Driven to seek shelter from the rain, Bruce and I had gone into a restaurant and been greeted by a turbaned man with a hawkish profile, brilliant dark eyes and a kingly air. I could not take my eyes off him, and he seemed equally intrigued by me.

‘That’s my Barbary pirate chief,’ I confided to Bruce. Of all the characters in the book, this one had thus far eluded me.

How can you explain that moment when lightning strikes, that coup de foudre? It is beyond words, which is just as well, since neither Abdel nor I spoke the other’s language.

It was all in the eyes: a jolt of recognition. But it was that drama on the mountain that honed what had been a fleeting arrow of intrigue and desire into something sharper and finer by far.

The next day, after a gruelling five-hour descent, we returned to great rejoicing in the village. Abdel took me aside and placed a ring on my finger. It was shaped like a tent, he explained in French, and by gesture: it would protect me.

We exchanged about 20 words of broken French, a bow and a Berber greeting. We also exchanged telephone numbers, then Bruce and I drove to the airport.
After a curiously old-fashioned courtship conducted by phone, I went back to see Abdel over the course of the summer, using up all my holiday allowance, staying in my own room in the family house, and treated as a respected guest.
Like me, Abdel had never married: he’d been too busy providing for the rest of his family after his father died young. He’d worked to put his two sisters and younger brothers through college.

He was so different to all those feckless men I’d known before. But as well as this powerful work ethic, he also had brio and style. He was thoughtful, funny, philosophical, educated, emotionally intelligent.