‘If you only get me as far as Tralee,’ says he, ‘I’ll make me own way home.’

And she didn’t argue. It didn’t really matter who came with them on their honeymoon, so long as Alex was driving and the sun was shining. That’s all she needed, because the world was different that morning. She had entered the infinite security of knowing that there was someone to make all the decisions in her life from now on. She firmly believed that Alex, being a vet, and being from Cork, and being an exquisite dancer who could probably drive all the way to Kerry and back without once looking at a map, was entirely correct in choosing to bring a flute player.

As it turned out, he wasn’t far wrong. Everybody got on famously well. The third party in the group prevented either Alex or Birdie from being overwhelmed by four long days of isolated intimacy.

So off they go. The two of them in the front of the white hearse, and the dead flute player stretched in the back. It’s a huge hearse now, and the flute player is getting longer and longer, so that his feet stick out the rear window, and she’s saying to Alex, is this the Ford or is it the white station wagon?

At last he answers her. His head floats through the wall from the other world, and he calls her. Birdie. Birdie. You’re dreaming!

Birdie wakes up with a fright. Yes. She was dreaming. There she is in the bed. And the light is off. It’s dark. And she fumbles around under the pillow for her flashlight. It’s working. So she points it at the bed. Moves the beam around the bedspread like the beam of a lighthouse trawling the face of the ocean. She’s agitated for a minute but it’s OK. She sees her wedding album. Her little life raft of survivors sailing on the bedspread. Everything is alright again. She must have turned off the light automatically and fallen asleep. But now she’s back.

And Hughie is back. She finds his photograph. Outside a pub with a low thatched roof somewhere in Limerick. Tea. Yes. They had tea there. Birdie can see the jester in him now. The fool he plays. The way he slopes himself against the wall and looks out to one side, ignoring the camera. And all the bicycles lined up against the wall. Those were the days. She turns over the photo and reads the faded writing.

– Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. You won’t succeed. And you’ll annoy the pig! –

It makes her laugh. Even now in the deepest darkness of the night. She props him up against the base of the bedside lamp. The cheeky devil. ‘I have my eye on you,’ she whispers at the picture. ‘I have my eye on you, Mr Dattledo Donoghue!’

Nine months after the honeymoon Augustine Delaney was born, named after a grandfather of the same name, and who, like many Cork people of the nineteenth century, had a high regard for the Augustinian Friars in that city. There were jokes, of course, among the travelling salesmen but nobody took offence. Alex would go into Mannion’s Bar in the evenings to buy six bottles of stout, which he took home wrapped in a brown paper bag and Hughie would stick his head out from behind the fogged glass of the snug. ‘How’s our child?’ Hughie would inquire, and the travelling salesmen would fall about the place laughing, because Hughie had told them the story of how he had shared the Vet’s honeymoon with the wife. It never bothered Birdie. No. Nor Alex.