They never fought, at least not as other couples did, and as Quirke himself had fought with others of his women in the past. In the old days he was never averse to a bit of argy-bargy, to liven things up and clear the air. But Evelyn, as he had quickly come to realise, didn’t know how to fight, or, if she did, chose not to. Their disagreements were hardly disagreements at all, more like slightly overheated debates. Evelyn was unfailingly curious about people and the ways in which they conducted themselves in their dealings with the world. Sitting there at the edge of that busy square, she might have been an anthropologist on a field expedition, sharply alert to the colouring, habits and behaviour of the local fauna. Quirke had once told her that she would make a good detective.

‘But that’s what a psychiatrist is,’ she said. ‘Freud was a living version of Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Yes,’ Quirke responded, ‘and his conclusions were about as plausible.’

His wife only smiled. Freud, the Nobodaddy of them all, as Quirke, an admiring reader of William Blake, liked to call him, was a subject on which she refused to be drawn.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘I am.’

Quirke wanted to go back to the hotel for dinner, but Evelyn suggested they should stay here and eat. They could make do perfectly well, she said, with the skewered snacks the Basques called pintxos. But the pintxo, as far as Quirke was concerned, was just a slightly fancier version of the dull old sandwich. He was against the idea of local specialities, which in his experience were all too local, and rarely special.

‘But it is so lively here,’ Evelyn objected.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes, of course it is. Look at that elderly couple, holding hands.’

Quirke wasn’t interested in couples, young or old, holding hands or otherwise. He was working himself up, or down, into one of his sulks. It was a thing he did when he was bored and in need of something to occupy himself with. For him, petulance was a pastime.

His wife regarded him in silence for some moments.