Althusser was in the news again. He’d confessed at once to strangling Rytmann, saying that he’d done it in a hallucinatory state. Three psychiatrists argued that he shouldn’t be charged with murder and have to undergo a public trial. He had a long history of mental illness, so the court committed him to a psychiatric hospital. It was a humane decision, Nick and I agreed, and of course the hospital was a punishment. At the same time, we both felt obscurely that Althusser had got away with murder. ‘You have to wonder,’ said Nick, ‘what would’ve happened if he wasn’t famous.’

‘Or if he’d strangled a man.’

Whenever I thought of Hélène Rytmann she was accompanied by another woman: Felipe’s sister, who didn’t have a name. I saw her falling into the well, down into endless dark with her skirt over her head.

Nick told me that he’d finished L’Invitée. ‘The ending struck me as contrived. The murder – I don’t buy it at all, do you?’

‘Women are murdered all the time. Hélène Rytmann?’

‘They’re not murdered by women like Françoise. Everything up to that point, the friendships, the tensions, all that’s fine.’ Nick grabbed an overhanging branch and swung himself along the path. His tan had faded, and the inside of his arm was a tender, salty white – I felt a rush of compassion for that strip of helpless flesh. ‘Here’s the problem,’ he went on. ‘You get the detailed build-up of a world and then you get a murder. You can’t put realism and melodrama together. It doesn’t work.’

Minna had caught up with us, rubbing a spike of rosemary between her palms. She said, ‘Gaston, you are simply irresistible when you stoop to groom the feeble female mind. For myself, I have never felt the need to look beyond A Catholic Lady’s Guide to Literature. A slim volume, elegantly bound in the skin of a heathen.’

But I didn’t want to lighten up. ‘De Beauvoir herself said the ending was a mess,’ I told Nick. ‘But she also said she felt compelled to end with that murder. She couldn’t say what she wanted to say any other way.’

‘Look, it’s just a matter of taste,’ said Nick. ‘I don’t think de Beauvoir’s anywhere near as good as Sartre, that’s all. Nausea – that’s a really brilliant novel.’

There was a quality to conversations I had when I was young that resists capture – call it shimmer, call it spring. All it leaves in memory is a flat-footed trace. By contrast, images have kept their clear formations. The Minna of that Sunday is vivid to me. She’s wearing a football shirt as a dress, teamed with lace tights and Converse high tops. The chaos and theatre of her style was a form of melodrama, I decided that day. Melodrama allowed people to express something unacceptable, and by ‘people’ I meant ‘women’. I wondered what Minna might be trying to say. I wondered what had driven de Beauvoir to murder and who or what she’d actually wanted to kill – Sartre or really brilliant novels or always having to make an effort with her shoes?