‘No, I don’t think it’s wrong at all. It’s just – unusual.’ He glanced about at the crowded tables. ‘What all this reminds me of is a not very engaging bullfight at which the spectators have lost interest and have started to talk among themselves instead. So much chatter.’

‘What sounds to you like chatter is conversation for the people making it. This is what human beings do, you know.’ She also looked about at the other people at the other tables. ‘Don’t you think that the restaurant is one of our greatest inventions, as a species?’

He gazed at her, startled, smiling.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘I never know what you’re going to come out with next.’

‘Look how people are enjoying themselves, and being nice to each other, talking together – not chattering – and making the best of the little bit of time that they will be given here on earth.’

He put a hand over hers where it rested beside her wine glass on the table.

‘Ah, you confound me in the most charming fashion,’ he said.

She wrinkled that broad nose of hers. She wasn’t beautiful, in any of the generally accepted senses of the word, which was what made her beautiful, for him.

‘Confound?’ she said. ‘What is confound?’

Even yet she had occasional difficulties with English, a language that made her cross sometimes by being, as she said, so untidy and illogical. Quirke often pondered the irony of her having settled in Ireland, a more or less English-speaking country, given that English was the language in which she was least proficient. She was the oddest woman he had ever known. If, that was, he could be said to know her.

‘To confound,’ he said, ‘means that you’re always right, and always prove me wrong.’

‘I don’t think you are always wrong. And I am not always right.’ She frowned again, indignant on his behalf. ‘Certainly not. You know so many more things than I do. You know all about the body, for instance, the inside of it.’

‘I only know about the dead ones.’

‘Well, you know me, and I’m not dead.’

He stroked her hand.

‘It’s time to order another glass of wine,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

He looked about for the waitress. She was a tall, slim young woman, the type described as sloe-eyed, dark and provocatively sullen. He had already noticed her exquisite wrists. He had a special fondness for the moving parts of women, their wrists, their butterfly-shaped ankles, their shoulder blades like a swan’s folded wings. In particular he treasured their knees, especially the backs of them, where the skin was pale, milk-blue, with delicate fissures, little fine cracks, as in the most fragile old pieces of bone china.

The young woman at the table behind him was speaking again, and this time he caught a word: ‘theatre’.