But an old man’s vanity is like a rope. They think that if they let go, they’ll fall off the cliff.

Ten times he’d comb that hair before he left the house. Putting the last details to the ears with a comb in front of the saucer-sized mirror, which hung on a nail beside the door. His mother had put it there when he was a child. And ten more times he’d comb it again and rearrange it in the taxi. And a further ten times upstairs in Birdie’s bathroom.

‘Arah, Hughie, will you for God’s sake come down, or we’ll be late.’

‘Patience, patience, patience,’ says he to her one day, ‘the hair must be combed.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but why do I have to endure it?’

‘Oh Missus Delaney,’ says he, ‘you above all people should know that life is hard but it must be endured.’

‘Do you think so?’

They were in the back of the taxi. Whizzing along the suburbs towards the hospice.

‘My dog does be whingeing when I put on the suit in the mornings, for he does know that whenever I comb me hair at the mirror and put on the suit, it signifies that he’ll be chained to the wall of the cowshed for the majority of the day. I know that whine. I acknowledge it and I do say this to him: Shep, I do say, life is hard, but it must be endured.’

The taxi driver was eyeing them through the rear-view mirror. ‘Oh now,’ says he, ‘that’s quare fucken true.’

And just like on the steps of that posh hotel in Killarney, with all the gardens, Hughie winks at her. And he laughs a chesty smoker’s laugh, as he holds open the door of the taxi for her. He links arms with her and escorts her up the stone steps, and he opens for her the big glass door into the hospice foyer. That’s the style of him.

2

‘OH, I DIDN’T KNOW you came so far,’ she said to Louise. Apparently Louise got stuck in the airport in Minneapolis or somewhere, and wondered would she make her connection. Chicago it was. Yes. She had to come through Chicago. And the flight was delayed for an hour. So she phoned someone called Tania, and then had a roast beef bagel, with sesame and potato salad.

‘Must have been lovely.’

She sat down on this seat. An end seat in a row of blue plastic seats, across from the signs for gates 9 and 10 and the desks for Northwest. Gates? Just a word, Birdie. It’s where you queue up for the flight. In the airport.

‘Oh.’

Anyway. People were reading newspapers, staring at their laptops, and watching the football on the television. One lady in a fur coat with blonde hair was drinking from a bottle of vodka. And there was a row of ten cubicles with telephones, and all these men in suits had their computers plugged in and they were all typing messages on their machines like a factory of sewing-machine operators.