We ambled through the winding streets of the Gothic quarter into an enormous covered food market called La Boqueria. We sat at a counter, and Caro did all the ordering in Spanish. We tried samples of everything on offer – dried and fresh fruits, jamon Iberico, olives, salted anchovies, fried sardines, baby squid, fish still fucking breathing they were so fresh (not such a turn on), oysters, cheeses, gelato, pintxos, hot sandwiches. You name it. When she was happily feeding her face, I saw my chance.

‘What was your son’s name? The one who died.’

‘Simon,’ she replied.

‘How did he get hooked on drugs?’

‘The usual. Moved to a city, mixed in with some bad apples, lost his job.’

‘Why did you two fall out?’

‘He’d only call for money. And when he stopped calling me, he’d call my eldest, Sarah. She soon washed her hands of him but I abandoned him first. I do that. Some therapist teased that out of me in the Seventies – someone gets too close, I abandon them before they can abandon me. I did it with each of my children. Comes from being adopted, apparently.’

‘You were adopted?’

‘My mother left me for a man who wasn’t my father. My own father couldn’t cope and put me up for adoption. This was in 1946, you understand, just after the war. He was old by then. His idea of a bedtime story was to tell me about his time as a PoW.’

‘Sorry.’

She flapped her hand. ‘Tish and pish, I’m not looking for sympathy. But it does explain why I left all five of my marriages early. And why I left Beatrice. I loved her more than anyone I’d ever met.’ Her head bowed. ‘But I couldn’t be sure I deserved her. So I left.’

‘But you said society wasn’t so accepting in the Fifties—’

‘—oh, bugger society. Society could fuck itself in the eye for all I cared,’ she snapped, wiping her hands roughly on a tissue. ‘If I’d wanted to stay with her, I would have. Irrespective of marriage. Irrespective of society. I’d have stayed. But I didn’t feel that I deserved her.’

‘I bet she felt differently.’

Caro laughed, a rueful laugh dampened with lemon juice. ‘It’s a vicious cycle. You don’t think you are worthy of love so you keep it at bay. But you still want it. I had a succession of flings after her – I treated all of them dreadfully for the simple fact none of them was Beatrice. I always called time on it before they had the chance to. After a while, you suffice yourself with being alone. You’ll never break your own heart.’

‘But Beatrice didn’t break your heart. You broke hers.’

‘I’m sure she got over it.’