Two months later he proposed in the garden of the Hotel Saint-Sulpice. There were names on the trees in Latin and French and in the branches a blackbird. Once in their conversation they heard a different bird. David turned and there behind their bench stood Hacine, a poet he had known at university. Hacine was drinking rosé from a bottle, and whistling. “I can do warblers, starlings and sparrows,” and he threw back his head. The wine burst in tiny bubbles on his tongue. “And cuckoos, of course.”

David proposed after a conversation about the healing qualities of herbs and the protection certain herbs were believed to offer against thunderbolts and witchcraft. “Mimosa bark for diarrhoea. Persicaria for mouth ulcers. Chicory for . . . ”

Marie never learned. She could tell David was not concentrating on what he said. Their heads were so close she could smell his skin. He leaped back crying, “My God, what am I talking about?”

(Very occasionally through the Abyla dust, David’s odour would cross the square to her, unaccountably erotic and smelling of chicory.)

They spent part of their honeymoon in the Aurés, part of it beside the sea. He could not yet afford Paris. That city could wait. On the sea they rented a villa at Tipala, near the Roman ruins. In the afternoons they slept on a bed of blue saxifrage, his head between her breasts.

They had been married for six months when David was murdered by the OAS.

He was killed a few days after Evian. The treaty had enraged the pieds noirs. Attacks. Reprisals. That was Oran in the weeks of March and April. But his murder was an accident. She returned home late, about nine in the evening. She had been working in her shop, on a dress for the Mayor’s sister. There were no trams. A bomb had exploded in the baths. OAS soldiers had fired on Arabs who ran into the streets in their towels. “There’ll be a rat hunt tonight,” warned a young man in the tram queue. She waited half an hour, then decided to walk home. The night was filled with car horns and people beating pan lids, shouting “Al-gé-rie Française! Al-gé-rie Française!” The ratissage had begun.

Their house was in Mers-El-Kebir, four blocks from the sea. She opened the gate, climbed the steps, unlocked the door and walked into the sitting room. She did not turn on the lights. The curtains were open. The city was blacked out, but there was a fire burning in the road below, beyond their little garden. The light from the flames leaped up a tree. She heard a scream from the fire in the road. The stench of smoke was horrible. A car was alight and around it dark figures were cavorting. “Al-gé-rie Française!” they chanted.

There was a noise behind her.

“David?” She turned. For the first time she noticed something unusual about the furniture. The room was untidy, chairs awry, books on the floor, the mirror given by her father as a wedding present at a strange angle.