She pulled her hand away.

‘No, the trouble is, Dad, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Let you forget what? What people? All I know is since we arrived in Ireland, you’ve been on edge. Initially, I put it down to the fact you lost your mother, but it’s much more than that. There was that man who called today, and then Maggie’s reaction to you in her house. Can’t you see these things are incredibly confusing for me? You’re my dad, the most important person in my life, the person I love more than anything else in this world. The man I think I know better than anyone else, and yet since we’ve been here, I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that perhaps I don’t know you at all!’

He could see her lip flutter. He stroked her hair.

‘Don’t talk like that. You do know me better than anyone else in the world. What I’m with you is who I want to be. To be your dad, to see you grow, to share your life, that’s all I ever want.’

The first signs of a tear began to well in her eyes. He brushed her soft cheek with his thumb.

‘Please don’t be upset. We’ll be home tomorrow and all this will just be a fleeting moment in our life.’

She pulled his hand away from her face, opened the car door and began to run. She climbed a fence and waded through the yellow field behind it. He chased her and caught her by the arm.

‘Annie, for Christ’s sake what are you doing?’

She beat his arm off her.

‘What am I doing? I’m trying to understand why my father is still treating me like a 12-year-old girl! Go on, tell me I’m your princess and everything will be OK! Well, everything is not OK. Why have I never been allowed to visit Ireland before? I have a right to know who I am, where I come from, who my family are. We live in a farm in Northumberland, you’re a politician, and you’re my dad. Who the hell were you before that? Everybody here seems to know more about you than me and more worrying than that, half of them appear to hate your guts! Can you tell me why that is?’

As Cormac held his sobbing girl in his arms, he tried to think of some way of appeasing her without having to return to places he never wanted to visit again. He took the easy option and betrayed his brother’s trust. He told her about Maggie. They walked back to the car. She was calm now.

‘Thank you for confiding in me. It must have been an unbearable situation for your parents and Maggie. Sorry I behaved like a spoilt brat. I’m the product of a one-parent family after all. That’s my defence and I’m sticking to it.’

He entered the living room and was oblivious to the stench of rotting food and stale tobacco. The room was a perfect box. An old second-hand settee wilted under the window. A reading lamp was precariously perched on one end of it. A three-bar electric fire, of which only one bar ever worked, sat sadly opposite. The floor to the left was filled with books which ran the whole length of, and halfway up, the yellowing wall. Great leaders, he recognised, only became great leaders once they truly understood their cause; understood it in a way their followers could never hope to. The books were almost exclusively on Irish history and politics, and included the writings of his heroes. Tone was there. Davis and Young Ireland were there, Lalor was there, and of course Pearse and Connolly were there.