“Not that there has to be a reason. Quite. But there was a reason, and I do remember it.”

“Was it Gerald?”

“No. Well, yes, partly. That’s certainly what I told Marco.”

“He . . . disputes that, by the way.”

I began to explain that it was the timing he disputed, not the remark itself, but she silenced me with a dismissive wave.

“Who cares what he says? Anyway there was something else, too.”

“Yes . . . ?”

She turned, facing the black window. I caught her eyes in her reflection.

“It was because it wasn’t me he was screwing, or trying to screw. It was someone else. And I didn’t like that.”

“You mean . . . in his mind?”

She nodded, turning back to me.

“I assume you know why we were in Belfast?”

“For that IRA film, right?”

“That’s right. Well, we’d spent the day in a flat with a view onto an alley where we’d been told by some disgruntled ex-OIRA man that the Provos were going to tar and feather a girl who’d been out with a British soldier.”

She paused, seeming to lose herself in the memory. Another long silence passed. She’d drunk enough, it appeared, for her sense of time to have become somewhat elastic.

“Marco told me,” I prompted her. “He said it had been grueling.”

“Did he?” A glimmer of sarcasm showed in her eyes. “Well, it certainly was for the girl. They dragged her screaming from a car, stripped her to her underwear and tied her to a lamppost with her hands behind her back. She already had black eyes and bruises all over her face but she was struggling as hard as she could the whole time. Two enormous women shaved her head and then a man who’d been warming a pot of tar with a blowtorch poured it over her and someone else dumped a sack of chicken feathers over her. They hung a sign around her neck saying SOLDIER DOLL and drove off. It was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was sick with guilt, too, for not intervening. Not that there was anything we could have done, from where we were. When we got back to the hotel that afternoon I had to have about six whiskies just to begin to calm down. I was drunk by then, obviously, but I can tell you sex was the last thing on my mind. Still, I’ll admit that when Marco started in with the little caresses and kisses it certainly gave me something new to think about.”

“He said it wasn’t the first time you and he . . .”

She gave me a sharp look.