Montpellier had no industry, Minna said, so North African men ended up working in construction or building roads. Many were harkis, Algerians who’d served as auxiliaries in the French army during the fight for independence. Afterwards they’d fled Algeria to avoid reprisals, but France had no use for them now. A reunification program, set up after protracted delays, had finally made it possible for their families to join them, but its implementation was slow. I had an honours degree in French, but that was the kind of thing Minna knew. Once, looking out at the city from the Promenade du Peyrou, she drew my attention to a forbidding set of buildings with small, barred windows. It was the maison d’arrêt, where prisoners were held on remand, and was known to locals as Le Château.

My degree had included a compulsory course in French history, I told Minna. ‘It was called Civilisation. Civilisation began with the Sun King and ended with May ’68. The Algerian war didn’t come into it. Everything we needed to know about Algeria could be found in Camus.’

We paused in front of a patisserie to scrutinise its display. Minna put out a hand and pushed up my fringe. Frowning at my reflection in the window, she asked, ‘Why are you afraid of showing your face?’ Her shaggy green jacket looked opulent, blurred into glory by the glass.

Sometimes Nick and Minna became a French couple, Gaston and Clothilde. Gaston, the director of his family’s bank, found it disturbing to associate with anyone whose family assets didn’t include a bank. The deaths of only three people stood between Gaston and a château with a vineyard and a torture chamber. Clothilde’s hobbies were attending Mass and pro-life demonstrations. Their daughter, Marie-France, expelled from her finishing school, had taken the skills honed on mutilating small animals to a splinter group of Basque separatists. ‘It is quite usual for young girls to go through a terrorist phase,’ explained Clothilde. ‘I myself remember going out in public without my pearls at that age. You see, I’d recently met Gaston. He was unbelievably handsome in his uniform. Fresh from the colonies, there was such a fragrance of Indochinese blood around him – I quite lost my head.’

‘Never will I forget my first sight of you, chérie. You were as exquisite as my horse.’

Once a week, the three of us would have dinner in a crêperie or treat ourselves to couscous at a Moroccan restaurant called Le Maghreb. Deb usually joined us, and Dieter as well. Dieter had wide eyes and glossy chestnut hair curling above a pure, high brow – he looked like a startled angel. Minna told him, ‘You belong in the lower left corner of a painting, playing a lute.’ She tilted the carafe of wine over his glass and poured too much, creating an overflow. Nick, mopping up the spill, said, ‘It’s always like this. You should see what happens when she runs a bath.’