And by the time she got there the blood pressure was normal again. She returned to Ballinasloe the following day. ‘Welcome back, Mrs Delaney. Were you on your holidays? Will we check the blood pressure now?’ And guess what! It was back up through the roof. Wasn’t that odd?

Back to Galway. Such a merry-go-round. But this time they kept her. Said they might have to keep her there for the duration of the pregnancy, which caused a right flutter in the golf club. The Vet was terrified. He ate his dinners in Hayden’s Hotel and spent the nights hugging pints in Mannion’s Bar. The other clients asked in sombre tones if there was any news. They looked as if it was already a foregone conclusion that Birdie would be buried in a wedding dress, with the little dead baby folded in her arms. All because of a little bit of blood pressure. Sure it was way out of all proportion!

She remained in Galway for six weeks, being monitored twenty-four hours a day, though her blood pressure stayed normal all that time, and her heartbeat was normal, and every bloody thing about the pregnancy was going according to the laws of nature. Eventually they released her. Alex wheeled her to the door with a pink hospital blanket around her waist, and gently manoeuvred her into the rear passenger seat of the station wagon. And he had tears in his eyes as he drove her home. She could see them in the rear-view mirror.

‘Do you know something, Birdie?’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to leave me.’

She just looked out the window and smiled. She didn’t tell him everything.

She didn’t tell him it was the nun. She didn’t tell him that when she went for her first check up, the old nun was waiting for her. A straight-boned nun with a white face and white hair and a white habit. A nun so white and cold in her gaze that even the doctors were afraid of her. She was the one who had pushed Birdie’s blood pressure through the roof. Sister Bernard had told her to take down her drawers and lie on the cold steel slab, and then she had taken her own two saintly hands, that Birdie always thought were meant for sewing shrouds in the convent or pressing wafers together for the Holy Communion of the Mass, and she had stuck them, without a by-your-leave, up the sweet and secret darkness that Birdie had thought was the exclusive preserve of her lovely Vet. Sister Bernard had it all done in a jiffy. To check that everything was where it should be, as she said. She had an expression of distaste on her face, carrying centuries of theology in every sweet and condescending grimace.

But it wasn’t the examination alone that raised the blood pressure in Birdie’s palpitating heart muscle, and which could be clearly seen through her cotton vest, beating its rage like a lamb’s neck in the slaughterhouse. It wasn’t that alone. It was the hurtful things the old nun had said to her. Those were the things she never told anyone. Not even the Vet. Those were things Birdie would keep in her heart for centuries, if she had to.