At the time of that trip, I’d been teaching at a high school in Montpellier for seven months. There were three assistants at the Lycée Jean Moulin: Felipe, Dieter and me. Like hundreds of other foreigners we were employed by the French government to help with the teaching of our native tongues. Dieter and I had contracts that ran from September 1980 to the end of the following May, but Felipe had been an assistant for longer than I’d been alive. In the last weeks of the Spanish Civil War, aged seventeen, he’d fled over the Pyrenees to France. Fascists, finding him gone, threw his sister down a well. Felipe could be observed in the staffroom drinking sour machine coffee with other old men. I was told that he had seven children. Someone else said five – the truth could have been one or none. Wanton procreation was expected of the Spanish, entrenched in French opinion as a backward, priest-ridden race.

The lycée put me up in its boarding house for the first few weeks of teaching, while I looked for somewhere to live. In accordance with the instructions I’d received in Sydney, I’d arrived in Montpellier a week into September. French students had snapped up all the cheap furnished places by then. At the tourist office, the clerk in charge of rentals couldn’t believe it: turning up after classes had resumed and expecting to find accommodation! He placed his palms on the counter and leaned forward to assess me, tossing up whether to despise a foreigner or take pity on a fool.

Dieter threw a party soon after we met. He lived in a hushed, Haussmann-style building with a slate roof. There was a lift in an iron cage, and a marble staircase whose lower steps flared. I took the stairs to the second floor, where one of the double doors to an apartment was open. Dieter’s mother was French, and the apartment belonged to a distant cousin. This cousin had married a diplomat, who was presently stationed in Amman. Their entrance hall was furnished with locked, glass-fronted cabinets that held Middle Eastern antiquities: clay tablets, unglazed figurines and small bowls. A girl in tartan dungarees with brassy pigtails was looking them over. The first thing Minna ever said to me was, ‘Pillage, obviously. I bet they got them out in a diplomatic bag.’ Her English voice was quiet and fierce. She said, ‘Have you seen the paintings? Through here.’ In the living room there were the Sex Pistols and tortured gilt chairs. Minna turned her back on three canvases: ‘Imagine having the money to buy Arcimboldos and buying Arcimboldos.’ She lit a cigarette, and I noticed that she bit her nails.