In the end I saw a doctor to arrange an abortion. She was concerned about my pressure. And I didn’t know my blood group, which amazed her. She sent me to a clinic for a blood test. They love them in France, I’m surprised French people have any blood left. At the clinic, I had to take off all my clothes in a room full of other women and put on a hospital gown. Then we all had to file through to a different room where there were barriers to control us and keep us in line like cattle. One by one, each woman passed her arm through an opening in a screen, and an invisible person on the other side drew her blood. When it was my turn I walked past the screen and left.

That night I had a miscarriage. The cramps weren’t much worse than a bad period. I looked down and saw it there in the loo. The baby I’d spent nineteen days imagining was only a few red clots.

There was an address in Bleecker Street, but nothing about what Minna was doing there and not a word of enquiry about me. But she’d enclosed a photo of Daring Audrey. When I dug out that photo the other day, I saw a child’s expectant face. I’m not sure that I’d know her if she came towards me in the street. Gun at the ready, she confronts the world in a wide-skirted dress cinched at the waist. Minna had used black-and-white film but coloured my dress golden. I kept her letter all this time, but just now I dropped it in a bin. Minna always signed her name with a circle over the ‘i’ instead of a dot. I’d asked Monsieur Bisset what that meant. He said that it denoted narcissism, fantasy and underlying anguish.

Sometimes a voice or a gesture makes me think of Minna – I see her pigtails or her whispery orange coat. They pass through my mind in an instant, carried on a strip of ice-blue light. Did Nick tell her about us? Sitting on a grave, he said that he’d filled two suitcases with Minna’s clothes and left them in the street, along with her sewing machine. It wasn’t the striped voice but one that was tired and pitiless. Nick married a short, intelligent, chivalrous, tender girl who dreamed of providing Africans with clean drinking water or saving an endangered rodent, but who settled for a corner office. Nick made her happy in bed and uneasy everywhere else. Those are delusions. I never heard from him again. The one I miss is Minna. She taught me that hot pink is really a neutral. She taught me to show my face.