There was something weary about his mother’s wisdom, Conor thought, as though it had come to her too late. He listened to her, fascinated, wary of showing how much her sayings meant to him. Boys were supposed to shock their mothers, to turn their warmth and kindness upside down, but Conor was always made tender by his mother’s vulnerability. He was childishly interested in what she had to say.

Since retiring from the hands-on side of the family’s restaurant business, Eileen Harris worked desultorily from home, selling patchwork quilts of her own design and, occasionally, cushions and throws that wound up in the unused living rooms of her wealthy friends and neighbours. Their neighbourhood in Donnybrook was like that: full of people who could afford to have a room they never used. Laura came from such a house, which she once described to Conor as ‘an ordinary six-bedroom family house’, and which always astonished him with its pristine permanence whenever he entered it. Every surface in that house would gleam and glitter. The rooms contained a silken hush, as though they expected you to be as neat and calm as they were. The kitchen was full of marble and stainless steel, and appeared never to have been used for anything so mundane as the preparation of food.

Certainly Laura would never have used it for such a task. She hardly touched food if she could help it. She greeted the suggestion of lunch with wan indifference. Conor never saw it as a problem. After his death I forgot about Laura’s eating disorder, and when I remembered it, sitting down to write this account, it had somehow become lapidary, inevitable, a part of the past. Perhaps more strangely, it had become something to do with Conor. It had become just one more fact about the dead.

30

As Conor got older, Brendan Harris learned to be awkward with his son. This was what men of their class and generation did: they found each others’ private lives embarrassing. Peter Culhane had always been blustery and vague with Richard. It came naturally to him. He had learned from his father. But Brendan Harris had to work it out for himself.

Brendan took his cue from his son. Shortly after Conor arrived at Brookfield he began to call his father ‘Bren’. To his school friends, habitually, Conor referred to his parents as ‘the old pair’. Both of these things were ways of denying that you had parents at all.

On a Saturday afternoon in May Brendan found Conor sitting on an old iron bench in the back garden of the Harrises’ house in Donnybrook. This was a week after Conor and Laura had broken up. Little fragments of browning mayflower dropped from the hawthorn tree above the bench. Brendan walked slowly down the garden with his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

Conor had spent the last two days lying in his room, listening to Alice in Chains records that he had borrowed from his brother. Now here he was, sitting in the sun, wearing wraparound Ray-Bans and drinking a fizzy drink.