You could see he was getting concerned.

‘Be careful,’ says he, ‘and don’t be hopping about too much on it. I heard them say at the door of the hospital that you should only walk a little bit every day for the first week or two.’

‘And you be careful going back into the city with all that traffic,’ she retorted.

‘I will, mam,’ says he, respectfully, and then, with the car in gear, and his foot on the clutch, he threw her one last glance.

‘Jesus, Mrs Delaney,’ says he, ‘you’re a fucken tonic.’

Not much consolation in that was there? To be a tonic for a taxi driver who whistled ‘The Tennessee Waltz’? No.

Gussie arrived at her door the following Sunday, with a male nurse who waited in a Nissan Primera outside on the driveway. Gussie walked down the hallway like an old man. He was as stiff as a poker. He stared around the kitchen in gentle bewilderment. Maybe the taxi driver from Clare was bewildered. Maybe most men are bewildered. Maybe it was fortunate that she got the Vet. Maybe she didn’t fully appreciate him even now. A man that’s not lost in a fog of his own confusion is hard to find and she found the only one who ever walked through Ballinasloe.

So there was no point in Gussie standing in the kitchen looking at her as if he pitied her. He had no fucken right to come into her house and stand there gawking at her like he was trying to figure out who she was. Her grey, wispy hair was standing up in ragged clumps on her head, because she was only out of bed, and her glasses, large headlamps in pink, plastic frames had slipped down her nose. Her eyes had the focused terror of a hunted animal. And around her on the floor were heaps of clothes. Sheets. Blouses. Pyjamas. That was her business. What would he think if she told him about her accident in the bed that morning and having to change everything and wash everything?

By Christ she certainly wasn’t going to tell him something like that!

‘What’s all this?’ he asked.

‘I’m spring-cleaning.’

He sneered.

‘It’s October.’

She stared at him and he looked away. But it was him who was almost on the verge of tears.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘It’s intolerable,’ he blurted out.

‘What?’

‘Intolerable that you’re here on your own, with no one to look after you. People are worried.’

She could have told him there and then that she had plenty to look after her. She could have stuck her wedding finger under his nose and told him that the day she undertook to wear that band of gold, she got someone to look after her who had never let her down and was still minding her. And then he’d think she was daft. Yes. Isn’t that funny? Him worried about her being daft. The pot calling the kettle black.