He could be such a charming man betimes.

‘That’s beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘That’s beautiful.’

The Vet was her prize, and he was out the road looking at other prize bulls or horses or goats. She couldn’t remember. And she had got all she longed for. The house was coming. The new cooker. The nights in the golf club. The unspeakable and delicious delirium of respectability. But Hughie was different. It was as if he didn’t care about those things. He played reels like tornadoes that week, in the smoky pubs of Listowel and Killorglin. He was a big, chiselled man with the long, angular face of Mayo folk in his grey suit. And he was always a gentleman. He never took advantage. He would take out the three pieces of black shining ebony, which he carefully assembled, screwing each one clockwise into the next. He lifted it to his lips. Spat into it once or twice. Spat on the floor. Took a long draught of his Guinness, and again, with the determination of a carpenter twisting a screw precisely into the right spot, he pressed the flute to his lips.

Jesus! Sometimes that’s all Birdie could remember. The floor melted into a whirlwind, and she saw the ribbons before her two eyes. Silk ribbons. Light blue and green ribbons dancing in the air and encircling both of them.

It was like being at the beginning of a new galaxy. As he swallowed the little tumblers of whiskey that glowed like liquid amber in the light of the bar.

In between tunes he was always raising disputes and arguments about history. He had his own theories about everything.

‘The question is, where did the music come from?’ he declared, like an orator in parliament. ‘Now some credit the fairies and some the Connaught Rangers,’ says he.

Who?

‘The Rangers,’ says he. ‘The British army’s most ferocious and finest regiment in the history of warfare. The true embodiment of Galway, Roscommon and Mayo courage for the last two centuries.’

‘From the Peninsular War,’ he sang, ‘to the fields of Salonica, from the deserts of the Punjab to the …’

The song trailed off. The landlady was watching him and he was uncertain of her position on ballads in celebration of the British army.

It wasn’t the song concerned her, but she was fascinated nonetheless. And knowing that the Vet was out the road, and Mrs Delaney was newly married, she didn’t mind coming out from behind the bar, since it was quiet yet, and she sat between the pair of them, between Hughie and Birdie, and showed no end of interest in the history of the music.

Hughie asked her to consider how many men besides his father had returned to their villages and townlands in Connaught over those centuries with a few shillings in their purse and an army flute or a fife in their kitbag?

How many had gathered in groups over the years, in dozens of different parishes, organizing themselves into marching bands, and parading on St Patrick’s Day at the local church or in a summer field before a football match?