Sometimes my younger friends ask me, “How on earth did you do it, Yvette? You hardly knew each other!” I want to reply: For heaven’s sake, nobody knew each other back then. We were only just adults; we didn’t know ourselves yet. Actually, we hadn’t become ourselves—that was what we were going to do, as husband and wife. Make each other into ourselves. I remember the couples who got married during my first year as a curate’s wife, snapped like us in black and white at the top of the church steps. I saw a single wedding outfit on five different young women, the hem swirling around thin knees or thin calves (depending on the height of the girl). The bride straight-backed, often shivering, smiling fit to burst. The groom grinning, his collar gaping. The point is, we were all the same. Young. Happy. Hopeful.

“But even so,” my friends remonstrate, “you came from Alexandria!” And all I say to that is, yes I did, and I left it behind with my childhood like everyone else leaves their childhood behind. I brought as little as possible to England. Admittedly space was at a premium, but I made sure to pack nothing more than a handful—well, maybe a small armful—of mementos. Including my cahiers, the school notebooks from my final year at the Lycée. I was given a prize when I left, for outstanding work, being particularly commended for the accuracy and detail of my maps and diagrams. Célia, on the other hand, left the English Girls’ College with nothing more than average marks.

(I don’t wish to make a great hoo-ha about my superior performance. But I see no reason not to mention it.)

Anyway, I brought these school notebooks to England as keepsakes, to remind me of the Alexandrian girl I once was. And now they’ve come in handy, full of masses of blank pages at the back to accommodate this story of mine. I have already filled up the back of L’Histoire with everything that happened in Egypt. I’ve had to move onto La Géographie . . .