One night I told her some of the things which had happened in Barcelona. I was still giving classes to Jorge and to two engineering students as well, but she knew that I liked him less after our vacation together, and it occurred to me one evening that it might help us get through the next hour together if I tried to tell her why. I was so used to hiding things from her that this account of Jorge and me in Barcelona was a relief. I told her about the Chileans in the pensión and then I decided to tell her about Jorge taking two of the girls back to our room and having sex with them in the bed beside me while I lay there pretending to be asleep. She was wide-eyed with indignation. The Argentinians are savages, she said, whatever mixture is in them that makes them like that, they are savages, they will do anything. And this became her theme in the months which followed, that she should never have come here, and how refined English people are, how polite and how civilized, how her father should have stayed in England after her mother died, how he could have married again. Compare the generals, she said, or Isabelita Perón with the Queen of England. Compare the Queen’s placid smile, her grace, her easy warmth, her modesty, her family life with the half-bred savages who run Argentina.

Perhaps it was easy in those years to invent a whole new set of political views and express them fiercely in your own apartment. We saw newspapers only when something we bought came wrapped in newspaper. We had an old television, but we never watched it. We listened to music on the radio sometimes, but paid no attention to the news. We did not believe the news. I know that the World Cup took place in Argentina in 1978, but I cannot say that I saw any of the matches, or knew when or where they were on, or who won. I remember crowds in the street, men cheering and waving flags, and I remember cutting through side streets to avoid them. We took no notice of anything public; we lived in a small space.

On her days off she stayed in bed. She found the stairs in the building difficult, and did not go out unless she had to. She worried if I did not return early from the university. Sometimes at night when I came in she would be asleep in a chair, her head to one side, her mouth open. I knew that soon she would not be able to work, and I realized that when I graduated I would have to find a job. I wrote to my old school and told them that I was about to qualify, and they wrote back to say that they had a vacancy for a mathematics teacher, but not for an English teacher. My mother could not understand why I did not come first in my class. She suggested that I should study more. I began to do all of the shopping and most of the cooking and cleaning.