‘I prefer to work at night. And I like to listen to music while I’m doing it. But Nick has to get up early to write. Anyway, you’ve seen our place. Where would I work?’ Minna sucked her crucifix. She took it out and said, ‘You sound like my mother. She’s always urging me on in that feminist way. I never want to be a mother, do you? Mine’s so predictable. Her family are Catholics. Too posh to wash – that kind. Nazi sympathisers every one, down to the Pomeranians. So of course she had to marry a Jew.’

Throughout this conversation, I was really thinking about Nick. Nick, who was writing a novel. I’d read hundreds of novels, and it had never occurred to me to write one. So many writers were dead or old or far away that they seemed as mythological as fiancés. Now Minna had punched a hole in a brick wall. Nick sat on the other side, one hand plunged in his hair, scrawling in a notebook lit by a lamp. For inspiration, he glanced at the tower of books beside him: all the important modern men were there, Proust, Camus, Robbe-Grillet. That picture flared in my mind again and again. I wasn’t curious about what Nick was writing. It was the act that astounded me, the nonchalant planting of his flag in le centre historique.

There and then, I resolved to write a novel one day. De Beauvoir had ended her first novel, L’Invitée, with a murder, and I’d do the same. My book would be narrated in the first person by a woman who lived in a city where a serial killer was at large. She’d be the kind of woman he liked to murder – young, foreign – and there’d be hints that she’d come to his attention. Suspense would mount, but readers would feel confident about one fundamental point: it was against logic for a first-person narrator to die. It simply could not happen. But those readers had forgotten that the reality of novels was only a fiction – I’d expose it by killing my narrator on the last page. All this arrived in my mind with an animal leap, sure-footed and fierce. I felt elated, certain that it would happen. But my novel was content to wait for now. Time had to pass first, years.

We all got together for dinner at Le Maghreb before the Christmas holidays. Afterwards, I walked home with Minna and Nick. The air was like iced water, and our footsteps rang out in the deserted streets. Montpellier was a small, provincial place that went to bed early. In winter at night, away from the buzz of the cinemas and cafes at L’Oeuf, there was no one much around.

‘Have you noticed that Dieter never leaves more than a franc as a tip? Less, sometimes,’ said Minna, as we walked. ‘How can a German treat poor immigrants that way?’