Quirke laughed. ‘Yes, of course.’ He looked down at his suede shoes. He wondered if perhaps they hadn’t been a bad idea. ‘But are we happy, or just ordinarily unhappy?’

As usual, she took the question seriously. He watched her considering it from all sides, as if it were something intricately worked, with many gleaming facets, each one requiring the most scrupulous attention.

‘Of course, yes, ordinary unhappiness is our condition,’ she said, ‘but don’t you agree that there are moments – indeed, quite extended periods of time – when everyone, including even persons such as yourself, experiences that famous oceanic feeling of being at one with everything in the world, to its depths and to its heights?’

He began to say something facetious, but stopped himself, beset suddenly by a strange disquiet.

For him, the ocean signified death, always.

Evelyn was waiting for his response, but he wouldn’t speak – couldn’t, in fact. What was he to say? What right had he to speak of death to her, of all people? She refrained from further prompting. Sometimes silence was more eloquent than words. Her arm was linked through his, and now she drew his elbow tight against her side. ‘My poor darling,’ she said. She pronounced it darlink, mocking her own accent by ex aggerating it, as she often did. Her foreignness – her foreignness to Quirke – was one of the many things she found amusing. How could one be oneself and yet foreign to someone else? It was a puzzle, one of many she had to grapple with in her life as an émigré.

Quirke spoke at last.

‘There was an old nun at one of the so-called orphan schools I was sentenced to when I was little,’ he said. ‘At least, I suppose she was a nun. She had a black habit, anyway, I remember that.’

‘A black habit?’

‘The outfit that she wore,’ he explained. ‘Her uniform.’

‘Ah. A black habit. I see. It sounds like something sinful.’

‘She was in charge of the infirmary, and was supposed to look after us when we were sick. Not that we were permitted to be sick, except in extremest cases – there would be a fuss when one of us had the effrontery to up and die. Anyway, disapproval was the constant of this woman’s life, the iron principle she lived by. Anything that smacked of tolerance, of tenderness, of solicitude, was to be stifled. The saying of hers that I remember best is “Laughing will turn to crying”. It was what she came out with at the least sign of high spirits, of gaiety, of’ – he paused – ‘of “happiness”.’ He gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘She didn’t have cause to say it often, since there was precious little to laugh about, in that place. We learned to keep a straight face, when she was around. She had a leather strap attached to her belt, and she could use it, I can tell you.’