‘You can be so silly,’ she said, ‘really, a most incredible fool sometimes, I think you’re such a clever girl, and then you’re not that smart at all.’

She smiled, showing only her bottom teeth.

‘It was the worst thing I could have done. He held it against me my whole life. He went absolutely crazy. Mad crazy … and he knew I would never love him, but I do, you see, I do love him … he would just never accept it …’ She stretched and wriggled. I let go of her foot. ‘Just after the wedding breakfast, we took our leave and went on to a guest house, that’s what you did then, different times now, and he dropped me at the front door, big green door, with a brass knocker, but said he couldn’t bear to come up with me or be near me and sped off out the gravel. He didn’t want to check in with me maybe, in case people knew. Or have to lift me up going through the door, like we did back then. I was watching for him out the window of the guest house, and I didn’t hear him come in after me, and I was waiting at the window. He snuck up behind me –’ she placed her hand to her forehead – ‘so I had no idea he was still so angry. Indeed, maybe I was a stupid girl, I was, so very naive, a bit like yourself, and when he came into the room behind me, before I had a minute to turn, he grabbed both my hands and twisted my arms up behind my back and shoved me hard into the window frame.’ She pointed to her forehead, to the long narrow line, the shiny snail-like track that ran from the crown of her head to the bridge of her nose. I had thought it was a deep furrow line, from ageing or squinting. ‘Yeah,’ she sighed heavily, ‘the blood gushed from me, he said I was a dirty rotten cunt,’ she coughed, ‘pardon me,’ she coughed gently into her hand, ‘and that he’d knock all of that dirty American slut, Ann Hegarty, out of me, that’s the way he said it, now pardon me again,’ she said, coughing gently again as she blessed herself. ‘You see, I’d never heard those kind of words before, and then he turned fully on me, and said that I drove her to it, Ann, that I drove her to the banister, and the cord, he was roaring then, all bothered about what he had gotten himself into at all at all, and that he’d heard about women like us. Dykes. But he hadn’t been crazy enough to believe it, because women like us were worse than witches, fucking dirty rotten devil whores.’

‘Oh, Jane, it’s OK,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to go back over this.’

‘Oh, I can assure you I spoke up,’ she said, sensing my apprehension, perhaps not wanting sympathy, ‘but it got me nothing, nowhere. I tried to defend myself. I shouted back at him, for I think I was braver then, that’s what being young does, “Well, Goodman Tom Lohan with all the big horrible words,” but he roared out and I was so afraid everyone in the guest house would hear, which I am sure they did, even though I tried to keep him quiet, and the more I shhhh’d him, the angrier he got, he was mad with himself for going ahead with it, the wedding maybe, I don’t know, he said nothing else but took the paisley neck tie off from around his neck and twisted it around mine.’ She stretched again as I gently wiped the rest of the lipstick off her face.