They’d been at it for a year. Gussie was in on it too. Along with the district nurse. And half the fucken staff in the doctor’s surgery. And then Birdie got the hip done. That improved things. And Gussie signed himself into a psychiatric ward with bars on the windows. Maybe that too was a sign of improvement. The priest sent word to the chalet in Cornagore, to inform him about the success of the hip, and what does the poor priest find but a man defeated by a sewage pipe.

They replaced the old hip with a new plastic one. And Birdie never felt better. She was scooting around the hospital ward all morning like an ice skater, while out in Connemara Gussie was having a nervous breakdown. One going in and one coming out. That’s the way it was that morning. A coincidence weighted with irony. Profound irony. Birdie was well aware what they would say about Gussie’s humiliating surrender in his underpants! Lots of juice there for the widows and old ladies who still went to the golf club on Thursday afternoons to sink gin and tonics in the new lounge. Birdie knew from long experience that it’s the mother who always gets the blame.

‘Oh now, Mrs Delaney, you’re not able to be walking around any more with that bad hip.’ Then replace it. ‘Oh now, Mrs Delaney, would you not lie down and die!’ No. ‘Well then, what else can we do but find you a nice nursing home, where you’ll be safe, and no one will be worrying about you, and we can throw away the key?’ Fuck off.

But now it was Gussie who needed to be put away. Ha ha! And to think that he had the neck to be worrying about her. Egging them on! Doing their bidding! It made her blood boil. He even sent her a brochure in the post.

‘A tiny room on the second floor of a large complex for elderly tenants, run by the Health Board and private investors.’

The brochure called it exclusive. She would have her own toilet and shower facility. How lovely. And a television set? You’re codding! And a window that looked out on the car park and two lovely birch trees. Shrivelled. The trees were shrivelled. Lovely me arse!

But she humoured Gussie by going to see it. She was breathless in the car. He thought she was going to have a heart attack. He didn’t see that it was just the annoyance of being bullied into a prison. Take the shovel and bury yourself. That’s what it felt like.

She had to get him to stop the car in Monivea, till she drew her breath in a lay-by beside a scenic wood resplendent with the red and yellow leaves of Canadian maples, but she had recovered enough on entering the glass doors of the reception area to insist on walking upstairs rather than taking the lift. Other residents, with rooms along the same corridor, brought her into their little homes and showed off their fine lace mats, and photographs of their children in Toronto and Seattle, and their silver-framed grandchildren.