When it grew dark and the shutters were closed, lamps turned the rooms tender and mysterious. They were set in an enfilade so people walked through them in a straight line – it made casual movement look ceremonial. The ceilings were low, and Nick ducked his head when passing through a door or under the beam that ran across the living room. He had thick brown hair, the kind described as moppy. His books were stacked beside chairs, mostly white Folio paperbacks. He was reading only French writers while he was in France, he told me. I’d borrowed The Women’s Room from the American Library and felt ashamed.

The street door had a decorative iron knocker, a woman’s hand wearing a wedding ring. The door was kept locked, and the secret apartment had no buzzer, so visitors had to stand in the street and shout. Minna told me to whistle ‘L’Internationale’ on my next visit so that she’d know it was me. I didn’t know the tune, so she stood up and so did Nick. Minna was wearing a blue vinyl mini and a shrunken leopard-print top, and Nick hadn’t changed out of the secondhand suit he wore to work. Side by side, they threw back their shoulders and sang:

C’est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous et demain

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain!

Minna’s mind worked in metaphors, spotting hidden connections. At the flea market she pointed to a wastepaper basket with a rim: ‘A perfect summer hat.’ She pounced on a girly maxi dress, blue with yellow sprigs and a ruffle down the front. The next time I saw it, Minna had slit open the ruffle, causing the neckline to plunge and revealing the lime-green shirt she was wearing under the dress. ‘My aim is the uglification of clothes,’ she declared. If I made the mistake of appearing in velvet or paisley, Minna would mime vomiting. ‘The sixties are over! Only someone as pretty as you could get away with dressing like a frump.’ She approved of an oversized, punky jumper with sleeves that hung down over my hands, but said that it would be better if it had holes.

The flick-flicks grew frenzied around Minna. She stirred a special mix of horror and pity in the breasts of French men. They wished to save her, but how? They might have been watching a mountaineer step wilfully off an alp – it was tragic, and there was nothing to be done. Whenever the sight of Minna induced that look of appalled bewilderment, we’d cry, ‘Goal!’, wet a finger and mark a strike on the air.

We were at the flea market one day when the gendarmes swooped. First they rounded up a Roma woman and her two children, all three in dragging skirts. Then they moved on to the North Africans. As usual, I was asked for my papers as I left. Minna wasn’t – she glared at the gendarme who’d stopped me and thrust her passport in his face.