That got the faintest twitch of her lips. “Frank, I knew you were working-class the first time you opened your mouth. You never made a secret of that. I still went out with you.”

“Yeah. Lady Chatterley likes her bit of rough.”

The bitter edge took us both by surprise. Olivia turned to look at me; in the faint light trickling through from the kitchen her face was long and sad and lovely, like something off a holy card. She said, “You never thought that.”

“No,” I acknowledged, after a moment. “Maybe not.”

“I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”

“It was simple as long as my family was out of the picture. You may have wanted me, but you never wanted my uncle Bertie who starts fart-volume competitions, or my great-aunt Concepta who will explain to you how she was sitting behind a black on the bus and you should have seen the lips on him, or my cousin Natalie who put her seven-year-old on the sun beds for First Communion. I can see how I, personally, wouldn’t give the neighbors full-on heart attacks, maybe just a few mild palpitations, but we both know how the rest of the clan would go down with Daddy’s golf cronies or Mummy’s brunch club. Instant YouTube classic.”

Olivia said, “I’m not going to pretend that’s not true. Or that it never occurred to me.” She was quiet for a while, turning her glass in her hands. “At first, yes, I thought the fact that you weren’t in touch with them probably made things easier. Not that they weren’t good enough; just . . . easier. But once Holly came along . . . She changed the way I thought about everything, Frank, everything. I wanted her to have them. They’re her family. That takes priority over their sun-bed habits.”

I sat back on the sofa, got more wine into me and tried to rearrange my head to make room for this information. It shouldn’t have stunned the bejasus out of me, at least not to this extent. Olivia has always been a vast mystery to me, at every moment of our relationship and especially in the moments when I thought I understood her best.