Richard Culhane turned his scholarship down.

‘Other people need the money more than me, you know?’ he said. ‘I’ll still play for the team, like. But I don’t need the scholarship.’

Peter Culhane was full of pride at his son’s decision. ‘Ah, he’s a generous lad,’ Peter said. ‘We raised him right.’

Conor Harris and Barry Fox both accepted their scholarships. They both, as it turned out, performed excellently in their exams. But they were Brookfield boys. Exam success was expected of them.

Sports scholarship boys at UCD were encouraged to study a subject that seemed relevant to their sporting careers – Physiotherapy, Sports Management, Athletic Performance. But the Brookfield boys stuck to Business.

UCD occupies an enormous campus on the south side of the city, between Donnybrook and Clonskeagh. Most of the campus was built in the early seventies, and the architecture is uniformly dull and angular. The Quinn School, where the Brookfield boys studied, is an exception. It was built in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and features a laptop area, a contemplation room, a café, and an atrium. It is fitted with wireless Internet access. All Quinn School students are expected to buy their own laptop, and to bring it to class.

Laura Haines was enrolled as a nursing student at UCD. Nobody expected her to pursue nursing as a career. She was taking the long route into medical school, because her exam results, contrary to expectations, had been relatively poor.

Training for the UCD rugby squad was a gruelling experience, but the boys were used to it. They had trained after school every day for three years, doing squats and sit-ups on the old school pitch while Pat Kilroy yelled at them and blew his whistle.

Still, Richard Culhane was more dedicated than most, even at college, even when his social life enjoyed that comfortable expansion that awaits any private-school boy who takes his class with him when he enters university. He trained on the floodlit fields on week nights when there were no team sessions scheduled. He did twenty laps of the college athletic track in the rain. I would see him as I walked to the bus stop. He was always completely absorbed, as if he recognized no other world, as if the answer to all his questions could be found at the end of the track that he was diligently running.

25

One summer, when Conor was two years old, Brendan Harris built a boundary wall between their back garden and the garden next door. He did the job himself because he resented paying for builders.

Conor dug at the deepening trench with a plastic shovel and shouted, ‘Helping Daddy with the soundation! Daddy digging the soundation!’ He watched as his father worked in noncommittal silence, pausing to drink a glass of water Eileen had brought from the kitchen. Brendan seemed to give off a strange, primitive power as he stood there with his head thrown back, his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed. But in those days Conor accepted Brendan’s power and mystery without question. It was so easy to love your father when you were small. Perhaps when you were very young, that was how your parents appeared: as though they had been constructed with your love in mind.