I found my washbag and left the compartment. When I came back, the child was sitting up. From her oversized front teeth I guessed her to be about seven. She saw me looking at her, pushed both hands into her hair and lifted it – a woman’s gesture. Beside her, her mother stirred and yawned. I reached for the abandoned newspaper and turned it over. The Most Beautiful Woman in France smiled out below a headline: Crime atroce à Clarensac. A journalist informed me that Marianne Sagara’s mutilated body had been found on wasteland near a village forty kilometres from Montpellier. She’d been missing for over a week. The police had a suspect in custody, and further developments were expected.

I learned that Marianne Sagara’s family had immigrated to France from Mali. She was twenty-four and she had a fiancé, a soldier. I might have those details wrong. While I was reading, all I could see was an intersection. A sign there indicated the road to Clarensac, and a white van was hesitating at the lights. Now and then I wonder if the child with the heavy black hair ever asks her mother, ‘Do you remember that girl on the train? The one who looked as if she’d lost something vital?’ But in those days I believed that the past could be left behind like a country. I believed that this plumy morning was the start of a new life. The first slate-roofed apartment blocks had appeared beside the track. The train was carrying me forward, everything was changing, sapphire into pearl.

A letter came to find me in Oxford that winter. It had gone to Sydney, and my mother had sent it on across the world. Minna was living in New York. She’d spent the summer in Greece, teaming up with a bunch of Americans she’d met on an island. They rented a white house with a mulberry tree. A storm blew up when Minna was on a ferry and she was unspeakably seasick. The ferry capsized, and she’d thought she was going to die. A fishing boat rescued her. A ribbon of skin got torn off her shin in the process. The Greeks had fought fascism with unsurpassed courage. They were also pointlessly cruel to animals. If she’d had a gun, Minna would have gone around shooting all the chained and beaten dogs. The icons made her want to paint. A dessert called bougatsa made her believe in heaven. There were many ruled, yellow pages to her letter but that was mostly the kind of thing they said.

Then she wrote: