She felt sorry for the pensive way he whistled old waltzes. She herself had a jaunty walk for a woman just over an operation. A black woollen beret cocked to the side of her head. She fumbled for the keys to open the door as they both stood there and the taxi man declared with admiration that she was the picture of health.

‘They’ll not be burying you for another couple of months,’ he chirped.

She didn’t think much of that remark but she let him away with it because she had a generally low opinion of taxi drivers and he wasn’t the worst. At least he was trying to be cheerful. She sat him in the kitchen like he was a schoolboy, and talked of all the things she was going to get done with the house that she loved. The oil heating wasn’t working properly. And she might change the radiators. They were old and bulky and had been there since the time of the Vet. Who was the Vet? the taxi man wondered. My husband, she said coldly, as if he should have known.

The lock on the front door would need replacing. And she was going to get a neighbour who mowed the meadows that surrounded her house to mow her front lawn as well, and put weedkiller on the path, where all the scutch grass and the little wild yellow flowers had been growing all summer. And she had people to tackle. A long list of vendettas that she didn’t have the energy for earlier in the year. She had been too worried about Gussie’s decline.

‘Who is Gussie?’ the taxi man inquired. Never mind.

No point in telling the taxi man everything. Gussie was jobless and witless and mired in a confusion of his own making. Wandering around the beaches of Connemara. Locked up in a mental hospital. So who was Gussie? Ha! She didn’t know who Gussie was herself any more, though she was hardly going to say that to a stranger. But she said it to the one who understood everything. She whispered it to the Vet. Nobody knows what a mother goes through. Nobody knows the half of it.

‘Oh you’re right there, Mrs Delaney,’ the taxi man agreed, sucking a chocolate biscuit.

Was it Clare he said? Or Longford? It’s hard to remember everything. Maybe it was the matron who was the Clare woman. And the taxi man who was from Longford. Or was it the other way about? Was that big fat lump of lard who ran the nursing home from Longford? Anyway, the taxi was halfway down the avenue when the driver, still sucking the remnants of a biscuit, saw her waving. He stopped and reversed until he was beside her. She had forgotten her stick. It was in the back seat. She was laughing like a schoolgirl. He gave it to her and she gripped it in the centre and said, ‘Of course I don’t need it now, with the new hip!’