No one ever went as close to the bone as Betty Burke. An explicit charge. Told Birdie to her face that Alex spent more time in the golf club with the pretty young boys from the secondary college than he did with Birdie, whose visits to the same club were limited to humiliating hours sitting in the ladies’ tea room, in a lambswool white dress, with white pearls, a soft, feathery white hat the size of a saucer on her head, and nobody to talk to, while Alex loitered around the bar until well past midnight. Loitered! Betty’s word.

Only gentlemen were allowed in the golf-club bar at that time, where the best sport was to argue with the teenagers from the local secondary school who had been caddying all day, and had been seduced into staying for a few minerals with their elders and betters: the overfed professional classes who squashed the boys like sardines into accidental corners and breathed stale smoky whiskey breath on them like dragons full of unconscious desires.

On festive occasions, such as the Captain’s Prize or the President’s Day, the ladies amused themselves in the tea room, an adjoining long hall with a dance floor surrounded by little wooden tables and chairs. And if the men didn’t join the ladies by nine o’clock, they were considered to have overstepped the boundary of provincial discretion.

What Betty Burke referred to was a night the previous year when Alex had been in the bar until after midnight, and Birdie had to hang onto the Burkes for the entire evening, her neck stretched in humiliation, like a dying swan without its mate.

But Birdie was loyal.

‘That,’ she told Betty, ‘is because Alex is educated. He likes talking to the college boys, because the rest of the crowd in the golf links are only fucken ignoramuses.’

‘Now, now,’ says Betty, ‘don’t use that language in my shop. That language may be alright in the terraces, but we don’t use it in this establishment.’

‘They’re still fucken ignoramuses. No matter what language they use.’

This time the punch had landed.

‘My Tommy,’ Betty whispered, ‘is no fucken ignoramus!’ The smile still holding on to her white talcumed face like a sheet in a storm, an Afton cigarette still clinging to the lipstick in the side of her mouth.

‘Well, he never went to college,’ Birdie declared.

‘Neither did you, Miss Waters.’

‘I didn’t have to,’ says Birdie, and she flew out the door, onto her bike, and belted down the street, in triumph maybe, or rage, or just confusion, and Gussie sitting on the carrier and holding on to the saddle for dear life and crying ‘Mammy, Mammy, you’re going too fast.’

‘Whoosh!’ she said to Gussie. Whoosh! And it’s as if someone clicked their fingers and she’s sitting on the bottom step of the stairs holding an Oxo box.

Whoosh!

4

NO WORDS CAN SAY how much she loved the Vet. How much she opened her heart and shared all the little secrets and worries of her life with him. And indeed he listened carefully to everything she said. She knew this for certain, because not long after her altercation with Betty Burke, and in that very same golf club one night, Alex Delaney faced a crucial test. Birdie was about to discover exactly what class of man she had married.