It was a mystery to him that not only had she married him, but had stuck with him, too, and showed no signs of letting go. Her steadfastness was the very thing that made him nervous, however, and sometimes, in the early morning especially, he would rear up in a panic to check that she was there beside him in bed, that she hadn’t given up on the whole project and slipped away in the night. But no, there she was, his large, soft-eyed, mystifying wife, as loving and lightsome as ever, in her always slightly amused, slightly distracted way.

His wife. He, Quirke, had a wife. Yes, the notion of it never failed to surprise him. He had been married before, but never like this; no, never like this.

And now here they were, in Spain, on holiday.

She had been right about the weather – it was raining when they arrived. She didn’t care, and neither, really, did he, though he wouldn’t say so.

*

About the greenness of the place she was also right, and about the Catholicism – there was a sense of staid piety that could have been Irish. It certainly wasn’t the Spain that old Spanish hands wrote about, with scorching dust, and hot-eyed señoritas stamping the low square heels of their clunky black shoes, and hidalgos – was that the word? – in skin-tight trousers fighting each other with knives, and everybody shouting Viva España! and No pasarán! and plunging swords between the shoulder blades of lumbering, bloodied and bewildered bulls.

All the same, however much the place might seem like home, Quirke still resented being on holiday. It was like, he said, being in a drying-out hospital. He had been in more than one such place, in his day, and knew what he was talking about.

‘You love to be miserable,’ Evelyn told him, giving one of her soft, low laughs. ‘It’s your version of being happy.’

His wife was a professional psychiatrist, and regarded his many fears and phobias with benign amusement. Most of what he claimed to be the matter with him she diagnosed as play-acting, or ‘performative defence’, as she put it – a barrier erected by an overgrown child against a world that, despite his distrust of it, meant him no harm.

‘The world treats us all equally,’ she said.

‘Mistreats, you mean,’ he countered darkly.

She had once compared him to Eeyore, but since he had never heard of Pooh’s mournful friend – A. A. Milne was not an author who would have figured in Quirke’s blighted childhood – the gibe fell flat.

‘You have no problems,’ she would say gaily. ‘You have me, instead.’ Then he would smack her on the backside again, hard, and she would turn and shimmy into his arms and bite him on the earlobe, just as hard.

Chapter 3