‘Alright, Con?’ Brendan said.

‘Yeah,’ Conor said.

‘Feeling a bit better?’

‘Yeah.’

Eileen Harris had hung a bronze windchime from a branch of the hawthorn tree. It shook and shivered in the cooling breeze.

‘How do you think the exams went?’ Brendan asked.

‘Fine,’ Conor said.

There was a silence.

‘I know it’s hard,’ Brendan said.

‘What?’

‘Dealing with ... you know, matters of the heart.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah,’ Brendan said. He frowned at an unweeded flowerbed. ‘It is. We’ve all been through it, you know.’

‘No,’ Conor said. ‘No we haven’t.’

‘I went through it,’ Brendan said.

‘Good for you,’ Conor said.

Brendan was offended by this. He was offended by Conor’s refusal to acknowledge that his experience was not unique. To Brendan Harris, heartbreak was soothingly universal. The way you got through it was to share your pain with someone else.

But I think Conor was right, in one way at least. He could never have conveyed to Brendan what it meant to lose Laura Haines.

Again Brendan frowned at the unweeded flowerbed. Then he turned and went inside.

Conor sat on the bench. After a few minutes he heard the hollow pocking sound of Brendan practising putts in the garage, sending the pitted balls with their core of childhood mystery (was it poison? glue? the hardest substance known to man?) rattling into a tin can saved from the recycling bin.

Only once did I ever hear Conor talk about his father. His tone was baffled, almost hurt. ‘Sometimes you look at your old man,’ he said, ‘and you wonder, what the fuck do you think of me, really? I mean, who are you, anyway?’

Richard Culhane would not have sympathized with this. He viewed his father with a mixture of pious scorn and exasperated love. Even when Richard was in his late teens – shaving twice a day, sleeping at his girlfriend’s house, drinking, driving – Peter would still tousle his son’s hair at the breakfast table.

‘He hasn’t noticed I’m a grown-up yet,’ Richard said.

You can see a larger truth in this. Our parents all suffered from the same reluctance to let us go. They loved and understood us when we were children, but when we became adults they found us too complicated, too alien, too wilfully self-destructive. Suddenly we made no sense. The only skills our parents could summon were skills that applied to us as kids. We came to resent them for this, for their inability to relinquish a tone of faintly condescending intimacy, and for the abrupt way in which they stood revealed to us as amateurs, sad approximations of our professional selves in our newfound confidence and nous.

And yet we took their prosperity for granted. We lived in houses they had bought and went on holidays that they had paid for. We saw our parents, as all children eventually do, as separate from the things that they had done for us. So it was never a question of gratitude. That wasn’t the way it worked.