The three-piece band struck up a samba. Alex swept up his beloved Birdie, whose dainty steps followed him around the room like a robin hopping after a blackbird. They swept the boards, gliding with rigour and triumph, and doing what they loved to do best. They danced.

Is that why he had married her? they wondered. Simply that! She could dance. They danced around the room on their own. They were so good that it took ages before a second couple had the courage to join them. They were a spectacle. Foxtrot, waltz or samba, they did it, like Fred and Ginger, and you either admired them or hated their guts. But make no mistake, they could dance. And when the saxophone blew the last note, they ended up right in front of Betty Burke’s table. Her Sweet Afton floating in the air beside her white powdered face.

‘Are you not dancing, Elizabeth?’ he inquired with the grace of a crocodile talking to its dinner. Her rich red lips parted in a smile as pleasant as if her bowels were being clawed out personally by Birdie.

‘Ah shure you know yourself, Alex,’ says she, ‘my Tommy was born with two left feet.’

Some of the other ladies said that the Vet was far too generous buying everybody drink, and they invited Birdie to sit down, and then Betty and Birdie nattered away for the rest of the night like two long-lost friends and they forgot about the mother and father of an argument they had had just two weeks earlier, and Birdie knew she was in. She had joined the top brass.

It was great fun after that. Except Betty smoked too much. At regular intervals she had to cough her way to and from the toilet like a cow with TB.

The men lined up to ask Birdie for a dance. Doctor Bradley and the Engineer and even the Reverend Richardson. They all wanted to dance with a woman as light on her feet as Birdie. Even younger men, trying to find their way up in the social world where Alex was the star, spent the night watching for their chance with Birdie.

What a life! And such fun! Dancing the night away. Not a worry in the world. Proud as a goose in the farmyard, waddling around behind her gander.

Birdie could tell him everything. And yet she could tell him nothing. When she had an altercation with the butcher or the baker, or one of her friends, she could give a blow-by-blow account, and Alex would stand at the hearth in the dining room, his backside to the fire, a bottle of stout in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He’d laugh.

That’s what she remembers about him. Because it’s difficult at such a distance to remember anything about him. Sometimes he fades completely. Sometimes he comes back like a shadow. Like a voice. And finally he’s there. But the laugh was the thing. That’s how you’d know him in a dark room.