Marianne and I had laughed and cried our way through our childhood together, and when the sunlight flickered through the magical glass creature I was holding, turning it into a rainbow in my hand, I had to ask myself why on earth I’d left in the first place.

‘The Americans?’ I asked again. ‘Where are they?’

Marianne looped her arm through mine. ‘They travel in gaggles,’ she laughed. ‘Like geese.’

*

They are different. American men. I sat in Gasparin’s Bar and observed them the way I would a sea lion in my living room and listened to the strange noises they made. There was a casualness to the way they sat and stood, an expansiveness that was in sharp contrast to the Frenchmen hunched over their Gauloises, nursing their glasses of wine.

American airmen spread their legs and puffed out their chests. They laughed as if it were a competition and drifted from one crowded table to another, slapping shoulders, always touching one another the way children do. Using up our French air as if they owned it. Yet there was something about these healthy young men from the wide-open spaces of the prairies, something guileless, yet beguiling. Their smiles made me smile. As I sat at a table with Marianne watching the airmen in their shirtsleeves drinking their beer and smoking their Lucky Strikes or dealing a hand of cards, I tried to work out why they seemed so much freer. Easier in their skins. Happier to be alive. The French locals appeared so serious, so eager to discuss and dispute with solemn faces.

Is that what I looked like? As if the war had drained all the fun out of me? Out of France?

Maybe so.

A street-player was squeezing out a shaky rendition of ‘La Vie en Rose’ on his accordion while his bright-eyed little gosse dodged between tables, rattling a tin to collect a few francs. I saw more than one of the men in uniform toss in a handful of coins. Americans were generous, it seemed, or perhaps just liked kids. Either way, it was nice to see.

‘So this is where they come to hang out in town,’ I said to Marianne after we had ordered our wine. It was the kind of bar I liked, no frills or fancy flounces. It hadn’t yet thought of trying to be modern. Just comfortable rough-plastered walls, the whitewash of the ceiling tinged amber by decades of nicotine, round scrubbed pine tables, and rows of dusty wine bottles lined up behind the counter that any bar in Marseille would envy. It was no wonder the Americans congregated here.

‘Is there ever any trouble with the locals?’ I asked.