An old-fashioned man. He believed in courting women and flirting with them, and he displayed an enthusiasm for their company that far outstripped his interest in music.

No matter what room he walked into, women instantly trusted him with their lives. He was that class of a man.

And thank God she has her photographs for if she didn’t have them, she wonders would she remember anything. And then she’d be daft. And they could put her away.

And in those days women were rarely seen in the bars, though it seemed an exception was made for musicians, who invariably drank ginger ale or tonic wine, or glasses of stout with spoons of sugar stirred in.

Birdie glowed in her blue stewardess costume and could be coerced into a few Babychams while the Vet leaned in on the bar, taking whiskey with the Kerry farmers, and Hughie played jigs with the ladies, and nodded over his flute to indicate the end of ‘Drowsy Maggie’.

She was more than happy with Hughie. She encouraged him. He would cross the galaxy just to be in the company of a woman. Wasn’t that the kind of man anyone wanted?

And the women often asked Hughie would he not settle down. Ah for Jaysus sake! Settle down! Sure men like Dattledo don’t settle down.

‘Would you not settle down, Dattledo?’

Hughie’s body stretched like a wild cat and he purred into her ear that he hadn’t found the right woman. Or that he was too hard to please. Oh he could send volts of terror through the spines of his young admirers. She used to ask him just for fun. Just to hear him purr.

‘Would you not settle down there, Dattledo?’

But isn’t it funny too, how things change. A few years after Gussie was born, Hughie and the Vet drifted apart.

There was no reason. Maybe Hughie’s nomadic lifestyle seemed at odds with the domestic responsibilities of fatherhood. It might not have been anything in particular. And they always remained friends. She knew that. There was no falling out or anything like that. But marriage defined a new universe for Alex. And they said that Hughie went bitter. Something happened inside him. Something that forced him down like a plane. Like a bird shot out of the air. Something. Couldn’t be named. Maybe it was nothing. Just in him. Like we all have a life mapped out for us in our bones before we’re born.

And then Birdie wonders is there someone at the foot of the bed. She senses something. A presence. No more substantial than the shadow of the wardrobe falling on the wall, but it speaks, and Birdie would know Alex’s voice anywhere.

‘Hughie descended into hell,’ the shadow declares with great authority. And the voice is slightly stilted, like Dracula’s. ‘Hughie descended into hell,’ the shadow repeats, ‘where only the drink can compensate for the unbearable passing of time and the lost opportunities.’

That certainly woke her.