‘Whatever you want to call it,’ she said, turning her face away from him and staring angrily out of the taxi window, ‘it’s still strange, that he should come across a person with those initials and be convinced straight off that it’s April  Lati mer. Quirke is not fanciful, and he certainly doesn’t believe in fairies.’

Paul leaned back against the seat and folded his arms.

‘And so you are going to join your father on his wild goose chase,’ he said, amused and incredulous.

In truth, she hadn’t intended to go, but at that moment she decided that she would. What right had he to patronise her and disparage her father? She would phone up the airlines as soon as she got home. There was an Aer Lingus flight to Madrid, she knew, and an Iberia one to Bilbao, twice a week, and Bilbao wasn’t far from San Sebastián.

Despite her irritation – how was it that Paul always managed to have the last word? – she felt a stirring of excitement. What would the weather in Spain be like, at this time of year? Already in her mind she was going through her wardrobe and deciding which of her things would be suitable for a sunny climate. For it was bound to be sunny, in April, in Spain.

Chapter 19

Paul had instructed the taxi driver to drop him at Merrion Square, outside the Institute. He asked Phoebe if he could leave his suitcase with her. She could take it to the flat and he would collect it that evening. He was living at his Tante Evelyn’s tiny mews house off Northumberland Road. He had moved in with her in the last year of his medical studies, and was still there. Phoebe had suggested that he might come and live with her, in her place in Baggot Street, but she could see he found the notion shocking. In many ways, he was a deeply conventional young man. However, his nice sense of propriety didn’t prevent him from spending nights with her at the flat. Whenever she alluded, lightly, of course, to this contradiction – she would never utter the word ‘hypocrisy’ – he would avoid replying, and she was always discreet enough to drop the subject.

He was, she had to admit it, a tiny bit of a cold fish. He made love deftly, in an exploratory sort of way, like a doctor searching for the source of an obscure malady. He was circumspect in many aspects of his character and behaviour. When he was leaving her flat, always he would make a detour to pass by the window and scan the street outside with a quick glance, as if he thought there might be a task force from the Legion of Mary or something posted out there, waiting to collar him and afterwards denounce him for moral turpitude in the columns of the Irish Catholic.