“You can say that again. What about the phone calls?” she said, turning on him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you understand half of the terror you caused?”

“I should have been let attend rehearsals of my own play.”

“They didn’t want you. No one wants to see you again. No one! You’re a joke, do you know that? Do you realize what people think of you?”

“I can imagine,” he replied. And before he could stop himself he caught her arm: “I was in hospital.”

“You were only there,” she answered, looking angrily at his hand, “collecting notes for your next play.”

“Christ! How can you say that?”

She looked away from him. “Take your hand off my arm, please.”

“Let me go, please,” she said.

He stood back. She walked off towards the theatre, proud and convinced, as if she had won some final argument. Already he had lost control. Everything he had meant to say he had forgotten. He turned away, ashamed of himself. Yet when he looked back after her she glanced towards him with wild agitated eyes. He ran after her again. When he caught up with her, she raced ahead of him.

“I waited for you.”

“You told me lies,” she said. “You were drinking all the time.”

“I’m sober now.”

“It’s too late.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Go away,” she shrilly whispered.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, as he trotted alongside her.

“I want you to go away.” She walked faster.

“OK,” he mumbled.

He stopped. Humiliation and defeat made the air in the street curve before his eyes.

He walked through Dublin, drinking coffee, in cafés and bars filled with the European tourists of early spring. The coffee drinking continued all that evening. He knew that he should leave, go home, be elsewhere, but he moved from pub to pub like a sick dog because there was always the chance he might run into friends who might speak on his behalf to her. Who these friends were he didn’t know. He didn’t drink. Not because he had chosen not to, not because of any great sense of discipline, but because he had forgotten about drink. He had forgotten that drink might ease the pain. And yet all those mad laps of the city had the hallmarks of a binge. The coffee was making him insane.

The trek from pub to pub, trying to talk to the odd person that congratulated him while his nervous consciousness chattered away; the foolish expectancy as he turned a corner, the comic inevitability, the talking to himself; the seeking out the eyes of sympathetic women, crying dry-eyed, saying his serenity prayer; all this had to be gone through even though the irreversible moment had passed.