Free Children of War by Martin Walker

stretched behind the small château. ‘The harvest must be in.’
    ‘I’ve been invited to the
vendange
supper but Julien hasn’t told me yet when it is,’ she said. Like Bruno and half of St Denis, Fabiola was a shareholder in the town’s vineyard.
    ‘They can never fix a date because they never know in advance when they’ll be picking. And the pickers will be moving on to another vineyard tonight. I imagine it will be at the weekend, Saturday or Sunday evening, when the pickers can come back to enjoy it.’
    Bruno knew he would be involved in the cooking, which would mean filling and lighting the firepit the previous night. Four big
sangliers
provided by the town’s hunting club were already waiting in the giant freezer of the town’s retirement home. They’d go onto the spits for roasting soon after dawn. He made a mental note to check with Julien, who ran the vineyard, about the arrangements. He hoped the event wouldn’t clash with Sami’s return. That reminded him of something.
    ‘How much do you know about psychology?’ he asked Fabiola.
    She turned to look at him in surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’ She picked up the reins as if eager to ride.
    ‘It’s about an autistic young man from St Denis called Sami, a nephew of Momu,’ he said, and explained the background.
    ‘I did some at medical school but it’s not really my field,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Let’s ride.’
    She kicked her heels into Victoria’s flanks and started off along the ridge, a trot that became a canter and then a gentle gallop, as fast as Fabiola’s aging mare could handle. They stopped close to the end of the ridge, where the woods began to creep onto the high ground and the slope down to the riverfell steeply away. From here, the town of St Denis nestled in the glow of the evening sun, half gold and half red as it sank through the scattered clouds to the horizon. Bruno had never known better sunsets than those he saw from this point. They made him think of the lowlands stretching to the estuary of the River Gironde and the long thin strip of the Médoc peninsula that produced the great wines of Margaux and Pauillac, of St Julien and Sainte Estèphe. He wondered whether they would someday sink beneath the waves of a rising sea, taking with them part of the soul of France.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
    ‘About wine,’ he replied.
    ‘As your doctor, I sometimes wonder whether I should warn you not to drink too much.’
    ‘You aren’t my doctor,’ he replied. Rather than mix friendship with medicine, Bruno usually consulted an elderly doctor in the next village whose brother produced excellent wines near St Foy la Grande, just over the border from the Bordeaux
appellation
, and who accordingly counselled his patients that a glass of good Bergerac
rouge
before retiring would help almost any ailment. In more difficult cases, a glass of the same wine on waking might also be recommended. On the infrequent occasions when Bruno went to see his doctor, he more often left with a bottle of the family’s Château Puy-Servain than with a prescription.
    Before they turned off onto the bridle trail through the woods that would take them to Pamela’s house, Bruno looked back to the east. The twilight was stealing over ridge after ridge as the land rose to the Massif Central, the high plateau of dead volcanoes that lay at the heart of France and was the sourcefor most of its rivers. Other than the large town of Brive, there were no cities in that direction until Lyon, more than three hundred kilometres away. And Toulouse was nearly as far to the south, with only Cahors along the way. Doing the sums in his head, Bruno reckoned there were close to a hundred thousand square kilometres in those sparsely populated uplands where the Jewish children of wartime had found sanctuary. Little wonder that many of them had been able to stay hidden.
    ‘I’m on call tonight, so I’ve been invited to eat pizza with the
pompiers
in the