We picnicked on a rocky ledge cushioned by tiny, creeping pink flowers. ‘This guy on the radio the other day was talking about 1980 being catastrophic for French intellectual life,’ I said, heaping a hardboiled egg with unctuous mayonnaise. ‘Barthes was killed in an accident, Althusser was arrested, Lacan’s Freudian school collapsed. He didn’t mention that it wasn’t a great year for Rytmann either.’
‘The French believe that a menstruating woman can’t make mayonnaise,’ said Minna. ‘And they still guillotine people, don’t forget.’
‘Ma belle Clothilde, have I told you about the time my favourite uncle, the Director of Prisons, took me to see an execution? It was my eighth birthday, so I was allowed to press the button that released the blade. A sublime experience – it remains the happiest day of my childhood, surpassing even the afternoon when I whipped the maids.’
The sky was a blatant, Australian blue – it cared nothing for us. Nick started singing ‘Some Velvet Morning’. Nick could really sing – have I said that? Minna leaned back on her elbows. She said that Christmas had brought home how much she missed London and her London friends. She went on and on: she missed art school, missed going out drinking in Soho, missed that whole world. London calling. It made my heart trip.
Then she said, ‘It made me really determined to get on with work this year. I’ve got a new project, and it stars you, Lili, because you inspired it. You’re going to be my Mam’zelle X.’ ‘Mam’zelle X’ was a story in one of those illustrated weekly papers for girls that had flourished in the 1950s: Girls’ Crystal, perhaps, or School Friend. A neighbour at home had every back issue, and I’d read them all growing up. Mam’zelle X was the Resistance codename of a Parisian nightclub singer called Avril Clair. I’d described her adventures to Minna on one of our languid afternoons. ‘She was beautiful and talented, and she wore slinky gowns. SS officers – they always had a monocle – couldn’t resist her allure. She put up with their advances and drank their champagne. They thought she was harmless, so they talked about military strategy and their secret plans for new weapons in front of her.’
Afterwards, with a trench coat slipped over her gown, Mam’zelle X would pass on the intelligence she’d gathered to the Resistance. Sometimes she sheltered an English fighter pilot who’d been shot down and helped him make his way home to London. Or she’d come to the rescue of a French résistant, distracting his German guards so that he could escape. People spat at her in the street, taking her for a collaboratrice – knowing the truth, she bore their insults with dignity. ‘I really think,’ I’d said to Minna, ‘that Mam’zelle X was the reason I first took an interest in French.’