They could easily afford the fees of eight thousand a year, of course. They could easily have afforded the slightly larger amount it would have cost to send Conor to board at Clongowes Wood in County Kildare, where Brendan’s father had wanted to send him. But Brendan Harris had always been attracted to what he saw as the austerity and refinement of the Dublin rugby schools. He saw Brookfield as Conor’s way into the establishment, into the kind of life where comfort and authority are taken for granted, where it is accepted that one will know neurologists at Vincent’s, paediatricians at Mater Dei.

It was also about sport. Brendan wanted Conor to make the Senior Cup team. After a while, Conor wanted it, too.

Of course, it made a difference that Conor’s father hadn’t gone to Brookfield. It made a difference to how he was seen by the other boys. There was always something of the outsider about Conor Harris, some air of dissatisfaction. People at Brookfield nursed the lingering suspicion that because Conor’s parents weren’t from Dublin, because they had made their money in the service industry, Conor simply wasn’t comfortable being rich, that he wasn’t comfortable at Brookfield. You could occasionally see that Conor was aware of this. On the rugby pitch, training in the leaden afternoons, he would charge a bit too heavily, run for slightly too long, exhaust himself and grow frustrated at his own exhaustion, at his own apparent unsuitability for where he was and what he was doing.

But this happened rarely, and you could only see it if you were looking for it.

You could see it in Brendan and Eileen Harris, too.

Brendan played golf at Mount Juliet and Druid’s Glen and the K Club, but he never, I think, felt that he particularly belonged at these places. It was an effort of will that kept him there – the same force of will that kept Peter Culhane and Maurice O’Brien and John Fox from quailing before the world’s complexity, but narrower somehow, more constrained.

Brendan Harris liked to cook. There was something private, even hobbyist, about Brendan when he was cooking. He liked to make duck à l’orange with shallots and parsnips. ‘I may never get a Michelin star,’ he would say, ‘but as long as I enjoy myself, that’s all that matters.’ He always sounded unconvincing when he said this, like a man verbally auditioning a philosophy he had already rejected; or like a man trying to deny a larger insecurity.

The most interesting story I’ve heard about Eileen Harris was about the time Brendan took her to his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party in a hotel in Kilkenny town. Eileen was working in a florist’s in Carlow. She was so intimidated by the prospect of presenting Mary Harris, her new boyfriend’s mother, with a bronze picture frame, that she waited until Mary was in the bathroom and passed the present, along with its card, under the gap beneath the toilet-cubicle door.