Another very good book, although completely different.
Set just after the end of the 2nd World War, Hilary Wainwright is an ex-British Intelligence officer who was married to a French woman, whose wife and, he thinks child, was caught by the Nazis in Paris in 1944, and disappeared; his wife he is told murdered and the child’s fate unclear.
Approached by a French resistance fighter who claims some knowledge of the situation post-war, he travels to Paris and then an unnamed French provincial town where he is told the child may have been orphaned. In the Catholic orphanage, he is introduced to the child but has no way of knowing whether or not this is his son.
After a succession of meetings, the nuns need him to make a decision in a situation not unusual post-war. Remaining undecided, he is seduced by a French girl and is about to return to Paris with her, mainly for a fuck. But on the morning they plan to depart, he returns to the orphanage and I think takes the child back to England with him. Unclear whether it is the boy or Wainwright (or both) who is/are the little boy lost.
Very good.
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