Margaret Rose took a sharp in-breath and shut her eyes tight.

‘Don’t be so critical, you –’ she whipped around and pointed at Margaret Rose – ‘I couldn’t allow her just to plough on forward and pass everyone out, you know what they say about too much praise? Besides, it’d have done her no good. All that praise.’ Jane spoke quietly now, not wanting anyone to hear. ‘We’d better be quiet and not pretend a thing, or we’ll never get out, they’ll never let us home, and we’ll have no tea outside later.’

The Hegartys never acknowledged Jane. And in turn she had kept an iron fist of silence on her story. The wind was blowing up outside, but the rain was lifting and the late-afternoon sun was showing itself. Leaves billowed and big seagulls cawed out, landing on the crumbled balcony edge and flying off, startled by the banging windows.

‘Her hair was braided so very tightly, you see,’ Jane said, making a tiny O out of her thumb and forefinger. ‘And let me tell you, ladies, it was not Claire’s mother who did that to her hair. You see … she did it to herself. The child. That tightly to herself … that it almost stopped the blood … but she had to be just perfect.’

‘I always liked putting my girls in plaits. Kept it neat,’ Margaret Rose said.

My sons. Barbers. Six weeks. Short back and sides. No razor. I’d go get a coffee and leave them in the place with music videos, scantily clad women, men with tight chinos swaggering, narrow combs in blue liquid with pretty teeth, lift-up seat for the smallest as he eyed himself furtively in the mirror.

‘Ah, I have you now, I have you,’ Jane shrieked at Margaret Rose, scanning her up and down. ‘Well, aren’t you the right one, and you named after the princess, the bitch, the whore one, went off with the photographer, Margaret Rose Windsor, that’s you, right? Wonder what ma’am would think of that?’

Margaret Rose laughed, ‘Ouch. But ya, yar correct.’

‘In fact, there is no way in this wide earthly world that Claire’s mother would give a damn as to what her hair was like,’ Jane said, going back to her tale and raising her tone now. ‘Claire Hegarty’s mother didn’t plait her hair. She put plaits in model dolls, mind you. But she was never going to touch a hair on the head of her own child. It seemed there was just something about her.’

Margaret Rose shot me one high eyebrow. I reciprocated.

‘She’s a lovely woman though, you know?’ Jane said, invitingly.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Patrick’s wife, gentle, could never understand why she didn’t take to Claire, and in the end Claire did everything for herself and her father. At first, little Claire began asking my year’s plan, and said she loved maths, but all I could think of was Ann …’ Jane said and sighed. ‘I was years teaching at this stage and let me tell you, there were few put it up to me as Claire did, not at all like the older brother and older sister.’