Nick was trying to remember how ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ began. He recited, ‘Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, / Entre les pins …’ and then he was stuck. ‘The next bit’s entre les tombes. But there’s a verb before that.’ Screwing up his eyes against the glare, he repeated, ‘Entre les pins, entre les pins …’

‘It’s palpite,’ I said. ‘Entre les pins palpite.’

Nick looked at me. It was a look of pure astonishment. It lasted three seconds – forever. ‘Of course,’ he said and turned back to the view. ‘Well done you.’ The sea flinched, the light went on darting about. It was like the light flashing off the Arab’s knife on that beach in L’Étranger. Who could say whether the Arab had a degree in French and could recite Valéry by heart? What was certain was that Meursault hadn’t expected that knife any more than Nick had expected to find someone like me in possession of le centre historique.

His hand began to straighten and close on his knee, straighten and close. He might have been calculating whether there’d be time for one last time – ducking behind shrubs or on the baking back seat of the car – but more probably he was shooting accusations at Minna. She was there in her tartan dungarees, perched on the roof of a mausoleum, ignoring him. ‘We have work to do,’ she hissed at me, under cover of the cicada static. ‘Girls against the world, remember?’ What Minna kept forgetting was that only one of us was the most beautiful colour. We could Reclaim the Night, marching side by side, and that counted a lot, but could it ever count enough? As for Nick, he was welcome to le centre historique – it was cold and creepy and no place for someone like me. But I’d go on ransacking it: for Cranach’s paintings and L’Invitée and Valéry’s poems and the full-noon trill. Nothing would stop me, not a gun or a look. I was Bold, Sexy, Modern and Intelligent. History would have to sprint to keep up with me.

In the Paris train that night there were only four of us in the compartment. A woman and her small daughter stretched out on one of the long vinyl seats, and an old man and I made the best of the other. I slept well in the swaying dark. When I woke we were forty minutes out of Paris. The man had gone, leaving a copy of Midi Libre. The woman was slumped near the window, dozing. Her daughter was asleep too, her head in her mother’s lap.