‘Oh, no, of course not.’ He heard her chuckle. ‘Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?’ she sang, in her out-of-tune voice.

‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘Goethe?’

‘Tristan und Isolde. It’s quoted in The Waste Land, by Mr Eliot.’

‘How literary we are this morning.’

She came out of the bathroom, and leaned against the jamb of the door, smiling at him, her waxy scarlet lips compressed, the little swollen bead in the centre of the upper one glistening.

‘How transparent you are,’ she said. ‘I can see straight through you.’

‘You spy, with your shrink’s little eye, is that it?’

‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, putting on an injured look. ‘Don’t call me shrink.’

He laughed, and she advanced on him with a pantomime glare and a fist upraised as if to strike. He caught her by both wrists and wrestled her on to the bed.

‘Stop, stop!’ she cried, laughing. ‘You will ruin my lipstick.’

He fumbled at the buttons of her blouse. She looked down at an angle and watched him do it, her double chin showing.

‘I’ll ruin your lipstick for you,’ he growled with mock ferocity, waggling his big, bearish head.

*

An hour later they got dressed for the second time that morning, and Evelyn went downstairs to drink a coffee and read the newspaper. Quirke mooched about the room, smoking a cigarette. He stepped on to the shallow balcony and surveyed the bay. The morning was still. He listened to each successive long curved wave making its subdued crash as it collapsed.

A pretty girl in sunglasses and a black swimsuit, her skin delicately tanned, was lying propped on her elbows just beyond the white-painted wrought-iron balustrade at the edge of the seafront walkway. He looked at her for a while in innocent admiration. She seemed so relaxed, so self-absorbed, so confident of what and who she was. The young consider themselves a separate and invulnerable species. The thought darkened Quirke’s benign post-coital mood. He stepped back into the room.

They were lovers, of course, the silvery Doctor Cruz and jangly-nerved Angela Lawless; he took it for a fact. Cruz’s voice had assumed an unmistakably proprietorial tone when he spoke her name. Well, good for him, he thought, though he wasn’t sure if he could say the same for her.

That name, Angela Lawless – somehow there was something wrong with it. It wasn’t convincing, somehow. People grow into a name, until it ceases to be a name and they become synonymous with it. Angela Lawless wasn’t an Angela Lawless. How did he know? He had only met her once, and only twice heard her speak. He knew nothing about her, except that she was Irish, and that her manner was abrupt to the point of being offensive.