They met on his return, in the hospital in Oran. Marie had a lump on her left arm and David Amaral was the doctor. The lump was benign.

She was a nineteen-year-old pied noir, studying to be a teacher. At weekends she read Shakespeare and Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. To earn her way through teacher training, she worked for a dressmaker in the Saint-Pierre district. She rarely saw her parents. Her father had a citrus farm south of the city and a temper like the levante which blew lemons through the windows. He would die in his bed, betrayed by his only daughter, and with bitterness in his heart when he considered the fate of Algeria.

David argued with him on the one occasion they met.

“What do you think of the situation?” demanded Marie’s father. There had been an FLN attack on a neighbour’s farm. A baby’s slashed body had been replaced in her mother’s womb and the mother’s ventricles stuffed with bottles from the dressing table.

David looked awkward. In the days before the Evian agreement it was possible to be twenty-five and not interested in politics.

“I don’t know, monsieur,” he said.

“You don’t know!” Marie’s father stood up. He walked to where David sat and leaning over him he filled the young man’s glass with vinegary red wine. David drank nervously.

“You know what the Arabs do to those who drink alcohol?” Her father’s voice was cruel now. “Do you?” He bent his face until his cheeks touched David’s. He placed the bottle on the table and opened his hand. Very slowly he wiped a palm over his mouth. “They cut off their lips.”

“Papa!”

“Louis, I think . . . ” said Marie’s mother.

He straightened. “Now,” he said. “I ask you again. What do you think of the situation?”

He told Marie’s father he was not dedicated to the preservation of Algerie Française. He said that, for him, the problem of the white man in Algeria began with his arrival.

“I’m going to bed,” said Marie’s father, whose family had farmed here since 1883. Silence replaced him in the room. Marie’s mother had followed in his wake, and they heard her quick steps upstairs and the father’s voice bellowing “bloody Jew.”

Marie stood up, but David said, “No, Marie. No. It’s not our business.”

She came over to where he sat and stood over him, stroking his black hair away from his eyes. “You know,” she said, “I’ve never met a Frenchman.” Oran was very much a Spanish city. The only French she knew were pieds noirs like herself.

“One day I’ll take you to Paris,” he promised.

The young couple left in the morning. They were heading for the sea, in a cart drawn by two bays, in the swaying back of which Marie remembered a carpet-spread with food and drink, and, balanced on a large cream cushion so the needle would not slip, a phonograph that played “The Horn Sounds at Midnight” as David held her in his arms, promising when they were married he would lose his head between her breasts and listen to the gunfire in her heart.