The summer before Montpellier I got pregnant. We were working in a hotel in Toulon, Nick was a waiter and I was helping in the kitchen. In the afternoon, between shifts, we’d lie in our attic room and argue. Worse was when there was silence that built up like the heat. It was too hot for clothes. We kept the shutters closed, but I remember bars of light and shade across our bodies as if there were slatted blinds at the window. It must have been a dream. It was August, and I felt faint a lot of the time. One day I was given a heap of mignonette lettuces to wash and prepare for lunch. I tore off all the dark edges and threw them away – I thought they were rotten, although I’d eaten them in salads often enough. Charlotte Perriand said that in every important decision, only one option represents life. Nick said that she was right. He said that we should choose our lives, not throw them away on a mistake.

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.