We’d been having a look at Bono on the telly holding David Trimble and John Hume’s arms in the air when they had emerged together ahead of the referendum in May. There was a joy in the image that lifted our hearts. Serena wanted to know how I was doing? Only she’d been thinking it would be great for me to go on a course. She’d been thinking that maybe I’d like to learn how to drive now that the roads would be safer? There were plenty of opportunities out there for women like me, apparently. Women like me? I was a farmer’s wife: nothing more, nothing less.

–  Things have changed since you were sixteen, says my wise child!

–  Is that so? says I.

–  Tell me again what happened?

So I told her again her favourite story of How Serena Came To Be and for a good few years now I’d even stopped thinking of it as The End of Mary Rattigan. I played up the glamour of the whole enterprise. I painted in the crescent moon, the summeriness of the night, the feeling of freedom, and glossed over the tiny fact that I was the tramp I’d always warned her not to be.

I never mentioned Joe Loughrey. He was irrelevant to the story of her even though he was the key to the story of me. I’d first told her about Jacques Bernier on her thirteenth birthday. She never expressed any desire to find him. I was glad of that, thinking what a shock it would be for him discovering that a few minutes of pleasure had led to a brand-new person. I had days when I could hardly believe it myself.

I’d never asked her to keep it from John but she hadn’t told him. She wouldn’t dream of hurting Dada by even bringing it up. The words we had set down when she was tiny had never left her: John Johns had taken the job on and he was all the daddy she would ever need. She was still his girl, right down to her bones. She sighed and threw herself across the bed, delighted she was the result of such a romantic interlude. Jesus Christ on a pushbike!

–  Did Dada ever tell you about Catherine?

–  No. I heard of a Catherine once but it was before my time …

–  Honestly! You pair! Have you ever thought about talking to each other?

I was still desperate to know what had gone on so I got up and started folding clothes as if I didn’t care a bucky and, sure enough, Serena spilled the beans without realising she was being flipped. I’d get her to bend the main rule that John and me lived by – he didn’t want to know about me and I wasn’t interested in him. Deals don’t break themselves, y’know?