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hadn’t learnt the art of disguising your body language. I felt sorry for you. Perhaps, deep down, I knew that if they searched you and then arrested you, we would have risked losing one of our finest musicians. I knew, instinctively somehow, that you deserved a second chance. So, it was simple, I showed the guards my Drancy card that stated my job and told them you were with me.’
    ‘As simple as that?’
    Now, finally, she looked at me. ‘As simple as that. I told them you were a trainee, and again, when they caught you in the street.’
    ‘A trainee ? In that place?’
    ‘It saved you.’
    ‘I was only a messenger.’
    ‘Maybe, but I wasn’t to know that. Still, they would have asked you for names, and I’m sure you know what that would have meant.’
    ‘Yes.’ I thought of the boy who did my job before me. Deported to a work camp somewhere in Germany. He never came back. Worked to death at the age of twenty-one.
    ‘Remembering how you were, I don’t think you would have withstood it very well.’
    ‘You’re right. I doubt I would today.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘What happened after the war? What did you do?’
    ‘It wasn’t difficult.’ She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. ‘There was so much confusion. Accusations and claims and counter-claims, collaborators who pretended to have been in the resistance. I put on some old clothes, made myself look like a peasant woman, and made my way to Saint-Romain, and stayed with my friend there. We became close. She vouched for me and together we invented a new history for myself.’
    ‘And your papers?’
    ‘I told them they’d all been destroyed in the war.’
    ‘Perfectly feasible, I suppose.’
    ‘Oh yes. Lots of people did it.’
    ‘So how were you found out?’
    She sighed at the regrettable memory. ‘I was recognised. I’ve been living in Paris a number of years now. I knew there was always the risk and sure enough, one day, I was shopping in a big department store in the centre of town when someone, a horrible little man, a Jew, of course, came up to me and said “Hello, Madame d'Urville”, that was my name then, not that I was married. Never have been. Like you on the train, I was unable to hide my reaction. I should have been on my guard. I tried to back away but I knew there was no escape. He yelled the place down. The store manager came down and forcibly took me to his office and from there he called the police. The silly thing is, had I’d been arrested at the time, after the war, I would have been one of many. But now, by myself, I’m exposed. But you know, I am no more than a scapegoat for a country still too ashamed of its wartime guilt to look at itself in the mirror.’
    ‘Is that how you see it?’
    ‘Of course. Yes, we are now a country full of resisters but we all know it’s not true. Especially at the beginning – had it been put to the vote, ninety per cent of us would have voted for the collaborationist government. At least I’m being honest. I worked for them; I regret it, of course, but I don’t see why I should play the part of the sacrificial lamb.’ I tried not to laugh – a scapegoat and a sacrificial lamb. I wondered how many other farmyard animals she could conjure up. 
    ‘And I saved you. Can I be that bad?’
    ‘I don’t know, Hilda, you tell me. What happened in that place?’
    ‘In Drancy?’ She looked away, scanning the café with its empty chairs and unoccupied tables. Behind the counter, the owner polished a glass, a cigarette stuck to his lip. ‘We had to maintain discipline. It was war.’
    ‘Discipline?’
    ‘It was not a holiday camp.’
    ‘But what do you mean – discipline?’
    ‘So many questions. Am I on trial already?’
    ‘No, Hilda, but you soon will be.’

Paris, September 1968
     
    It’d been a difficult summer. Rehearsals for the Berlioz symphony were arduous and took every ounce of my energy. I would return home at night exhausted and bad-tempered, hoping for some sympathy