Uncle Patrick had come home from Africa within months of his brother’s death, but Katie didn’t remember this either. It felt as if Patrick had always been there. Yet she had never once confused him with her father, despite the fact that what she recalled was often muddled and disjointed. There was another memory of being carried, this time by her mother who was wearing a green coat; Katie remembered curling her left index finger through one of the buttonholes, which had darker green stitching round it. They were outside a black, shiny door with a narrow window halfway up, below which was a brass knocker. Then the door was open: in a dark hallway a large man with a neat moustache, who stood up very straight. A woman, much smaller, was trying to see round him, just her head and shoulders showing and sandy brown hair. She knew now that these people had been her grandparents, but she had never seen them again after that day. Things were said, no voices raised, but a poisonous tone, eyes narrowed, frowns, then the door slammed in their faces. And on the way back her mother kept talking in sharp bursts, but not to her. There were enormous emotions somewhere. That was what her mother was like. Just under the surface, something swelling, frightening, that Katie could never understand.

Very rarely, her mother’s emotions did burst out, like on those mornings with Uncle Patrick when Katie was small.

Patrick was her father’s elder brother by eight years, but looked a good deal older. He was thin to the point of emaciation, slightly stooped, with sunken cheeks and stone-grey eyes. But his voice reminded Katie of her father, and his eyes were like her own, a blue that seemed to contain a vision of the sea. He was very variable: sometimes full of endless, wiry energy, full of songs and tales; at others, silenced, almost unable to move.

‘Your uncle has been in Africa,’ her mother told her. ‘The climate takes it out of people. It doesn’t suit everyone. He and your father were Cork men – that’s a very different sort of place, by the sea and full of mists and cool greenness.’

Her mother seemed to be in love with the idea of Ireland as much as she had been with the husband who had come from there. It was all part of the fairytale.

Katie was used to Patrick as someone kind and gently spoken, except when he was in his excited moods, when he became loud and talked so fast that the words tripped over one another and he began to seem alarming. To her, he was never anything but kind. Information came to her as torn rags, never a full cloth. Uncle Patrick had come back from a country called Uganda, where he had been with a Catholic missionary order of the White Fathers. When he told Katie this, she imagined everything about them ghostly white: skin, hair, long white robes. Maybe that’s why her uncle’s hair was almost white, unlike her father’s raven-black. They might not have let him join otherwise.