PART FOUR

1943

Andre Duguay ran down the stairs when he heard Mlle Cariteau's urgent call. It was six in the morning. In the kitchen was the nice young woman who sometimes came to visit them and read stories. Andre smiled briefly at her, then turned his eyes to the floor. Mlle Cariteau attacked his face with a cloth from the sink while he grimaced and tried to wrench his head away.

"We're going to say goodbye," said Mlle Cariteau.

"For a few days you're going to another house, just for a holiday."

"It'll be nice," said Charlotte.

"You're going to be on a farm with animals, you and Jacob. Would you like that?"

"No," said Andre.

"I don't want to."

The two women set about trying to persuade him, by painting pictures of outdoor life with dogs and chickens and games in old barns. Andre felt suspicious of both.

"I don't want to leave, I like it here."

"And Jacob's coming too," said Charlotte.

"You'll have wonderful games together. Then you can come back later and visit."

Andre, who had seemed to be on the point of acquiescing, suddenly shook his head.

"I want my mother. I want to know where she is." Charlotte said gently,

"Andre, there really isn't any choice. Soon this war will be over. Things are beginning to happen. And soon, when it's finished, you will see your parents again. I'm sure you will.

But just for the time being it would be better if you do what we ask. Trust me."

Andre was beyond the reach of reason; he felt he had been trusting enough already, and still his parents were not there. His small, muscular body set itself in resistance to all these adult plans; he grasped the edge of the chair next to him and began to wail his defiance.

Mlle Cariteau said, "I'll go and get the little one."

In the middle of the previous night, Andre had heard a hammering on the kitchen door, then the sound of voices. He crept to the top of the stairs and through the banisters was able to see Madame and Mlle Cariteau talking urgently to the young woman, Madame Guilbert. As a result of their conversation, he and Jacob had been pushed up into the attic for the night and told to sleep on a pile of old blankets. They clung to one another for warmth in an unaccustomed embrace. Sylvie Cariteau returned to the kitchen with a suspicious Jacob and the suitcase the boys had once used for tobogganing downstairs. It now held a few clothes Sylvie had managed to extract one evening from the Duguays' house, the tin soldiers that Julien had brought, the book about the crocodile who lost her egg, an old adjustable spanner of which Andre had become fond and one or two other small objects of mysterious but intense private significance.

"Listen," she said, 'a friend is coming to pick you up later in the morning and take you to the farm. I just want you to say goodbye to Madame Guilbert now." Madame Cariteau appeared in the kitchen and, seeing that Andre was upset, clasped him against her bosom, where he breathed in the old sour smell of her and felt the heat of her embrace, which once had reassured him, being soft and vaguely female, but now seemed only to emphasise the extent to which she was not his mother.

The night before, Charlotte had arrived, dripping wet, from the Domaine and woken the Cariteaus with her knocking. After she had explained the situation to Sylvie and they had moved the boys to the attic, they sat at the kitchen table and tried to decide what to do with them.

"I think our best chance is Pauline Benoit," said Sylvie. Charlotte remembered what Julien had said.

"Isn't she a Gaullist?"

"Does that matter?"

"Maybe not." Charlotte wanted to say as little as possible.

"She's a kind woman. She'd certainly want to help two children." When Charlotte left Sylvie Cariteau and bicycled off, as instructed by Julien, to the monastery, Sylvie went quietly through the dark streets to rouse Pauline Benoit. Initially resentful at being woken, Pauline was intrigued by the plight of the boys and amazed at how successfully Sylvie Cariteau had concealed them.

"I can't have them here," she said.

"Obviously. Especially now with Monsieur Levade in difficulty. This is the first place they'd look. We want to get them out of the village.

There is one person I can think of. I don't know her very well, but..."

"Who is it?"

They were sitting by candlelight in Pauline's small front room.

"Wait a minute. Let me think."

Eventually she said, "Yes, I think it'll work. She's called Anne-Marie. She sits as a model for old Monsieur Levade. Her father has a farm about twenty minutes from here. He knows how to keep his mouth shut. God knows, he's got enough to be discreet about."

"Are you sure they'll co-operate?" said Sylvie Cariteau. "I'm pretty sure. We can always offer to pay them. And the boys will be much better off on a farm. They might even get some eggs. I'll take Gastinel's van and go and see them. I'll be back by dawn."

Julien Levade was not a particularly strong man, but he was younger and bigger than the German soldier guarding him, and in the struggle that followed Charlotte's departure he had more reason to fight. With his arm round the German's throat he said, "Put down your gun and I won't hurt you." His words meant nothing to the other man, who continued to wriggle in Julien's embrace and to thrash out with his elbows. It was so long since he had fought as a boy, playground disputes with trembling lips where the loser was the child who cried, that Julien could barely remember how to go about it. There was a repellent intimacy about the other's man hair against the skin of his face. Julien held a forearm across the German's throat and locked one hand with the other to increase the grip; in this way, he was able to pull him slowly backwards to the floor, while he retreated step by step to make room. As the German finally lost balance, Julien was obliged to let go, at which moment he kicked out at the rifle the other man still clutched in his right hand. He watched it slide a few feet over the bare floorboards. He drove his heel as hard as he could into the German's ribs and, while the man gasped, he was able to dive across and grab the gun himself, then scuttle over the floor on all fours and turn round, kneeling to face his enemy with the rifle in his hand.

The German levered himself into a sitting position, in which all soldierly pretence fell away. Panting and snorting from his exertion, he placed his hands together and prayed Julien not to shoot.

Julien stood up slowly and walked back towards the door. Now that he had gained control, he still faced the awkward question of what to do with the man. He could tie him up, but with what? He could shoot him, but really he wished him no harm. As his tearful imprecations made clear, he was just a pathetic creature, caught in a job he did not want, anxious to return to the children he had left behind and whose photographs he was now, to Julien's embarrassment, fumbling to produce from a wallet.

Perhaps he should just shoot him in the leg, to disable him. Really, these were considerations of war of which his own activities had as yet given him no experience. But there was no use being squeamish, he thought.

"Take your clothes off," he said.

The German looked at him, head on one side, striving to understand. His thinning hair had been tousled by the struggle, and a single long strand hung down over his ear; his face was flushed and looked exhausted in the shadows and pouches of his incipient middle age.

Julien mimed what he meant and the German, in ecstatic relief at having understood his captor's wish, did his best to please him.

"More." Julien gestured with his rifle. The pile of clothes mounted by his ankles, and when he was naked Julien pointed to the door.

Shivering, and no longer pleased, the German soldier walked across the room, his eye on the barrel of the gun as Julien retreated to one side to let him pass. Down the corridor of the first floor they went, past the door of Levade's studio, the man's white buttocks a dim beacon in the darkness. At the top of the stairs Julien stuck the tip of the rifle into his back to remind him that he was serious and kept it there as they groped their slow way down.

In the hall, Julien turned on a light and, keeping the gun steady on its target, backed over to the desk from which Levade had earlier taken his identity papers. Among the letters and documents was a bunch of keys which he took over to the door beneath the stairs that led to the Domaine's enormous cellar. When he had found the right key, he indicated with his head that the German should go through the door.

"It's all right. In the morning your friends'll come. They'll hear you. Go on. Go on." He raised the rifle and fired a shot into the ceiling. Each angle of his body protesting reluctance, the man moved slowly over the floor of the hall to the open door, one hand raised to protect himself, the other placed across his genitals, in self-defence or in some reflexive modesty beneath the light snow-shower of fallen plaster.

Julien smiled.

"You'll be all right. I'll leave the key here on the table. Go on." At the last moment, faced with the icy darkness, the German suddenly protested and turned to fight again, but Julien kicked him through and closed the door against his struggle.

He returned to the bedroom and went through the man's clothes to see if there was a handgun or anything else that might be useful to him in the days ahead.

There was nothing but a few extra rounds for the rifle, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.

He let himself out of the Domaine and took a bicycle from the barn. He could still be clear of Lavaurette by dawn.

Charlotte was unable to sleep in the monastery. She paced up and down in a book-lined room that looked like an office, and, shortly before dawn, returned to the Cariteaus' house.

She leaned her bicycle against the wall by the back door and remembered all the times she had done this on her visits to the boys; she thought of the night of the drop and of the excitement she had felt as they pedalled away into the night. She knocked quietly at the door and Sylvie Cariteau let her in. She looked anxious.

"Madame, it's dangerous for you to be here."

"I wanted to know about the boys. Are they all right?"

"Yes. Pauline's just been here. They're going to live with Annemarie."

"She didn't mind?"

"No." Sylvie Cariteau shook her head.

"I don't know if she really understood the danger. But she's a kind girl, Annemarie."

Charlotte looked about the kitchen, with its huge, blackened range, its pitted oak table and traces of the Cariteaus' frugal meals.

Now that the time had come, she could not bring herself to leave. In this raw, square room something valuable had taken place. With Sylvie and her mother she had formed an understanding that went far beyond their differences. Something elemental and loving in her had found an answering spirit in these two French women, and parting from them now, before they knew how it would end, would be like leaving behind some vulnerable element of herself.

She felt Sylvie Cariteau's eyes on her.

"You must go, Madame. It's almost light."

Charlotte went to the door, then hesitated. She turned and saw that Sylvie's eyes were fall of tears.

"Oh, Sylvie," she said, going back and throwing her arms round her. They clung to each other for a few moments. Charlotte struggled to find words, but then gave up. She knew that they were thinking the same things.

"I will come back," she said.

"Do you promise?" Sylvie Cariteau was smiling now, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her large, red hands.

"I promise." Charlotte kissed her on the cheek and ran from the house. Then, in the early morning light, she pedalled hard out of Lavaurette, Julien's fearful warning still loud in her ears. She reckoned it would take her a day to reach the small town where the wireless operator lived and she knew she should not delay. The farther she went, however, the more tormented she felt by the thought of Levade being held in some detention camp and Julien, exiled in the chilly countryside, unable to reach him to explain what he had done. Her business was not finished, and, until it was, she could not go home.

Late in the morning she stopped to rest at the edge of a field. There was a small stone-built hut, presumably a store or shelter of some kind, but now dilapidated. She pushed the bicycle inside and lay down to rest, but it was very cold. She thought longingly of Dominique woollen vests.

Somehow she dozed in the sunless afternoon, and when she awoke, stiff and hungry, she knew that she had to return to Lavaurette. She would give it a day for the alarm to subside, then go back to the Domaine.

The reason she gave herself was that she needed her identity card and some money, which were still in her bedroom. She did not listen to an inner voice that told her the wireless operator could in due course supply her with both. She bicycled into the nearest village, but the food shops were closed and there was no cafe. At least there were still some tins in the store cupboards of the Domaine, she told herself, as she went back to her stone shelter.

She passed a long night without sleeping. She spent the first part of the next day walking up and down to keep warm, then began to bicycle slowly back. She timed her return to Lavaurette for eight o'clock in the evening, well after dark, but before the curfew. She went on a long circuitous route that avoided the village and brought her through the woods at the side of the house. She found the front door of the Domaine ajar, as though someone had left in a hurry. There were no lights burning. She paused in the hall and looked round: something was not right; she noticed that the door to the cellar was open and that the bunch of keys was in the lock.

She took a torch from the desk and went down the steps into the cold gloom. The beam of light travelled over the dusty wine bins, some of which had empty bottles spanned by cobwebs in whose sticky grip were long-dead flies and globs of thicker dust.

Charlotte walked carefully over the uneven floor of beaten earth, hosing the walls with her torchlight. It was intensely silent, aromatic with the passage of damp centuries.

There was no one there. She climbed back to the hall behind her, replacing the keys in the desk, in their proper place, some housekeeperly instinct prompting her. Still using only the torch, she went into the kitchen, where she opened a tin of ham that she had been saving for some special occasion.

She sliced it hurriedly and consumed it all, with a crust of bread, some walnuts and a glass of stale wine from an open bottle on the sideboard. Then she crept for the last time over the sprung floor of the dining room and went to the top of the house, where she once more packed the possessions of Dominique Guilbert in their tattered leather case and cast a farewell look at the little bedroom in which such extraordinary days of her life had passed: the toile with its figures of eighteenth century gaiety, faded and worn; the servant's bed, the threadbare rug and the view down towards the lake.

She walked along the corridor of the first floor. In the room where she and Julien had been held, she straightened the bedclothes, still rumpled by their simulated passion. She noticed that a chair had been turned over, presumably in the struggle that followed her leaving.

She had no doubt that Julien would have prevailed: in the last picture she had of him, he already had the German by the neck.

The door to Levade's studio was open. Inside, the chaos of his work was undisturbed, except where she had wrenched the painting from its stretcher; some shreds of canvas, mostly white but some that he had painted on, still clung to the nails in the beam of her torchlight.

She smiled at the portrait of Anne-Marie in her green skirt. Her unreadable, almond-shaped eyes smiled back, unembarrassed by the strangeness of her situation. All around was the evidence of Levade's furious and fruitless effort: the stacked canvases, the open books, the palettes, tubes and exhausted brushes; and none of it, according to him, of any use at all.

She went, tidying and straightening, through all the other rooms of the Domaine. It had been many years since a family, rooted in the events of the day, had lived there. Levade was an outsider, presiding over something that was already moribund; and she, the last inhabitant, was an impostor, a foreigner who had come to run her hands across the surfaces of these draughty, uninhabited spaces, everywhere fastening and closing, like a pallid lawyer come to seal the house and the failure of its contract with history.

She paused finally in the hall, looking back at the broad staircase and the smoky ancestral oils that ran up the wall beside it. Then she went out, pulled the door closed behind her, and hurried down the stone steps where a few days earlier the master of the house had been prodded by a bewildered gendarme. At the end of the drive, she was moved by some final tidying instinct to open the letter box. Inside were half a dozen letters, one of them addressed to her. Her feet on the ground either side of the bicycle, she tore it open.

In the light of the torch she saw Levade's handwriting.

"Dear Madame ..."

She set off with stinging eyes. She would have to find him and tell him what Julien had done. If she could resolve the misunderstanding between Julien and Levade, she might come to see in a purer light the presumed betrayal that had fallen between her and her own father.

This, it was suddenly clear to Charlotte, was her hope of salvation. She would endure the agony of having to abandon her search for Gregory if she could heal these harsh familial wounds. This, in fact, was the way she would make herself worthy of her lover.

Julien was in a solitary cell inside the monastery. At the back of the building, beneath the kitchens, it was the space in which the boilers would shortly be installed. He paced up and down on the new cement floor, admiring the solid, level finish the builders had achieved in readiness for the giant cylinders, which stood outside in wooden crates.

I should be praying, he thought, in this dank space hallowed by the prayers of so many devout, unhappy men. I am about to kill a man and I should be praying for my soul, and his.

Against the wall he had leaned the German soldier's rifle. A dozen times now he had cleaned it, pulling an oily rag through the barrel; he had laid the butt against his shoulder, balanced the cool mass in the palm of his left hand, squinted down the sights; he had done all but fire the gun in his desire to be prepared. He shivered in the cell. Days had passed already, and although he was sure that Dominique would have moved the boys from Sylvie Cariteau's house, he should act before Benech, so well informed about the welfare of the young, discovered their new home.

He stamped up and down the floor, looking at his watch. It was almost dark. In just four hours' time he would risk going into Lavaurette to find Benech; he thought he knew where to look. He wore the battered leather jacket that had accompanied him on so many night-time errands, but still the cold was sinking into him. He had made a bed from the lagging that would be used to insulate the boilers and now he took a strip of it from the floor to wrap round his shoulders. Outside he could hear the builders packing up for the day. At least that meant he could go above ground and have a change of scene. He had let himself into the fenced-off site with his own key, then made a deal with the foreman, who agreed to say nothing provided Julien stayed out of the view of the other workmen. He heard the shovels being thrown into metal barrows, the weary calls of farewell, and at last the padlock rebounding off the metal gate post and rattling briefly against the chain-link fence. Julien opened the door of the cell and climbed the stairs. Outside, he watched as the lorry's tail lights vanished and the red glow from the last bicycle lamp shrank into the January mist. He wandered down the cloister to the abbot's office, which had its own bathroom attached. Relieved but still shivering, he lit a candle and looked down the bookshelves, whose contents had still not been packed up. He pulled out a copy of Pascal's Pensees and began to flick through it, hoping for some consolation. Much of it seemed to be about Abraham or the Jews or to concern Pascal's own. reactions to Montaigne.

"Sound opinions of the people," Julien read.

"The greatest of evils is civil war ..."

He moved on through the pages. He lifted the book to his face and sniffed the yellow dusty paper.

"Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are clearly murdered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition." He remembered this melodramatic passage from his school days.

He carried the volume over to the desk. What he wanted was some sort of confirmation that a greater good could excuse an apparent evil. In war, presumably, killing was permitted, if it was a just or holy war, as when priests had come to bless his father at Verdun. What if the war was not declared, what if the war was internal? All Pascal seemed to offer was that 'the greatest of evils is civil war." Perhaps the words "Sound opinions of the people were in italics to show that the view expressed was second-hand or null, like an entry in Bouvard and Pecuchet's Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Thought 526 read: "Evil is easy; it has countless forms, while good is almost unique. But a certain sort of evil is as hard to find as what is called good, and this particular evil is often on that account passed off as good.

Indeed, it takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to attain such evil, as to attain good."

Was that 'greatness of soul' his or Benech's? Neither, he suddenly saw. It was Petain's.

When it was time to go, Julien walked back down the icy cloister, obliquely admired the new stone fountain they had installed in the middle of the quadrangle, and went down to the cell to retrieve the rifle and his bicycle.

He tore off" some lagging and stuffed it down inside his jacket to keep out the wind, slung the rifle across his chest by its webbing, then wheeled the bicycle to the gate, let himself out, relocked the site and set off for Lavaurette. It took twenty minutes before he arrived at the silent factory on the outskirts of the village, where he turned down a narrow side road and left his bicycle. He felt absurdly conspicuous with the rifle, even in the unlit streets. Luckily, the cold was serious enough to deter people from leaving their houses. Julien hoped it would not have been too much for Benech.

As well as the aching in his face and hands he was aware of the pain of hunger in his stomach. It was almost two days since he had eaten, buying eggs and some ham from a remote smallholder who supplied wood for the fires in his apartment building. As he approached the square which held the Cafe du Centre, he went down a path to the back, where an untidy yard, full of boxes, dustbins and bits of defunct agricultural machinery, was faintly illuminated by a light from the steamy kitchen.

He laid his rifle down against a wall, crept across the open space and peered into the wooden crates. From one of them he pulled out a tin, and, looking furtively round, slipped it into his pocket. Just next to the back door was a crate of lumpy objects he thought could be vegetables. The mud of the courtyard was frozen hard beneath his feet as he edged forward; a thin piece of ice on a puddle cracked beneath his step. He could make out the sound of a wireless playing inside as he inched up to the building. With his eyes fixed on the glass of the back door, he lowered his hand into the crate and pulled out what felt like a potato, then made his way quietly back across the yard to his rifle and went out into the dark path that led back to the street.

He squatted on the ground and stuck his torch between his teeth to examine his stolen dinner. It was a potato, with diamonds of frost in its muddy skin; the tin had no label on it. When he had peeled the potato with his pocket knife, he sat on the grass verge and, by hammering the knife with a stone, was able to open the tin far enough to pull out part of the contents.

He stuck a piece in his mouth. It was a sliced pear. The starch on the surface of the peeled potato stung the soft inside of his lips and he pushed another piece of pear into his mouth to counteract it. In this way he crunched through the freezing potato and the sleepy grey pear.

The front windows of the Cafe du Centre gave on to the square, but the side of the bar overlooked a narrow street that led up to the main part of Lavaurette. It was here that Julien made his way. He laid his rifle on the ground by the outside wall of the bar and looked cautiously in.

How strange his peering, unshaven face would look to anyone inside, he thought. He could make out the bar and could see Gayral himself polishing a glass, his mournful moustaches bent to the repetitive task.

There were two figures at the bar, one of whom, he was fairly sure from the back view, was Benech. He wondered what he could be drinking, now that alcohol was almost impossible to obtain. It was so quiet in the bar that Julien could make out some of the words of the wireless broadcast.

The announcer introduced a government minister.

Monsieur Darquier de Pellepoix, the head of the General Council of Jewish Questions, whose ranting voice was quickly subdued by Gayral's hand. Julien could still make out the phrases: "Killed by London, Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem

... England, the hereditary enemy ... the ideological war desired by Israel.. Allied Victory would mean more of what we have already seen in North Africa: the return to power of the Jews and Freemasons... who for half a century lived on the backs of the settlers and natives until the Marshal cleared them away." The Marshal's name always made Julien think first not of Vichy but of Verdun, the glorious context in which, when he was a child, it seemed to have been for ever fixed. He remembered the soft awe of his father when he spoke the name, then thought again with a shiver of Pascal's words: '

... It takes as much extraordinary greatness of soul to achieve such evil." Then he saw Benech. He turned to offer his cup to Gayral to refill a cup, not a glass, Julien noticed, as Benech's features came for a moment into his view: perhaps, for lack of wine, he was drinking Viandox or some meat-drink substitute. He must value the social aspect of his visits to the bar very highly to think it worth the cold walk from wherever it was he lived.

Julien had to move quickly into the shadows, down the side of the building, when he heard footsteps on the street coming from the village, but he was back at his place by the window in time to see Benech put on his coat and hat and make his way towards the front door of the cafe.

Julien pulled back into the darkness and waited. It was almost certain that Benech would come past him to go up to the centre of Lavaurette.

His only concern was that he would be on a bicycle, but he had seen none left outside the front of the cafe.

After a few moments, he heard footsteps and saw Benech's figure, his shoulders hunched against the cold, his hands thrust down inside his coat, go swiftly past him up the hill. Julien picked up the rifle and followed. If he went too close, Benech might hear him; but if he hung too far back, Benech might vanish down an unlit street. He tried to conceal the rifle from anyone who might be looking from their window by holding it upright between his side and his arm. The shutters of Lavaurette were all closed. His and Benech's were the only footsteps on the street. Julien walked as soundlessly as he could manage, once pulling back into a doorway when he thought Benech was about to stop. When he peered out, it was to see Benech turning off the main street, and he had to run to the junction. Benech was a short way down the road and was feeling in his pocket, presumably for a key. Julien moved as swiftly as he could along the walls of the houses until he was only a few paces away.

Benech pushed the door open and reached inside for the light. Julien ran the short distance to the door, where Benech turned in alarm at the sound of footsteps. In the light of the electric bulb in the hallway he looked into Julien's face with a terrified recognition.

He tried to slam the door, but Julien had stuck his foot in the way. The door rebounded, shuddering on its hinges.

Julien raised his finger to his lips, then showed Benech the rifle. He mouthed the words, "Where's your apartment?"

Benech breathed in, as though to shout for help, but Julien stuck the muzzle of the gun beneath his jaw and once more raised his finger to his lips. Benech turned to lead the way through the hall.

It was a house divided into rooms rather than an apartment block.

Julien noticed a light beneath the door on his right on the ground floor. There could be four or five separate flats, he thought.

On the bare-boarded landing Benech took another key and let them into his apartment. The sitting room was large and tidy, the comfortable home of a professional man, but seemed to be unheated.

"What do you want?" said Benech.

Julien held the rifle pointing at his chest. He looked at Benech's face, the grey and floury skin, the features regular and almost handsome in their way, but made plain by his fear.

"You said something to me the other night. I want you to explain. You said,

"I'm a schoolmaster. It's my business to know the whereabouts of children." What did you mean?"

Benech turned his back on Julien, walked over to a table and sat down. When he turned round he was smiling.

"You know very well what I mean. I know about you and your father. I know about the English servant-girl, the mistress you share with him.

I know about your little escapades at night. People like you can't understand what's in front of them." He gave a short, derisive laugh.

"You're like the children I teach. Time and again you explain some simple fact, but they're incapable of understanding."

"Who else have you told about the boys? Did you tell that man Pichon?"

"Never you mind. My organisation can have you arrested any time I like. I'm working for the Government." He put his hand into the drawer of the table and pulled out a piece of paper.

"My membership of the Milice. Look."

As Julien moved over to the table to take the paper, Benech put his hand in the drawer again and pulled out his revolver. Julien threw himself to the floor. The noise of the shot was so loud that it took Julien a moment to realise he had not been hit. The sound and recoil of the gun seemed momentarily to have stunned Benech as well. He was staring at the thing in his hand as though it had somehow fired itself. Julien stood up and rammed the butt of his rifle into Benech's mouth, knocking him backwards off" the chair, then wrenched back the rifle and ran out of the apartment. The door of the ground floor flat was opening in the hall as he went past, causing him to step aside.

With his back to the wall he looked up to the landing above him, where Benech was standing, leaning on the banister rail, blood dripping from his mouth. Julien raised his rifle and shot him through the heart, causing the revolver to drop from Benech's hand as his body folded at the waist and fell over the rail, a dead weight slamming down and shaking the insubstantial wooden staircase below. Charlotte reached the address Julien had given her late in the afternoon. It was a street in a medium-sized town, and the house appeared to be unoccupied. She returned at hourly intervals until, at about eight o'clock, a light came on. With the memory of Antoinette in the back of her mind, she had been expecting "Zozo' would be a woman. The door was in fact opened by a corpulent man in braces. They went through the formalities swiftly and Zozo ushered her into the hall.

"I expect you'd like some dinner," he smiled.

"What a wonderful idea."

"Bring your bicycle in."

There appeared to be no Madame Zozo, and after a dinner of soup and some noodles, Zozo said; "Do you want me to send a message? I have a scheduled transmission tomorrow."

"No," said Charlotte.

"Not yet. I " want you to find me somewhere to stay." Zozo nodded.

"I can manage that. At your own risk, of course."

"Then I need to borrow your telephone."

"And that's all?"

"For the time being."

Zozo's plump face split into a smile.

"You're very easy to accommodate, Madame. The telephone's through there." Sylvie's voice answered almost at once. Charlotte was excited.

"Hello? Hello? Sylvie? Can you talk? Have you heard from our friend? And he's all right? I have a message. He must find out where his father is and leave the answer with you. Do you understand? It's vital. Tell him it's a matter of life and death. I'll call again."

It would be difficult for Julien to make contact with people, but she knew that he had ways of finding things out: friends, contacts, even Communists. In the meantime, she would wait.

Peter Gregory was sitting in a borrowed dressing gown, enjoying a cup of what tasted quite like coffee. He had his feet up on a stool in front of him and was looking down through the window to the narrow street below.

On the other side of the room sat Nancy, her half-moon glasses stuck below the bridge of her nose, inspecting the newspaper with occasional murmurs of dismay.

The telephone began to ring on a table in the corner and Nancy went over, paper in hand, to answer it.

Gregory found French in Nancy's Pennsylvanian accent considerably easier to understand than any of the other regional variants he had encountered, though on this occasion she said very little as she scribbled a note on the margin of her paper while the voice at the other end dictated.

Gregory now felt impatient to be on his way. It was as though his fatal weariness had been purged; the feeling that replaced it was a cold and energetic hope. When he thought about Charlotte he felt sure that what had held him back was fear. He was scared of her clarity of mind and the intensity of her feeling for him; it had taken him time to see that she could love him as he was that the peculiar shapes and deformities of his personality were not just entrancing but necessary to her. Again he felt blessed by a prodigally generous fate that this should be the case. To be worthy of her he had needed to do just one thing: to want to live.

And having accomplished that, he thought with a smile, I have one other small task: to get back.

"That was an Italian friend on the telephone," said Nancy, sitting down in her chair and resettling her glasses.

"Looks like there's a chance of a little action at last." She spoke quietly, with her head slightly averted. She said, "Ever heard of a felucca?"

"Is sounds like a blister on your feet."

"It's like a Portuguese sardine boat. Kind of uncomfortable, I guess, but you won't be going far."

"What's this Italian friend got to do with it?"

"East of the Rhone, France is occupied by the Italians. You knew that? Well, this guy, this friend of mine, Gianluca, he's gonna help you. He'll go with you. I'm not sure at this moment exactly what his plan is, but he's never let us down before."

"But if we cross the Rhone, won't we run into Italian soldiers?"

"I'm not so sure about that, Peter." When she approached a topic of real urgency. Nancy sometimes had a way of becoming oblique, like a college professor who is still quietly thrilled by the complexity of something she is about to reveal to her students.

"As I understand it, there's some give and take with the Italians. Ask yourself what looks like the easy way out for them. I guess it's been the same with the French, hasn't it? We're all scared of the Vichy police, but it's not all like that, is it?" Gregory thought of his old couple in the farmyard.

"Not at all."

"You're supposed to go on Thursday, but it's a movable feast." Levade arrived in the concentration camp at Drancy at ten minutes past four on a Monday afternoon, and for a few moments he felt nothing but relief. To be in the open air was a benediction to his lungs, which were seething from the atmosphere of the closed railway truck. The brief bus journey from the station had offered no respite, and he sucked down the freezing air until he began to cough in long, rib-stretching spasms that made him double over.

When he could stand up, he found himself among a crowd of bewildered, dirty people staring at the unfinished housing complex that lay in front of them. It was in the shape of a rectangle, more than a hundred yards long and about two thirds that distance in width, with buildings of four storeys on three sides. The fourth side was open, though fenced with barbed wire into which was cut a gate at the bottom right-hand corner. There were raised guard posts at either end of this open side, where gendarmes stood with machine guns pointed over the courtyard enclosed by the rectangle. Levade could see a tower to one side, the construction of which seemed to have been abandoned.

His relief passed, as gendarmes pushed among them, shouting orders; it became, as it had been throughout the journey, an effort of will to confront the fatigue that weighed him down.

All round were surly, muttering voices, recalcitrant in different languages German, Yiddish, Polish, or French spoken with a variety of foreign accents. The gendarmes worked them through the gate, funnelling them into the narrow opening, so they were once more forced into the bodily contact that repelled them. Levade half-walked and was half-carried among the slow tide of people being prodded and marshalled down the length of the rectangle.

For a moment he raised his eyes and saw faces pressed against the windows all round the yard, their gazes wide and expressionless as they swept over the figures of the latest convoy.

At the far end was a wooden barracks, set in from the main buildings, outside which a queue was forming. Levade clutched the handle of his suitcase and leaned against a pillar which supported a shallow flat roof that ran round the three sides of the rectangle to provide shelter above the walkway beside the buildings. Pushed by the baton of a gendarme, Levade stumbled into the gloom of the barracks where long trestle tables were set up in the bleary light of hurricane lamps. A German officer was sitting at one of these, with a French policeman to his right; but most of the work in the barracks was being done by local gendarmes, who were making the prisoners empty their luggage on to the tables while removing anything that was forbidden by their rules. They threw what was confiscated over their shoulders, where shabby creatures wearing white armbands collected it into piles. The gendarme opposite Levade unrolled the canvas Charlotte had packed, glanced at it briefly and hurled it behind him. He searched Levade all over, tearing off his jacket and shirt in his hurry to get done; he wrinkled up his nose as his fingers touched the purple scar on Levade's shoulder. He emptied the suitcase on the table, chucked some of the contents over his shoulder, and thrust the rest into Levade's arms.

"Move," he said. At the doorway, Levade was given a piece of yellow cloth in the shape of a star.

"Read this." The gendarme pressed a notice against Levade's face.

"Any internee seen within camp bounds not wearing the insignia of the star will be imprisoned and automatically included in the next transport.

"The same sanction will be taken against any internee found on the women's staircases. Only those issued with a white arm band are allowed on those staircases.

"The orderlies are responsible for seeing that these orders are carried out." Beneath these words was another proclamation, signed by the Commissioner of Police, which detailed the imminent punishment of two people who had breached the rules; despite being married to "Aryans', they were to be deported at once. Levade felt his wrist taken by a young man wearing a white arm band They walked along the side of the building among a small group of stumbling new arrivals, some of them weeping with fatigue and fear.

Levade found himself climbing a stairway with difficulty, as he was finding it hard to breathe, and people were jostling him from behind.

Then he was in a large room, filled with panic and loud voices. He sat down on the floor, sweating into his shirt despite the cold, and leaned his back against the wall, clutching his few spared clothes to his chest.

Eventually, a hand rested on his shoulder and he opened his eyes to see the face of a man of about forty, clean-shaven, looking earnestly at him.

"Are you all right?" The man spoke French in a native, educated accent. Levade smiled and nodded.

"I'm the head of your staircase. I'll try to help you, but it's always chaos when people first arrive. Have you got a knife and fork, or a bowl?

No? All right, I'll see you get them."

Levade looked round. It had grown dark outside, and the room was lit by naked bulbs hung from the ceiling. He saw rows of makeshift wooden beds piled one on top of another to make bunks. From many of these hung coats, shirts, jackets, saucepans and bags that had escaped the search in the barracks.

"My name's Hartmann," said the man, still kneeling by Levade.

"You can stay sitting here if you like. I'll get the head of the room to find you a bed." He smiled for a moment.

"We're very bureaucratic here head of this, head of that. There'll be some soup later. Make sure you get some."

Levade nodded and tried to thank the man, but his mouth and throat were too dry for words to pass.

He closed his eyes again and thought of the Domaine. He had struggled there with the limits of himself, pressing against the restrictions of what was left to him by age and temperament. He had considered himself unhappy. Yet he could see now that in the north light of that studio, disappointing though the results may have been, there had been a certain pleasure in his work.

And the presence of the English woman that too had been a comfort. In the time since he left the Domaine the smell of excrement and unwashed bodies had never left him. At the first camp, Beaunelarolande, it was bad; but here, in this place, the air was almost as rank as in the train. It was hard to love your fellow-man in these circumstances.

"Do you want a bed? Come with me." Levade was addressed in French by a plump, grey-haired man with an accent that sounded Polish or Hungarian. He took Levade by the arm to the corner of the room.

"You'll have to climb up. Let me take the clothes."

He helped Levade up to a bed that was in the middle of a rack of three.

"Sorry about the crush. The room's only supposed to have fifty people and we've got over a hundred. By the way, you're not allowed to smoke." Levade lay down and turned his face to the wall. There were thick electric cables that had not been plastered over but hung loosely from the grey cement; further down the wall was a cavity in "which he could see a number of unconnected pipes and other signs of aborted plumbing.

On the other side of the room, a long sheet of zinc had been attached to the wall to act as a wash basin, fed by half a dozen tap less pipes.

The window, a foot or so from Levade's face, had for some reason been painted blue perhaps to stop them looking on to the world outside, he thought. It was of the type that slides along metal runners, and although it had been nailed shut, it did not fit flush with the frame.

Levade was grateful for the slim icy draught because it helped against the smell of people in the room. He pulled the pile of his clothes on top of him and huddled down to sleep.

Later, a voice tried to interest him in soup, but Levade shook his head and pulled the clothes higher up over his shoulders. He heard the sound of a whistle and sensed the lights being extinguished.

Then, at last, for the first time for many years, Levade dreamed rich, sensuous narratives expanded at beguiling length; visual revelations of remembered places; a total habitation of other fully realised worlds. When he awoke in the morning, he found it impossible to believe that he was back in the room at Drancy. Surely the more powerful existence in which his dreams had so ravishingly placed him should have prevailed over this reduced reality. It was seven o'clock and one of the orderlies with white armbands had brought a pail of coffee into the room. People crowded round him with their mugs outstretched while the head of the room tried in vain to make them form a line. Levade stirred beneath the pile of clothes. He could feel an intense irritation in the skin of his chest and legs. It was a familiar sensation that for a moment he struggled to place. Then it came back to him: lice. He had not felt this tormenting itch since he burned his service shirt in Paris after being demobilised in 1918. He struggled from the bed and asked the head of the room where the lavatory was.

"You have to wait. Our turn in the Red Castle is in five minutes. Wait here." Men were washing in the cold water that gushed from the pipes above the zinc trough. Some stood naked and performed their intimate ablutions with unhurried care; some furtively splashed and dabbed, revealing as little of themselves as they could. A father, a religious man, agonisingly hid his nakedness from his son. Levade found that Charlotte had put a toothbrush and some paste in the pocket of his jacket and he waited his turn to use them.

The Red Castle was a block of latrines made from a temporary barracks set near the main gates. When his room was detailed to use them, Levade went down with his fellow-men, herded by the orderly. In the courtyard, they had to keep to the edge of the buildings; they were not allowed to step into the open space, but had to huddle back like shadows on the wall. The latrines were inadequate for the numbers; the paper in the cubicles had been used by previous rooms, and when Levade pulled his plug there was no water in the cistern. The smell and the filth were not new to him; everything reminded him of the earlier war, when he had lived in such conditions. In those days, they had been told there was a reason: the glory and the honour of the country were at stake, and their sacrifices would be honoured when they returned from the front. This time, Levade did not think he would be going home.

The inhabitants of all the staircases in due course assembled in the cindercovered courtyard for the roll call. Levade marvelled at the variety of his fellowprisoners. There were sleek and shaven men in heavy overcoats who might have stepped out of an important business meeting for a quiet cigar; there were vagrant people in whose faces the grime was long ingrained; there were bare-legged women fussing over families, trying to keep threads of order; and there were children, large numbers of dark-eyed, lethargic infants, some barely able to stand from fatigue, some with their mothers but most of them isolated and stunned, beyond speech. The roll call of the thousands gathered there took an hour and a half. Levade leaned on his young neighbour for support and, when it was over, went trembling back to his bed where he coughed until he thought his ribs would crack. A noisy argument was taking place between a group of Frenchmen and some Poles. The French were blaming the Poles for their own plight in being rounded up by the police, while the Poles complained that the French were given privileges by the police who ran the camp.

After all, they argued, are we not all Jews?

"Yes," a Parisian accent turbulently shouted back, 'but we're not all French. At eleven in the morning some bread was brought to the room, where it was divided into portions of one seventh of a loaf to each man. The head of the room was scrupulous in his division, as it was carelessness in this task that had once led to two men being immediately deported.

Levade had no appetite, but kept his piece of bread and gave it to the young man on whose shoulder he had leaned at roll call. At midday, the pail that had earlier brought up coffee arrived with what was described as soup a broth of cabbage shavings and hot water, which was hungrily received by the other inmates.

"Don't you want your soup?" It was Hartmann, the head of the staircase, who had helped Levade when he arrived.

Levade shook his head.

"You don't look well."

"It's my chest. I haven't been well for a few weeks. I don't think the conditions are a help."

Hartmann smiled.

"I'll see if I can get the nurses to look at you. We had a doctor on this staircase but he was deported."

"These deportations," said Levade.

"Where do they go?"

"Pitchipoi'. That's what we tell the children. It's a name they made up in the infirmary. They go to Poland."

"And what happens there?"

Hartmann raised his shoulders and spread his hands a little. Levade looked into his face: his eyes, Levade noticed, were of a remarkable deep brown with a thin bar of light at the centre.

"In theory," Hartmann said, 'they work. In fact. In fact, I don't really know. But there are rumours, there are stories you'll hear in the camp."

"And what do they say, these rumours?"

Hartmann shook his head slowly.

"I don't think it matters. I think we'll find out, you and I." Levade was lying on his bed, with Hartmann standing next to him.

Levade said, "Why are you here? What was your crime?"

"My crime ... aah. So many crimes. As far as they were concerned, the problem was that I wasn't wearing a star. I lived in a little town in Brittany, in the Occupied Zone, and someone informed the local police that I was a Jew and was refusing to wear the star."

Levade smiled.

"Like me. My papers weren't stamped with the right word."

"My mother's family isn't Jewish anyway," said Hartmann.

"My father was an atheist. But they needed people to make up numbers. I've been here six months now. That's how I got appointed to this elevated position, and because I'm a lawyer. The authorities like lawyers for some reason. I suppose they think we're intelligent. Or honest, perhaps." He laughed.

"Who was it that chose you?"

"The gendarmes. They run the camp really. Officially, the national police are in charge, and it's their commissioner who's the commander of the camp. But they keep at arm's length, they feel happier that way, being the guardians of public order, doing the bidding of the Government but allowing the gendarmes to do the dirty work."

"And these people with the armbands. Who are they?"

"There's a sort of Jewish administration, too. The gendarmes get us to run the place as much as possible. These people are orderlies. It's the same principle as the Germans using the French police. But if you're the head of a staircase, you can do some good, you're not just working for the enemy.

You can help people, you can try to keep their spirits up. We have times of bad morale. Before a deportation there are a lot of suicides. People throw themselves from the windows."

Levade closed his eyes. Perhaps it was illness as much as religious stoicism that was keeping him at a distance from the circumstances he was in; or perhaps they were simply too strange to be fully apprehended.

He said, "How long do people stay here before they're deported?"

"Not long," said Hartmann.

"We had a lull during the winter when no trains seemed to leave, but now it's starting up again. It's a few weeks for most people, and for some just a few days."

"And who chooses the people?"

"To some extent the Jewish authorities choose. They try to send foreigners before the French, and they try to keep back veterans of the war. But the police can throw in anyone they like, and so can the Germans. In the end it's a matter of chance."

"And the children?"

"Yes, they can go, too. Once they were ruled out, but not any more."

"I see. And are you a veteran of the war?"

"Yes, but only at the end, from 1917. I was too young to go in before. And you?"

"Yes. Four years. Verdun. The smell here ' " I know," said Hartmann.

"It takes you back."

Levade had closed his eyes again. He felt the other man's hand on his wrist. He said, "I'll get someone to come and examine you. Perhaps you should sleep now."

But Levade was already dreaming.

Sylvie Cariteau took her bicycle from the square and set off into the countryside. The post office was closed on Wednesday afternoon, so she had plenty of time, but she wanted to be back before it was dark.

It took her an hour to reach the farm where the boys were being kept. She felt unsure of her reception as she pedalled down the muddy track; she never really knew if they regarded her as their saviour or their gaoler, and Andre had become sensitive and strange in the course of the long months without his parents.

Andre turned out to be in his best mood, skipping and talking incessantly, eager to share with Sylvie the marvels of his new home.

He was, or could be, the most delightful child, she thought, and little Jacob never complained, but just tagged along in his own time.

Anne-Marie's mother was in the kitchen, a woman of the same generation as Sylvie Cariteau's own mother, and of a similarly reticent character. She was not pleased at having two extra mouths to feed, but her husband had told her it would work out for them in the long run. He had given Sylvie a mysterious and conspiratorial look.

In the course of the afternoon, Anne-Marie herself came back from work in her cafe and joined in the games Sylvie was playing with the boys. Then she set to work to make a large omelette with eggs she sent Andre to gather from the hen coop. She even had butter to set foaming in the blackened skillet she put on the stove.

They were halfway through the meal when Anne-Marie suddenly raised her finger to her lips.

"Ssh. I can hear a car. Quick. Upstairs. Quick!"

Andre and Jacob scrambled up the ladder while Anne-Marie gathered their plates into the sink.

"It's not your father's van?" said Sylvie.

"No. He has no petrol. Wait here."

Anne-Marie, a slight woman beneath her lumpy winter clothes, went to the door and stood with her hands on her hips.

Coming into the yard was an open-topped German military vehicle with four men in it, their rifles pointing skyward from between their knees. Anne-Marie stayed where she was as they climbed out and crossed the muddy farmyard.

The tallest of the four men stepped forward.

"You have Jews here," he said in French.

"We take them. Jewish boys."

"I don't know what you're talking about. There are no boys here. Just my mother and me. And a friend."

"Move." The German sergeant pushed past her, followed by the corporal and the private who had been at the Domaine, and another private who was part of the detachment at Lavaurette.

The sergeant shouted an order to the other three, who began to move about the kitchen, turning over the furniture, opening cupboards.

"What do you want?" said Anne-Marie's mother.

The sergeant stopped at the door to the next room.

"The French police say there are Jews here. Two boys. We take them." A cry from one of the privates brought the other three over to his corner of the room. He was pointing to a padlocked door that led into a back storeroom.

"Where's the key?" said the sergeant.

Anne-Marie shrugged.

"No key."

The sergeant hammered at the lock with the butt of his rifle until he broke the housing off the door frame.

While all four men were in the back room the women looked at each other. Sylvie Cariteau held her hand across her mouth. Anne-Marie's eyes darted back and forth between the other two, her lips set resolutely together. The soldiers returned.

"Where are they?" The sergeant grabbed Annemarie by the lapels of her thick woollen jacket and Anne-Marie spat in his face. He pushed her back on the table, ripping the cloth of her coat and the dress beneath, half baring the breasts she had for so long exposed to Levade.

He paused for a moment, then seemed to recollect himself. He pointed to the ladder in the corner of the room and gave another order. The three others climbed up, and Sylvie Cariteau watched their boots disappear into the gloom above. She heard their footsteps overhead and wondered how well the boys were hidden. The sergeant turned away from Anne-Marie and began to look round the kitchen again.

Anne-Marie leaned over and whispered in Sylvie's ear, "If you and I can detain them, perhaps Maman can get the boys out at the back, through the window." She said the word 'detain' in a way that made its meaning clear to Sylvie Cariteau, who hesitated for a moment, then mournfully nodded.

Anne-Marie whispered to her mother, who pursed her lips.

"What's this?" The German sergeant was holding up a book he had found on the floor by the sink. It was the story of the crocodile who lost her egg. He raised his eyebrows as he advanced once more towards Annemarie. He spoke softly this time.

"Where are they?"

"There's no one," said Anne-Marie, though her voice had begun to tremble. The two privates and the corporal came back down the ladder.

The corporal shrugged and spoke briefly in German. The sergeant smiled sceptically and shook his head, too, as he held up the book.

The private who had been overpowered by Julien at the Domaine stepped forward and grabbed Sylvie Cariteau by the hair, twisting her head. She screamed in pain as she turned her body round in the chair.

She pulled herself free from his grasp and stood up. She glanced for a second at Anne-Marie, as though for confirmation, and then, to the private's visible amazement, embraced him.

He pushed her back, but then seemed to think again, as though it was not so much what was offered as the way in which it was being made available that displeased him. He muttered to the corporal, who took Sylvie Cariteau by the arms while the private wrenched at the waistband of her skirt. As it tore, he began to shout at her and slap her in the face.

The sergeant watched indifferently as her clothes were ripped. Beneath the skirt there was a pair of silk drawers with a satin edge of daisies and forget-menots. The sergeant turned back to Anne-Marie and said something to the other private, who held her arms while the sergeant pulled away the clothes from her chest. His movements were slow and quite deliberate, unlike those of the corporal, who was slapping Sylvie Cariteau in a frenzy.

Both had loosened their belts and were fumbling with the fastenings of their trousers, pushing the women back against the kitchen table, while the other two men held them down.

Anne-Marie's mother was screaming.

"Stop it, stop it, stop it, you pigs. They're upstairs. I'll show you. Stop it." She battered the sergeant's shoulder with her small fists.

"The boys. I'll show you.

Come, come." She grabbed his arm and began to drag him across the room. The sergeant reluctantly buckled his belt and went with her. As he passed the corporal he shouted at him to stop what he was doing, as though unwilling to allow his junior what he himself had given up.

Sylvie and Anne-Marie rearranged their clothes beneath the sullen eyes of the German soldiers. From upstairs they heard a roar, then the sound of childish screams.

Andre and Jacob were pushed, slithering, down the ladder, followed more slowly by the sergeant and Anne-Marie's mother.

The sergeant smiled thinly at the two private soldiers and jerked his head towards the door. The men dragged the boys out into the dark afternoon. Anne-Marie's mother stood by the kitchen table, staring first at her daughter, then at the sergeant, her face scarlet with peasant defiance.

There was a moment's silence; then the sergeant gestured to the corporal, turned on his heel and left the house. Outside, an engine started up. Zozo moved his charge to a bare room above a chemist's at the other end of town. The shop was owned by his sister, a tall woman in a white coat with grey hair, who looked at Charlotte disapprovingly over the rims of her glasses when she made her way daily through the pharmacy at the back, past the shelves of pills and lotions. She never spoke, as Charlotte went through the door and up the small back staircase. The room had a bed with a blanket, a washing bowl and a jug. It overlooked an untended yard at the back, and beyond that a row of small houses. Every evening from Zozo's house Charlotte rang Sylvie Cariteau in Lavaurette, but there was never any news. The days went by. She borrowed books from Zozo to pass the time. In her cold room she felt the depth of her loneliness, but she would not give in to it. The value of all that she was and all she might become depended on whether she could see Levade and explain to him what Julien had done.

If she failed, then the broken ends of her own life would never be joined. On the eighth day, Sylvie Cariteau said she had a message, delivered by Cesar. Octave had sent him to say that all was well and that the name of the place was Drancy, near Paris. The word meant nothing to Charlotte.

She asked if there was news of the boys, and Sylvie broke down in tears. Charlotte went upstairs to Zozo's bedroom, where he was draping the aerial wire of his transmitter over the top of a wardrobe before making a transmission.

"What's the excitement?"

"Zozo, can you find me someone in Paris? Someone who can get me home?"

"Paris. My God. You want to be careful."

"I know. But do you have a name?"

"No. But I can probably get one."

"How soon?"

Zozo looked at her curiously.

"I'll see what I can do." When she was back in her cold room above the pharmacy, Charlotte said a prayer for Andre and Jacob.

In the morning, the internee whose job it was to clean the room would sprinkle water on the floor from an empty jam tin in which small holes had been pierced. A brush was provided, but for the dustpan he had to use a piece of card, from which the sweepings would then be thrown into a pail by the door. There were only two buckets for the use of the hundred or so occupants of the room; the other one was for food.

Levade was told by the head of the room that he would be on fatigues like everyone else. The most likely task would be the peeling of vegetables, which took place every morning in a room on the ground floor, not far from the main gate. It was tedious work, the man explained, but some people liked it because they could supplement their rations by secretly eating the potato peel when the gendarmes were not looking.

Levade felt lucky that illness had robbed him of his appetite. He heard the complaints of empty stomachs all day long, and witnessed a desperate bartering of half-carrots or small slices of bread for cigarettes. Since no communication was permitted with the outside world, the main source of tobacco the only hard currency in Drancy was the gendarmes.

A doctor on another staircase had advised those in a developed state of hunger and weakness that they could best conserve energy by lying all day on their beds. Word of this advice had reached Levade's room, and many of those not on fatigues would pass the long hours between roll calls immobile on their wooden bunks.

The doctor himself, it was noted, had been seen by the gendarmes rooting through a dustbin near the Red Castle, looking for scraps of potato peel from which he would scrupulously clean the cindery dust of the courtyard and other waste or slime before furtively consuming them. He had been a gynaecologist with a large practice in the Opera district of Paris, but this made no impression on the camp authorities, who decided that his scavenging should be punished by deportation on the next transport.

Hartmann managed to find a German paediatrician called Levi, who came to visit Levade one afternoon as it was growing dark. Levade was asleep when he arrived and was roused by his touch. He looked up to see two men staring down with concerned expressions, Levi and Hartmann, one on either side of the bunk. Levi spoke good French, though with the pronounced accent of his own country.

With no instruments, it was hard for him to diagnose Levade with any accuracy: he felt his forehead, took his pulse and inspected his throat; then he put his ear against his chest and made him cough into a cloth, where he examined what he brought up. He asked him how long he had been ill, how much weight he had lost and when he had last eaten.

"You must at least try to drink," Levi said.

"You have a cup? Get someone to bring you water from the pipe-there's nothing wrong with it. I'm going to see if I can find a place for you in the infirmary. It's difficult because there's dysentery at the moment among the little ones. But you need to be in bed."

"What's the matter with me?"

"I think you have pneumonia. Your lungs are very full."

"And what happens?"

"Nothing. Normally there's a crisis, a big fever, and then either you survive or not. There's no certain cure, even in the proper world."

Levade looked at the German's serious face, its dark features shadowed by fatigue. Clearly, he had not had the strength to pretend. Levade put his hand on the doctor's.

"Did you fight in the war?"

"Not this one," said Levi.

"The last one."

"That's what I meant."

"We " were considered proper Germans then. I resisted for as long as possible. I was making my way as a children's doctor in Hamburg. In the end I had to go. I was in France for two years. My brother Joseph was killed in a tunnel just before the end. But I survived. And you?"

Levade was smiling.

"I was there." He squeezed Levi's hand.

"We're old enemies." Hartmann said, "When did you come to France?"

"In 1940," said Levi.

"My wife and children left for the United States, but I stayed to work in the hospital for as long as possible.

Then I went to Paris, where I was safe for a time, until that big round-up in July. I managed to get down to Toulouse, but I was arrested there and sent to a camp. I was brought up here a month ago."

"And now?" said Levade.

"And now ... When the trains start again, I'll go where everyone goes." Hartmann said, "The wireless in London has said there's no work at the other end. They say we just get killed. Exterminated by the thousand."

"I don't believe that," said Levi with a twitch of German pride.

"There are always such rumours."

"And do you believe it?" said Levade.

Hartmann shrugged.

"Yes, I think I do. I've been told the trains are starting again any day. They're making a list now."

Levade began to cough and the other two men pulled over him such covers as there were.

Late that night Levade was awoken by the sound of screaming. A woman had thrown herself from a fourth floor window and had landed on the narrow flat roof that sheltered the walkway along the inside of the rectangle.

She had learned that her name was on the list of those due to be deported when the transports resumed on Thursday.

"Stupid bitch," said the man in the next bed to Levade.

"Now someone else'll have to go instead."

There was no sympathy for the dead woman or for the two men who died in the same way the next day.

That evening, at roll call, Levade leaned as usual for support on his neighbour, a young Rumanian who felt himself lucky to double his daily food ration in return for this slight service.

After an hour in the freezing evening Levade began to feel lightheaded. He was aware of a Parisian accent barking names, but his connection with reality seemed slender. He could see that the lights had come on in the rooms inside the buildings, and they reminded him of the lit houses he used to see when, on winter evenings in the small suburban town where he had grown up, his father Max Rutkowski brought him home from school on the handlebars of his bicycle. The air was so cold that he could barely breathe it in, yet he felt that what made him faint was not so much the thinness of the atmosphere as the thinness of time, as though he was at a great altitude-not of space, but of exhausted years. He slumped down into the arms of the Rumanian, who laid him on the ground as gently as he could. He answered Levade's name for him, and, when roll call was finally over, promised half his extra share of bread to a friend if he would help him carry the old man up to the room.

Later that night, before the lights were turned out, Hartmann brought Levade some soup he had saved and forced him to drink it. A dribble of the cold broth ran through the grey stubble of his chin. Hartmann kept a distance while Levade gurgled and spat, as though he did not wish to stand close to a man who, after all, had been too ill to wash for several weeks.

Hartmann took the empty cup and said, "I've got some news for you. They've put up the list of names for Thursday's transport and they've also put up a list of reserves. They always do this. It's about fifty extra names, in case of suicide or last minute changes, or in case they find more room. I'm sorry to tell you that your name's on the reserve list."

Levade, for all his feverish detachment, felt the cells of his body violently protest.

Hartmann said, "If I can get you to the infirmary, they'll probably take you off the list."

Levade was still fighting what felt like waves of freezing vertigo. When he could speak again he said, "It makes no difference. Leave my name on."

Charlotte was once more on a train. Her bundle of French francs was now almost at an end, but G Section's generous forethought would be enough to see her through at least until she made contact with the name in the rue Villaret de Joyeuse in Paris that Zozo had given her.

She had not had time to re-dye her hair before leaving, and there were traces of her own colour showing through at the roots. There was just enough dye left in the bottle Antoinette had given her in Ussel, and that night she would for the last time eliminate the gold and strawberry and barley shades that for the moment were concealed beneath Dominique's felt hat.

Quite how she would manage to find and speak to Levade, she was not sure. Presumably detention camps had facilities for visitors: she would simply go to the entrance and make her request. Doubtless, there would be some form-filling and delay. It was likely there would be set times to visit, or even particular days of the week, but since even criminals in prison were allowed to be visited, she could not imagine that an innocent man would be denied such a modest favour. Charlotte took out of her suitcase a sandwich made with fresh goose liver pate that Zozo had pressed on her as she left.

When the war was over, she would return and she would visit all the people who had so unquestioningly helped her Antoinette, Sylvie Cariteau, Zozo and little Annemarie.

And Julien, of course. For the rest of their lives, when each was mired in slack middle-age, they would make the inconvenient journey to the other's country, despite the protests of their respective children.

They would continue to laugh at one another and to indulge their love of what they had fought to protect. Their spouses would know nothing of the night they had spent together and they themselves would not refer to it, because it meant little compared to the joy of their companionship.

Her destiny was still with Peter Gregory. Nothing that had happened in her life had changed that conviction. For herself, she had no doubts: it depended only on him, on whether he had changed, on whether he still loved her and, most of all, she reluctantly conceded, on whether he was still alive.

She believed he was; or at least she would not let herself imagine otherwise. Perhaps, on reflection, it was not quite belief, it was more like faith. The difference, she explained to herself, as the train slowed for its arrival at Tours, was that belief was a logical conviction, while faith, because it admitted doubt, required emotional effort.

It was that effort that made her weary, that took so much of her strength, but the rewards of keeping the faith were high. She had seen the people of Limoges protesting their hatred of the English and the Jews, but she had refused to believe that they were typical, and that same night she had, at the time of the drop, been repaid by the sight of those men stumbling about their dangerous business in the fields. She had seen the eyes of Claude Benech that narrowed as he smirked over the long table in the Domaine, but she had also witnessed Sylvie Cariteau's unquestioning efficiency and Cesar's boyish rapture. It was almost as though it was her faith that kept them going; she could not bear to look away.

Charlotte glanced up as the train came into the station at Tours. She was surprised to find the four other people in the carriage looking at her. Had she been talking to herself out loud? An elderly man opposite with a white moustache and a grey Homburg was staring at her lap, in which lay a piece of waxed paper with the remains of her sandwich. She looked round the carriage and smiled. Now she came to think of it, the aroma of brandy and garlic that had come off the fresh pate was of a peace-time pungency.

"Excuse me," Charlotte said, and reached up to her suitcase in the luggage rack, where she took out the paper bag that contained the rest of the picnic Zozo had given her. She had had the best part herself, but there was some brawn, some slices of rye bread and a little jar of potted goose which she offered to her companions.

"My brother's a butcher," she lied happily, with what she hoped was a charming smile.

"Some people have all the luck."

Two women were getting off at Tours and declined her offer, but the old man in the hat and a small woman with a headscarf helped themselves with incredulous murmurs of appreciation. It was the fattiness of the goose that obviously appealed to people who had been so long deprived of oil or butter.

Julien had told her he knew a man in Lavaurette so desperate he had drunk half a litre of motor oil. To Charlotte's dismay, her two companions felt they should pay for their early supper by making conversation.

Having given herself a butcher as a brother. Charlotte felt a hysterical urge to fabricate more, and more bizarre, relations a family tree of jazz singers, rich industrialists or institutionalised lunatics. How tired my long, long caution has made me, she thought.

But she forced herself, for what she hoped would be the last time, to be reticent: my father ... my husband ... since 1940 ... She heard the words, bland and discouraging, then turned the questions on the others.

As the woman chattered on about her family. Charlotte allowed her mind to wander behind her fixed, indulgent smile. She thought of Gregory, of what her first words to him would be.

She was aware that it was now the man who was speaking, telling her of how regularly he took this train, but her reverie remained unbroken until she heard him say, "But after we've been through Chateaudun the SS always join the train before Paris. They drive up through Illiers and generally get on at Chartres. It's such a nuisance with all their inspections and ' " What?" said Charlotte. It was the word Illiers, taking her back to reading Proust's novel in Monsieur Loiseau's garden, that had snagged her daydream, but then she let the earlier words replay in her mind.

"The SS?"

"Yes, always. They're such brutes. They know me perfectly well by now, but still they take me into the corridor and search me."

"I see." Charlotte licked her lips, then resumed her lighter manner.

"Well, good luck with them. It won't affect me. I shall be getting off at Chateaudun."

It was dark and raining when Charlotte left the train and made her way into the centre of the town. In the shadow of the improbably grand castle, there were a dozen narrow streets that crossed at regular right angles. In other circumstances the atmosphere might have felt quaint or reassuring, but Charlotte wanted to be out of the rain. In a street called the rue Lambert-Licors she saw the welcome word

"Hotel' stuck halfway up a building and made her way through the glass front door to a cheap wooden desk beneath the stairs. She rang the bell, and a dark-eyed, unsmiling girl of about eighteen appeared from a door behind the desk. Her haughty manner.

Charlotte presumed, derived from her looks rather than the dignity of her office. She inspected Charlotte's damp, untidy figure with the disdain of a northern Irene Galliot.

She took Charlotte to a room on the second floor whose ceiling followed the pitched angle of the roof. Dinner would be served at eight, she said, shutting the door briskly behind her.

Charlotte took off her hat and bedraggled overcoat. From her suitcase she took out her washing things and the bottle of hair dye. It occurred to her that the girl had not told her where the bathroom was, and she went out on to the landing to investigate. All the doors she could find had numbers on them, so perhaps it was on a lower floor. In any case, there was only half an hour to wait till dinner; she would ask then.

Back in her room, she inspected the roots of her hair in the mirror on the dressing table. Rather than make a mess of it in the gloomy light of the bedroom, she would wear a scarf to dinner and do her hair properly in the bathroom later. She left the dye by the mirror, took off her skirt and sweater and lay down on the bed. Tomorrow she would think again about how to complete her journey to Paris. Presumably there were buses as well as trains; perhaps she could buy a bicycle and avoid the SS that way. It would probably take no more than two days to reach the outlying stations of the Metro. She would decide in the morning; in the meantime she would rest and see what Chateaudun could offer for dinner.

The dining room had small windows with orange curtains that gave on to the narrow street at the front; with its cheap wooden light fittings and scarlet embroidered tablecloths, the room had a faintly Alpine feel, as though a man in leather shorts might at any moment emerge from the kitchen with a steaming dish of sauerkraut and glistening pink sausages.

Four other tables in the room were occupied by people who murmured greetings as Charlotte took a table by the window. Some complicated bartering of coupons seemed to be taking place with a grey-haired man she took to be the proprietor, and, when he approached her table, Charlotte offered him some tickets, letting him also see the corner of a banknote she had slipped into the ration book. There was little sense of Tyrolean plenty in the small beetroot salad that eventually materialised, wordlessly presented by the haughty girl from behind the desk, but there was a quarter carafe of thin red wine and a single slice of chalky bread with which to eke it out.

Charlotte took out a novel she had borrowed from Julien's shelves, a romance of the kind Dominique might like, and began to read. After a few pages it was clear that the heroine was in for a difficult time with the saturnine stranger she loved from afar. The character's struggles were completely uninteresting to Charlotte, and she remembered Levade's pointing out how absurd and irritating most people found the romantic travails of others. How different her own dilemma was, how much more serious ... She smiled and thought of Levade again, and how he had told her that everyone was convinced that their own plight had a particular poignancy, a special unfairness. She was just like all the other young women; her crisis was as perpetual and as comic as theirs. She pushed away the plate.

What did it matter how her anguish compared to that of other people? It was only its own intensity that was important-that, and the value she allowed it in the battle for an understanding of her life.

As the weeks had passed in Lavaurette, she had noticed a change in people's attitude towards her. In their manner, in the way they looked at her, there was a respect that was sometimes touched with awe. It made her laugh inside. I'm just a romantic girl who's come to find her lost lover, she thought, but they look at me as though I were a woman of fierce conviction, a person of unshakeable dedication in the fight for freedom.

And yet, she thought, as she picked through the food the waitress had brought, perhaps there was something in the attitude of Julien, Sylvie and Cesar. Perhaps there truly was something they had seen. A market is made at the price that someone will pay; to some extent you are what other people think you are. Why then did she feel in some way provisional, almost fraudulent, as though she had always to apologise for herself or justify her existence?

She looked up as the waitress took her plate, and saw the door from the hall being pushed open by the proprietor. On his face was an expression both obsequious and scared as he stood aside for a tall, broad-shouldered man of about forty-five dressed in the shining boots and grey uniform of the German army. There were further muttered greetings from the other diners as the distinguished visitor sat down, and the manager scurried across with a basket of bread and a full bottle of wine, from which he poured a genteel amount for the German to taste.

Charlotte's fearful inclination was to go up to her room at once, but she felt, since the dessert had not yet been brought, that it might look suspicious if she abandoned her dinner. There was no sign of dessert; service to all other tables came to a halt while the German was plied with the best the hotel had to offer. A smiling woman who was presumably the manager's wife fluttered in from the hall to pour him some more wine, and the waitress brought various dishes of hors d'oeuvre from the kitchen. Charlotte was delighted to see that the Irene Galliot of Chateaudun was completely unaffected by the presence of the German, but dumped down his food with wordless contempt.

Equality, thought Charlotte, liberty, fraternity. The Republic is not dead. Some of the other tables became restive as the German's banquet wore on, but when he had reached his dessert they were allowed to have theirs too. Finally, there was a general clearing of the room, and, in the pushing back of chairs, doors held politely open. Charlotte found herself addressed by the German. In French that was barely comprehensible he was offering her a drink in the small dark sitting room on the other side of the hall.

Charlotte's mouth felt dry, not only from the ersatz coffee she had drunk, as she forced herself across the floor. The proprietor switched on a light in the dingy room, placed a bottle of brandy and two glasses on the low table, then, with ostentatious tact, withdrew.

The German in his way was rather charming. Charlotte thought. He seemed diffident, almost shy in his courtship, hampered no doubt by his stumbling French, for which he several times apologised.

Charlotte concentrated on being Dominique, and her fear made her plausibly abashed. Even within the role of modest married woman, however, there were choices she could make in how to deal with her situation.

Dominique might well be so terrified that she would do anything the man suggested; Charlotte had to find a response that was both realistic and discouraging.

Initially, she kept bringing her husband into every answer, to stress her unavailable state, but then found the German politely inquiring more and more about the work and life of this ever-present man.

Charlotte eventually had to plead that it was too painful for her to talk about him. She asked the German about his home and what he was doing in Chateaudun. He did not understand the question about home, or perhaps affected not to, and only shrugged and muttered briefly about his orders.

The peculiar thing about him. Charlotte thought, was that he seemed to be quite unaware of the fact that he was the enemy, the armed occupant of her presumed country. The only word she could think of to describe his attitude was

'friendly', and from this she could only deduce that his motives were improper. After twenty minutes of laboured conversation. Charlotte began to yawn.

"Excuse me. I'm very tired." She held her hand over her glass as he made to pour more brandy.

"I think I must be off to bed. Thank you very much for the drink." The German stood up stiffly, and a trace of displeasure came into his heavy, handsome face. He stood back to let Charlotte pass into the hall, where the proprietor was waiting nervously at the desk. He opened the front door for the officer, but the German looked only briefly into the night, where it had begun to rain, and shook his head. He pointed upstairs.

"Let me see the rooms," he said.

"For my men. To sleep."

His manner was now less charming; it was as though the memory of his military duty had made him cold. The manager fumbled with the room. keys that hung on a little perforated board behind him; in the dim wattage of the overhead bulb Charlotte saw the bubbles of sweat on his upper lip. He began to climb the stairs, with the German officer behind him. Charlotte hesitated for a moment, then followed.

On the first floor the manager began opening the flimsy doors of the rooms that were not occupied, allowing the German a brief glance inside.

"Good night," said Charlotte loudly, as she began to climb towards her room on the second floor.

"Goodbye."

Neither man answered.

Charlotte closed the door of her room and listened. She heard more doors being opened and closed, then she heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There was a jangling and a thudding along the landing, though no sound of voices. The noise came closer to her room. She heard the German speak, briefly, something that sounded like an order, and there was the noise of one man's footsteps departing down the stairs.

Charlotte stood with her ear to the door. There was no sound. She was certain he was still there, so he must be standing in the corridor. He must have seen all he needed to see; surely now he would have to go.

There came the reverberation of boots on floorboards and a violent knocking on her door. Charlotte sprang back into the room and tried to compose herself. She said nothing, but the knocking came again. She went over and opened the door a little. The space was filled with grey uniform.

Charlotte met the German's eyes and gave what she hoped was a smile of surprise, mixed with modesty. She tried to look friendly, but as though she did not wish to be disturbed.

"May I come in?" He had resumed his more diffident manner.

"I was just going to bed."

"Just for a moment. It's not that I ..." His French seemed to fail him.

"It's very late," said Charlotte.

"Just for a moment." His foot was in the door.

Once inside the bedroom his manner became nervous. He walked round the room, his eyes constantly moving, as though he did not want to let them rest on some feminine intimacy.

"I want to say that I am sorry if I am not proper." He had picked up Charlotte's room key and was flipping it back and forth absently in his hand.

"Many difficult things arrive in wars," he went on.

"We do not do what we want."

"Of course." Charlotte had no idea what he was trying to say. She had kept the door open to increase the impression that this was no more than a final word. The German put down the key on the dressing table and picked up the bottle of hair dye. He tossed it from one hand to another as he walked round the room.

"I have friends, I have brothers who are like me." He turned his eyes, now large with sincerity, on to Charlotte, but her appalled gaze was fixed on the bottle of hair dye. As it spun back and forth through the air she could plainly make out the label, which stated that it was dye and was decorated with a picture of a freshly coiffed female head. There were only the dregs of the dark fluid inside, but it was of a colour and consistency that the German could not possibly mistake for anything else.

"I have my wife at home. It is difficult for all of us, and to be righteous is my last hope."

The bottle flew in its highest arc yet, from left hand to right, the brunette liquid slapping up the sides. Suddenly Charlotte thought: it is not his lack of French that is making him incoherent: he's shy he's frightened of making a fool of himself.

"I fully understand," she said.

"It's been a pleasure."

"Yes." He looked down at the bottle in his hand.

"And one day soon the war will be over." Smiling brightly. Charlotte extended her hand, as though this was the honourable conclusion to an entirely successful piece of social intercourse. She stepped back a little as she did so, to reveal the beckoning escape of the half-open door.

"Yes, yes." The German held out his hand to Charlotte, switching the bottle to his left hand as he did so.

"Good night," said Charlotte.

"Yes. Good night."

She had backed him into the doorway.

He stood for a moment, unmoving.

"Please." Charlotte held out her hand and pointed to the bottle.

"Excuse me," he said.

"I don't know."

"Thank you." With the last remnants of Dominique's determined propriety. Charlotte narrowed her eyes into an expression of polite but incontrovertible farewell.

"Goodbye."

The German nodded, stepped out of the room and made off down the stairs. Charlotte held the bottle in both hands, close to her bosom.

Her heart was thudding so hard that it was making her palms tingle. Good God, she thought, what have I become that even German officers are scared of me?

She went out on to the landing and ran to a window that overlooked the rue Lambert-Licors. She saw the street splashed by a rectangle of light as the front door of the hotel opened, then heard the rumble of a military vehicle being started in the rain.

A series of country buses brought Charlotte to the outskirts of Paris. At the first sight of the fancy ironwork sign above the steps, she descended, bag in hand, into the Metro.

Within moments she was assailed by a smell as familiar and as loaded with memory as a child's first sensuous impression involuntarily recovered after decades of loss. She had forgotten this extraordinary atmosphere and how, as a teenage girl, it had struck her on her very first descent as something that was already deeply familiar and suggestive, as though she had been there before in a dream or in an earlier life. No one had been able to identify it for her; presumably it had some prosaic mechanical origin, but people talked of tarred hemp rope, of tobacco, garlic or sub-soil in vain attempts to explain this essence of the city.

Charlotte was for a moment so moved by it, and by its persistence, that she did not notice how much other things had changed. There were many more people than usual, queuing in the tunnels to get down to the pneumatic scarlet gates at the end of the platform. Among the austere clothes of the Parisians were flashes of grey uniform, though the Germans democratically awaited their turn among the French. Charlotte noticed that her clothes and her suitcase were not out of place among the Parisians, most of whom seemed to have abandoned their habitual chic. She squeezed through the barriers as they were closing and clambered on to the last carriage of the train. She put down her case and looked round. Something was strange. All the people were staring at her with dark, distrustful eyes. All of them were wearing a star of yellow cloth pinned to their lapels. The man standing next to Charlotte muttered, "Jews only', and pushed her out on to the platform.

In the next carriage. Charlotte was offered a seat by a young Parisian as the train clanked off" into the tunnel. This was not her normal experience of the Metro, where people had to be reminded by statutory notices to give up their seats to the war-wounded or to pregnant women.

There seemed to be a contest of politeness between the French and the Germans, as the soldiers in their pressed uniforms and shining belts made way for shabby matrons and young Frenchmen, not to be outdone by Wehrmacht charm, mounted a counter-offensive of Game courtesy.

Charlotte wanted to have one look at Paris before boarding the suburban train and she left the Metro at Odeon with the idea of walking up past the restaurant in the rue de Toumon where Monsieur Loiseau had taken her as a girl On the Boulevard St. Germain the green and white municipal buses moved with unchallenged ease, the only other traffic being licensed bicycles, many ridden by wobbling citizens long past their cycling peak.

The Metro might have kept its pungency, but the streets of the sixth arrondissement had become odour less and pale, with no sudden gust of coffee or fresh bread from open doorways, no morning freshness from the water-sprinkled pavements. It was quiet and anaemic in the rue de Toumon as though proper circulation had been strangled by the Nazi flag that draped the Senate House. The restaurant had shut down.

In the Gardin de Luxembourg Charlotte walked the dusty paths she so acutely remembered and stopped before the statues that had puzzled or entranced her: Watteau being adored by a decolletee creature from one of his own paintings, the Comtesse de Segur, nee Rostopchino (1799-1874) and a bearded man of bronzed self-importance called Jose Maria de Heredia whose claim to a plinth in this moody garden was his membership of the Academie Francaise. By the wooden summerhouses, beneath the scabby plane trees, there were a handful of children, muffle red and wrapped against the winds from the Boulevard St. Michel, but their games seemed, to Charlotte's searching eye, inhibited, and their voices thin and scratchy in the winter air.

She took herself make what she assumed would be almost her final rail journey before her return to England. On the suburban train she thought of Levade, picturing him in some tidy, if ascetic, little room, surrounded by his few possessions, with his painting hung above the bed.

At Le Bourget-Drancy station she asked the way to Drancy in a glass fronted cafe by the road, and the proprietor directed her across the large bridge that spanned the tracks. Beneath her in a siding as she crossed was an idle express the wooden destination board slid into the side of the carriage proclaiming Paris Nord and, upside down, Amiens She remembered her father talking of Amiens as a place where British soldiers went on leave during the Great War. Its great cathedral was sandbagged to the level of the stained-glass windows a big cold barn, he had called it a frightening place, and an unforgiving town despite its inhabitants' claims for the dazzling cathedral and charming water-gardens.

The long, broad road that led Charlotte down to Drancy had streets of all the usual names: those of Alsace-Lorraine, always among the first places to be claimed by any French municipality, and of Jean Jaures, the martyred president. There was a spacious, unkempt park on the left, though the town seemed hardly inhabited enough to need such recreational space.

The houses were in a variety of urban styles, one of the most popular of which was stone and cement with wooden gables, like the holiday villas just back from the front at Deauville.

Nothing was strange about Drancy, Charlotte thought, nothing was less than typical. Quite what she expected to see, she could not say, but surely if she was so close to a place of such despair there should be some sign of stress or concealment. The camp itself was visible enough. Its abandoned towers were several storeys higher than any building in the area, and an elderly woman Charlotte stopped to ask the way pointed to it with an exhalation of distaste. The road went past the southern, open side of the rectangle of the camp, and an area of broken ground lay between the street and the barbed wire fence.

Charlotte stopped. In the raised observation posts were gendarmes with what appeared to be machine guns. While the housing complex looked civilian, even hospitable in a bleak way, there was something wrong about the barbed wire and the guns. She could see the wooden gate that had been set into the wire fencing, but at the thought of simply going up and asking to see her friend, she faltered. On the other side of the road, looking across at the camp, was a cafe, and Charlotte went inside to ask advice.

"Excuse me," she said to the proprietress, "I have a friend in this place here and I wondered how ' " You want a room?

" said the woman quickly.

"We've got one spare at the moment. Binoculars are extra." Charlotte was taken aback by the speed of the response.

"You have people staying here in order to look, to ' " You'd better hurry if you want the room. There's more coming every day."

"I really just wanted to see this friend, to pay a visit." The woman laughed.

"Are you out of your mind? They're not allowed to see anyone. They're only allowed out for the roll call. That's when you need the binoculars, to see if they're still there."

Charlotte looked at the woman's rapacious eyes. Inside her skirt pocket her hand closed on the last of her francs.

"Do you ever manage to get word to people? Can you ever get messages in?" The woman ran her eyes up and down Charlotte's cheap clothes.

"There's a gendarme who comes over for a drink, but I don't think someone like you could ' " How much?"

" You take the room and I'll have a word this evening."

The room was little more than a cubicle, recently partitioned from a larger space to increase the guest capacity, but it had a bed and it overlooked the camp. For the room and the binoculars Charlotte was asked to pay three times what she had been charged in Chateaudun. In the afternoon she drafted a message that would as briefly as possible tell Levade what had happened.

Several times in the course of the evening she went down to see if the pliable gendarme had called, but each time she was disappointed. She had fallen asleep over her romantic story when she was woken by a sharp knocking.

The proprietress put her head round the door.

"He's here. Come now if you want to see him."

Charlotte slid off the bed, straightened her skirt and pressed her feet back into her shoes. She followed the woman down a narrow passage to a small sitting room, where a uniformed gendarme was standing with his back to the door.

"Here she is," said the woman, and left the room.

When the gendarme turned round. Charlotte saw a pale man, probably not more than thirty, but heavily jowled and unathletic with a moustache in which grey hairs were already sprouting.

He said nothing, and Charlotte guessed he would prefer her to take the initiative.

"I have a friend. I need to get a message to him. Can you help me?" The gendarme wordlessly inclined his head.

"His name is Auguste Levade. He's French. He's been here only a few days. And I need to hear a message back. I need to know he's understood." The gendarme nodded again.

"How much?" said Charlotte.

The man took a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had already scribbled a figure.

It was slightly less than Charlotte had expected: presumably most people who required this service were refugees, or French whose businesses had been closed down by the Government.

She handed him the note she had written to Levade.

The gendarme spoke for the first time.

"I can't take that." His voice was unexpectedly high and nervy.

"Just tell me."

"It's complicated," said Charlotte.

The gendarme shrugged.

"All right, let me try. My name's Dominique. Can you remember that?"

"Yes."

"Tell him ... Julien was acting, to save two children. Say " at the Domaine" as well.

"At the Domaine Julien was acting to save two children." From Dominique. Can you remember? Say it to me."

Like an overweight schoolboy, he repeated the words.

Charlotte produced the banknotes from her pocket.

"And I'll see you back here tomorrow night?"

The gendarme nodded once more as he left the room, and Charlotte felt the rising of elation. She was almost there.

In the morning, the young Rumanian and his friend carried Levade down to the infirmary, a series of five rooms in the north-west corner of the rectangle with seventy-five sheet less beds.

Some of the patients had been ill on their arrival at Drancy. There were old men who had been transferred from Jewish hospices in Paris, and lifetime inhabitants of psychiatric wards removed from their hospitals by gendarmes to make up the numbers demanded by the deportation programme. There were also those who had grown sick since arriving at the camp, women giving birth to babies conceived at liberty and many young children whose soft skin was covered with scabs and sores caused by malnutrition and the bites of vermin.

From the lips of these children there rose a permanent, bewildered wailing against which the other inmates tried to stop their ears.

Levade was given a bed with two others stacked on top of it. A Jewish nurse brought him a glass of water, but his hand was trembling too much to hold it. His whole body had begun to shiver. He tried to calm the quivering muscles of his arms and legs, but even his neck and head were shaking with the spasms of cold.

The nurse brought him the only spare blanket she could find, but his rage for warmth could not have been satisfied by all the coverings of his life-time piled on top of him.

"Cold ... cold," he muttered to the nurse, the words broken up by the rattling of his teeth.

She took him in her arms and tried to warm him, but she could not contain the jerking movements of his body. A young Jewish doctor came and cast an eye on the violently trembling figure. He wiped some blood from Levade where his teeth had pierced his lip, then passed on to other patients.

After an hour or so, the temperature of Levade's body began to rise. The shivering died down and for a moment his body was relaxed. He looked about him and saw the bare cement walls, the Red Cross nurses and their co-opted Jewish sisters, the frightened gaze of the powerless Jewish doctors. A crisis, he remembered the other doctor, Levi, saying: a crisis through which you may or may not pass ...

By this time he was starting to sweat, so he pushed back the blanket. Soon, the skin of his face was flushed purple with heat and he had to keep licking his lips. Everything seemed to be moving very quickly; his thoughts started to become disarrayed: it was like being carried on some machine of colossal momentum over 'which he had no control.

He tried with his conscious mind to calm his thoughts, but he had no sense of time any more; it had collapsed on him.

A gendarme was leaning over his bed and speaking. For a moment Levade reestablished contact with the world. The man was giving him a message. Julien ... two children ... But what did it matter?

Julien, the dear boy, his only son, how much he loved him ... How dearly, dearly ...

But the gendarme was not there. When had be been? An hour ago? A day? Had he been yet? Has he come?

"A priest... I want a priest."

A passing nurse looked at him in surprise.

"A rabbi, don't you mean?"

A minute later, or perhaps two hours, a doctor came to his bed.

"Those on the Reserve list have to go to the other corner of the courtyard. Block One. Staircase Two. We need your bed."

The man helped Levade to the door, then turned back into the infirmary. Outside, Levade leaned against the side of the building, beneath the shallow roof. It was dark.

He knelt down on the ground, then laid his cheek against the cold stone. Some stirring of childhood memory came to him at the touch of it; some recollection of the crawling world of the infant who is intimate with floors and surfaces.

He closed his eyes to spare his mind the images of the night and felt time rushing up suddenly in him. Once more he was at a thin altitude of years; but as the final wave built up, it was not with the memory of war, not with thoughts of women he had loved, not with the touch of the God he had worshipped or the pained awareness of the nights when dreams had fled from him.

It came in sounds of elsewhere, of other people's lives. He heard a baby cry, he heard the sound of a bird; there was a motor lorry backfiring in the quiet street and then a woman's voice; he heard a jangling bell.

Then all the years rose up and swallowed him in one rapid, sweet unravelling. f-v-^

"This is Gianluca Soracci. Peter Gregory." Nancy made the introduction and the two men shook hands.

"I'm sorry it take me so long," said Soracci in English.

"Is difficult. I have much work to do."

"That's all right," said Gregory.

"I understand."

"What's the plan, Gianluca?" said Nancy.

"First I have a cigarette." Soracci took an onyx lighter from Nancy's table and lit up shakily. After a deep inhalation he sat down and smiled. He was a delicate man, with small hands and feet, brown, candid eyes and a slight plumpness round the belt.

"Are you taking him in the felucca?" said Nancy.

"No, no, we do different. I take him to Italy. We go to Genoa. Then he take a ship to North Africa. Is easy."

"Any particular part of North Africa?" said Gregory.

"We see. I think soon you go where you like. Anywhere is yours. The Germans soon finished."

"Rommel?"

"Si'." Soracci nodded quickly and pulled a shred of tobacco from his lower up;

"Isn't it going to be dangerous for an Englishman in Italy, getting over the border and so on?"

"No. I fix it. I know many people. Soon all Italy is on your side. You see."

"I think he's right," said Nancy.

"There's no enthusiasm for the Germans. Especially now they're losing."

"What kind of boat?" said Gregory.

"A big boat. Goes quick." Soracci laughed.

"Then you see your old friends. The boys in blue. They take you home."

"That sounds good."

"You can trust Gianluca," said Nancy.

"He knows what he's doing."

"All right," said Gregory.

"When do we leave?"

"We leave tomorrow. I come for you in the morning. I don't know how long you wait in Genoa, but not long I think. Is the best way."

They shook hands, and Soracci disappeared.

There was a silence after he had gone. Nancy coughed and began to speak in an artificial way, as though talking to a schoolboy.

"The Italians have been useful in France," she said. They've stopped Vichy sending all the Jews from east of the Rhone up for deportation." She began to tidy the living room in a distracted way. As she was making a pile of some newspapers, she turned to Gregory and said abruptly, "Now why don't you go and pack your case?"

"I don't have a case. Nancy."

"I'll lend you one."

"When' give it back?"

"When I come and see you in London. After the war."

"Do you promise you'll come?"

"What are war-time promises?"

"It would mean a lot to me."

"Go and pack," said Nancy softly.

"Just go and pack."

All day Charlotte fretted about her gendarme and whether he would be able to repeat her message to Levade. With nothing to do to pass the time, she walked round the perimeter of the camp. A narrow road ran along the eastern flank of the building, where there was a further line of barbed wire. In the north-eastern corner there was a small entry into the camp, not large enough for a vehicle, guarded by a gendarme. The windows in the long eastern side were painted over blue, and the inhabitants behind them were invisible.

For all that she tried to imagine the hardships inside, the place and the surrounding area retained an extraordinarily normal atmosphere.

This suburb was not a wealthy one, but people came and went along the street with shopping bags; bicycles rang their bells and dogs barked as they sniffed along the pavement. Life went on, and no one seemed concerned.

In the afternoon. Charlotte went back to her room and looked through the binoculars. Between roll calls, the courtyard was almost deserted. Sometimes she could see inmates slinking round against the inner wall, presumably on their way to work in the kitchens or the repair shops. It was dark when the evening roll call began, and she could not make out the faces of the multitude who grudgingly assembled in the cold air. She went downstairs to find something to eat. While she was sitting at a table by the door, her gendarme came in.

There were about a dozen other people in the cafe: some workers on their way home, and four or five people staying upstairs, hoping for news of their families. Charlotte said nothing to the gendarme, but allowed him time to have a drink at the bar. He caught her eye as he looked round the room and she walked slowly past him, up the stairs, and waited on the landing. The sound of his boots was not long in coming, and he gestured with his head down the corridor towards the little sitting room.

Charlotte went softly after him and closed the door behind her.

"Did you find him?"

The gendarme nodded.

"He's dead."

"When?"

"This evening."

"Did you give him the message?"

"Yes."

"Was he all right when you told him? Did he understand?" The gendarme had taken off his cap and was moving it slowly round in his hands. He licked his lips and swallowed, "Yes. He understood."

"And did he have a message for me?"

The gendarme looked down at his boots. There was a soft silence in the room. Then he nodded violently, twice.

"He said, "Thank you."

"I see." Charlotte breathed in.

"And thank you. Monsieur. Thank you for ' But the gendarme brushed past her in his hurry to be gone. Charlotte heard him thundering down the stairs. She sat down suddenly on the edge of an armchair.

Andre Duguay could not see out of the windows of the bus as it drew into the courtyard; it was packed with children and their suitcases and bundles of belongings. He was jolted back and forth between Jacob and a girl of about the same age, whom the motion of the bus had made vomit on the floor.

When the doors were finally opened, the smaller ones were helped down off the platform by gendarmes. Andre stood blinking in the large cindered courtyard of Drancy, Jacob's hand clenched in his.

Some women were hovering at the edge of the group of children, and Andre instinctively went towards one of them. She did not look like his mother: she was fatter, and she spoke with a strange accent.

"My God, the smell. Where have you come from?"

Andre shrugged. In the jostling of people he heard the question repeated and the word "Compiegne." Was that where he and Jacob had been? It had been a filthy place.

Holding Jacob, he went with a group of children, following two women down the courtyard. They were in a room where they were made to take their clothes off. Andre had been able to keep himself clean, but Jacob's shorts were caked with excrement. The women held their hands across their faces as they tried to clean the children in the showers.

Some of them were covered with sores where the acid of their waste had eaten into their skin. Other women tried to wash the clothes, while the children were pushed into another room where two or three soaking cloths were used as towels. One woman who was drying them wept at their pitiful state, but another one looked at her sternly.

"Don't worry," she said, patting Andre's bare chest, 'you're going to find your parents again."

A doctor, who painted purple liquid on their sores before their damp clothes were returned to them, looked at her with a quizzical stare.

She shrugged and pouted, as though to say, What else can I tell them? Andre was in another building. A gendarme was asking his name. He wrote it on a wooden tag and hung it round Andre's neck. Some of the children did not know what they were called. The girl behind Andre, a child of about three, stared up, uncomprehending, into the big face of the gendarme. Some of the children swapped name tags.

Out in the courtyard again, Andre stood unsure of what to do. He saw some other children following a grown-up man with a white band round his arm, and assumed he might be someone in authority. He pulled Jacob along with him. They entered a staircase, but the steps were too high for some of the smaller children, who were carried by their brothers and sisters, panting and heaving to the floor above. Here, on the bare concrete landing, another man told them to keep climbing. Dragging themselves and their squaw ling burdens, they came to the third floor where they were shown into an empty room.

Andre and the other children stood beneath the single, blue light bulb for some time, uncertainly, before they eventually sat down on the mattresses that were soaked in the filth of previous children. A bucket was placed at the doorway for those too small to make the long climb down to the courtyard, but it soon overflowed.

Andre, who never remembered either to take his bag of books and shoes to school in Lavaurette or to bring it home at night, had left his suitcase on the bus.

"I must go and find it," he said.

"It's Madame Cariteau's case, the one we did tobogganing with. She'll be cross if we lose it."

Anne-Marie had delivered the suitcase to Bernard, the gendarme, who had passed it to them through the window of the departing train at Lavaurette. Andre had been delighted.

Outside again, he went over to where the bus was now leaving the compound.

Three more buses had been and gone in the meantime, and Andre found a number of children of his age wandering among the hundreds of forgotten bundles and bags, looking for some identifying mark. One boy sat cross-legged on the cinders, his head between his knees. Andre noticed the scabs and sores on the back of his hands, which were clamped round his neck.

The boy appeared to be immobilised; it was as though he had found the point beyond which he could not go. Andre saw the fair hairs on his neck, matted together with filth.

Andre wanted Madame Cariteau's case with a fierce desire. There was a sweater for Jacob, who was shivering after his shower, and, more than this, there were the tin soldiers and the adjustable spanner.

Suddenly, he caught sight of the brass locks and the name Cariteau on a case half-hidden beneath a pile of other bags and he pulled it out.

Bumping it across the courtyard with both hands on the grip, he found he had forgotten which was his staircase: there were so many similar doors on the ground floor, each of them opening on to identical stone steps.

With great politeness he asked for the help of a man who seemed to be directing traffic and who reminded him a little of his father.

"Monsieur, I've lost my brother. I'm afraid I've forgotten which room he's in and I'm worried he may be afraid without me. He doesn't like the dark." Andre hoped God would forgive him this lie; it was he who was so scared of the night, not Jacob, who was always willing to go into a darkened room on any errand Andre asked him.

The man smiled.

"Don't worry. We'll find him." He took Andre's hand.

"Are you a policeman?"

"Good God, no." The man laughed.

"I'm in charge of this staircase. My name's Hartmann. You won't remember that, will you? It doesn't matter.

I can see what your name is from your tag."

Up and down the dim stairwells the kindly man led Andre until they found the room where Jacob was lying, huddled on a mattress. He gave a little cry when Andre came across the room, stood up and kissed him, with terrible tenderness, on the face.

There was a solid wailing in the room as though the children's nerve had given way in a collective wave of despair. The older ones could no longer be of comfort to the younger, and even the women who tried to help them were in tears. Jacob clutched Andre, his arms round his neck like a monkey clinging to its mother, and Andre held on tight for his own sake too.

A pail of cabbage soup came up in the evening, and the children clustered round with what cups they had found or been given. One of the women warned them that it would make their diarrhoea worse, but they drank it and shared it out among themselves with ravening hands.

Later Andre saw the kind man from the courtyard, who came back into the room with a second man in whose concerned expression even Andre could see exhaustion. He went from one soaked mattress to another, tapping the chests of the children with his long fingers, feeling their wrists, and laying his hand across their foreheads. Some of them seemed better for his touch.

"Dysentery," said Levi to Hartmann when he had finished his futile round.

"Where did they come from?"

"Some came from the camp in Compiegne and some from a children's home in Louveciennes."

"We've never really got rid of the dysentery here, anyway," said Levi.

"Some of these children should be in the infirmary, but there isn't any room." Hartmann walked with him to the end of the corridor.

"I don't think it matters very much," he said.

"I doubt whether they'll be here more than two days."

They heard the scream of a whistle signalling that the lights should be turned out. In their fouled bed, Andre and Jacob heard it too.

"It's very dark," said Andre, as the glow of the blue bulb was extinguished.

"Don't worry," said Jacob, close in his arms.

"I'm not frightened of the dark."

Through her binoculars Charlotte watched the morning roll call. Now that the children she had seen arrive the day before were standing still in rows, she had a chance to scan their faces.

Towards the back she could see two small boys she thought she recognised. The distance was too great for her to be certain, but there was something about the way the elder one's hair stood on end, something, too, about the pliant attitude of the smaller one, his hand lightly resting on his brother's forearm. She did not know what she could do to help them. Perhaps she could send some words of encouragement. What she wanted to do was take them in her arms and kiss them as a mother might. She no longer had enough money left to bribe the gendarme; the only thing she could think to do was to walk along the outside of the camp to where she had seen the second, smaller entry, and try to persuade someone to bring the boys over to her.

Later in the morning, she walked up the street to the north-east corner of the camp. A gendarme was standing guard over the entrance; it was not promising. Throughout the day. Charlotte watched the narrow gateway in the hope that it would for a moment be unguarded.

All that happened was that, in the afternoon, a second gendarme came and smoked a cigarette with the first before taking over his position. Charlotte looked up to the long lines of blue-painted windows in the eastern side of the building. If one should open just a crack she might be able to shout up a message.

The afternoon turned to early darkness. Charlotte felt hungry, and stupefied by the anxious tedium of her wait. It was no good. She had done what she first came to do: she had enabled Levade to die in peace of mind. The comforting of Andre and Jacob was a secondary consideration, and the truth was that a brief meeting with her would make very little difference. What they wanted was their mother, and nothing Charlotte could do would affect whether or not that joy would ever come to them again.

With the greatest reluctance, she would have to leave them. All her maternal feelings cried out against it; she hated the thought that she of all people should be abandoning the boys. It troubled her that she had been unable to finish her selfimposed task, but she saw that there was nothing more that she could do for them. After one more night in the cafe she would return to Paris.

The evening before a transport was the time Hartmann feared. An atmosphere of nervous dread seeped through the bare concrete and straw mattresses of Drancy. These people, driven and starved, were made to contemplate a new uncertainty: while few of them believed the foul gossip of gas and crematoria, none of them could look with equanimity on their departure.

Word came to Hartmann in his room that an extra wagon had been added to the train. In view of the poor condition of the new arrivals, it was suggested by the French police authorities that the wagon should be filled with children. The Jewish committee had protested that many of the children were French nationals, and that there were Poles and Rumanians to spare, but in the random logic of the concentration camp the children were selected.

The specificity of the typed lists, with their details of family names and dates of birth, concealed the haphazard nature of the selection, but once the carbon copies rolled off the platen the list was unalterable.

Hartmann went up the stone treads of his staircase with aching steps. Going into the room at all was hard enough, with its faecal stench and background of permanent wailing. He would have to tell them that they were going to rejoin their parents; such a lie was not only forgivable, it was obligatory if they were to get through the next few hours.

He carried a sheet of paper in his hand.

Andre looked up from his bed. He was pleased to see the man who looked like his father. This was what they needed someone from the old days, someone from before the world went wrong, a man with a handsome face and deep voice who would take them back to their house and let their lives start up again.

"Very early in the morning you'll be leaving. You're going on a train." Hartmann did not get far before children began to jabber and shout.

"Pitchipoi'!" an older one called out in excitement. Some of the others were encouraged by the childish word and began a chant. The younger ones looked bewildered.

Hartmann's own expression was unconvincing.

"You are advised to make sure your bags are labelled clearly. I will ask some grownups to come and help you. You can take a blanket and any little bits of food you may have." He looked down at the piece of paper.

"Any larger items of baggage will be transported separately."

"Where are we going?"

"The train goes to Poland."

"Will we see our parents again?"

"I ... think so. I can't promise, but I think you probably will." Yes! "Jacob squeezed Andre hard in his delight.

Hartmann managed a smile.

"I must warn you that the journey is long and uncomfortable. You must be brave. All of you must be brave."

Andre noticed that the kind man's voice had gone peculiar. He was starting to cough.

"Later in the evening, you will move to the departure staircase in the corner of the courtyard near the main gate. Please make sure all your bags are packed and labelled. I'll be back later."

Hartmann left quickly, ignoring the volley of questions that followed him. Andre at once pulled out Madame Cariteau's suitcase and began to arrange his possessions inside it. He took the sweater Jacob was wearing and folded it carefully on top of the book about the crocodile. There was nothing else to put in; all their possessions were already safely stowed. Andre closed the lid of the case to make sure everything fitted.

Then he clicked the brass locks open and straightened the contents all over again.

An hour or so later, two gendarmes came into the room and ordered the children downstairs. Those who did not understand or who were too numbed to obey were prodded out by truncheons. Andre pulled Jacob by the wrist and hurried into the safety of the mass that was descending.

Outside, it was still daylight, and Andre saw a line of people of all ages waiting to be shaved by the camp barbers. Half a dozen of them attacked the women's hair with long scissors, then ran clippers over their shorn scalps; the men's faces and heads they shaved with razors.

Then it was the children's turn. Andre shuffled up along the queue, frightened of what his mother would say if she saw him with a shaved head. He remembered the feeling of her hand as she stroked his skull, allowing the soft, dark hair to trickle out over the webbing of her fingers.

Would she recognise him shorn?

The wind coming in through the open end of the camp lifted tufts of fallen hair, mixed with the cinders of the courtyard, and carried them high on to the inner roof and even up to the windows of the rooms, where they made small drifts of grey and black and blonde and brown.

When they were back in their room, some women came with paper luggage labels and some pencils. Andre, shaven-headed, wrote his name with lip-scouring care, but had to ask the help of one of the women to tie the label on. Then they were ready.

After the cabbage soup, towards nine o'clock, Hartmann came back into the room, accompanied by two Jewish orderlies.

He stood in the doorway and swallowed hard.

"All right," he said.

"It's time to go."

There was no movement in the room. The children were suddenly reluctant. Hartmann spoke very gently into the silence.

"We have no choice in this. We must go quietly. I cannot promise you that you will find your parents at the end of the journey, but I think there's a chance. There is hope. Make your parents proud of you now. Be brave and be hopeful. One of the elder children, a boy of about fourteen, stood up and turned to face the younger ones.

"We must trust Monsieur Hartmann.

Let's go."

Many of the children did not speak French, but something of the boy's manner convinced them, as though the adult world had been mediated to them by one of their own. Slowly, the fetid bunks emptied and the children trailed their bags out on to the concrete landing.

Down in the freezing courtyard, the orderlies led them to the search barracks. Inside were long trestle tables manned by gendarmes under the supervision of two officers of the Inquiry and Control Section, formerly the Police for Jewish Affairs. Andre and Jacob shuffled up in the queue until they came to the table. A gendarme took the case from Andre and opened it on the table. He took out the adjustable spanner and threw it over his shoulder. He picked up the book and laughed.

"Won't be needing that where you're going."

This was a phrase they heard repeated along the line of tables as the book fluttered like a broken-winged bird into the corner of the barracks. When the case was returned to Andre it contained only Jacob's sweater, a shirt and a dirty pair of shorts. Then the gendarmes searched their bodies, smacking their bony ribs and running their hands up inside their thighs.

"Got some money sewn in there, have you?" said the man, feeling the fabric of Jacob's shirt.

"God, you smell horrible."

The gendarme next to Jacob tore the earrings from a little dark-haired girl.

"Won't be needing jewellery where you're going!"

"All right, then, get out of it, move along. Go on."

At the door of the barracks a gendarme marked their backs with a chalk cross.

"Wait here."

Jacob had started to weep. He put his hand in Andre's, which already held a lone tin soldier he had managed to smuggle through.

From a carbon copy of the irreversible list their names were read in alphabetical order, and they were marched off to the south-east corner of the camp, next to the main gate. This section had been separated from the rest of the courtyard by rolls of barbed wire strung between hastily erected wooden posts. At the foot of Staircase Two stood a gendarme and a Jewish orderly, who ticked their names off another copy of the list as they went through the door. On the first floor, they were shown into an empty room. There were no beds, no mattresses, no tables; beneath the single light bulb and between the unplastered concrete walls there was only a scattering of straw and two empty buckets. There were more than a hundred children in the room, and the contents of the bucket rapidly overflowed and trickled down the steps.

Andre turned his head against the wall. He could read the names and messages written there by others on the eve of their departure.

"Leon Reich'.

"Last convoy. We will be back." And next to his head: "Natalie Stem. Still in good heart."

He broke down and fell to the floor.

Through a window on the other side of the courtyard, Hartmann and Levi were able to watch the people entering the departure staircase in the path of the searchlight fixed on the corner of the courtyard.

Levi said, "In the war, did you ever take part in an attack?"

"Once."

"Do you remember the night before?"

The two men looked at each other.

Hartmann said, "When time collapses."

Levi nodded.

"I wish I had faith."

"You're here because of your faith."

"My father's faith."

Neither spoke for a long time as they watched the last of the deportees going in. He was a man of about their age and they could hear his violent protestations.

"I'm a Frenchman! I was decorated at Verdun! You cannot do this to me!"

"You're a filthy Jew like all the others."

The door to the staircase was closed.

Hartmann looked at his watch.

"About five hours to go."

From the deportation staircase they could hear the beginnings of the Marseillaise, followed by a boy scout song, "It's only a short goodbye." Hartmann said, "You believe me now, don't you?"

"About the destination?"

"Yes."

"All logic is against it."

"But you feel it, don't you?"

"I'm a German. I'm a reasonable man." Levi stared into the darkness where the gendarme had turned off the searchlight.

"I cannot permit myself such beliefs."

Andre was lying on the floor when a Jewish orderly came with postcards on which the deportees might write a final message. He advised them to leave them at the station or throw them from the train as camp orders forbade access to the post. Two or three pencils that had survived the barracks search were passed round among the people in the room. Some wrote with sobbing passion, some with punctilious care, as though their safety, or at least the way in which they were remembered, depended upon their choice of words.

A woman came with a sandwich for each child to take on the journey. She also had a pail of water, round which they clustered, holding out sardine cans they passed from one to another. One of the older boys embraced her in his gratitude, but the bucket was soon empty.

When she was gone, there were only the small hours of the night to go through. Andre was lying on the straw, the soft bloom of his cheek laid, uncaring, in the dung. Jacob's limbs were intertwined with his for warmth.

The adults in the room sat slumped against the walls, wakeful and talking in lowered voices. Somehow, the children were spared the last hours of the wait by their ability to fall asleep where they lay, to dream of other places. It was still the low part of the night when Hartmann and the head of another staircase came into the room with coffee. Many of the adults refused to drink because they knew it meant breakfast, and therefore the departure. The children were at the deepest moments of their sleep.

Those who drank from the half dozen cups that circulated drank in silence. Then there went through the room a sudden ripple, a quickening of muscle and nerve as a sound came to them from below: it was the noise of an engine a familiar sound to many of them, the homely thudding of a Parisian bus.

At once the gendarmes were in the room, moving quickly and violently, as though anxious to have them gone. Cowering, the adults clasped their cases and bundles and stumbled down the dark stairs out into the courtyard, where the sudden heat of searchlights flared up from the guard posts.

Five white-and-green municipal buses had come in through the main entrance, and now stood trembling in the wired-off corner of the yard. At a long table in front of the Red Castle, the commandant of the camp himself sat with a list of names that another policeman was calling out in alphabetical order. In the place where its suburban destination was normally signalled, each bus carried the number of a wagon on the eastbound train. Many of the children were too deeply asleep to be roused, and those who were awake refused to come down when the gendarmes were sent up to fetch them. In the filthy straw they dug in their heels and screamed. They clung to walls and floors and bits of plumbing; they held on to one another and gripped the cold steps as they were dragged out beneath the thrashing truncheons. For every sound of wood cracking on bone they screamed more loudly in their frenzy not to leave. The gendarmes staggered down with their arms full of children, blood on their truncheons, out into the sweeping light. Some of them were sobbing as they hurled their living bundles on to the ground and turned back into the building. In the glare of the hurricane lamps at his table, the police commandant's face was drawn with impatient anguish.

Andre heard his name and moved with Jacob towards the bus. From the other side of the courtyard, from windows open on the dawn, a shower of food was thrown towards them by women wailing and calling out their names, though none of the scraps reached as far as the enclosure.

Andre looked up, and in a chance angle of light he saw a woman's face in which the eyes were fixed with terrible ferocity on a child beside him. Why did she stare as though she hated him? Then it came to Andre that she was not looking in hatred, but had kept her eyes so intensely open in order to fix the picture of her child in her mind.

She was looking to remember, for ever.

He held on hard to Jacob as they mounted the platform of the bus. Some of the children were too small to manage the step up and had to be helped on by gendarmes, or pulled in by grownups already on board.

Andre's bus was given the signal to depart, but was delayed. A baby of a few weeks was being lifted on to the back, and the gendarme needed time to work the wooden crib over the passenger rail and into the crammed interior. Eventually, the bus roared as the driver engaged the gear and bumped slowly out through the entrance, the headlights for a moment lighting up the cafe opposite before the driver turned the wheel and headed for the station.

When the last bus had gone, it was daylight and the cleaners went into the departure staircase, wearing clogs with high soles.

There were people going early to work or taking their dogs to the park on the straight road to the station. They looked curiously on the small convoy of buses that rumbled past, down the broad, empty street. They saw faces pressed against glass and, where the destination should have been, a number.

At Le Bourget-Drancy station there were German soldiers as well as gendarmes.

In the milling turbulence of the platform, Andre Duguay held on hard to his brother and the suitcase which for once he had remembered.

The soldiers prodded the throng down to a siding, where there was a line of boxcars normally used for the transportation of horses. With a screaming of German words, they pushed and herded the sullen mass towards the doors.

Commuters on the main platform looked on, while the gendarmes, who had relinquished their charges to the German soldiers, shuffled from foot to foot and looked away from the local travellers' puzzled gaze.

Jacob could not manage the height of the boxcar and had to be lifted by an adult. The inside of the wagon was crammed with standing people of all ages. There were two buckets, one of which held water and a cup.

As Andre clambered up, a German soldier took his case and threw it down the platform, where it joined a pile of bags and bundles that the soldiers told them they would not be needing. A woman in the wagon who spoke German translated to the others.

Andre and Jacob stood among the taller people, their vision blocked by coats and legs and bulky adult hips. Then a German soldier heaved the sliding door along its runners and bolted it.

It was by now a bright morning, and Andre could still see a little patch of cloud through an opening in the wagon. Then, from outside, came the noise of hammering, and the last glimpse of French sky was suddenly obliterated.

"What was all that noise in the night?" said Charlotte to the proprietress as she settled her bill.

"The buses. Another load of them." The woman counted the notes carefully on the zinc-topped bar and slid them into the cash till.

"I see. Where do they take them?"

"To the station."

Charlotte squared her shoulders and breathed in deeply as she stepped out into the winter morning. She walked a short distance to a large crossroads, where she saw people waiting for a bus. A few minutes later they were on their way, the big engine throbbing, the destination clearly marked.

Charlotte had slept late, and it was almost eleven o'clock by the time the bus crossed the railway bridge and deposited the passengers at the top of the slope down to the station. The next train into Paris was not for half an hour, and she had time to telephone "Felix' on the number she had memorised.

She had no idea what sort of street the rue Villaret de Joyeuse was, though, being in the seventeenth arrondissement, on the western outskirts, it was likely to be filled with large semi-suburban apartment blocks rather than small cafes and cobbled yards. Felix agreed to be there at four in the afternoon to meet her, and Charlotte strolled out through the booking hall and on to the platform. As she walked up and down, she glanced over to a siding, where she noticed a large number of apparently abandoned suitcases and bundles.

After checking to see if anyone was watching her, she walked over to inspect them.

The contents of the bags had spilled on to the platform. They were mostly old clothes, filthy or torn, odd shoes and the occasional child's toy. Charlotte wondered if they had been rejected by their owners on some hygienic grounds: perhaps this was a rubbish dump waiting to be cleared. Then her eye was caught by something white that stuck out from under a grey woollen jacket. It was a bundle of unposted letters and cards. Making sure once more that no one was watching her. Charlotte stooped down on the platform and picked them up.

Some were composed and thoughtful. Some were mere scribbles: "My dear parents, they're taking us to work in Germany. I hope I will see you again soon'; " To whoever finds this card. Please, please post it to the right address, to my old Mayor who can save me."

Others seemed heavy with knowledge.

"We are being taken to the east.

I embrace you, dear parents, with all my heart. Goodbye for ever." Charlotte put the little bundle in her pocket and stood up. Towards the end of the pile was a small suitcase with brass locks, canted over to one side, its mouth gaping. Inside was a soiled pair of boy's shorts.

Between the locks, on the front, a leather label that was glued to the case bore the word 'Cariteau'.

On the train. Charlotte found a compartment to herself, in which she looked at the letters. She did not like to read their contents too closely, but there was one she returned to twice, despite herself.

It was written in a sloping, educated hand, in blotted pale blue ink, with no crossings-out or corrections. It was the letter of a man to his daughter. The handwriting suggested someone in middle age, and the girl must have been in her late teens or older, to judge from the tone her father had chosen.

"My dearest little Gisele, They allowed us some post last week and I was delighted to receive your card and to know that you and Maman are in good health. I too am extremely well and in excellent spirits. Alas, I am to be deported in the morning by train to a destination as yet unknown. I am going with plenty of old friends from Paris and I am very much hoping that I'll find Charles and Leonore at the other end.

Please look after yourself, my little squirrel. That is the best thing you can do for me today and every day. Don't worry about me, think only of yourself: eat well as well as you can! - keep your clothes clean, make yourself pretty and work hard for Maman and for yourself.

The sweetest joy of my life was buying little things for you when you were younger. How I loved your solemn face, the way, when you were tired, your laughter hovered on the brink of tears; above all, the way you loved me as only a little girl can, with no resentment or fear of me and such trust.

I will return in good health, quite soon, I think. Even if this letter does not reach you the orderly was unsure of the facilities for posting I hope my previous letter has got there. Please keep the photograph of me as a souvenir until such time as you see me again.

Look after yourself, my darling little girl. I am not lost; I will return. I embrace you with all my heart.

Charlotte put down the letter.

"No resentment or fear of me." Were fear and resentment the normal emotions between a daughter and her father? "Such trust..." She was touched by the unknown man's tenderness. She had not imagined fathers to feel such vulnerability or to rely on their daughters for comfort.

From the Metro station Argentine, Charlotte emerged into the wide spaces of the Avenue de la Grande Armee. It was only a few steps to a triangle of street-ends, from which the rue Villaret de Joyeuse led gently downhill.

The door of the building was open, and Charlotte proceeded cautiously over the scarlet carpet of the hall. In front of her was a lift, with broad stone stairs to the left. She needed only to climb half a flight to reach a glass door with the name of a company printed in black. She pressed the lower bell, as instructed, and a few seconds later the door was opened by a plump, fair-haired man with a brightly coloured cravat.

He ushered her across a gloomy vestibule and through the front door of a dark apartment with low ceilings. He showed her to a hard, upholstered chair in the sitting room, then went down the corridor and returned with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.

"Chin-chin, Daniele." He sounded English.

"Yes ... Chin-chin."

A white Persian cat slunk into the room and rubbed itself against Felix's legs.

"So. How did you manage to get up here?"

"Trains. Buses. I've done a lot of travelling. Are you English?"

"Yes, but my dear Mama was French. I have a little shop in the Place des Ternes. It's a perfect front."

"And can you help with transport?"

"Stop it, Marat! He's scratched all the furniture and it's not my flat. As a matter of fact, you're in luck. On Wednesday night, weather permitting, a Lysander is leaving from a field near Rouen.

I've been in touch and they've got room for a small one."

"How will I get there?"

"I can arrange everything. You look awfully tired."

"Tired? Do I?"

"Yes. A lot of people who pass through here look the same way. They've been active for several weeks and I think they've got used to being short of sleep. I notice these things, though."

Charlotte thought guiltily of her late start that morning, and how she had missed the departure of the buses from Drancy. Yet Felix was right. Now that she sat in this domestic room, each spare surface of which was covered with small ornaments, she felt an ache in her arms and back, while her legs felt almost boneless with fatigue.

Felix stood up and pushed the cat away.

"I expect you'd like a rest.

Then this evening I'll find you some nice dinner. You're hungry, I expect, aren't you?"

Charlotte nodded. Speech seemed suddenly beyond her. Felix led her down a dark corridor, and opened a door on the left. It was a large shadowy room with a huge oak desk, a narrow window hung with net curtains and a low bed with a tasselled cover.

"Will you please take care of these?" she said, handing him the bundle of letters and cards from the train.

"Perhaps you could post them."

"I'll call you later," said Felix, as he shut the door, the letters in his hand. Charlotte lay down and closed her eyes.

Andre Duguay was standing in the darkness. Three hours in the truck, and still the train had not moved. Some people were still talking; an old woman was moaning her prayers.

The wheels ground suddenly on the track, and they were thrown against one another. The full pail of water had been drunk, and the empty one was already full of waste, which slopped beneath their feet as the train jerked forward. Jacob had slumped to the wooden plank floor, through whose narrow gaps he could see slivers of French ground.

The hours would not pass. High up there was a small slit in the wall of the boxcar. A tall man stood by it and told them what he could see.

"Epemay," he said, when the train had pulled into a station, and another man began to weep, as though with longing for the lost associations of the name. Although it was winter outside, the air was rank. When it grew dark the train stood motionless for many hours. The slit man said there was no light. They seemed lost in a night without direction.

Andre had fallen against other children. They leaned on one another, half sleeping, with no room to lie down. A man near him was thrusting himself at a woman. She had lifted her skirt and moaned when he pushed.

The old woman was still muttering in Hebrew; sometimes she sang with a wailing voice that sounded to Andre very foreign, from a strange, far-off land. I will see Maman, thought Andre; when I get there, I will see Maman.

"Metz," said the slit man. Each time the train stopped, there was a beat of hope. A destination, any place on earth, was better than being lost in the bottomless night. The doors were thrown back and they saw a snowy countryside. A German soldier was shouting at them and a woman translated.

"If anyone tries to escape he will be shot. If anyone has died, throw out the body."

They begged him for water. Even a handful of snow.

The old woman was almost mad. The doors were closed again. The stretched hours would not amount to days; there was no sense of time passing, though by now it was the second night. Someone had died in their wagon, and the others were edging away from the body.

Andre held Jacob in his arms.

There was another stop. The slit man said they were at a station with a German name.

"There are ordinary people. It's morning. They're going to work. They're staring at our train."

They moved on again into another day. Andre held tight to hope. His life had been ordered properly: bad things did not happen. If he could believe strongly enough in the normal world that he inhabited, it would return.

The stench of the boxcar was making him feel sick. He had almost forgotten the darkness. They went through fatigue and its boundaries so many times that they were beyond exhaustion.

It was deep night. The train stopped.

The slit man said, "There's no town, only fields. This is it. We're there." There was elation: at last they had arrived. Then some smoke came through the slit, a pungent smoke.

"There's a long platform. Hundreds of people. German soldiers. There are dogs. It's very bright, there are searchlights. There are people in striped uniforms. They must be the workers. They're unpacking the wagons. Hey!" In German, the slit man called out, "What happens here?"

"What do they say, what do they say?"

A sweep of light came through the narrow grille as the slit man turned back into the packed wagon.

"One went like this." He ran his index finger like a knife across his throat.

"And one went like this." He made a twisting gesture with his fingers that, to Andre, conjured rising smoke.

With a scream of metal runners, the doors were pulled back and the wagon was filled with light.

"Raus, 'Raus, alles 'raus There were men shouting. There were dogs howling. Andre held Jacob as they stumbled forward. Two dead men were on the step. Someone helped the boys down.

"Say you're older than you are."

"Say you're younger than you are."

A huge dog was tearing at its chain. It was the closest thing Andre could see to a world he had lost. He forgot his parents' firm instructions and made to stroke it. He was pushed away by a man in stripes. His wooden clogs went clacking up and down the ramp. The striped men were hunched and hurrying; they would not look at you. Their faces were tight on their bones.

Andre saw a tall woman with fair hair. She was like his mother: he would follow her.

"Come on, Jacob."

Up ahead, from a remote, high building, they saw flames pouring into the black sky, and there was this burning, melting smell. Was it the rails, hot beneath the iron wheels? It seemed too rich.

Shuffling up the platform, Andre made his effort of belief. From his memories of being alive, from the trust of normality and in his parents' world, he tried to dredge up faith. That certainty was invincible; no hell could overcome it. He would see his mother.

The people were dividing. The fair-haired woman was pushed one way, and Andre saw her child steered into another line. The woman screamed at the man in uniform. He merely shrugged and pushed her, too, into the line of children. Andre was pleased. He would be with her.

The dogs were leaping at him, but he held Jacob hard. They were coming to a tall man who stood on the platform with a stick, like a man doing music. He moved his baton gently, inclined his head, gazing with wise eyes on those in front of him, directing them this way or that. He was like the doctor in Drancy, who tapped the children's chests and made them better with his touch. Andre had trust in the man; but when their time came he barely glanced at the Duguay boys.

Now they were in a line of children and old people. They were climbing into lorries.

Andre was at the back. They went past a long ditch in which ragged flames were rising. From a tipped lorry, what looked to Andre like giant dolls with broken limbs were being poured into the trench.

They stopped at two whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs. The lorry's headlights showed up pretty fruit trees.

Now they were naked. It was very cold in this room. Jacob took Andre's hand and found that there was already something in it a tin soldier.

Andre kissed Jacob's shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips.

There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared.

>From the car which took her from the airfield into London, Charlotte noticed signs of early spring among the hedgerows. It was noticeably warmer than in Lavaurette or Paris; there were buds and scents the Highlands would not see for weeks. She thought of the house where she had spent her childhood, of the bursting pink and white blossom on the chestnut trees, the daisy-covered lawn on which she walked out one May morning and saw inlaid with a fantastic marquetry of violets. The house outside Edinburgh, where her parents now lived, held no interest for her by comparison: it was a solid building, ample and spacious, but neither its view over the hills nor its square, chilly rooms were inviting to her.

Yet it was to this house that she found her thoughts turning as the black Wolseley entered the London suburbs. She must not only contact her parents, she must go to see them as soon as she was free. Such a visit seemed less of a duty than usual; she found that she was anxious to see them again and to reassure them.

The fany driving the car asked if she wanted to be dropped anywhere, or if she should go straight to G Section headquarters. Charlotte thought of her narrow room in Daisy's flat and wondered who was living there now.

Presumably G Section would help find her somewhere for the time being.

"Straight to the office, please," she said. She was the only passenger in the car, and was enjoying the comfort of it. There had been four of them in the Lysander, which was one more than the usual load. One man had been on the floor, one on the shelf, and Charlotte had shared the seat with a third man, who politely arched himself away from physical contact with her.

Charlotte felt she should be similarly delicate, with the result that her hip developed periodic spasms of cramp.

The fat leather bench-seat of the Wolseley felt luxurious, and she sat back to watch the big buildings of Whitehall as the car waited for a group of men with briefcases to hurry across the street. There was hardly any traffic as they moved smoothly up towards Trafalgar Square.

Charlotte thought of the gaping suitcase on the platform at Le Bourget Drancy. cariteau. The single word had removed all doubt. Until then, she had felt that the camp at Drancy was perhaps not as bad as people feared.

Levade had died from illness, from whatever problem his chest had developed at the Domaine, and the camp had not affected the outcome of his disease.

And Andre and Jacob, they were refugees, like hundreds of thousands in Europe; it was a hard fate for children, but they would survive being moved around, as others had survived. Then the cases and bundles, contemptuously hurled down the platform, had in an instant crushed that easy hope Cariteau: the simple name from an old village, cast aside.

It occurred to Charlotte that she was too tired to register exactly what she felt about the death of Levade and the deportation of the boys. She suspected, as she sometimes had when tormenting herself with thoughts that Peter Gregory was dead, that her emotions could not encompass the complexity of feeling that the circumstances seemed to demand. It was beyond her; the pressure of sadness would eventually find its own expression. Meanwhile, there were times when you merely had to go to your next appointment, go through the day and hope for sleep at the end of it.

The car pulled up some way from the flat in Marylebone, and the fany asked Charlotte if she could remember the way.

"It's just a final precaution. You know Mr. Jackson." The woman smiled.

"Thank you. I can manage from here."

The door was opened by the butlerish figure Charlotte remembered from the day of her departure, and she felt drab in Dominique's clothes beneath his appraising eye. He gave no sign of recognition as he showed her to an empty bedroom in which to wait. Charlotte sat on the bed with her case on her knees. She did not feel anxious about what Mr. Jackson might think other extended stay; or, at least, she felt she had the answer to any reprimand, because she was happy to resign from G Section at once.

"This way, Miss.."

She followed the butler to the door of Mr. Jackson's office, where he knocked disc reedy "Ah, Daniele. Thank you. Philips, you can leave us now." Jackson stood up and came round the desk, his froggy face split open by a huge smile. Charlotte held out her hand, but to her surprise he kissed her on the cheek.

"Welcome home, Daniele, welcome home. You poor thing, you've had a rough time, haven't you?"

"No, I ... I think it went quite well, really. I was able to do what I went there to do."

"Absolutely. Transmissions from Ussel have been with us loud and clear since August. You seem to have inspired the local operator."

Charlotte smiled as she thought of Antoinette with the wireless aerial draped round the furniture of her bedroom.

"I saw Yves a month or so ago on a return visit. He spoke very well of you. Said your French was absolutely tiptop."

"That's very kind of him, though I'm not quite sure he'd be the best judge of that."

"Quite, quite. Anyway, Violinist has been performing well. We managed to get a lot of stores in, thanks to you and your Frenchman."

"Are you still doing drops there?"

"Not there, no. It's too dangerous. Since Mirabel, alas, disappeared. But there's another drop zone not far away. What they're doing now is helping train the troops. They're getting a lot of volunteers, thanks to the Germans."

"What do you mean?"

"Haven't you heard of the Statutory Work Order? Ah, well. Monsieur Laval has been our best recruiting sergeant. He's decreed that all young men have to go and work in Germany for a time, a sort of national service.

He's achieved what General de Gaulle and even we have so far not quite managed, which is to drive large numbers of young men into the Resistance." Mr. Jackson paused and coughed.

"Of course, the fact that the Allies are now manifestly winning the war may have been a further incentive."

"That's good news."

"It's very good. Now, tell me, Daniele, what was going on in Paris? I'm glad you were able to make contact with Felix, he's an excellent chap. But, to be frank, we had rather expected to pick you up from somewhere near Limoges. A long time ago. Last summer, to be precise."

"It was important that I stay." Various fabricated and implausible stories suggested themselves to Charlotte, but in the end she thought she might as well tell the truth. All Jackson could do was dismiss her from the service, and, now that she had been to France, she had no desire to stay in it. Her encounter with Mirabel had not shaken her conviction about the morality of the war, but it had lessened her loyalty to G Section. It had also frightened her; and, for fear of incriminating herself or others, she thought it best to say nothing of it to Mr. Jackson. Meanwhile she did her best to explain to him about her feeling for the country and her conviction that it had been necessary for her to remain there. The wireless operator had, after all, been able to reassure them that she was safe and useful. Both Mirabel and Octave had said they needed more people. As for being in Paris, she told Jackson about the night they took Levade from the Domaine; she talked of her sense of responsibility to him and to the Duguay boys. And if Julien was a key part of the G Section network, whether he admitted it or not, then she was presumably entitled to pursue his interests.

Jackson gave a little laugh.

"I'm quite used to our people popping up in the most unexpected places, don't worry about that. They have carte blanche to travel where they like. But those are agents, and not, if I may say so, couriers. I had heard from Mirabel that you were still there and I was happy for you to stay on for a time, but you must understand that a woman is more at risk than a man. The other thing, which I'm sure you know, is that every time you travel and use people and addresses, the more you expose them to danger.

It's really a matter to borrow an expression of "Is your journey really necessary?"

"I do understand," said Charlotte.

"It seemed necessary to me, that's all I can say. And perhaps you haven't had first-hand accounts of these camps and trains before."

"No, indeed. That could be useful. It's not really my pigeon, but I certainly know who would be interested."

"Anyway," said Charlotte, 'if you'd like me to resign, I quite understand."

"Good God, no! My dear Daniele, you're a first-class asset. I wouldn't dream of letting you go. There are one or two people in this organisation who doubt your utter dependability. I think I recall hearing the phrase “loose cannon" used by one of them. We may find you a slightly more ... domestic role at first. But as far as I'm concerned you'll jolly well stay with G Section until the hostilities are satisfactorily concluded."

"I don't know. I think I've really done all I can do, and ' " Excuse me, Daniele. Will you please stop talking such utter rot? I presume this is just a way of teasing me into buying you lunch. Very well. If you'd like to go to the bedroom at the end of the corridor, I'll get Valerie to bring your old clothes back. You can smarten up a bit and we'll pop out in half an hour. How does that suit you?"

"It sounds fine. There's just one thing." From her handbag Charlotte took out an empty bottle of hair dye and placed it on Jackson's desk.

"I was fortunate enough to be given this."

"Fortunate?" said Jackson.

"It was only your decision to stay on that made it necessary. Surely Valerie had already organised everything here."

"Not quite everything."

"Why are you smiling, Daniele?"

"I don't think she foresaw the possibility of my taking a bath in a public bath house."

"I'm not with you."

"Certain ... inconsistencies of colouring."

"What do you oh my God, I see what you mean. Yes, yes, indeed." Jackson stammered for a moment, then regained his composure.

"Well, I think you've certainly caught us with our trousers down, if you'll forgive the expression."

"Gladly."

"I'll make a note about the dye for future use. Now. Lunch. Do you like fish?"

"Yes, I still like fish."

It seemed that what Jackson had in mind was a job training agents. Charlotte would help with their language and pass on various tips and information from her own experience. He mentioned one of the holding schools in Suffolk. There would have to be a full-scale debriefing in London first, and in the meantime he could offer a bed in one of the fany hostels.

Charlotte felt oddly ill at ease in her old clothes. The skirt was loose, and the stockings, after months of Dominique felt draughty when she walked. After lunch she sat on Jackson's desk, swinging her legs back and forth, and making telephone calls. It was a delight to speak English.

Her mother wanted her to come to Scotland at once, but Charlotte said there were things she had to attend to in London. Roderick, her mother told her, was in Tunisia and doing well when they had last heard. Then Charlotte telephoned Daisy at the Red Cross. Daisy let out a long theatrical scream of delight, and, when she had regained coherence, arranged to meet that evening.

Finally she telephoned Squadron Leader Allan Wetherby.

She did not really expect to be able to talk to him, but after various delays and protective enquiries she heard the man himself say, "Wetherby."

"You very kindly wrote to me a few months ago about a friend of mine, Peter Gregory. I'm sure this is most irregular, but I just wondered if you had had any news."

Charlotte found that the combination of trying not to sound too eager and of speaking English for the first time for six months made her sound, in her own ears, almost regal.

Wetherby appeared unimpressed.

"It's just that since you wrote to me, I thought you wouldn't mind having an unofficial word," said Charlotte.

Wetherby coughed.

"I tell you what, Miss. Gray. I have heard reports-and I must stress that these are very, very unofficial reports of one of our chaps making touch with various local people, who belong to ... to a different organisation. With whom we're cooperating."

"These unofficial reports, they're just rumours, are they?"

"No, they're better than that. The dates and the places just about tally. Except..."

"Except what?"

"Except I don't know how he ended up in Marseille."

Charlotte thought of Gregory's French.

"He could have ended up anywhere."

"I suppose so. At any rate, someone's trying hard to make his way back. Whether it's Gregory or not I can't say for sure."

"How can I find out more?"

"I don't know if you can. Unless you try your luck with ... the other organisation."

"All right. Thank you."

The trouble was, she did not trust herself to ask Jackson if he knew anything without giving away her interest. By the time he knocked before re-entering his own office, she had been through, and abandoned, various ruses concerning the brother of a friend, the fiance of a neighbour and so on. She would have to think of a better lie.

Meanwhile, Gregory was on his way. No, that was a foolish thing to think; she would not allow herself to believe it. But the more she struggled to suppress her springing hope, the more it animated her.

"My God, Charlotte, what happened to your hair?"

"Oh, I just felt like a change of colour."

Daisy let Charlotte out of her fierce, welcoming grip.

"Come in, come in. I've arranged a bit of a party later on. Let's have a look at you."

Charlotte went into the sitting room, where Daisy stood back and inspected her.

"I think you've lost weight. Apart from that, you look gorgeous. Why didn't you write, though? We were worried sick."

"I couldn't really write. It was all ' " All very hush-hush, I know. You can't have your old room back, I'm afraid. We've got a new girl.

Alison."

"What's she like?"

"Delightful. You'll meet her later on. Little bit of a prude, but otherwise terrific fun. Which reminds me, have you heard anything?

About ... "

"Peter? Not exactly. But I spoke to the squadron leader this afternoon and he sounded quite hopeful. Apparently there's someone stumbling around there, trying to get back. They just don't know if it's him."

"It must be awful not knowing."

"I'd rather not know than know the " worst."

"Of course." Daisy looked a little doubtful.

"Sally's got a new boyfriend. They're engaged. She's absolutely dotty about him."

"What happened to Terence?"

"She found out he was being unfaithful to her."

"What, with his wife?"

"No, with another woman."

"Oh dear. Poor Sally. You wouldn't think, looking at Terence, that ' " She's well out of it if you ask me. This new chap's a bit of a stuffed shirt, but at least he's single. You can sleep on the sofa, by the way, if you haven't got anywhere else."

"It's all right, thanks. They've found me a room in a funny little block in Riding House Street."

"You can always come back. Charlotte. When Sally leaves. Listen. I think that's Michael."

Daisy went to the window and looked down into the narrow street where Michael Waterslow was hooting the horn of his car.

"Yes, come on, let's go down. Lazy so-and-so. He never comes up." Michael drove them to a pub in Maida Vale, a huge building with engraved Victorian glass and a gleaming mahogany bar. To Michael's disappointment there was a blackboard outside with a mournful drawing of a long-nosed character, new to Charlotte, and the words, "Wot, no beer."

"We'll just have to drink gin instead," said Michael.

As the evening progressed, they were joined first by Ralph, at whose flat in the Fulham Road Charlotte had met Gregory for the second time, then by his drunk friend. Miles.

Michael, with his neatly pressed suit and punctilious manner, was a generous host and kept a steady tide of drinks coming to the table. At one point he turned to Charlotte and said, "Don't worry about Greg. I know it's a long time, but he'll be back. He's got the luck of the devil. That's the whole point about Greg." Charlotte nodded and smiled. Gregory seemed more real to her since she had been with people who knew him even people as marginal as these now seemed to her. It was no longer her willpower alone that was keeping him alive. The party swelled in numbers as the evening went on. There were people Charlotte recognised from the Melrose literary party and others she had never seen before. Primed by Daisy and Michael, they all bought drinks and toasted her safe return. In the smoky racket of the pub. Charlotte became aware that she had drunk too much. She went outside for a moment into the night and walked up and down, breathing in the cold air. She thought for a moment of Julien, hiding out on some freezing hillside. She thought of Levade, and of the gaping suitcase. Then she went back into the noisy warmth and accepted the full glass that was pressed into her hand.

The next day, in a bare room in Whitehall, while she sat describing her French experiences to three men behind a table, she found that parts of the night before came back to her, bit by bit, unexpectedly.

There had been another pub, in St. John's Wood, and then a group visit to an ABC cafe. Then there was a club somewhere in the West End. She noticed how close Daisy and Michael were dancing. When Daisy returned to the candle-lit table. Charlotte asked her, "Are you and Michael..

" Yes, darling, I'm afraid so. He's awfully sweet, you know." Charlotte had begun to laugh in a feeble, defenceless way, that she later recognised was close to tears.

The three men in Whitehall dismissed her. They had been interested in what she told them and would pass it on, though it was not really their pigeon either. Next there was a full debriefing in the flat in Marylebone with Mr. Jackson and two senior colleagues. Charlotte had to keep asking for glasses of water. A week later, she sat on the train to Edinburgh. She placed a suitcase, her own at last, not Dominique's, in the luggage rack and sat down by the window. Until York she was alone in the compartment. She read a book for an hour, then gazed at the English fields. Nothing about their tracks and barns, the clumps of elm and ash, the mess of farming with its rusted tractors and dung-smeared animals was, on the surface, any different from what she had seen from the windows of numerous trains in France.

She stood up to go to the buffet car and caught sight of her reflection in the small, rectangular mirror with its bevelled edges above the seats opposite. The hairdresser to whom she went in Bond Street could see enough of her hair's natural colours to give him an idea of how he should re-dye the Ussel brown. The result was so close to how she had looked on the train coming down a year before that even Charlotte could barely see the difference.

Her face was perhaps a little thinner, though the change was not obvious. Were there black marks beneath her eyes? Not really: her skin was still so young that it was incapable of showing weariness in lines or shadows. The dozen dark brown freckles over the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes remained the same, and she remembered how Gregory used to touch them with the tip of his tongue, claiming they had a taste of their own. Yet even if her skin denied it, she was not the same person who had gone down the swaying corridors with Cannerley and Morris.

After the second pub, after the night-club, when they had gone back to the flat and drunk coffee, Daisy, in a moment of extreme alcoholic candour, had said something like, "When you first arrived from Scotland, darling, I thought you were a bit of a shop-window mannequin, with all your clothes and your self-control. But you're not, are you?" Daisy had leaned forward and placed her hand on Charlotte's thigh.

"You're ... God, I don't know. You're a rum one, aren't you?" Charlotte pulled back the door of the compartment and stepped out. Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character.

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

Amelia Gray was waiting at Waverley station. She signalled cheerily to Charlotte from the barrier and grappled with her briefly in a botched, powdery kiss. Charlotte abandoned herself to her mother's control. She sat in the passenger seat of the car and responded happily to Amelia Gray's anxious questions. However much Charlotte had been disappointed and irritated by her over the years, she had always been fond of her, and there was a self-indulgent pleasure in allowing herself to be mothered.

"Your father'!! be back at about seven. He's got a meeting at the hospital, but he's so much looking forward to seeing you."

"Good. I'm sorry I couldn't keep in touch more. It was impossible."

"Just so long as you're safe and well now, that's what matters." In her absence. Charlotte's parents had acquired a small terrier called Angus. For some reason this struck her as peculiar. Were they lonely?

Was it a substitute for their children? What future did they envisage for themselves and the dog?

Amelia Gray had kept bedrooms for both her children in the spacious house, even though neither of them had lived there for some time. On the bookshelves in Charlotte's room were various tales of witches and ponies she had had as a child; the bed was the same one she had had in their old house in the Highlands. She unpacked her case, in which she had put enough things to last four or five days. In the chest of drawers were old clothes of hers, wrapped in tissue paper and mothballs by her mother. They looked slightly less ravishing than she had imagined in the draper's shop in Limoges.

The disjunction between what had happened to her in France and the life, both past and present, suggested by her bedroom in her parents' home was very strange. She could not reconcile the different experiences at all, and trying to do so made her feel unreal, as though she was still drunk from her return party. She went downstairs to the sitting room where her mother poured her a glass of sherry. Half an hour later they heard the front door open.

William Gray was not sixty years old, but he had not worn well since his return from the Western Front. He seemed to move straight from youth to late middle age, without passing through the vigorous part of his life; then, in the twenty-five years that followed, he had rapidly aged. His mental curiosity and his wiry body gave him a certain energetic presence, but it was that of a springy old man who is fit for his years.

His hair was white, and his eyes were sunk deep in his head, with heavy pouches underneath. His skin felt dry and cracked where Charlotte kissed him on the cheek.

There was an awkwardness between them that never changed. As Gray tried to express his delight at seeing her again. Charlotte recoiled; when she gave him her most candid and affectionate look, he would make some dry remark. Amelia Gray watched, powerless to help, as she fluttered between them. Charlotte was aware of the way she reacted to her father, and knew that it was different from her behaviour with other people. One of the reasons she had so much valued the company of friends as a child was that, with them, she felt liberated and at ease, while at home she felt reduced. As the evening progressed, she was disappointed to find herself going down familiar paths, becoming evasive and discouraging in her answers to her parents' questions.

She was not like this with Julien, or Daisy, or Levade and, least of all, with Gregory. She did not like herself for it.

At dinner. Gray opened a bottle of wine he had long been saving and drank to his daughter's safe return. He was encouraged and amused by how much of it Charlotte drank, and went to fetch another from the cellar.

She told him of a man she had known in France, who could drink huge quantities with no apparent effect, and said it must have been from him she had learned. For a time they talked of French customs and habits, of Paris and the provinces, and everything went well. Amelia Gray served out plates of gooseberry tart, made with fruit she had bottled from the garden.

Afterwards, they sat round the fire in the sitting room, and Gray poured brandy from an old ship's decanter on the sideboard.

"And will you be going back to France?" he said.

"I doubt it. Things are changing rapidly. It's becoming more of an open war. They need men and guns more than interpreters and so on."

"I see," said Charlotte's mother.

"And the work you did, what ' " Don't tell us," said Gray forcefully.

"We don't need to know."

"All right," said Charlotte.

"I won't."

A silence descended. It seemed that their combined mental resources were unable to conjure a single conversational topic beyond the one that had been brought so abruptly to an end. Eventually, Amelia Gray managed to achieve utterance by addressing the dog and telling him it was time for bed. With the help of some business with the coffee cups she was able to restore some sense of geniality.

Charlotte expected that her mother would return to say good night, and that she herself would take the opportunity to go up to bed at the same time. After ten minutes or so, it became clear that Amelia Gray was not coming back, and that Charlotte would have to negotiate her own departure. She could not pretend to be tired when she felt so alert; and, although she found the conversation with her father awkward, she was aware of an urge, perhaps inspired by the wine, to communicate in some way. She felt the weight of many unassimilated experiences pressing her for some expression.

With an effort, she said, "I met another interesting man in France, a painter. We had lots of long talks together. I was a lodger in his house for a time."

"Oh yes. What sort of painter?" Gray was lighting a pipe.

"One of those daub and splash merchants, or the real thing?"

"Oh, the real thing. I think he was famous once, but he says he lost his way. He lost his inspiration."

"I suppose that can happen."

"He said it was because he had stopped dreaming."

Gray laughed.

"Sounds a wee bit like an excuse to me."

"Perhaps." Charlotte did not know why she wanted to talk about Levade, but was reluctant to let the subject go.

"He was in the war, you know.

Your war. He told me some terrible stories."

"Aye, well, they were terrible times. Best forgotten."

Charlotte felt she was close to something. It was vital to keep the conversation going. With a greater effort this time, she said, "Don't you think you ought to talk about it? To get it out? Isn't that what you tell your patients?" Gray laughed drily.

"Well, you never forget. It's always with you.

Just now, when I told you not to tell us what you'd been doing, I know you thought I was being rude and uninterested. No, wait.

Charlotte, let me finish. It wasn't that."

"I'm sorry."

"No, no. It's just that when you've commanded a battalion for three years you understand about war. Security, intelligence and so on. You have people's lives in your hands, so you do understand."

"Of course you do. I'm sorry if I seemed ..."

Gray suddenly stood up and went to the fireplace. With his back to Charlotte, he said, "My dear girl, I'm very proud of you."

Charlotte could say nothing.

Gray turned round.

"So very proud of you. Now, will we be friends?"

"Friends ... friends?"

"Please, Charlotte. I know I've failed you as a father. But it was difficult, after the war. It was very difficult. I tried to keep a balance, but I was troubled by memories. And dreams."

Charlotte still said nothing, too frightened to confront what Gray seemed to be suggesting. Was he asking her forgiveness for what had once happened between them? If so, could she trust her memory of what had taken place?

Gray said, "Do you remember, I told you once of how some men in another company took some German prisoners and then, instead of handing them over, took them into a wood and shot them?"

"Yes, I remember."

"We were very tired," said Gray.

"We'd been under shellfire for days, and the men were not themselves. There'd been a hit in our part of the trench, and terrible casualties. It was raining and we were supposed to walk for almost five miles with these Boches. I couldn't get my men to do it. I couldn't make them. I think they might have shot me if I'd pushed them any harder."

"So it was your company?"

"You can't possibly understand what it was like. Three years of this. They'd seen all their friends slaughtered. We stopped at a little copse and I said, "I'm going to speak to the officer in the village.

I leave the prisoners to your disposal." I knew perfectly well what they'd do. And they knew I knew."

Gray's voice was flat and without remorse.

"Is that what you dreamed of?"

"No. The dreams were of my men's faces. The look of incomprehension, the look of terror when I told them we were ordered to attack at dawn. On the Somme. In daylight. At walking pace. Night after night I saw those young men's faces. Boys younger than you are now. They looked at me and they knew. We all knew what was coming."

Somehow Gray had remained calm. Charlotte murmured some soothing words.

"Now, Charlotte, you must try to forgive my shortcomings. Or at least describe them to me, so perhaps I can explain or understand."

"I ... I don't think I can."

There was a silence for a moment; then they heard rain beginning against the windows.

In a voice of desperation. Gray said, "What did I do wrong?" When his selfcontrol gave way, it went completely. A great sob rose up in his chest and made him double over.

"For God's sake. Charlotte, please tell me what I did wrong." Gray held out his hand to her, but Charlotte would not take it.

"My dear girl," he sobbed, 'whatever it was, can you not forgive me?" Confronted at last with the outline of the thing that had lain for so long unrealised in her mind, Charlotte was too terrified to look.

"No," she said.

"No, I can't."

In the days that followed, Charlotte tried never to be alone -with her father. When he returned from work at six o'clock, she made sure she went upstairs for her bath, then helped her mother in the kitchen until it was time for dinner. In the afternoons, she went for long walks in the hills and tried to understand herself. She could not but be impressed by her father's anguish.

If he had done something terrible to her, how would he have been able to beg her to explain it to him? He had always been an honest man; he would not only have thought dissimulation to have been immoral in such circumstances, but would also have been incapable of acting.

Yet, if he truly had no idea of what had passed between them, it must mean that she had imagined it, or somehow misremembered This she could not accept, or force herself to believe. In some physical and cruel way, he had destroyed her innocence; and while the fallible functions of memory would not tell her exactly how, she was as certain of that simple fact as she could be, with an instinctive conviction that had never before let her down.

Still it seemed vital to her to establish what had really happened, and she felt agonisingly close to doing so. She thought of what her father had told her about the war, about his dreams and subsequent sufferings.

For some reason, she remembered, too, the letter from father to daughter she had found at Le Bourget-Drancy station. She strained at the memory of her own childhood, at the sense of some rapture lost. Yet it all remained like some frozen sea: great blocks of ice, submerged, but static, and beyond the melting capacity of her conscious will.

As she strode over the damp hills and turned for home, she felt torn between guilt that her father stood in some way wrongly accused by her and an absolute knowledge that her memory had, if not in detail, then at least in essence recorded what had happened.

At tea-time on the third day of her visit she returned from her walk and went to the kitchen, where her mother was taking a tray of scones from the oven. Amelia Gray gave her usual friendly, slightly startled smile of welcome.

"You're just in time," she said, as she poured tea from the pot on the scrubbed table.

"Let's have it in here, shall we, as it's just the two of us?" Perhaps her mother could help, thought Charlotte; perhaps this was the time to enlist her confidence. Somehow, the very thought of it was discouraging to Charlotte: her mother would turn her face from intimacy of this kind, she would run for some domestic cover.

In her state of heightened introspection this, too, seemed suggestive to Charlotte. Was this another aspect of the problem? Or was she now turning in such tight circles that she could no longer distinguish between the trivial and the significant?

She put her elbows on the table and sighed, holding her face between her hands, the restored colours of her hair tumbling down over her fingers. Amelia Gray was looking at her daughter with anxious concern when the telephone rang.

"Oh, drat," she said.

"Who can that be?"

She went into the sitting room to answer it.

"Charlotte," she called out a few moments later.

"It's for you."

"For me?" Charlotte was dragged out of her reverie.

"Who is it?"

"He didn't say," said her mother, as she came back into the kitchen. In the sitting room Charlotte picked up the big receiver from the polished occasional table where it lay on its side.

"Hello?"

"Is that Charlotte?"

"Yes, it is."

"Charlotte, you may not remember me. It's a voice from long ago. This is Peter Gregory."

"Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

"Charlotte?"

"Oh, my God."

At the end of their conversation, Gregory had to inhale deeply. He was sitting in the office of the convalescent home near Godalming, to which he had been sent on his return from North Africa. There had been a wait of two days before Daisy could contact her mother to find out the telephone number of Charlotte's parents, and he feared that she might already be on her way back to London by the time he got through.

Gregory was not by nature a timorous man, but on board the ship from Genoa he had run this conversation through his mind several times. At various points he had convinced himself that he should not contact Charlotte.

He could not offer her what she was worth; all he could bring was this absurd passion that he had conceived for her almost in the moment of their separation, then kept doggedly alive in the months of his absence.

He knew that it was this feeling alone that had brought him through the agony of his untended injuries and through the pain of his reconnection with the world.

He valued it accordingly, but was not convinced it was worth offering. Only when he heard her stunned and gasping reaction to his voice did he fully register the depth of his passion for her. There was such struggle and humility in her tone, the sense of something so long and terribly desired, that he felt crushed by it. But for the first time since he had known Charlotte he no longer felt intimidated, and he understood that the complexity of her feelings was not for her the source of any sense of superiority but, on the contrary, the cause of awful anguish. For the first time he believed that his own life, however tarnished in his eyes, was what was necessary for the redemption of hers.

Charlotte put down the telephone and walked out of the house, down to the end of the garden. She sat on a wooden bench in an area of lawn surrounded by rhododendron bushes and tried to control her feelings.

She could not at first think of Gregory as a person, as a man with a voice and hands and things of his own to say; his return seemed only a disembodied vindication of her long and solitary refusal to give up hope.

She felt stunned by gratitude, because that hope had never amounted to belief.

In the evening, over dinner with her parents, her trance-like incredulity began to be penetrated by the first movements of joy.

What would he look like? What would he say?

"You're in a world of your own tonight. Charlotte," said her father.

"I'm sorry." She smiled at him.

She tried to hold his eye and in some way to encourage him. She felt the return of Gregory had a bearing on her father, too, and that there might yet be some way out of their impasse.

That night, sleeping deeply beneath her old quilted eiderdown, she had a sequence of dreams. They were mostly of the intensely realised but inconsequential kind that her father's friend had characterised as 'neural waste'. She dreamed she was a nurse at war, and that Levade came to her with the wound on his shoulder gaping. She was on a ship, and had to organise interminable games among unruly children who would not listen to her orders. Finally, she dreamed she was herself a child. She was on the deck of the ship, surrounded by her dolls and by her books, and, from a door down to a lower deck, her father emerged.

Instinctively, she recoiled as he came and knelt beside her. He opened his arms and hugged her, hard, against his chest, then laid his face on her shoulder. Looking down, expecting to see his cruelty or rage, she saw instead that he was weeping. She brushed away the tears with her fingers; she soothed him and stroked his white hair.

All the next morning she paced round the house and garden. She had the feeling that the blocks of frozen memory were melting, that movement was coming back into these long-locked regions. There was nothing she could do to speed it up or clarify it, but she felt that physical activity would in some way help. After lunch, she went for another walk, and, as she sat on a hill looking back towards the city of Edinburgh, she began to think of Levade's death. The rooms of the Domaine her bedroom and, in particular, his studio seemed very clear in her mind: she could smell the lime wood of the back staircase, the oil paints, the dusty air.

She mourned her dead friend at last, thinking of his undignified death in that half-built place among strangers. She cried for his lonely end and for his defeated struggle, and she cried, if she was honest, a little for herself as well, and a suspicion that, whatever the degree of anxiety in which she had lived those days in the Domaine, she might never again exist at such a level of intensity. Later, when she was walking home, she felt an uplifting gratitude towards Levade. Perhaps a dozen times in his life he had painted pictures in which he had been able to pierce the deceptive layer of appearances that clothed the world, to go beyond it and re-imagine a deeper existence that lay beneath. Then he had become a prisoner of his sensual desires, and of his mind's refusal to unlock itself, with the result that the last ten years of his life had passed with a vain hammering at the gates of his memory. Yet, Charlotte thought, as her quickening steps carried her toward the lights of the village below, that dreaming process he had so passionately desired had worked instead for her: what had long imprisoned him had set her free. The next day was a Saturday, the last but one of Charlotte's intended visit. Her mother went into Edinburgh to do some shopping. Charlotte said she would stay and cook lunch for her father. Both her parents looked surprised, and her mother talked temptingly of Princes Street and new clothes.

Charlotte remained firm and, when they had had lunch and cleared the plates away, forced herself to confront her father once more.

"You know what we were saying the other night? About ... you and me, being a father and so on."

"Yes." Gray sounded uneasy.

They were in the sitting room, either side of the fire, on which he now selfconsciously threw another log. Charlotte folded her hands in her lap.

"I've been thinking. I think I must apologise."

"Oh, yes?" Gray was at his most discouraging. His tone suggested that not only was what Charlotte was trying to say intrusively personal, but that it was also likely to be misguided.

Very slowly, and picking the words she felt were as gentle as possible while still being truthful. Charlotte said, "All my life I've believed that when I was young, perhaps seven or eight, you did something to me.

You hurt me. I've never known exactly how. All I knew for sure was the result. I felt as though my childhood had ended. As though something had been prematurely and cruelly taken from me."

Gray looked appalled.

"What did I do?"

Still speaking with slow precision, despite a constricting pressure in her lungs. Charlotte said, "My memory is of some physical contact that went too far. Later on, I came to believe that it might have been something sexual. I don't believe that now, but only something like that could have explained the depth of the wound you inflicted."

She found her cheeks and forehead were burning.

Gray swallowed. For a moment his devastation at what his daughter had said appeared to overwhelm him; then some professional curiosity steadied him.

"I'm glad you've told me, I'm glad it's out at last."

His shattered voice sounded anything but glad, but Charlotte was reassured by his response. There was no trace of guilty recollection, and his attitude meant she might now carry on.

"Since I've been here, in these last few days," she said, "I feel as though I've somehow come to grips with it. This thing, this terrible thing that has been in my mind all my life ..." She began to sob, then controlled herself. "By a complicated process, too much to explain, I think I may have understood." Gray was nodding, but did not speak.

"Do you remember anything?" said Charlotte.

"Any incident?"

Gray stood up.

"Before you tell me what you think, would it help if I told you what I had thought? Then if we think the same, at least you won't think I'm just agreeing with you to bring it all to a close?"

"All right."

Gray chose his words with equal care.

"What you must understand first is that you were a miracle to me. At that time of war. To return from the scenes I'd witnessed, and to see this girl child ... To look at my hands, know what they had done, what my eyes had seen and then to think that from inside my own body I had created this female flesh. He shook his head and breathed in tightly for a moment.

"That's what a father feels about a girl this otherness this innocence, when I myself felt so terribly old and filthy and corrupted by experience. And as a little girl, you did love me. Then I was aware that something was wrong. You weren't an easy child. Charlotte."

"I know."

"You turned into such a bluestocking. You were so ferocious with your studies, so good at them. But I felt I couldn't reach you. And then those awful depressions. I felt powerless. This was my profession, and I couldn't help you. Of course, I strongly suspected that I was the problem, or part of it. It was agonising to watch. Can you imagine?

Because, still, for me you were the hope of life and femininity."

"I can imagine."

"Your mother was ... a wonderful woman, but she was not comforting in any physical sense. I don't mean like that, but ' " I understand."

"Perhaps there was a time, a particular incident." Gray spoke very slowly.

"Perhaps there was. I can honestly say I don't remember, but perhaps at some level I was determined not to. And this cruelty I forced on you. Do you know what it was?"

"I think so," said Charlotte, very softly.

"War. The memory of war."

There was a long silence in the room. Eventually, Gray said, "Better men than I were destroyed by it."

"I'm sorry I was no comfort to you."

"I must have asked too much. I asked a child to bear the weight of those unspeakable things, a weight that drove grown men mad."

"And do you think there was a time, an incident?"

Gray breathed in deeply.

"I do remember crying once. I was suddenly caught by this frightening emotion I had so long held in check. I remember it was triggered by something trivial, then it came up out of me with these terrible noises, a sort of primeval howling. I think you came to me. Perhaps you were worried by the noise. Perhaps I shouted at you to go away because I didn't want you to stay."

"No. You did want me to stay. You held me, and you held me so hard it almost crushed me. But I don't think it was that pain that remained with me. It was the sight and the sound of your grief. Somehow you must have conveyed to me the horror of what you had seen. You told me about it. The millions of dead."

Gray's voice was scarcely audible.

"I was so alone."

"And is it possible that I would remember it as physical pain?"

"It's possible." He lifted his head.

"Your memory may have been trying to protect you. To lay a screen across something worse. A child would find it easier to think of being hurt in some way, crushed or beaten, than to look on the misery I had somehow opened up to you." Charlotte was very calm.

"I think that's right, I think that may be right." Her father, meanwhile, was distraught.

"But my dear Charlotte, to think that I did this to you. That I couldn't face it on my own. That I had to take away all your poor childish innocence to help me bear it." He began to weep.

"The faces of those young men at dawn ... All that joy that should have been yours."

Charlotte stood up and went to her father. She held out her arms.

Gray came into her embrace and laid his head on her shoulder. He was howling.

"All that innocence. From my own daughter."

"It doesn't matter," said Charlotte, as she held her father in her arms and stroked his face. She felt love erupt in her.

"It doesn't matter now, it doesn't matter any more."

By the time Charlotte returned to London, Peter Gregory had been moved from the convalescent home and sent to an airfield in Suffolk to be debriefed by the R.A.F. Both of them used Daisy's flat as a place to leave messages, but there followed a frustrating three days' delay before he would be free to come back to the capital.

Charlotte returned to her room in Riding House Street, but it was only for a short time, as a place in the flat was shortly to become vacant again.

"The invitations went out while you were in Edinburgh," said Daisy.

"There's one here for you. Shall I read it out?"

"Go on." Charlotte was on the telephone in the hall of the hostel.

"Colonel and Mrs. Michael Ridley invite you to the marriage of their daughter Sally to Mr. Robin Morris on 3 June 1943 at St. Andrew's Church, etcetera, etcetera, and afterwards at the White House, Crookham End. Isn't it marvelous? What are you going to wear?"

Charlotte laughed.

"God knows. Is this Robin Morris the stuffed shirt?"

"Yes, that's right."

"I think I met him once. On a train. Does he work in the Foreign Office or something like that?"

"That's right. Sally's in seventh heaven, as you can imagine. Anyway, you can have your old room back if you like. Alison can move into Sally's."

"I think I'd rather have Sally's if you don't mind."

"I thought your old room would have sentimental memories."

"Yes, it does. But it's a bit small, to be honest. Daisy. And we don't want to inconvenience Alison, do we?"

"Not very romantic, are you. Charlotte?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that."

Later in the day Charlotte went into the offices of G Section in Marylebone, where Mr. Jackson told her she could have a further week's leave before her new posting came through.

She walked up Marylebone High Street and over into Regent's Park. It was a warm spring day. Mothers were pushing children along the paths; there was a certain lightness in their step and in their called greetings.

Charlotte passed the coffee stall where she had bought a leaden bun one day in her lunch break from Dr. Wolf's consulting rooms. She could still recall the feeling of intense separation from the world that meeting Gregory had induced in her. She had never really believed that it would work out happily; she had hoped, but she had not believed. Before she left Edinburgh, her father had warned her that it was dangerous ever to think that one had solved buried problems of memory and fear. The human desire for neatness, he said, would always ultimately be defeated by the chaos of the mind's own truths.

Charlotte resented this dour note at the moment of her joy and freedom, but recognised that he was probably right. She would never really know what had happened, but between them they had come close enough to the truth. It would suffice, she knew, because in the days that followed, the feeling of relaxation continued. As she walked through Regent's Park, she felt that a long-broken circle had finally been closed: as a grown woman she had reestablished contact with her childhood self, and there was now a continuous line through her life. Peter Gregory arranged to meet Charlotte the next evening in Daisy's flat. Daisy said she could organise for all three tenants to be out until at least ten o'clock, so they would have plenty of time to themselves.

Gregory took a train to London in the morning. He had booked a table for dinner at a restaurant near the flat, and somehow had to pass the day. In the afternoon, he went to a cinema in Leicester Square, but found it impossible to concentrate on the film, a patriotic naval adventure, full of improbably stoical sailors. The expectation of seeing Charlotte was so intense that he felt as though his skin was going to burst beneath the pressure.

He walked out of the film and down to the river. What would he say to her? What physical reaction was going to take place? Would his wounded leg give way? Would he shake so much that he would have to sit down?

Later, he went to a pub in Chelsea, where he sat in the window and drank beer. He thought of Forster and all the others he had flown with. Those few, hot weeks had burned themselves into his memory and into the flesh of who he was, but in the turmoil of his nervous anguish he no longer felt that by continuing to live he was in some way unfaithful to them.

He bought some flowers from a barrow on the Brompton Road as he walked north in the early evening. His leg was beginning to hurt, and he hailed a taxi to take him the rest of the way. He had concealed the champagne in a briefcase with an evening paper, so that when she opened the door all she would see were the flowers. It was not too presumptuous.

He was talking to himself in the back of the cab. He was more frightened than he had ever been in flying. What terrified him was the thought of some hideous physical collapse, of his bones and blood breaking.

He was trembling as he went up the steps and rang the doorbell. He stared hard at the painted wood of the door as he waited. He could not picture Charlotte's face.

The door opened, revealing at first shadow and space, then all at once a young woman in a summer dress with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. Gregory stepped inside and wordlessly held out the flowers. Charlotte took them from him, then dropped them on top of the briefcase as she opened her arms and gathered him in, pressing her cheek against his.

He smelled the lily of the valley on her neck and burst into tears. Later, in the restaurant, he told her about Jacques and Beatrice, how they had cared for him and how he was determined to revisit them.

When he came to the part of the story that took place in the Mayor's front room, he noticed that Charlotte had stopped eating and was holding her knife and fork in mid-air. He described his journey to Marseille, but left out the more adventurous episodes, deterred by some residual airman's code against what the men called shooting a line. He talked a little of the crash and his injuries, and spoke of Nancy and of Gianluca, who had been as good as his improbable word. All the time Gregory talked, he felt compassion emanate from Charlotte, not some passive sympathy, but a radiant force that seemed to soothe his wounds and make past unhappiness appear something insubstantial, hard even to remember. Then Charlotte told him how she had been to visit Monsieur Chollet in Clermont Ferrand, and of her despair when he said he had had no word. She described her friendship with Julien and Levade, and told him how Levade had died.

Her story was more complicated than his, and towards the end she gave up. She held out her hand across the table and took Gregory's. She sat for a long time staring into his eyes, holding his hand in hers.

When they went back to Daisy's flat, Gregory opened the champagne and they drank to Jacques and Beatrice; to Monsieur Chollet in his oily garage; to Gianluca and Nancy; to Levade and Julien; to Sylvie Cariteau and little Anne-Marie. Charlotte could not bring herself to mention Andre and Jacob.

"I'll have to go soon," said Gregory.

"You don't have to go just because the others are coming back."

"I don't think I could face Daisy tonight."

"You'll have to soon. When you come to Sally's wedding."

"Am I invited?"

"You will be."

Gregory looked round the sitting room. He said, "Do you remember the first time we came back here after lunch in that awful hotel in Screatley? You were so shy."

"I had a good deal to be shy about."

"And now?"

"Now ..." Charlotte sighed.

"Now I feel so many things. I feel exhausted by happiness."

"Not sad?"

"Well, there are never just the broad sunlit uplands."

Gregory also sighed. He took out a cigarette, keeping himself in control, not wishing to force anything.

Charlotte suddenly turned and unleashed her most unguarded, intimate smile.

"And what do you feel?"

Gregory put down the cigarette.

"For the time being I feel that I would like it if, just for a moment, just for a second, you would wrap your arms round me and let me feel your skin on mine. That's all I ask."

Charlotte came towards him. He looked into her face and saw that there was a power of acquired self-knowledge that had steadied her eyes' once prodigally sensitive and unsettled gaze. He stretched out his hands, hesitantly, and touched the bare flesh of her forearms.

"That's all you ask," she said in her humorous, forgiving voice, as she held him hard against her.

"My darling, that's all there is."

But he came back in the middle of the night, bribed his way past the night watchman of her block in Riding House Street and knocked softly on her door.

"Oh my darling, my darling," she said.

She told him everything this time, about her father and her lost childhood, about Julien and the boys and Levade, and, as she saw the anguish in his tearful eyes. Charlotte had for the first time in her life the exquisite exhilaration of being understood.

He made love to her in the narrow bed and covered all of her with his hands and his lips. She had no modesty or inhibition; she looked at herself through his dazed eyes and felt powerful with the desperation she ignited in him. When they made love again, she thought for a moment of Levade. She felt he would have approved, and she laughed for a moment, not without sympathy for the man who had died, but because she was alive.

It was growing light outside when she could leave him alone long enough to sleep. She could see smoky rain pattering on the roof tiles.

A week later, Charlotte went in to G Section headquarters to receive details of her posting to Suffolk. Before she left, Mr. Jackson handed her a letter.

"This was brought back by one of our chaps yesterday. I've given him the most tremendous ticking off, as you can imagine. If he'd been found with this on him they'd have known at once what sort of game he was in.

That's the trouble with agents. Once they're out there, some of them seem to feel invincible." He gave her a knowing look.

"Anyway, I hope it's good news."

Charlotte recognised the handwriting before she opened the letter and saw the signature: "Octave'. She took the letter up to Regent's Park and walked up to a semi-circle of chairs arranged in front of the bandstand.

My dear Daniele, I doubt whether you will ever read this letter, but I want to write to you anyway, to set out my thoughts. And who knows, perhaps some Englishman will bring it back to London. You know how reckless these English are. I am in a very cosy little farm in the hills, quite a long way now from our own town. (I'll be at least prudent enough not to mention actual names). I'm with Cesar, who is a splendid young man, and half a dozen others in their twenties who have come to escape the Statutory Work Order. We have enough arms for the time being and are receiving more volunteers all the time. Monsieur Laval's perpetual desire to please the Germans has rebounded greatly to our advantage.

I have heard no news from my father, but I'm hopeful that the worst rumours about camps and so on are not true. C. told me that, alas, the boys were taken. I pray for their safety. C. travels a lot and brings news as in some way he has managed to keep up good appearances as a model citizen.

I, on the other hand, am not so well respected in the town and must keep my head down. The death of a certain person has not been connected in any way with me as far as C. has been able to discover. I can say no more about this in any detail. However, following scenes at which you were present (or later scenes at which you can guess), our friends in grey do not like me.

I will wait until the war is over. Things will be forgotten if we win. In fact, history is already being rewritten. C. tells me that since the war has turned, many of the Marshal's oldest supporters are saying they never trusted him and that the General was always the best bet. Some of the most dedicated Petainists are already beginning to talk about 'our Anglo Saxon friends' and 'the noble Tartar'!

We will win; somehow, we will win. And we have kept alive something of France to make the victory worthwhile. That is the achievement of the dark days. How long it will take, I don't know, because it's very complicated. Within an hour or so of here, I know of three different resistance groups. One of them detests the other more than it detests the Occupant! This is a civil war as well as a national war; it is a fight for influence and for possession of history. It is squalid, Daniele, it is mean and horrible, and the only way our group keeps going is to remember its clear objective: to defeat the invader. I expect you're safe at home now. Perhaps you're even back with your lover. Dear Daniele, your friendship was a wonderful thing to me at that time of greatest darkness. Being a man, an awful base creature, I do also treasure the memory of the night of the drop, and I will never forget it. But I know that it was not the most important thing, and I do know that your future is elsewhere. As for me, I'm very excited by what we can do. Despite the squalor and the shame, and the bloodshed that will come, I feel great hope. We will be free, and we will have a true government again. I will return to Paris, and I will see my old boss Monsieur Weil restored and in his pomp, ordering oysters from the big restaurants on the Boulevard de Montparnasse.

Will you come down for the opening of the hotel? What a party we'll have. And I'll come to visit you as well, many times in the years to come. Thank you for everything, Daniele, my friend, my dear, dear friend. A thousand kisses, "Octave'.

The day of Sally's wedding dawned hot and clear. Charlotte awoke in the bed in Sally's old room, having come down from her holding school in Suffolk the night before. Sally was with her parents, but Daisy and Alison kept the bathroom occupied for the first two hours of the morning. Charlotte was still in her dressing gown when they heard Michael Waterslow's imperative hooting in the street below. Daisy pulled up the window and shouted that he and Gregory should come upstairs. Charlotte dressed in her bedroom and hurriedly put on her make-up in the finally vacated bathroom. When she went into the sitting room, she found Peter Gregory and Michael Waterslow drinking bottled beer, while Daisy and Alison completed their preparations.

Michael was in a morning suit, Gregory was in uniform, his unusually neat appearance spoiled by a small speck of blood on the collar of his shirt. Charlotte kissed his smooth cheek.

"Must you have that stick?" she said.

"I thought it made me look distinguished."

"Just as you like." She straightened his lapels and smiled. All of them were ready: they stood in a circle inspecting each other's appearance. Alison, a slender, dark-haired woman, was in a pre-war Hardy Amies suit; she indignantly pointed out that Charlotte's dress had too many pleats in the skirt and that both the collar and belt were wider than wartime restrictions allowed. Daisy was wearing a floral print dress with a turban and sunglasses. After almost an hour in the car, as they approached rural Surrey, Gregory asked Michael if he would mind making a short detour. He had made an arrangement to meet someone, he said, some time after midday.

In a village with some Tudor and more mock-Tudor houses with pots of geraniums outside their doors, Gregory directed Michael to a pub called the Rose and Crown. The bar was cool and dark after the hot June sunshine outside.

"Greg! I never thought you'd make it!"

Borowski loomed out of a shadowy corner and took Gregory's hand. "You remember Leslie, don't you?"

"Still alive, Brind?" said Gregory.

Leslie Brind touched the wood of the bar before shaking hands with Gregory, who introduced the others.

Charlotte watched the delight the men took in each other's company as they poured drinks into one another and competed in their mocking rudeness. Gregory was persuaded by Borowski to stay for just one more, and then by Brind for just one more on top of that, but they were still in good time for lunch at the town nearest to the wedding. It was market day, and many of the stall holders were packing up and going off in search of food and drink.

Michael swung the car beneath an arch in the high street, into a lane that ran down beside the White Hart Hotel and to a car park behind.

Inside the hotel, they followed a carpeted corridor to the lounge bar, which was full of local people from the market as well as others in uniform or morning dress who were on their way to the wedding. The women sat at a table while Michael and Gregory pushed their way to the bar.

The bell on the till was ringing in a continuous monotone as a barmaid from the public bar was summoned to help. A tray of drinks was held high above the throng, with tall mugs of beer, glasses of fizzy drinks with slices of cucumber and orange, smaller glasses with cherries on sticks and pink gin.

Gregory arrived with an oval plate of sandwiches, hastily cut by the harassed barmaid, but full of fat ham and mustard that, Charlotte thought, would have caused a riot in Lavaurette.

Charlotte found herself swept up in the air of slightly frantic joy. There was no point in resisting it, she thought, as she raised her glass and drank to Sally's health for the third time that morning.

She looked across at Gregory, who was in earnest conversation with Alison. In all the long months she had forgotten how much she enjoyed his company the simple pleasure of being with him. And, as he put his head on one side, the better to listen to something Alison was saying, she thought how she had also forgotten how beautiful he was, how very beautiful.

When they reached the churchyard at last, Charlotte saw Dick Cannerley and Robin Morris in anxious conversation. Morris went inside the church, while Cannerley stood for a moment with a pile of service sheets. He divided them between two other young men in morning dress, then followed Morris inside.

Cannerley had aged. Charlotte thought.

She stood by the lych gate where Michael had dropped them while he went off to find somewhere to park along the crowded verge. She inhaled the smell of cow parsley from the bank as she looked over the gently swelling tumuli of grassy graves that led up to the church.

There was Peter Gregory, leaning on his stick half way up the path, talking to Sally's mother, who was looking nervous beneath a wide brimmed hat. In Charlotte's mind, Gregory belonged to the category of dreams and traumas.

The possibility of happiness he had once held out, and that she had briefly tasted, was of an intensity so great that even at the time it had seemed already to belong to the past. The power of such feelings, it seemed to her, lay in their promise of transcendence.

People followed them and believed in them because they offered not only a paradise of sensation but the promise of meaning, too; like the miracle of art, they held out an explanation of all the other faltering lights by which people were more momentarily guided.

By their nature, however, these feelings were unreliable. Sometimes, they seemed to be remembered before they were even experienced, and they could leave in those who felt them a fear that only what had been forgotten, what stayed beyond the reach of recollection, was capable of truly transcending the limits of their sad incorporation in the flesh, and of their death.

To believe otherwise remained an act of faith, but it was one that Charlotte felt prepared to make. She walked up the path of the churchyard and took Gregory lightly by the arm. They went between the grey, lichen-covered headstones, and turned for the final few yards towards the door of the Norman church. As they came near to it, Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory's and found that it already contained something the handle of his stick.

She held on tight to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared.

The End

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although this is a work of fiction, I have tried to represent the historical background as it actually was. For this purpose, I have relied only on books that were based on first-hand documentary evidence, or on such documents themselves. G Section is an invention, but its techniques are modeled on those of actual organizations. Pichon is a fictional character, but the Enquiry and Control Section and the Police for Jewish Affairs acted as described. The Milice oath and the quotation from the broadcast by the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs are verbatim. Drancy came under German command in July 1943. There are survivors'

accounts of both French and German regimes.

I should like to thank the large number of people in England and France who helped me with aspects of the background of this novel.