Alex Delaney was the Vet who came from Cork and lodged in a red-bricked boarding house with Arthur Murphy, a man who worked in the bank and had bad breath and later went on to be a government minister. There was another boarder as well but he had no significance for the young ladies. An older man who was bald and managed the local cinema and played the organ in the church. He had been in the boarding house so long nobody knew where he had come from. Or if he had come from anywhere. Perhaps he was from the town and owned the boarding house. Birdie can’t be expected to remember everything about everyone. She remembers the Vet. That’s enough.

He was a tall man. Slim and obscure. He had a light heart and a light foot, and when he first arrived in Ballinasloe the townspeople were of the impression that he was a flirt whom nobody would ever tie down. He was in his late forties, and wore grey linen suits and soft felt hats, and when he smoked his cigarettes the girls said he looked like an American in a film. His arrival in town was an enormous event in the social calendar. Vets were the men of the future, people said. Farming was going to be called agriculture. Bulls were going to be abolished. It would all be coming out of a test tube in a laboratory. Everything would become scientific. And the vets were the boys who had the road maps.

He arrived. Oh he did surely. In a big Austin Morris station wagon. Or was it a Ford? Anyway. He sang the ‘Banks of My Own Lovely Lee’ in the discreet snug of Mannion’s Bar where the professional men went drinking on Friday nights. He wasn’t afraid to let go. But as people said, that kind of thing is alright in Mannion’s if you have the money behind you. And though everybody guessed that Alex Delaney didn’t have much then, they knew that in time he would. He was a man who knew the future, they said. He saw what was coming. He was like a man waiting for apples to fall off the tree, they said.

Dumbstruck. That’s the only word could describe the reaction of all the virgins of Ballinasloe, the daughters of the shopkeepers, and the teachers and traders, with their piano lessons and their convent educations. Dumbstruck. That’s the truth. When he married Birdie Waters. And it wasn’t just her address in the terraces. It was the lines on her face. The mileage on the clock, as they said. Birdie was no chicken.

But they were married anyway, and not in the big church in the town, with pomp and fanfare, but in a small country chapel on the edge of the parish; on a hill a few miles from the town and Birdie didn’t even wear a wedding dress. She wore a pleated suit in pale blue, with a matching hat like a small fez. It was modern and caused people to say with envy that she looked like an air hostess.