She sees him first thing in the morning. Washing his face in a bucket by the range, which he has lit long before dawn. She sees a shirt, a vest and underpants hanging above the range, all still slightly damp.

What can you say about men? They never change. She sees him soaping his body as he stands on the flags and then taking a kettle from the range, and pouring it into the bucket to heat what is there, and then he rinses himself with a warm damp cloth. From beneath the sofa the dog watches the ritual with cautious curiosity.

Hughie, preparing himself to visit her. Preparing for his pilgrimage. Like a monk doing his beads or his chores, or his ritual practice, Hughie gets up every morning and washes himself, and then steps out into the world, on his way to her.

There are three rooms in Hughie’s cottage: the kitchen and two bedrooms, one to the west of the kitchen, and one to the east. The room east of the kitchen is only a storeroom now, cluttered with years of abandoned junk. The mangle and the hames and the holy pictures. The trunks that came from America decades ago. The tilly lamps. The old rocking chair with no back. A tongs for the fire. The remains of a bed. And a thousand other small boxes of wires, plugs, old clocks, broken vases and copies of religious magazines his mother used to read a very long time ago.

Hughie rummages and burrows and pokes for half an hour before he finds the iron in there. Then he makes it operational on the kitchen table, where he presses his white shirt, and his green tie, and the trousers of his brown television suit.

Men.

By then the underclothes are dry and, with huffs and puffs and blistering curses, he negotiates his withered old bones into the vest and the long johns, and into the shirt and the suit. He’s not as bronze as he once was. In fact, he has turned very white. And thin.

Birdie can imagine him stretched in his coffin but she dispels that terrible image.

Once Hughie puts on the suit, the RTÉ suit he once wore into the studios to make the music programme, and which fits him better now than it did then, he is a changed man. He is back to the old style. The old Dattledo.

Men never know what to do with their hair. Birdie chastised him about that. It was too long. It gave him the gimp of a clown. He confessed to her once that he manicured himself every Saturday night with the same fastidious attention as when he was a young lad. Brightening his locks to a garish rusty brown with dollops of henna, and combing it with the latest Brylcreem available in Tiernan’s chemist’s shop in Crosshill. A waste of money, she told him. It’s having no effect. ‘Go to the barber and get a haircut. It’s not hygienic. At your age.’