Reaching the agreed drop zone was no longer the simple matter it had been before the advent of the Germans. They left the house separately, at a quarter to ten in order to beat the curfew, and were instructed by Julien to make their own way to the farm, without lights on their bicycles. ‘You can come with me, Danièle,’ he said. ‘We’ll bring up the rear.’

As Charlotte free-wheeled down the Place de l’Eglise, the wind whistling through the insubstantial fabric of Dominique’s overcoat, she was aware both of how much she had drunk and of the fact that, whatever the amount, it was less than half that consumed by any of the others. She followed Julien to Madame Cariteau’s house on the main road.

‘We’ve got half an hour,’ said Julien, rapping on the glass of the back door.

Sylvie Cariteau, her hair shiny from the effects of the pink carbolic soap, let them into the kitchen where she had set out six glasses on the cleared and scrubbed table. In answer to her daughter’s call, Madame Cariteau appeared at the door to the main part of the house with André and Jacob.

‘I don’t know what all this is about,’ the old woman muttered, ‘and I don’t think I want to know, I’m a loyal citizen. Sylvie doesn’t tell me anything.’

‘We should have a song. A song from each of us,’ said Sylvie Cariteau, and sat down at the piano. ‘Who’ll go first?’

‘Madame, Madame, you go,’ said André, looking up at Charlotte.

‘I think you have an admirer,’ said Mlle Cariteau.

The only song Charlotte could think of was ‘Alouette’, which she sang, with some help with the words from Sylvie and André. Julien drained another glass before starting up an old folk song about a man who was jealous of his wife but was cuckolded all the same. Madame Cariteau’s clucking disapproval was drowned by a chorus full of ‘la-la-las’ with which the boys were able to join in.

Madame Cariteau walked over to the piano and folded her arms across her chest. She launched herself precipitately into something that her daughter was not expecting, and there were some family words before they agreed to start again.

Madame Cariteau’s voice, once it had found the right key, turned out to be surprisingly clear and firm; no trace of self-consciousness blurred the high notes of the traditional song she had chosen. Looking at the old woman’s stout, worn body, Charlotte was amazed by the youthful purity that had been preserved intact within it; it was like watching a clear stream erupt from dark, decaying undergrowth. The chorus went: ‘But then I was young and the leaves were green/Now the corn is cut and the little boat sailed away.’ It was a song of the most self-admiring sentimentality about the different ages of a man’s life. One of the verses began: ‘One day the young men came back from the war, the corn was high and our sweethearts were waiting . . .’, and there was a silence in the Cariteaus’ kitchen as though the music had exceeded the sum of its modest parts. Charlotte could not help thinking of Madame Cariteau’s husband and of all the men who did not come back for Sylvie. She found tears filling her eyes and was appalled both by the feeling and by her lack of musical taste.

Julien called out a virile ‘bravo’ to break the mood and brought Jacob forward to the piano. He sang a tune he had learned at school, though his shyness made it difficult to understand. It was something about ‘To the right, to the left, please take my hand, and come and dance, and . . .’, but after two or three attempts the words seemed to peter out at this point.

Sylvie Cariteau sang a canon by Bach, her voice oddly coarser than her old mother’s. Finally, André sang all the many verses of the story of a little ship that had never sailed and set off on a long voyage. The chorus involved Julien conducting with the empty wine bottle: ‘Sailors sail upon the waves!’ It went down so well with the boys that they had to go through it again.

On the final note, Julien embraced both women warmly, kissed the boys, took Charlotte by the elbow and out into the night. They were ten minutes up the road before Charlotte had caught her breath.

In the farmhouse they met the other members of the group, standing round beneath the lanterns hung from the beam of the kitchen, smacking their upper arms with their gloved hands, drinking from coffee cups and enamel mugs they filled from an unlabelled bottle on the table. Charlotte watched in disbelief as César, Lepidus and Antony helped themselves again. One of the other men produced a dry sausage, which he cut into lengths and handed round. A youngish man with curly hair and a beard took a pistol from his jacket, emptied the bullets into his hand, twirled round the empty chamber, held it up to the lantern, checked the sights and carefully reloaded it. Most of the others had firearms of some kind. Charlotte knotted her headscarf more tightly under her chin and smiled at César as she declined his offer of a sunflower-leaf cigarette. The men muttered and growled at each other as they shrugged, lit cigarettes and occasionally punched one another on the shoulder.

On the bare table Julien placed two cups to show the location of the farm building and of a barn the other side of the drop zone. Then he drew tracks in the wood with his finger to show the plane’s path and the line that the men’s torches must make. It was a large bomber, he didn’t know what make, but it would be heaving out sixteen containers into the void. It was dangerous to be underneath because of the weight of what was coming down, so no one was to move a pace from his designated spot.

‘Listen,’ said one of the men, slightly less agricultural-looking than the others, ‘my brother-in-law was in the air force and I know a thing or two about flying. The chances of a bomber finding that little clearing and being able to drop on the lights you’ve described – it’s hopeless.’

Julien smiled tolerantly. ‘They’ve done it before.’

‘Just on co-ordinates and a couple of torches, you don’t think—’

‘If you don’t want to take part, you can leave now. Go on.’

The man shrugged and puffed for a moment, but stood his ground. ‘It’s all right. I’ll stay.’

‘Good.’ Julien turned to a small man who looked from his torn clothes and bedraggled appearance as though he had spent several nights in the woods. He had an unwashed smell that reminded Charlotte of a beggar who had once lurched at her from a doorway in Glasgow, but Julien seemed to defer to his knowledge of the terrain, and particularly of a wood they needed to cross. He told them he had heard the second BBC bulletin and that the drop had been confirmed; they would meet four more volunteers at an agreed clearing in the woods.

Julien looked at his watch. ‘Is everybody ready? From the time we make contact with the other four until the drop is completed and everything has been cleared away there must be no talking. Do you understand?’

The men shifted their weight and stamped their feet on the cold stone floor. Charlotte thought they looked like ghillies preparing for a rough shoot on the estate of some minor aristocrat fallen on hard times. She saw two of them fill flasks from the bottle on the table and slip them into their pockets.

As they left the building and clattered over the moonlit farmyard, Charlotte felt the sweet illicit thrill she remembered from her childhood when, on the endless summer nights beneath the northern skies, she and Roderick would climb out of their bedroom windows, go down a ladder they had left beside the house and make for the fields. The aching cut of the December wind brought her back to the present, but the moonlight was as white and as evenly spread as on a Highland night in August. ‘“Charlotte” . . . admirable,’ she thought.

They walked in single file, obediently silent, down a narrow path beside a field in which half a dozen cows stood like iron statues. The tramp-like man in front, who, Julien whispered to Charlotte, was a poacher, then made them drop down into a ditch and up the other side into a dense wood. Hearing the noise of breaking twigs and shuffled leaves, Charlotte shivered at how easy it would be for a German patrol to run a machine gun swiftly down their line. After about twenty minutes they emerged on to the rim of a large clearing, which Charlotte could make out was edged on all four sides by woods.

Charlotte jumped at the sound of a creature coming through the thick undergrowth at her shoulder. She had no gun and found she had let out a small cry as she grabbed Julien’s arm. The creature was followed by three others. They whispered greetings to Julien who motioned them to go forward into the field.

In the twenty minutes before the plane was due, Julien placed the men with torches at intervals of a hundred yards and told the others that each of them must count the number of parachutes with the utmost care. He took Charlotte by the wrist and positioned her on the edge of the field. ‘Watch carefully, Danièle. And count. One parachute missed means we can never use this place again. And they’ll be on to us.’

Charlotte watched the sky, picking out the tilted saucepan of the Great Bear, from which northerly direction the plane would presumably arrive. The thought of the English plane with men from London, Lincolnshire, perhaps from Aberdeen, that had ploughed through the night and would by dawn have taken its men home to tea and English newspapers made her feel, for the first time since she had been in France, a lurching homesickness.

Above their heads was a narrow crescent moon in a sky almost yellow with the light of sludgy galaxies. The curved shape reminded her of some lines by Victor Hugo that she could never, irritatingly, quite remember, about a careless god who had been reaping in the sky, then stopped and ‘left his sickle in this golden field of stars’.

They stood in their places, listening to the darkness. The huge country lay peacefully all about them, indifferent to the whereabouts of some tiny plane. How futile it seemed, Charlotte thought: the villages in the Cévennes would still cling to their rocky defiles, the Loire would still broadly flow; the vastness of the silent, undisturbed country made their sincerest efforts look quite useless.

She strained against the silence of the night. There was the sound of some night-bird, fussing over the limits of its territory, a sudden rattle in the undergrowth of the woods, perhaps a rabbit or a grounded pheasant, then the icy stillness once more all round. Then there came a sound like breath, like a soft grunt caught and stifled on the beat of a pulse. She reached out and touched Julien’s hand. She pointed upwards. ‘Yes?’

Julien put his finger to his lips and listened. The noise grew louder, becoming a whirring growl. ‘Yes.’ Julien ran out into the field and shouted to the men in the line.

The sound was now continuous, and above the deeply pulsing engine there was a whining note as though it was straining to slow down.

At last the plane came into sight. A black square against the white moonlit clouds, it grew swiftly in size as it began to descend on them. With no lights, it was like a thunderous animal coming down closer and closer, until it filled the sky to one side of the torches only a few feet above their heads and made the ground tremble with the huge sonorous notes of its exhaust. Charlotte saw four vast engines, then the belly of the plane, then square rudders on the tail as it passed over them and began to climb. It dropped nothing, but started to rise and bank slowly to its right.

‘What’s wrong?’ called Charlotte to the figure nearest to her. ‘Wasn’t it ours?’

‘Yes.’ It was the man with the brother-in-law in the air force. ‘It was a Halifax. It’ll come back.’ His tone was grudging.

The sound of engines was almost lost as the heavy plane made its long, heavy turn, then, at the point of vanishing, it began a slow crescendo. Once more the black, ragged square approached beneath the lights of the Bear and this time it came in almost flat on the line of the waiting torches. The noise of the propellers seemed to echo and ring off the frozen sky, and as the plane levelled out above them the moon struck a tingling reflection in the perspex canopy.

At the moment the four engines seemed on the point of stalling, the belly of the aircraft broke open and heavy dark blossoms filled the sky behind it like a handful of black confetti. They swung on swift, narrow arcs and landed with a tinny sound on the hard earth. Before the plane was out of sight, the field was full of people running to the collapsed parachutes and wrenching them free of their metal cargo. In the excitement Charlotte had forgotten to count.

Julien was running round trying to find out how many parachutes had come down. Charlotte hurried over to the nearest one, where she found the poacher opening the cylinder down one side. There were three further canisters inside with two wire handles for carrying. He pulled one out, handed it to Charlotte, and pointed her to the corner of the field while he folded the parachute into the empty outer container. The squat little tube was extraordinarily heavy, and the wire handles cut deeply into Charlotte’s hands. She noticed that most of the men had somehow hoisted the tubes on to their shoulders. She took off her headscarf and wrapped it round her palms to protect them as she lugged the cylinder across the field.

There was a growing pile inside a small clearing at the edge of the wood where Julien was discouraging the men from opening the containers until everything had been brought in from the drop zone. The rule of silence had been completely forgotten in the exhilaration of the moment as they smoked and laughed and congratulated themselves on the successful drop.

As Charlotte went back into the field to retrieve another of the heavy packages she heard the sound of the plane again. It came down on a different angle this time, not directly overhead, but on a slow, wide turn from east to west. As it dipped in above the clearing it seemed dangerously low, and the sound of its groaning engines made Charlotte think for a moment that it was going to stall and bury itself in the ground. A torch to her left was flashing a morse signal to the roaring, juddering plane, and as her eyes ran up along its beam, Charlotte, alone in the field, her hair whipped against her face, looked up and saw for a second in the black open cave of the bomb bay a kneeling English airman looking down on her.

His silhouette was caught for a moment, lit from behind by a light in the fuselage. Then the plane was climbing as swiftly as its bulk would permit, the engine noise rising in pitch as it completed its turn and pointed north for home.

‘They like to have a look at their clients sometimes. It’s their way of saying hello.’ It was Julien. ‘Come on. Let’s see what they’ve brought us.’

Charlotte followed him back to the wood. She was shaking.

In the clearing the men were transferring the contents of the metal containers into sacks. There were Bren guns, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades; there was also plastic explosive, which the men inspected doubtfully, and a huge number of cheap-looking Sten guns with magazines and loaders.

César let out a cry of delight as his canister disgorged bars of chocolate, butter, tins of food and prime Virginia cigarettes, a packet of which he opened at once and handed round.

‘You’ve got to stop them taking the parachutes,’ said Julien. ‘They’ll try and make them into clothes and anyone can see from the stitching where they’ve come from.’

Eventually they finished burying the stores and covered the place with leaves and loose branches.

‘The horse and cart’ll be here tomorrow night,’ Julien said, ‘but it’s too dangerous to take it all back to Lavaurette with the Germans there. We’ll have to keep it at the farm. Is that all right?’

The farmer he had turned to shrugged as he pulled deeply on his English cigarette. ‘We had a visit from the police two weeks ago when we had two calves and a pregnant sow in the cellar. They didn’t see a thing.’

‘Come on, then.’ The men began to file back through the wood, with the poacher leading, then out on to the narrow track. Many of them stumbled and swore as they went. One of the men passed Charlotte a flask. Although she had already drunk more than ever before in her life she felt the bonds of comradeship required her to accept. Here was service at last in the ill-defined but urgent moral cause that had first sent her south to London; here was the reason she had decided to stay in France. She was not going to appear half-hearted at this late stage.

‘Are you all right?’ Julien asked her at the farm, as the men mounted their bicycles and rode off shakily towards their homes.

‘I think so.’ It was hard to say precisely. She had been frightened by the dangerous proximity of the plane and by the noise it made, then felt tricked and wounded by the vision of the single airman looking down on her. She also felt a powerful bond with these absurd drunken men stumbling about in the darkness, a sense of gratitude to them for having understood what needed to be done. She was one of them, and wanted to be closer.

Her skin felt swollen with this odd mixture of emotion as she followed Julien back into Lavaurette, her bicycle wobbling dangerously as they turned the sharp corner out of the Place de l’Eglise.

‘Will you be all right to get home?’ said Julien, leaning his machine against the wall.

Charlotte nodded.

Julien put his face close to hers; he seemed to be inspecting her in the darkness. She closed her eyes for a moment. She was aware of how strange and sleepy she must appear; it was as though she were anaesthetised by drink, yet beneath the painless surface she was turbulently conscious.

‘Do you want to come in? We could have a nightcap. Or you can sleep here if you’re too tired to go back to the Domaine. I don’t mind the sofa.’

Charlotte nodded and Julien took her arm as they made their way across the hall and up the stairs. He turned on a lamp in the sitting room and handed her a glass. She put it down on the table and opened her arms. Julien embraced her and she rested her head against his shoulder.

‘It’s all right, Dominique, it’s all right.’ He kissed her hair.

She pulled her head back and smiled at him. ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

‘Of course you are. It’s late. It’s almost dawn. And tonight was . . . different.’

‘Yes.’ Charlotte wanted to explain her conflicting passions to Julien, how strong they were, how important, but she was too tired to find the words, and too drunk.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

She had no wish to leave Julien’s apartment; she had been so long alone, so long thrown back on the resources of her own mind and feelings that she wanted to take strength and comfort from someone else.

‘I’d like to stay with you,’ she said.

Julien appeared once more to be earnestly, almost clinically examining her face. ‘Are you sure? You won’t regret it?’

Charlotte smiled. She would not regret anything that brought her closer to the companionship of the men with whom she had spent the evening. They had understood their past and they had made some effort to keep a thread intact, a link that would enable their country to survive because the connection to better days, before the Fall, though tenuous, would be unbroken.

‘And Monsieur Guilbert?’ said Julien. ‘What would he say?’

‘I don’t care.’ She opened her hands in shrugging dismissal. ‘You can kiss me again, Monsieur Levade, if you like.’ She saw in Julien’s eyes the look of furtive schoolboy pleasure she had seen when she first kissed him in Lavaurette, as though he could not quite believe his luck. It made her start to laugh, so she had to pull her mouth away from his.

‘Your face,’ she said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

Charlotte looked at its expression, now agitated and serious. ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘it’s a beautiful face.’

‘Madame Guilbert, you’re a very teasing, wicked woman.’

‘Shall we go into the bedroom?’

Charlotte sat on the end of Julien’s bed; she remembered how she had slept in it the first day she had arrived in Lavaurette with her detective story, her identity fiercely subdued in that of Dominique. Now it would be wonderful to do something spontaneously affectionate, free from the weight of anguish and uncertainty.

‘My husband has a mistress, anyway,’ she said, as she pushed off the ugly shoes. ‘It serves him right.’ She reached up and undid the buttons on the back of her dress; she stood to let it fall to the floor. She was not quite too drunk to calculate that, unless the cycle of her body had played an unprecedented trick, there was no danger of her becoming pregnant.

‘Oh, Dominique,’ said Julien, running his hands down the small of her bare back, then slipping a finger inside the waistband of her new silk underwear. ‘I’ve always wanted to make love to a stranger, someone whose name I don’t even know.’

Charlotte felt him slide away her remaining clothes and tightly shut her eyes, some modest hope persisting that she might thus herself become invisible. Julien pushed her gently back on to the bed and she felt the mattress shake as he tore at his own clothes.

‘Quickly,’ she said, aware that her churning emotions might move into a new pattern that would make her want to stop, or that the serene sense of not caring might desert her.

She felt Julien’s lips kissing the skin of her inner thigh and for a moment thought of what he might be seeing, and wondered whether it was yet light enough in the seepage of the grey winter dawn through the shutters for him, like Pauline Benoit, to be puzzled. She lifted him by the shoulders and felt his body loom over hers as he kissed her mouth.

Between her legs she felt the touch of his hand while he whispered in her ear. ‘Madame Guilbert, you are a remarkable woman. If you were not married I might think myself in love with you.’

‘Please, Octave. Please.’

Charlotte heard her own voice as she begged him to begin, but he kept her waiting, whispering, ‘Dominique, you’re so beautiful,’ while his hand caressed her until she could take no more but reached out and pulled him into her.

She felt Julien clench his body in desperate self-control. He moved slowly back and forth for a few minutes, then briefly stopped.

‘Dominique,’ he breathed, ‘this is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments.’

She pushed against him, reclaimed him, and he began to move more vigorously, then sigh with sad rapture as though he recognised his time was limited. Though she sensed how he tried to hold himself back, Charlotte felt buffeted by the urgency of his desire, too much so to venture off into her own imagining, and so she merely went with him, in a willing indulgence.

At the last moment she did feel a rise of feeling in herself as he groaned out her presumed name for the final time; but what name she called out in return she could not have said, as her mind was full of the picture of Julien being annihilated, as he slumped down gasping on top of her, breaking into tiny dying fragments.