He could even make letting me read sound like something I might have to pay for, somehow. I put Heaney back on the shelf, he was the O-level me. Walter Macken, Sean O’Casey, some American novels – The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, some Steinbecks – all sat happily cheek by jowl; none of those had been on the syllabus. I pulled out T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; it had been on the reading list for A-level English. Footfalls echo in the memory/down the passage which we did not take/ towards the door we never opened/ into the rose-garden. I would carry it to the Lower Room and soak up the words from better, brighter lives, like a blood-starved tick.

It was him who sent for Auntie Eileen when Serena was about six months old and still not christened. He’d mentioned it to me, made it sound like my duty as a good Catholic mother and wife, and I’d walked straight out of the half-door with her in my arms. He needed reminding that she was mine but he wanted his name branded on her. He knew that I wouldn’t be bold enough to call her Serena Rattigan and damn every pious hypocrite in St Bede’s. I just didn’t want it to happen yet.

She was already reaching out for him; her little face lit up brighter for him than it ever did for me. I didn’t want to lose another crumb of her. Auntie Eileen and Bernie showed up one day with a mission and a fresh cream sponge. She knew all my weaknesses. I knew she’d do anything if John Johns asked her, even if it was slipping a set of reins over my head.

–  Well?

–  Well what?

–  Why hasn’t this gorgeous girl been christened yet?

–  What’s the rush? Why is everyone so desperate to toe the party line?

–  Everyone isn’t! But you have to get her christened at some stage and there’s never any better time than the present. Here, take another slice of cream cake and cheer yourself up – you’ve a face on you that could turn an Orange Order parade!

Bridie cut me another slab of sponge and I rammed it into my mouth. I noticed she was very quiet on the subject of going back to the chapel and swearing more lies. But then she was carrying the secret of an unconsummated marriage without a single stumble; this was small beans.