All this fascinated him, and he spent a lot of time sitting in front of the window just looking out at the view, his mind a blank. ‘You look at the sea as other men would look at a woman,’ his wife said with amusement.

It was she, Evelyn, who had suggested San Sebastián, and before he could think up a convincing objection, she had written off for a brochure to the Hotel de Londres y de Inglaterra. ‘Honestly,’ he scoffed, ‘the names they give to these establishments!’ Evelyn ignored him. But when he saw the place he had to admit it was impressive, sitting smack in the middle of the seafront facing the bay, a solid, handsome edifice.

‘That’s “The London and England Hotel”, right?’ he said, reading the name on the brochure. ‘Why can’t we stay at a Spanish one?’

‘It is Spanish, as you very well know,’ his wife replied. ‘It’s the finest hotel in the city. I stayed there once, when the war was on. It was very good. I’m sure it still is.’

‘Look at the prices,’ he grumbled. He knew better than to ask how she had come to be in San Sebastián in wartime. Questions like that were verboten. ‘And this is not even the high season,’ he added.

It was spring, she said, the best season of all, and they were going to Spain on a holiday, even if she had to handcuff him and push him up the steps and on to the aeroplane.

‘Northern Spain is southern Ireland,’ she said. ‘It rains all the time, everywhere is green, and everyone is Catholic. You will love it.’

‘Will they have Irish wine?’

‘Ha ha. You are so funny.’

She turned away and he smacked her on the bottom, with just enough force to make it wobble in the wonderful way that it did.

Strange, he thought, that the same passion was still there between them, the same erotic thrill. It should have been embarrassing, but it wasn’t. They were middle-aged, they had made a late marriage – a second one for both of them – and, so far, they still couldn’t get enough of each other. It was absurd, he would say, and ‘Oh, ja, ja, ziss is zertainly zo!’ Evelyn would agree, putting on her exaggerated, Herr Doktor Freud accent to make him laugh, while at the same time guiding his hands on to her broad, uncorseted, wobbly bum, and kissing him on the lips in that light, peculiarly chaste fashion that never failed to set his blood sizzling.