‘Your identity card.’

It was not in my pocket. I had been so preoccupied with Aurélien’s words that I had left it on the hall table at the hotel.

‘I have forgotten it.’

‘It is an offence to leave your home without your identity card.’

‘It is just there.’ I pointed at the hotel. ‘If you walk over with me, I can get it –’

‘I’m not going anywhere. What is your business?’

‘I was just … going to the boulangerie.’

He peered at my empty basket. ‘To buy invisible bread?’

‘I changed my mind.’

‘You must be eating well at the hotel, these days. Everybody else is keen to get their rations.’

‘I eat no better than anyone else.’

‘Empty your pockets.’

‘What?’

He jabbed towards me with his rifle. ‘Empty your pockets. And remove some of those layers so I can see what you are carrying.’

It was minus one in the daylight. The icy wind numbed every inch of exposed skin. I put down my pannier and slowly shed the first of my shawls. ‘Drop it. On the ground,’ he said. ‘And the next one.’

I glanced around me. Across the square the customers in Le Coq Rouge would be watching. I slowly shed my second shawl, and then my heavy coat. I felt the blank windows of the square watching me.

‘Empty the pockets.’ He jabbed at my coat with his bayonet, so that it rubbed against the ice and mud. ‘Turn them inside out.’

I bent down and put my hands into the pockets. I was shivering now, and my fingers, which were mauve, refused to obey me. In several attempts, I pulled from my jacket my ration book, two five-franc notes and a scrap of paper.

He snatched at it. ‘What is this?’

‘Nothing of importance, Officer. Just … just a gift from my husband. Please let me have it.’

I heard the panic in my voice, and even as I said the words, I knew it had been a mistake. He opened Édouard’s little sketch of us; he the bear in his uniform, me serious in my starched blue dress. ‘This is confiscated,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You are not entitled to carry likenesses of French Army uniform. I will dispose of it.’

‘But …’ I was incredulous. ‘It’s just a silly sketch of a bear.’

‘A bear in French uniform. It could be a code.’

‘But – but it’s just a joke … a trifle between me and my husband. Please do not destroy it.’ I reached out my hand but he batted it away. ‘Please – I have so little to remind me …’ As I stood, shivering, he looked me in the eye and tore it in two. Then he tore the two pieces into shreds, watching my face as they fell like confetti on to the wet ground.

‘Next time remember your papers, whore,’ he said, and walked off to join his comrades.

Hélène met me as I walked through the door, clutching my freezing, sodden shawls to me. I felt the eyes of the customers as I pushed my way inside, but I had nothing to say to them. I walked through the bar and back into the little hallway, struggling with frozen hands to hang my shawls on the wooden pegs.

‘What happened?’ My sister was behind me.

I was so upset I could barely speak. ‘The officer who grabbed you that time. He destroyed Édouard’s sketch. He ripped it into pieces, to get revenge on us after the Kommandant hit him. And there is no bread because Monsieur Armand apparently also thinks I am a whore.’ My face was numb and I could barely make myself understood, but I was livid and my voice carried.

‘Ssh!’

‘Why? Why should I be quiet? What have I done wrong? This place is alive with people hissing and whispering and nobody tells the truth.’ I shook with rage and despair.

Hélène closed the bar door and hauled me up the stairs to the empty bedrooms, one of the few places we might not be heard.

‘Calm down and talk to me. What happened?’

I told her then. I told her what Aurélien had said, and how the ladies in the boulangerie had spoken to me and about Monsieur Armand and his bread, which we could not now risk eating. Hélène listened to all of it, placing her arms around me, resting her head against mine, and making sounds of sympathy as I talked. Until: ‘You danced with him?’

I wiped my eyes.

‘Well, yes.’

‘You danced with Herr Kommandant?’

‘Don’t you look at me like that. You know what I was doing that night. You know I would have done anything to keep the Germans away from le réveillon. Keeping him here meant that you all enjoyed a proper feast. You told me it was the best day you’d had since Jean-Michel left.’

She looked at me.

‘Well, didn’t you say that? Didn’t you use those exact words?’

Still she said nothing.

‘What? Are you going to call me a whore too?’

Hélène looked at her feet. Finally she said, ‘I would not have danced with a German, Sophie.’

I let the significance of her words sink in. Then I stood and, without a word, I went back down the stairs. I heard her calling my name, and noted, somewhere deep in a dark place within me, that it came just a little too late.

Hélène and I worked around each other in silence that evening. We communicated as little as possible, speaking only to confirm that, yes, the pie would be ready for seven thirty and, yes, the wine was uncorked, and that indeed there were four fewer bottles than the previous week. Aurélien stayed upstairs with the babies. Only Mimi came down and hugged me. I hugged her back fiercely, breathing in her sweet, childlike smell, feeling her soft skin against my own. ‘I love you, little Mi,’ I whispered.