But this was just another way of disavowing the secure and confident joy of owning a swimming pool.

Privately Richard was glad that he had been absent during the pool’s construction. He knew that Peter would have spent the summer nattering away to the builders about paintings and share prices, unaware of how ridiculous they found him, these men in their grubby tracksuits and golden jewellery, men who spoke a language of which Peter was serenely ignorant, a language of coarse competence and trenchant masculinity. But Richard was glad the pool was there, shimmering like molten lead under temperate skies in the long back yard.

He had known, the minute he saw the pool, that he would have to break up with Claire Lawrence. Why? Because she just wasn’t classy enough. She didn’t deserve a boyfriend with a pool. She would get pissed on half a bottle of vodka, and monopolize Richard’s attention in a bedroom when he could have been downstairs drinking with the lads. Sometimes she would cut herself with a razor blade, which she kept in her handbag in a neatly folded scrap of paper torn from a glossy fashion magazine. She was an embarrassment. ‘Always opening her mouth at the wrong fucking moment,’ Richard confided to Barry Fox. ‘And not so I could shove my cock in it, you know?’

Barry and Richard high-fived.

For the first two weeks after the builders got the water heater up and running, Peter Culhane went out on to the patio in his dressing gown every morning and had breakfast sitting by the pool. It was very cold, and eventually he had to stop.

6

Three people killed Conor Harris outside Harry’s Niteclub on the last night of summer, 2004. Two of them were Brookfield boys. The other had gone to Brookfield College and then transferred to Merrion Academy. These things matter. These things make a difference.

Brookfield College, founded by the Jesuits in 1872, occupies a leafy enclave off Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock. Merrion Academy takes up most of a Georgian terrace in Milltown. They’re both rugby schools, they’re both single-sex, and they’re both famous for the outstanding achievements of their students. ‘The percentage of students from Brookfield who do not go on to some form of third level education’, says one broadsheet, ‘is negligible.’ Brookfield and Merrion Academy annually swap places at the top of the Irish second-level league table for private schools.

According to the Brookfield website, the school buildings ‘are situated in bucolic grounds, a short distance from Dublin’. In the ‘About Us’ section of the site, there is a paragraph about ‘the importance of faith to the ethos of the school’, the necessity of imparting to students an ethic of both fortitude and faith.

The Brookfield admission papers advise that priority will be given, in considerations for admittance, to the sons and brothers of former Brookfield students. ‘Parents are also requested to contribute to the Building Fund’ (I am quoting now from the Brookfield prospectus, a glossy publication done in faux-Celtic style). According to a ‘Vision Statement’ included in this prospectus, Brookfield College expects that its pupils, on graduating, will have been inculcated with ‘ideals of excellence in all aspects of their lives – spiritual, moral, intellectual’. I don’t know if Richard Culhane was familiar with these words, but Peter Culhane certainly was.