‘Your husband was a smart man.’

‘That he was. And he put up with my grumpiness. Especially in the face of human stupidity. I suppose if I have a central fault it’s that I don’t suffer fools … and I don’t know when to hold my tongue.’

‘But he still thought the world of you?’

‘Now that’s a bit presumptuous.’

‘So he thought you a jerk?’

She smiled.

‘Sometimes, yes, I think he did. But only when I was in one of those moods where I was at odds with the world. He was a very patient man.’

‘Were you a patient woman?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

‘When you drive a lot of people around …’

‘He was called Wilbur – a terrible name, I know, but he was stuck with it, because his very tyrannical father was Wilbur Sr. My husband had his complexities. We met when we were both undergraduates at Harvard …’

‘You really went to that place?’

‘Radcliffe – that’s what they called in my day Harvard for “young women”. But yes, it was still Harvard. Wilbur was my first love. We met our second year there. We were together for the next three years. Wilbur got accepted at the law school. He wanted me to marry him. I got accepted into the doctoral program at the Sorbonne in Paris – so we had a problem. I decided to choose Paris over marriage … even though I could have stayed on at Harvard to do my PhD. Wilbur was stoic about it. But I could tell that I’d broken his heart. Still, it was the right call. I needed a sense of liberty. I needed to flee the regularity of American life for a while. I wasn’t ready to be with one man for the rest of my life. Paris gave me many opportunities on all those fronts.’

‘Yet you ended up together.’

‘I had several boyfriends during those five years. Then, just before my sixth year in Paris, a letter arrived from Wilbur. He had finished law school two years earlier. He’d sidestepped an engagement to a highly connected Boston woman from one of those upper-crust families where everyone is beyond white, Anglo and Protestant. He’d found his way to Los Angeles and work in a law firm noted for its progressive politics and taking on the establishment. And he asked if he could pay me a visit in France. I said yes. And …’

Her eyes became full. I could see that all this talk of her late husband was leaving her raw.

‘You must miss him a lot,’ I said.

Her lips tightened. She shut her eyes, then opened her purse and took out a Kleenex and dabbed them.

‘Only every hour on the hour … even if, like most marriages, there were periods when we drove each other mad. Still … a good man, Wilbur. Did I ever really see myself – the ultimate East Coast girl – becoming an Angeleno? Hardly. But I adapted … and even grew to like the idea of living under a near-perpetual dome of blue. And listen to me, talking, talking, talking … and all about my little self.’