The café – or the bar, as Quirke insisted – was a popular spot, not only for tourists, they noted, but for Donostians, too. This was a good sign, Evelyn said, nodding in the slow, pensive way that she did, as if larger thoughts lay behind the commonplace words.

The last light leached from the air, the stars above the square came out, and they sat there, contented husband and happy wife, sipping their glasses of drily fragrant txakoli and watching the passing promenade.

‘Spaniards have no shame when it comes to public display,’ Quirke observed.

‘And why should they?’ Evelyn asked, surprised. She reflected for a moment, then said, ‘But of course, I see. This is a pleasure the Irish have never learned, simply to sit and observe the ordinary things that happen in the world.’

Quirke said she was right, or so he supposed. There it was again – relaxation, that problematic concept. He was making himself have a conscious go at it, now, sitting there, but without success. He had a lot of practising to do.

The people around them were English, Americans, Swedes – he took that sing-song accent to be Swedish – and even Germans, who were once again posing as the happy wanderers they used to imagine themselves to be, before the years of madness and their aftermath taught them they were nothing of the kind.

It was only when he heard an Irish voice somewhere behind him that he realised it was the thing he had been listening out for since he had first landed in Spain. You can take the Irishman out of Ireland, he thought despondently, but not the other way around.

It was a woman’s voice he had heard. She sounded young, or at least youngish. Her tone was oddly urgent, as if she had more things to say than she could possibly get said. The accent was Dublin, south-side, middle-class. He tried to catch what she was saying with such odd vehemence, but couldn’t. He turned his head and scanned the crowd, and there she was.

Chapter 5

He didn’t point her out to Evelyn, that first time. In fact, he didn’t pay much attention to her himself, once he had registered the accent and deplored the nostalgic ping! it had sounded in his suddenly homesick heart. He took her to be just  another well-heeled tourist, doing Spain on Daddy’s  money, and that the man sitting opposite her, an elegant, lightly bearded, grey-haired gent in a pale linen suit, was Daddy himself.  Afterwards, he remembered how it had struck him as remarkable that a daughter should address her father with such dark-toned intensity. He decided they must have been having a row. Being on holiday with an elderly parent would try any young person’s tolerance, after all.

That was the evening when Quirke and Evelyn themselves had – not a row, exactly, but a sharpish difference of opinion.