‘She doesn’t mean it, you know, Cormac.’

Cormac sat down on a bench in the middle of a perfectly groomed flower patch. His anger betrayed him.

‘She deserves a fucking Oscar if she didn’t!’

Tom slapped his knee and sat next to him on the groaning plinth and attempted to justify her.

‘OK, she meant it … but she is grieving.’

‘Thanks Tom, but the trouble is she wasn’t grieving last week, or the month before that, or the year before that. She has hated me since I was a child and to tell you the truth, the feeling is mutual.’

Tom stood and began pacing the flowerbed. He came back and crouched in front of Cormac.

‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this now, or then again, I probably should have told you a long time ago. You must promise me you’ll say nothing to Maggie about this.’

He had Cormac’s attention.

‘OK, go on.’

‘No, I want you to promise on Annie’s life you won’t speak to anyone about this.’

The gravity in Tom’s manner had Cormac leaning forward on the bench.

‘I promise on Annie’s life.’

Tom hesitated, and then spoke to the flowers.

When you were very little, maybe not even a year old, I can’t really remember, Maggie got pregnant.’

‘At 13? Tell me you’re joking?!’

‘Maybe it’s best if I talk and you listen.’

‘Sorry, Tom.’

‘Like I said, she got pregnant, and in those days, in the 60s, it was regarded as not only a terrible sin, but a monumental shame on the whole family. So Mammy and Fr. Mackie sorted it all out between them. I got up one morning and Maggie had disappeared. They organised for her to go and stay with nuns just outside Dublin.’

Cormac stood on the flowers.

‘Not a Magdalene laundry?’

Tom pointed to the bench and he sat down again.

‘Will you let me finish? She went to a Magdalene laundry and she didn’t come back until she was 16 and you were about 4 at the time. Before she went, she was a brilliant girl: bright, funny, and beautiful just like Annie. When she came back, she had completely changed. She rarely smiled, was always tidying, never went out, except to mass. She never saw her baby. Not once. As soon as it was born, it was shipped to America, to some childless family with enough money to pay the nuns. She wasn’t even told if it was a boy or a girl. I think you reminded her of what she lost, and you still do. I think when you left and went to England, all the bitterness she buried somehow resurfaced. I know she gave you a hard time as a child, but she was suffering so much. When I look at her, I still see my beautiful little sister and when I swing her around like an old fool, it’s the 12-year-old girl that flies through the air. She goes to retreat after retreat, mass after mass, confession after confession, for one reason: to make sure she sees her baby in heaven. I’m not asking you to vote her sister of the year but I suppose I just want you to understand her a little better.’