And when they got as far as Kerry, it was Birdie who insisted that they couldn’t under any circumstances abandon him so far from home. She wouldn’t dream of letting him go. Not in Kerry. For goodness sake they couldn’t have half the fun if he wasn’t there, with his flute, impressing all the musicians from Kerry with his furious tunes.

They had fun. That’s the only word for it. Fun on the road. Innocent fun. All three of them. For four amazing days. And then it was over.

It was all over. They returned to Ballinasloe in silence and waved goodbye to Hughie at Mannion’s corner.

And as the Skehana people say, there’s more to life than romance. That’s something Birdie found out for certain. Seeing the Vet’s cream long johns on the kitchen floor for the tenth time when she was sorting the laundry. That was a turning point. Hearing him fart in the bedroom. That was a milestone. Cleaning his beard hair from the sink hole. But it was called marriage. It was called being Mrs Delaney. She knew that there was going to be more to marriage than what you saw in American films, and even in those some of the women didn’t come out so good. But she didn’t mind. In fact, she considered herself the luckiest woman in Ireland to wait hand and foot on Alex Delaney. And besides, Daddy had moved to the County Home where he could do no harm other than to stare at the ceiling and wait patiently to die, so there were certain things to be thankful for in every situation.

And then suddenly Alex farts so loudly that she wakes up again. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she shouts, who farted? But it wasn’t Alex. Because she was just asleep again and now she’s so shocked with the sound of the fart, it was so distinct, and so huge, that she sits up in the bed, her reading glasses like a tractor’s headlamps, and she looks at the night in Killarney, and the trip around the lake in the jaunting cart, and the walk on the long beach on the last morning, and she feels enormous gratitude. And Hughie’s sad eyes light up every photograph that they took with the new little Kodak camera Alex had bought as a gift for her on the way through Limerick.

Hughie navigated the pair of them up roads and down byways they would never have found on their own. They heard music played by women on little concertinas, and by men on fiddles, which would have made the angels weep.

‘Would make the angels weep,’ Hughie said. ‘The way I like it. Slow and sorrowful.’

And in those days Hughie was still full of boyish fun. He was only thirty. People said he had his own love affair tucked away somewhere in the forests of Cong. And he certainly had the aura of experience. The scent of a dog that enjoys being off the porch at regular intervals. He would sit beside the ladies and put his long fingers on the buttons of their concertinas to take a little jig out of it and sometimes he’d whisper scatological crudities in their ears.