She came to Northern Ireland a long time ago to marry him. They're grandparents now, and they live an extremely comfortable life among other unionist establishment figures like themselves.
They'll never leave Belfast now. Yet still they argue as passionately about the place as if they were deciding on it.
A question arises: their middle-class friends and neighbours, are they much the same as middle-class people in Leicester, say, or Carlisle?
"They're more politicised," she says. "more articulate." But "the Northern Prods are into blinds. They pull the blinds down whenever they can."
"But that's our culture . . ." he begins.
"Oh, come off it," she cuts across him. "Spare me the word `culture'. I'm sick of everyone throwing the word `culture' around as an explanation for everything."
`Culture' slips from being a description of behaviour in general to being something to do with the arts.
"Look," she begins forcefully. "There is no Protestant culture. The Catholics have their diddly-i-di music and all that and of course they wave it in our faces for sectarian reasons. But the Protestants have nothing."
He ripostes with Frank McGuinness and the rich Protestant culture celebrated in Observe the Sons of Ulster. And so on.
But it turns out that these are mere decorative skirmishes. They mask a fundamental agreement, if not a complete one, on the huge question of the peace agreement.
Their function is perhaps to divert attention from the feelings of reluctance, and even shame, that accompany the intention to vote Yes. Perhaps the sparring has kept them going through the decades when these two vigorous and public-spirited people had absolutely no political outlet.
They have effectively been disenfranchised for all their adult lives because they live in Northern Ireland, are pro-Union and, at the same time, are left-leaning liberals, natural members of the British Labour Party.
They wanted to be part of something that never existed, a non-sectarian, radical party, within the Union.
"We were told to join the SDLP," she says bitterly. "What an insult! How could I join something green?"
And he hardly bothered with electoral politics. "I voted maverick. I voted Alliance. Or Democratic Left. I never voted Official Unionist. Never. I could never vote for a confessional party. But I often didn't vote at all."
At last there's something they can assent to. They will be voting Yes on Friday.
"We have the opportunity on that day," he says, "for Prods and Catholics to vote the same way. That's the first time that's happened in my whole life."
But he isn't one bit complacent about what endorsing the Belfast Agreement will achieve. "The problem of Northern Ireland is still there: how to get the ghosts out of the machine."
And he feels more than half-forced into his Yes vote. "There is nowhere else for us to hide."
His wife doesn't even agree with him that the Agreement secures the Union.
"This is a united Ireland for slow learners," she says with confidence. "And it kills me to have to vote for it. Because it means that the bastards have won. The killers have killed their way to this."
Nevertheless, she is willing to do anything at all to bring peace.
"I'm a grandmother," she says. "The children have to have something better than we've had. This is the only way.
"I wasn't brought up here and I still see things from an outside point of view. I have come to understand that the Catholic middle class aren't ever again going to accept whatever my unionist husband and his pals might condescend to offer them. And England doesn't want any of us. It's unity or nothing."
"But you don't need unity," he begins arguing. "You need dissolution of disunity."
"Unity or no unity," she says. "This has to work. We can't go on running after England. They don't want us. It is too humiliating to go on running after someone who doesn't want you."
Even while they vote Yes they'll be full of sympathy for the No-voters.
"This is the home of the people who are voting No. If Paisleyites didn't love their home they wouldn't feel so strongly about it," he says. He bends forward to impress what he's saying on me.
"The No vote won't be a question of nasty shits staying at home and wishing this thing ill. It will come from people full of anxieties, afraid of being made suckers of."
The ghosts in the machine?
Husband and wife nod, in complete agreement. That's who might take all this into their icy hands and turn it to nothing. The ghosts in the machine.