He spoke with the deliberate patience of a Frenchman called on to demonstrate logic to a foreigner. ‘In that case, mademoiselle, don’t take showers.’

On my way home I passed a salon de thé. Someone rapped on the window – I noticed that one of Minna’s pigtails was tied with a sock. I sat at her table, and we began at once, as if we’d planned it, to tell each other about our lives. Minna’s father was a Jew from Hamburg. His father had refused to leave Germany, even after Kristallnacht. He maintained that Hitler looked exactly like a slow-witted stablehand his parents had employed and could pose no credible threat. So Minna’s grandmother arranged visas to Britain for herself and her children, and Minna’s grandfather suffocated in a cattle car on his way to a camp.

On learning that my mother’s mother was Armenian, Minna said, ‘So we both have genocide in our history.’ I didn’t say that my Armenian ancestors had left Turkey well before 1915, because what struck me wasn’t ‘genocide’ but ‘history’. If Minna had asked why my mother’s people left their homeland and ended up in Asia, I’d have answered in terms of wishes and luck. In the same way, I didn’t think of the forces that took my family to Australia as history or even politics but only as our lives. That might have been because none of us had died in those upheavals, but more probably because I hadn’t read about them in novels, unlike the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. It was the beginning for me of thinking about why some people had history and other people had lives.

Another thing I learned that day was that months earlier, in London, Minna had fractured her arm. She’d been thinking of taking a year off art school to live with Nick in France, and the accident decided her. They’d driven over at the beginning of June and meandered south. Minna said, ‘It was the time of les fruits rouges.’ She didn’t speak much French but would suddenly pull out a phrase like les fruits rouges. ‘We lived on strawberries, raspberries, cherries. The strawberries were so big, we took turns taking bites.’ The life of couples – loneliness ran into every cranny as if I’d swallowed black milk. Minna’s eyes were as small as almonds, and the colour of almonds as well. They inspected me, and her soft, frightening voice asked, ‘Why are you sad?’ I wasn’t going to admit to feeling lonely, so I told her about my apartment instead.

‘Your landlord is a peasant,’ said Minna. ‘Peasants are rapacious – it’s a universal truth. Marx had no time for them.’ She said that French law required the provision of heating in rental properties – a revelation to me, accustomed to the rubbishy tenancy arrangements of a garbage-bin country. When she heard that I paid my rent in cash, Minna said, ‘Lili, before the end of today you’re going to ring that piece of shit. Tell him he’s guilty of tax evasion for a start. Tell him he’s breaking multiple laws, and that you intend to report him to the authorities. Say “the authorities”. Nothing impresses the French like authority – think what excellent collaborators they made.’