‘They didn’t start with nothing,’ says Louisa, ‘and they’re meant to be Catholics which should mean a love of the poor.’

‘Is that what you tell them?’

‘Of course.’

‘And what do they say?’

‘That you can’t expect una inglesa to understand.’

They walk on for a while in silence. In his mind Jomier compares the wide views and open spaces of the estancia with the cramped confines of Queen’s Park. ‘But you don’t regret it?’

‘Living out here?’

‘Yes.’

She thinks. ‘I do miss England. I miss you and Mummy and Henry and Sandra and am sad not to see their children growing up. I wouldn’t have stayed here if it wasn’t for Jimmy.’

‘And you don’t regret that?’

‘Marrying Jimmy? No.’ She smiles. ‘He has his limitations, but all husbands do, don’t they, after a while? And sometimes limited people are easier to deal with. I mean, men out here – men like Jimmy – have very simple and straightforward expectations of their wives. They want them to bear their children and run their homes and put up with their intolerable old mothers whereas in England . . . I don’t know . . . everything seems to depend upon a relationship between two rival bisexuals both working and both cooking and both parenting so that neither needs the other except for some kind of psychological ego boost which is hard to sustain over the years.’

‘Your mother didn’t work,’ says Jomier.

‘No. She fell between two stools. Girls of her generation and her background didn’t expect to have to earn their living so they didn’t train for a career and so felt demeaned when the feminist zeitgeist downgraded motherhood to the status of office cleaning.’

‘You can’t blame me for that.’

Louisa hesitates. ‘No. No one blames you for the change in the zeitgeist.’

‘But for other things?’

‘No, not blame exactly . . .’ Then: ‘Let’s not talk about it. What’s done is done.’

They move on to books. Louisa reads a lot. With servants to shop, cook, clean, wash, iron, garden, she has the time. She buys the New York Review of Books in Buenos Aires and has the Week and the Literary Review sent out from England. She makes a double-click purchase on Amazon of any book she thinks looks enjoyable or interesting. She has read all the novels on the Booker Prize shortlist and thinks that the judges made the wrong choice of the winner. Jomier has read none of the novels on the Booker Prize shortlist and so cannot discuss their merits or demerits with his daughter. She is puzzled by his lack of curiosity about contemporary fiction. ‘Surely now that you’ve retired you have the time?’

Jomier: ‘I like rereading classical authors. Chekhov. Stendhal. Dostoevsky.’

She nods. ‘I like those too.’