I pulled over and killed the engine. My fragile good spirits scattered in an instant, replaced by familiar symptoms. Damp palms, dry throat, the familiar spike of pain in my stomach. I took off my cap and leather gloves, ran my fingers through my hair and covered my eyes. Sticky fingers smelling of hair oil and shame, that grief should still come so easily, that after all the talking cures, the treatments and kindness, the kneeling at hard wooden pews at evensong, I still carried within me a cracked heart that refused to heal.

It was then that I first became aware of a disturbance in the air. A kind of restlessness. I looked sharply up through the smeared windscreen, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The road was deserted. No one had passed by on either side for some time. Yet there was a suggestion of movement nonetheless, a shifting of light on the ridges high above. The mountains loomed more menacingly over me and the hillside appeared even closer, those ancient forests of evergreen and the naked, unforgiving branches of trees in winter. What secrets did they contain within their shadows?

My heart skipped a beat. I wound down the window. The silence surged around me. Again, nothing. No telltale footsteps or voices or rumbling wheels in the distance. Only later, when it was over, did it occur to me that the silence was peculiar. I should have been able to hear something. The roar of the furnaces back in Tarascon or the belching chimneys of the factories at my back. The sound of metal on metal or the song of the railway lines snaking up through the Haute Vallée. The rapids on the river. But I was aware only of the silence. Silence, as if I were the only man left alive in the world.

Then I heard it. No, not heard. I sensed it. A whispering, almost like singing.

‘The others have slipped away into darkness.’

I caught my breath.

‘Who’s there?’

I often heard the ghost of George’s voice inside my head, though it was growing fainter with the passing years. But this was different. It was a lighter sound, gentle and exquisite, carried on the cold air. A reverberation, an echo of words once spoken in this place? Or the girl I’d heard singing outside the hotel in Tarascon, her plaintive melody somehow reaching high into the mountains? Or was that too fanciful? Of course there was nobody there, no one at all. How could there be?

I realised my hands were clamped rigidly to the steering wheel. The temperature had fallen and what looked to be snow clouds were approaching from the south. It was bitterly cold inside the car, too. I wound up the window, flexed my fingers until they were in working order and tucked my scarf tightly into the neck of my jumper.

I took refuge from my troubling thoughts in practical things. Leaning over, I studied the map book and tried to work out where, precisely, I was. I’d been heading towards Vicdessos, which was about fifteen miles from Tarascon. My intention had been to turn there and head across country on the back road to Ax-les-Thermes. Two chaps from home were at the resort for a week’s skiing and had invited me to join them for Christmas. I’d neither accepted nor declined the invitation, but now saw some merit in being among friends. I’d been driving around on my own for a few weeks now and the companionship might do me good.

I peered outside. If the map was accurate, it appeared I had missed the turning to Ax-les-Thermes. And if the weather were changing for the worse, it would be lunacy to head higher into the mountains. The sun was covered completely now and the sky was the colour of dirty linen. Far better to rejoin the main road.

I traced the route with my finger. If my calculations were correct, I could continue this way for another mile or two, past the villages of Aliat, Lapège and Capoulet-et-Junac, then I’d find myself back on the road to Vicdessos on the far side of this low range of hills.

Leaving the map book open on the passenger seat, I put my gloves back on and fired the electric starter. The little saloon spluttered back into life and I drove on.

I had gone no more than a mile or so when a flurry of sleet splattered against the windscreen. I turned on the wiper, which only smeared muck and ice over the glass. Winding down my side window, I reached round and tried to clear the worst of it with my handkerchief.

A violent gust of wind hit the Austin head on. I dropped from third to second gear, acutely aware that the tyres would not hold if the sleet turned to ice. A single snowflake, as large as a sixpence, settled upon the bonnet, then another and another. Within seconds, or so it seemed, I was in the centre of a blizzard. The snow was swirling and twisting in the spiralling draught, settling on the roof of the car and deadening the sound inside.

Then I heard what sounded like a rumble of thunder, echoing through the space between the mountains. Was that likely, thunder and snow at one and the same time? Even possible? As I considered it, a second roll reverberated through the valley, making the question obsolete.

I pressed on, inch by inch. The road seemed to be getting narrower. To one side, the great, grey walls of the mountains; to the other, an abrupt chasm, the forested hillside dropping sharply away. Another growl of thunder then a snap of lightning, silhouetting the trees black against an electric sky.

I switched on my headlamps, feeling the tyres struggling to keep a grip on the steep, slippery road, as on we lurched into the spiteful headwind. And always the shriek of the wiper, struggling back and forth, back and forth.

The windscreen had fugged up. My nose itched with the smell of damp wool and leather, of petrol fumes, of the damp carpet beneath my feet. I leaned forward and wiped the inside of the windscreen with my sleeve again. It made no difference.

I knew I had to find shelter, but there were no houses to be seen, no signs of human habitation at all, not even a solitary shepherd’s hut. Just an endless expanse of cold silence.

Another childhood memory seeped into my mind. The old attic nursery, the night lights burnt out. Me crying in the dark, jolted awake by bad dreams and calling out for a mother who never came. Then George, sitting at the end of my bed, opening the curtains to let the silver moon in, saying there was nothing to be afraid of. How nothing could harm me. How we were the Watson boys, invincible and courageous. Nothing could get us so long as we stuck together. And with George by my side, I believed it.

How old must he have been? Eleven, twelve? And how was it that he knew how to comfort a lonely boy who was scared of the dark – neither showing too much sympathy, nor too little – and understood that he should never mention it again.

‘The Watson boys,’ I murmured.

So I talked to myself to keep my spirits up. I was in no actual, physical danger, I said. It was just a matter of holding one’s nerve. The odds against the car being struck by lightning were small. Too many tall trees around. The storm sounded worse than it was, and as for the thunder? A by-product of the unusual weather, no more. There was nothing to be afraid of. Noise could not hurt, noise could not kill. Not as bullets did, not as chlorine gas, not as bombs or bayonets. George had known what he faced every moment of every day. This was nothing to what he, to what all of them, had coped with.

I kept it up, but the comparisons rang hollow in my head. Courage hadn’t saved George in the end, hadn’t saved any of them. If the weather deteriorated further, the road would quickly become impassable. The danger was real, not just a shadow in the dark. The surface was already turning to ice. It would be easy to lose control and plunge over the edge.