Neither the Misses Bewleys nor Mrs McWeeney were ever seen. Their families had hunted the fox with horses and hounds, and owned all the land in the vicinity of the town. In the new Irish Republic they had little inclination to engage in local society, apart from selling their assets like slices of ham to the local building contractor. Birdie used their mysterious and invisible presence as a weapon to frighten Gussie. If ever he refused to eat his cabbage or turned over the coffee table in a tantrum, or knocked the head off the Child of Prague, which he did one day with a pillow, she’d threaten to deliver him to Mrs McWeeney.

‘She knows how to look after children who don’t behave themselves,’ Birdie would say. It always worked. Every Friday, on their way into town on the bike, Birdie would invite him to turn his head sideways as they passed the gates to see if Mrs McWeeney was at her window.

She was always there. The bottom half of the lace curtain pulled back by a hand floating in the darkness. The vague outline of a white head farther back in the dark room. It made him shiver. And worse were the windows of the Bewleys’ house, from which, he supposed, light never emerged. Gussie would not even dare to look in the direction of those windows, for in that darkness he feared he might see too much.

But most shocking of all was when the tinkers arrived. The gypsies with their roll-top wagons. Their piebald horses and ragged donkeys camped beside the stone bridge. They camped just off the main road, beside the gorse bushes, which they festooned with their drying underwear. They had mad dogs chained to the wheels of the wagons, and mucky-faced children stood at the blackened stones of a previous night’s fire, their backsides bare to the wind.

I’ll leave you there, Birdie would say, if you’re not good.

Poor Gussie. Did she frighten him too much? He’d wrap his little hands around the springs under the saddle and hold on for dear life. The poor wee rabbit. But Birdie wasn’t thinking much of rabbits then. She was thinking of lamb chops and roast beef and how well she looked on her bicycle, with her chest pushed out like a pigeon on the gate.

It’s so easy now to look back and admit that she was stuck up. To admit that she was too full of herself living in her splendidly detached mansion, with a perfect child on the back of the bike as she wheeled it into town to rub everyone’s noses in the triumphs they all thought she’d never achieve. And even then, she was fooling nobody only herself. Put a beggar on horseback, they said, and she would ride to hell. Whoosh! Whoosh! That’s how her life went betimes. In a whoosh!

Now it’s all in a little tin box as she sits at the foot of the stairs and just as she opens it, she hears the whoosh again. Whoosh!