He decided to inform me. Father Pat O’Connell was holed up in a luxury Catholic Church house called Killhatch to recover from an operation on his bowel, suspected cancer. It started out well enough, two men having a standard Irish conversation: the price of this and that compared to America, the shocking amount of rain that had fallen just that afternoon, the change in the times since his day. John was feeling happy – imagine that, Mary, happy after all these years of being the most famous bastard in Carncloon? Hundreds of auld bitches just like Sadie Rattigan whispering about him in the streets and snorting when he was safely past without contaminating them with the sins of his father? He’d thought the old man might want to reach out, that he might want to apologise for leaving his son so exposed. He’d dreamed that the shaming of Bishop Casey would give him food for thought.

I nodded and nodded. I knew just the sort of behaviour that my mother and her Catholic cronies were capable of. I would have tried to stammer out that I didn’t want to be tarred with her brush but there wasn’t a lot of gaps. John was beating out his explanations in time with the sledgehammer: whump, whump, whump.

Father Pat O’Connell hadn’t really wanted to see him at all, hadn’t actually wanted to spend time with his son. He’d wanted to tell John Johns what a mistake he’d made. He should never have married me. ME! It had been playing on his mind for years and he wanted to put it on record that I should not have been married off when I was only a child. He’d met me once: I’d seemed a very sweet, innocent young girl and I should have been given the chance to get on with my life.

I had the look of a girl who might do something with my brains, certainly I was too good to be stuck on a farm. It had been good enough for Bridie – she’d had no options – but me, me, I had come across as having potential. John should have seen his way to being the bigger man, maybe even just taking on the baby and rearing it with his mother’s help?