None of this struck me as very important. My thoughts were busy with a letter. Signed ‘Lucio’, it had been waiting in my pigeonhole at the lycée one morning. In patched-together English, Lucio reminded me that we’d played scopa on a ferry. He had ‘a grand hope’ for socialism, he wrote, and he was thinking of coming to France for the presidential elections in May. He asked if I’d like to see him if he did.

‘Do you think he’s a serial killer?’ I asked Minna.

‘He’s going to a lot of trouble about it if he is. He could’ve just strangled you on the ferry and shoved you overboard. But how did he know where to write?’

‘Apparently we all swapped addresses.’

‘You know he wants to fuck you. I suppose he could kill you afterwards. Or first, if that’s his thing. Just remember that I won’t be around when you scream.’

The final round of voting in the elections was to take place on the three-day weekend that marked the Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War. Nick and Minna planned to spend it in Lyon, where a friend of theirs lived.

The poster for Mitterrand’s Socialist Party was everywhere at the time: a ham-pink fist fastened around a red rose. Lucio was to arrive on a Friday, the first day of the long weekend. On my way to meet him, I accepted a scentless, long-stemmed rose from a campaigner, who was handing them out on the steps of the station. I’d sent Lucio a postcard that consisted of a sentence, and he’d sent me one with the time of his train. When it pulled in, I didn’t know which of the Italians I’d see. The tall one or the one with glasses or the shy one? I realised that the rose was a stupid encumbrance. Would Lucio recognise a socialist emblem? What if he mistook it for romance? That would be far more embarrassing than if I’d turned up to meet him naked. Dodging travellers, I rushed about searching for a bin. In the end I dropped the rose on a seat. As the platform cleared, a boy with a knapsack and black hair remained by a vending machine – Lucio was the shy one. But in my bed he wasn’t shy at all. Over the three days we spent together, I learned quite a few Italian words.

The cinematheque held its last screening before the summer break, Saura’s Peppermint Frappé. The freshly socialist streets were dark when the film ended, but the sky was a beautiful, spooky greenish-blue. As I walked home, I pretended that Lucio was waiting in my apartment. More than a week had passed since he went away forever, but my small, high breasts still grew warm as I thought of him. On the morning of the elections he’d bought me a bunch of tulips. They’d wilted since and been thrown away but remained open and lush in memory.