‘Isn’t the problem the buying, not the love? Marxists are always going to be anti any system that keeps people buying new stuff.’

‘How much new stuff have you seen me buy? You sound just like Nick,’ said Minna. ‘He’s always saying fashion is capitalism. But if I got into the industry, I’d have only two small collections a year. I’d carry over a couple of pieces from one collection to another, and others from one year to the next. They’d be inventive, practical clothes. Affordable, also – but in any case a smart woman would be able to put similar outfits together from stuff she’s already got. Or from flea markets and Oxfam. I’d travel round giving talks on exactly that.’

I couldn’t see what any of it had to do with John Berger. ‘Has he started designing clothes? I thought he was an art historian. I only know him from Ways of Seeing.’

‘That’s what this is about: a way of seeing. Seeing that revolutions are run by men and that what they don’t take into account is pleasure. Women’s pleasure. You can’t overthrow capitalism if you ignore that. That’s where the whole Mao suit thing went wrong. There should have been variations in style, lots of different colours, a range of prints. I’d love to go to China,’ said Minna wistfully. ‘I’d buy all the Mao suits I could get and remodel them. It’s what I plan to do – buy up other people’s overstock at the end of a season and uglify it.’

She licked the tip of her finger and dotted it over her plate to pick up flakes of pastry. ‘I wish Nick could have made this trip,’ she said. I could see that she wasn’t being rude, wasn’t wishing me away. The argument she wanted to lay before John Berger was really intended for Nick – it wasn’t an argument in fact but a quest for approval.

We still had to buy our tickets for the ferry to Sardinia. Enunciating clearly, Minna asked the waiter, ‘Shipping office?’ He replied in Italian. Then he came around the bar, touched Minna’s elbow and led us to the door to point the way. As we headed off, Minna said, ‘The local accent’s impossible – I speak Florentine Italian, it’s very pure.’

The shipping office wasn’t open, but a queue had already formed. We’d intended to leave our packs at the station, but the Bologna bombing the previous year had seen locker service discontinued everywhere. So we were stuck with our packs for the day.

The office opened at last, and after half an hour the queue had barely advanced. Minna told me what we were going to do. We began to sing. We sang ‘L’Internationale’. A man abandoned his position near the head of the queue and walked down it singing, ‘C’est la lutte finale …’ with us. He picked up our packs and ushered us before him to the counter, while everyone in the queue applauded.