Her eyes glance at the French windows, closed to the flat. Jake isn’t home. She has arranged to meet him in town, at a concert in the Button Factory. If she leaves now, she can catch the Dart and make it on time. And yet she feels a wavering inside her.

‘Just for a few minutes?’ he tries again.

In the evening sunlight, he looks brighter than he has done in days. The lines on his face have diminished, and his skin once more looks tanned and healthy. But it’s the liveliness in his eyes that marks the real difference – a warmth there that draws her in – from the lifeless body she’d rescued.

‘Please?’ he asks, his smile broadening, his expression fixed on her in a way that is almost flirtatious.

What harm? she thinks. ‘Very well,’ she tells him, and follows him up the steps into the house.

19

Anton

How easy it is to reel her in.

Tea in the garden, then watching her unwind at the piano in the front room. After the music they talk, only the talk is different now. More relaxed. Intimate. It’s as if when she plays the pieces he sets in front of her the natural barriers between them come down. Communication finds a different level.

Evening after evening, she comes.

‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ she suggests, and he feels his heart soar.

They don’t go far, just across the road to the park. It’s quiet at this time of the evening, no one around except the dog-walkers. Anton notices the tents that have appeared in the shade of the trees on the west side. Ireland’s homelessness crisis has reached the leafy environs of Wyndham Park, he thinks, with something close to satisfaction.

He tells her about his marriage, the difficulties within it.

‘It was not the easiest relationship,’ he confesses. ‘I had my own weaknesses, and I didn’t always understand what she needed from me. But I still loved her.’

‘And Charlotte?’

‘Oh!’ He laughs and looks out across the wide expanse of grass.

At one end of the green a stone plinth holds up the bronzed head of a local playwright, long deceased. The memorial has been there as long as Anton can remember.

‘Do you see that?’ Anton says, pointing it out for her. ‘I once came across Charlotte kissing Ken Tansey from across the road right there, up against that lump of rock.’

She stares at the plinth, then at Anton.