There is something tacky about ice-skating. One goes to meet Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean expecting Colgate smiles and the psychological equivalent of sequins. Instead, they talk for the first time about their traumatic childhoods, the shocking death of his father, their intimate relationship and their years of celibacy. They are humble, genuine and touching.

We meet at Queens Ice Rink, west London, where they are practising during The Best of Torvill and Dean UK tour. This is Nottingham’s celebrated ‘Royal Couple’, four times world champions, Olympic gold medallists and the only team in skating history to be awarded nine perfect scores.

Jayne is weeny, with a full face, big eyes, generous lips and a recently acquired antipodean twang. She is 34 and looks innocent in jeans, white lacy shirt, koala bear brooch and hair in pony tail. She looks to Chris before replying to questions. Also 34, he is tall, blond and be-jeaned and has a pronounced dimple on his chin.

Chris is ‘married’ to two women: his partner Jayne, with whom he has formed an unusually strong bond over 17 years, and his wife of one year (his protege, as his curriculum vitae would have it), the French Canadian ice-dancer Isabelle Duchesnay.

Jayne, in turn, has her ice partner and her ‘other partner’ – her husband of two years, American sound engineer Philip Christensen. Jayne and Chris spend more time with one another than they do with their respective spouses.

Their symbiotic relationship is partly rooted in their childhood experiences. Chris doesn’t remember much of his. His father was a miner and they lived in a two-bedroom council flat.

‘I suppose when it’s unhappy you block things out.’ He talks slowly. His parents divorced when he was six. ‘I lost my Mum. She went off.’ He doesn’t know why he was left with his father, who swiftly introduced a stepmother. ‘I’d been very much tied to my mother’s apron strings. She’d always been with me and looked after me – and suddenly she’d gone.’

‘And he didn’t understand why.’ says Jayne.

‘It wasn’t as if she was just around the corner. I didn’t know where she went to.’ Chris didn’t see his mother again for nine years. ‘Then things were very cool between us. By then my stepmother had taken her role. I suppose losing Mum made me independent.’

Jayne partnered Chris, aged 16. She was also an only child. ‘I wasn’t ever lonely,’ she offers, in a way that suggests she might have been. Her father was a newsagent and her mother did odd jobs. (‘A very working class background.’) She went to grammar school. ‘So they thought I was going to be clever.’

‘But you managed to fool them,’ interjects Chris, affectionately. She passed only two of her nine O-levels.

Chris reveals more about his emotional make-up, talking about his father. His father suffered a heart attack and died, aged 59, just after the 1984 Olympics. Chris was only 26.

‘That was very difficult,’ he says, talking heavily and sighing deeply. ‘I felt very alone. You’re probably crying for yourself and the way you feel, so it’s kind of selfish. But I felt so alone.

‘I had to deal with all these organisations which dealt with death all the time, so they are quite blase about it. And I wanted to shake everybody and say, ‘My father has just died! Doesn’t it mean anything?’ ‘My father worked down a coal mine and smoked a lot. He worked seven days a week. For 20 years he got up at 5am every morning to go to work, just to cover costs. The minute I earned some money, he could have retired.’ He pauses. ‘But he died.

‘We weren’t one of those families, like middle-class families, where you have a lot of conversation. We never talked. But we had a quiet understanding of each other. We meant a lot to one another without saying anything. We never told each other we loved one another, I wish I’d done that now. And I wish I had known him more – he was never there because he was always working.’ He speaks regretfully.

‘Suddenly my mother (as he calls his stepmother) became dependent on me. I had to do a lot of growing up quickly, become responsible and be a provider.’ He still supports his stepmother financially.

We talk then about the relationship between Jayne and Chris. Their rapport (professionally they echo one another’s every glance and movement) is legendary. ‘We’re not brother and sister, we are a bit more,’ Chris has said. But people – despite their protestations – always made out that there was more to their relationship than met the ice.

Did they have crushes on one another? ‘I think so, when we started . . .’

‘I think,’ interrupts Jayne, ‘it was because we liked one another that we became friends.’

Did she really want to marry him? ‘I never said I wanted to marry him,’ remonstrates Jayne.

‘People probably thought we were strange because we didn’t bring other people into our lives,’ resumes Chris. ‘But that would have sidetracked us.’ So were they both celibate? ‘I guess so,’ they say, simultaneously and laugh nervously.

Were they really celibate from the ages of 16 until they both married, aged thirtysomething? ‘Yeah, pretty closeted lives. But I don’t want to get into our sexuality,’ says Chris, his voice rising.

Are they saying they didn’t sleep with anyone? Jayne protests that this is too personal. ‘There was no one else for years,’ admits Chris. Do they love one another? ‘Not the same way as my wife.’

It did not always appear thus. ‘If one of us fell for someone else, our partnership could not survive,’ Jayne once said.

‘We’ve grown up since then,’ explains Chris.

‘When Chris got married, there was nothing to make me feel jealous,’ she adds. Their marriages, they say, haven’t affected their partnership. There is, they say, no difficulty with their respective spouses over their being so close, nor with Jayne being inextricably linked with Chris in the public consciousness.

‘The difficulty is to do with making our separate lives coincide. The difficulty with our marriages is that we haven’t had much time together because our lives are split like that.’ Chris makes a V with his arms. ‘It’s hard having a telephone relationship. You just have to throw yourself into work and not be bitter about it.’

Jayne lives in a small two-bedroom Knightsbridge house with her husband. Chris (who drives an old Renault) has a three-bedroom cottage in Buckinghamshire and a rented apartment in Germany: ‘Isabelle lives out of a suitcase.’ Does he feel married? He exhales deeply. ‘It’s different in there.’ He motions to his heart.

‘We’re doing the skating while we can,’ he continues. ‘It’s difficult not being with the person you want to be with.’

‘He’s stuck with me,’ says Jayne.

‘I didn’t mean it to come out like that. It’s hard if you marry someone and then don’t see them for the majority of the time. I’ve been married a year and of that I’ve had less than three months with my wife. Just days here and there.’

Jayne and Phil have had more time together: ‘When we first married we were together for six weeks.’

The Torvill and Dean partnership will come to an end when their bodies give up – or Jayne decides to have children. ‘I’d like to have children before my time clock runs out.’ Jayne starts unconsciously to wring her hands and cradle her body. ‘I can’t leave it much longer.’

Before they leave, the millionaires who have struggled for financial security look at one another. It is said they have a telepathic relationship. ‘You want some sandwiches?’ asks Chris.

‘I was just about to take some,’ says Jayne, and wraps in a red napkin the sandwiches the Queens Ice Rink management have left on the table. * Torvill and Dean, 17-26 September at Wembley Arena.