So I didn’t have much to say about myself, and avoided talking about my eight British years. Easy enough with Riccarda, who had so much to tell: tales of her travels, stories of books she’d read, plays she’d seen, concerts she’d performed, and the time when, in Paris, she’d played accompanist, at a tiny gathering, to the ageing, ailing Callas. (The children of estranged parents and emigrants have much in common. They learn early to elide most details, and to embroider a significant few. Riccarda was both.) Then she started asking me questions: about my childhood, school, friendships, love. When I shrunk away or mumbled, she would say: ‘Talk to me. No masks please.’ I would have thought of myself as awkward, yes, even timid in a way, but never masked. I found that she, too, like me, had left home young; she lived in France for some years, and then in Buenos Aires with her father and stepmother, until her father died of a heart attack and she was forced to return to her mother and Rome. ‘I was seventeen. I spoke Italian with an Argentinian accent. My mother added an extra letter to my name and Ricarda Gris became Riccarda the Roman.’

Marco was excluded from our outings. Riccarda didn’t like him, found him coarse-grained, his Roman accent grating, his tastes philistine; she couldn’t understand why he was doing Persian or South Asian studies. Luckily, there was no chance of his resenting our sessions at the kitchen table, where there was no room for him: he had left Lady L’s basic grammar course the previous year, after just one term.

Lady L summoned me to her office one afternoon after class. Was it my moment of disgrace? My knees trembled, my shoulders quaked.

‘Mr Meer,’ she said, ‘are you a sporting man?’

(So I’d been accused of gambling? But wait.)

‘I mean, do you play cricket, football, tennis …?’

‘No, Professor.’

‘I was merely asking in case you wanted Wednesday afternoons off in order to play.’

(She made some reference to my being young, energetic, and in need of constant exercise. But if I could ever get away early from classes, I would rush to an office a mile’s walk away to file papers for a small sum that kept me in Jacques Brel LPs, cigarettes, Italian paperbacks and cinema tickets for the month. I had taken a studio flat a mile away from my parents, so I could work alone, and had to pay the rent. Although the time off to work extra hours and earn more money would actually have helped, my studies, too, were important that first year. I wasn’t going to take any chances.)

‘I wouldn’t want to miss a class.’

‘Oh, good man. But if some day you’d like a game of squash, I play on Thursday evenings.’