bent over his cradle, whose outline he had over the years uncritically absorbed, so that it had become the face of love. He was with her, he saw her, and she was in darkness among crowds of people wailing.

Down the corridor came the running footsteps of Mlle Cariteau. She had had time to throw a flannel dressing gown over her nightdress, and she stumbled into the boys' room, not wishing to turn on the light in case it woke whichever one had not called out. She could not tell from the cry alone which it was, and at first went to Jacob; then she heard a voice from Andre's bed and went to him.

Sylvie Cariteau wrapped the boy in her arms and stroked his hair.

Childless, she felt the torrent of maternal tenderness go out of her to the weeping child, a force that was angry in its desire to protect him. On the walls of the bare upstairs room there were daguerreotypes of Sylvie's respectable grandparents, uneasy in their Sunday clothes; there were two plaster crucifixes.

For half an hour the granddaughter with no husband rocked the unprotected little boy against her bosom, back and forth, back and forth in the awful night. Levade had lit a candle at the writing table in his bedroom. An hour earlier he had said goodbye to Julien and his mind was still full of the boy. He wrote: Midnight. I thank God for Julien. The joy I have in him is simple. Merely to be near his life brings me delight. This makes me think of dying, because I feel my spirit is one with his and that only by death will our separation be dissolved. I believe we will be in paradise together, and I believe we will become one, as God, through the Trinity, is indivisible from His own Son.

Of course I believe this. I believe it since Christ showed himself to me that night on Dead Man's Hill at Verdun, without arms and legs, nailed to a tree trunk. I didn't understand at the time, but later He came to me again, the same body, this time on a cross. It was the night my cousin appeared to me in a vision; his face was illuminated, though we did not know until the morning that he had died. I believe, because God showed me in a dream my dearest mother as a child, her happiness secured, and I was able as a grown man to care for her, as, when death at last folds time away, I shall again.

And hell will be the absence of God, the complete loss of Him. I have lived in this place and I have felt its void. I lived this time without God because I was not worthy of Him. The chances that I was given I ignored or spurned because I was sunk so deep in sensual things, ambitions, self-deceit. Every day I must affirm my faith.

Every day I must be reconvened.

When I write at times like this, the voice I hear does not sound like my own. But I hope this voice of devotion is the most true of all the different voices I have. My friend Madame Guilbert (she is my friend; I do admire her) has made me think about this. Yet I hope there is some core of goodness in me, and of faith. After all, what else is it that will die?

And when I go, will it be in a hospital for the old, or here in my dreamless bed? When it comes, the doctor will prolong my breathing for a few more useless hours, the priest will lean over me to hear my last and most sincere confession. Some friends will come and be polite.

Some will cry at the recollection of their own lost youth-experiences they must now concede are for ever gone, beyond the redeeming power of the imagination, in the abyss of time closed. And my sinful life will offer them no fine or comforting example.

Somehow they will stick my gaping jaws together, weigh down my staring eyes.

And my head, which has teemed with thoughts for so long, will hold not even the flicker of an idea. My once hot, mobile hands will not be capable even of picking up a paintbrush. Someone will lift up my arm on the bed and it will fall back by my side. They will bundle up the rotting meat and put it in a box. The millions of people who have lived without knowledge of my small life will be ignorant still; the handful who knew me will forget.

But I have faith in God. At moments I have seen with His blessing and through the light of art into a world that transcends this one but lives beside it, like a lost city visible through the now-impenetrable, now-translucent waves. These things I have believed in, and I believe also in the love of my son. Death does not separate us from those we love. It is life that keeps us frustratingly apart. I trust in God that on the Day of Judgement He will reunite me with those I have loved, and that our spirits will at last become truly one. v

It was the day of the drop; but before the evening came, Charlotte had an errand to run in Limoges. She dressed quickly and went down to the scullery, where she found some bread and a tin of what was referred to by the ration ticket as fruit condiment. She swallowed it with a glass of water, tied her headscarf, checked that she had Dominique's papers in her handbag and went outside to get her bicycle. As she pedalled beneath the arch of the pigeonnier she turned back to look at the front of the house, and saw the sun glistening on the tightly closed shutters of Levade's studio. The bicycle juddered over an unseen pothole and water splashed up over Dominique's admirably hard-wearing shoes. All down the avenue of flaking plane trees the birds were singing.

There were only two other passengers waiting for the early train, both elderly women with empty baskets on their arms. Charlotte smiled at them and mouthed a polite greeting, while making it clear she had no wish to talk.

The second-class carriage of the train had seats to spare, and as they nosed into the open landscape, leaving the town of Lavaurette to foment its closed and unsuspected conflicts, she saw the country of her heart reveal itself once more in all its old beguiling colours.

Tonight, unless there was some drastic change in the weather, the drop would go ahead, and in Charlotte's mind it had become an important occasion. She would need warm clothes, and she would wear beneath them whatever she managed to buy in Limoges; she would have a bath, and since the water at the Domaine would not be hot, that would mean braving the public baths at the women's allotted time of six o'clock. There would be dinner with Julien and perhaps with Cesar and some of the other men; then there would be the big plane from home hurling the contents of its hold out into the beleaguered darkness.

The flashing pictures revealed by the train's windows were like the country Charlotte remembered, with its effortless harmony of church and meadow, grey villages and their rooted inhabitants; but the streets of Limoges showed the strains of the present. There was a shoddiness in the way people were dressed and an unhealthy calm caused by the lack of motor vehicles. It did not lower Charlotte's spirits as she walked up past the Jardin d'Orsay, where the flowerbeds were still well tended, though it was only as she came closer that she saw that they had been planted with vegetables.

In her mind she repeated to herself the details of the message Mirabel had given her. Her destination was in the Place des Jacobins; the person she needed was called Georges. She felt no fear as she walked through the streets of the city, though she did not congratulate herself for it.

You were frightened or you weren't: it was not something in your control. She did glance briefly round her, however, as she rang the doorbell. There was no reason for alarm: Limoges was sunk in provincial peace. The door opened and a concierge looked out.

"Good morning, Madame. I'm looking for Georges."

"Who shall I say is calling?"

"A friend of Frederic."

The woman disappeared, leaving the door open. A few moments later, a portly, unshaven man in a cardigan came to the entrance.

"Are you Georges?"

"Yes." He nodded, dislodging some ash from the end of the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth.

"I have a message from Frederic." She gave him the time, the date and the map reference.

To her surprise, he took a pencil from the pocket of his cardigan and wrote down the figures on his cigarette packet. Clearly he had not had the benefits of G Section's mnemonic training.

Georges smiled.

"Would you like to come in for a glass of wine?"

"No, thank you," said Charlotte.

He shrugged; they shook hands and she walked swiftly away. The reward that Mirabel had promised her was so great that she did not wish to jeopardise it by staying.

In any case, there was something more pressing than wine. There was a shop just off the Boulevard de la Cite, where she had been told by Pauline Benoit it was possible to buy clothes, provided you were not fussy about the material. The directions Charlotte had received were precise, and the shop itself was unmissable. Its glossy black-painted front contained a window display that would not have disgraced the rue du Faubourg St. Honore ten years earlier. The window on one side contained mannequins in dresses and suits, their plastic wrists cocked and their slender feet dipped into crocodile shoes: one held a long lapis lazuli cigarette holder to her lips, another appeared to be wearing a mink stole. The other window revealed an encyclopaedic array of underwear. Charlotte looked in amazement at the brassieres, slips, foundation garments, drawers, roll-ons, petticoats, corsets and other devices of whalebone and pink flannel.

As she stood staring, the door opened and a man in shirtsleeves with a tape measure round his neck came on to the step.

"Do come in, Madame."

Charlotte followed, with misgivings. This array could not be legal.

"All these things," she said, pointing to the window, 'do you have '

"Alas not, Madame. Do take a seat." The shopkeeper pulled a high stool up to the counter.

"Those are remnants from the days before the war.

We keep them to remind us of what life was like." He was about sixty, with a round face and a small moustache; he was respectable but with a humorous eye, and Charlotte found that she could not distrust him.

He smiled.

"We have a little stock, of course. Is there something in particular Madame was looking for?"

Underpants that would not take two days to dry; shoes that did not make her feet look deformed; something pretty to wear in the evening ...

"Perhaps a blouse?" she said cautiously.

From beneath the counter the proprietor pulled out a long drawer. It contained four white or off-white blouses made from some synthetic material.

"Hmm ... I'm looking for something a little more colourful. If you haven't any blouses, maybe something knitted."

"Ah-ha, a little knit, yes." The man took a step-ladder and walked down the bare boards of the shop to the back.

While he pulled out various boxes from the top shelf, inspected and replaced them with a mutter. Charlotte thought of the wardrobe full of clothes she had in Scotland: the plum-coloured cashmere pullover, the lilac cardigan, the silk and cotton shirts, the kilts, the pleated skirts, the sleeveless summer dresses so seldom worn north of Berwick, the piles of cotton and silk underclothes.

The shopkeeper returned with half a dozen woollen items and laid them on the counter. To Charlotte's eye, most of them appeared to have been knitted by his mother. He read her disappointment and said, "One minute, Madame. There's something I'd like to show you."

From the back of the shop he produced a burgundy-coloured dress, with a discreet pattern of golden curlicues, made in light wool, like a Limousin version of paisley.

"I think it's exactly your size," he said encouragingly.

"If you'd like to try it on."

In the changing room Charlotte slid off Dominique skirt and jumper. She looked at her reflection and smiled as she pulled on the dress. It was cut high at the neck but rather tight over the bust; she pulled it from the waist to loosen it, and smoothed it over her hips. The hem swung loose below her knees. With Dominique's porridgey stockings it did not exactly look elegant, but it was well made and, while middle-aged in style, it was at least slightly feminine. Charlotte walked into the shop and turned round a couple of times in front of the mirror.

The shopkeeper told her it fitted perfectly.

"Very, very pretty, Madame."

"How much is it?"

"Aah." He held up both hands and then leaned forwards to put his mouth against Charlotte's ear.

"You are from the country, I think, Madame?"

"Yes."

"Shall we say ... could you manage ..." His voice dropped to a whisper, '... a leg of ham?"

"I beg your pardon," said Charlotte through her laughter.

"A shoulder then."

"Monsieur, I'm sorry, I think there's some misunderstanding. I can give you cash."

The shopkeeper's mouth turned down sadly.

"I have cash, Madame.

That's not a problem. The trouble is, I have nothing to spend it on." Charlotte smiled.

"What about the clothes in the window? Are they for sale? How much for the dress? A whole pig?"

"At least. Made into ham, into chops and black puddings. One could begin with the belly roasted in sea-salt, or the liver fried with onions in butter and olive oil."

Charlotte eventually persuaded him to accept some of her G Section bank notes in return for two pairs of silk drawers and the woollen dress. He made them all into a parcel and tied it with string, carefully knotting and snipping, as though he knew it might be all the work he had that day.

The winter sun was still bright when Charlotte stepped out of the shop and began walking. She had plenty of time before taking the two o'clock train and intended to look at the cathedral, but was sidetracked by the noise of a crowd. She followed the sound into a square she recognised as the one obliquely visible from her bedroom when she had spent that first night in Limoges. A man with a megaphone was standing on the steps of a monument and addressing about three hundred people, many of whom carried placards and flags.

Charlotte moved to the edge of the crowd, from which she sensed a surprising degree of animation.

The word 'assassins' was used frequently by the speaker and was angrily echoed by the crowd. It took Charlotte some time before she understood that the object of this term and the focus of the crowd's hatred were the men of the R.A.F. She was startled at the passion they evoked.

Their bombing raids over France had killed hundreds of civilians, according to the speaker, and all of the deaths were quite unnecessary.

"They say they're destroying German installations and French factories that supply the German war effort, but that's a lie. The English have always been our enemies and the Monster Churchill is prolonging the war for his own selfish ends!

This is war for Wall Street, war for the City of London, war for the Israelites!" The name of Churchill was greeted by a wide range of expletives from the throaty crowd, the most common of which was "Jew'. A couple of drums started up a regular beat, though the people could not decide whether the chant should be

"R.A.F-Assassins' or "Churchill, de Gaulle Jew!": the first had a good hammering rhythm, but the latter had a catchy, iambic quality. Charlotte looked at some of the banners and placards being waved and saw the usual demonic faces of ringleted, black-coated figures, depicted in the act of thieving, hoarding and plotting in connivance with the British, Russians and Americans. One had a photograph of a Lancaster bomber imaginatively decked out with stars of David.

Poor Gregory, Charlotte thought as she moved quietly away from the square. She glanced back once over her shoulder at the crowd, whose breath was making angry statues in the freezing air.

By five o'clock she was back in Lavaurette. Pauline Bobotte told her that Monsieur Levade was busy, so she left some packages of food she had brought for dinner at the desk and made her way slowly towards the public baths. The thought of the drop that evening had chased away the bitterness she felt at watching the demonstration: the people who would hold the torches in the field did not see things in that way; nor did Antoinette, patiently tapping out her messages in the drizzly hills of Ussel.

The public baths had been installed eight years earlier by a socialist mayor anxious that Lavaurette should move with the times. They had become popular during the fuel shortages, though even now they were disdained by the town's elite who preferred to wash in cold water or not at all than to mingle with the shopkeepers and the proletariat.

In the tiled vestibule Charlotte was given a ticket and a towel by an old woman stationed in a glass-fronted box. On the opposite wall was a giant framed photograph of Marshal Petain, looking down indulgently on his clean people; beneath it, to the words Work, Family, Fatherland, a local sign writer had neatly added: Hygiene.

Although it was only a few minutes after six, the baths were already almost full. A long, concrete-floored space had eight tubs on either side, and was divided down the middle by wooden benches with attached rails at head height on which were hooks for clothes and towels.

Charlotte could taste on her tongue the steam that rose up against the cold air and made it difficult to see if there was room for her. She walked along the duckboards until she came to a free place, where she put her parcel on the bench and began to undress.

As she quickly slipped Dominique's brassiere over her shoulders and ran it down her arms, she found herself addressed by a naked Mlle Cariteau, who was about to climb into the bath next to her. Charlotte was unsure of the etiquette and found herself blushing, unseen, in the steam.

Sylvie Cariteau was making conversation in the positive and factual manner she favoured in the post office and Charlotte did her best to respond in the same style.

Sylvie Cariteau turned away and walked round her bath to feel the temperature of the water. Charlotte watched the departure of her strong back and solid haunches with relief as she quickly finished undressing and climbed into the high-sided bath. On her other side was Madame Galliot from the ironmongery, though without her glasses and with her hair let down her back it was a moment before Charlotte recognised her.

Naked, she seemed younger and less formidable. She walked up beside Charlotte's bath and leaned over to take one of the bars of soap that were perched on the taps. As she did so.