I felt the worst possible course would be to close the bar. There was a kind of hilarity to the proceedings still, and this would not be maintained if I stopped serving booze. The pace of the drinking, if anything, quickened now that the waters were rising. You never know when you are going to lift your last.

‘Would we want to be making south?’ Mick Harty wondered.

Vivien rubbed at his wrist so tenderly I found myself welling up.

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush it, babes.’

‘If we went up past Lough Fee and swung around the far side of her,’ Bill Knott said, ‘we’d nearly make it to the N59.’

The Belarusians carted boxloads of old curtains from the attic to use as sops against the doorways but the moment the last boxload reached the bottom of the stairs the doors popped and the waters of Killary entered.

I moved everybody upstairs. There was a function room up there that I used for the occasional wedding. It had a fully stocked bar and operational disco lights. We weren’t a moment too soon. As I trailed up the stairs, keeping to the rear of all my locals and Belarusians, I cast an eye back over my shoulder. It had the look of death’s dateless night out there.

‘Hup, people!’ I cried. ‘Hup for Jesus’ sake!’

More calls were made on mobiles. We were promised that the emergency services were being moved out. I turned off the harsh strip lighting overhead and switched to the mood lighting, which moved in lovely, dreamy, disco swirls. Even yet the rain hammered down on my old hotel at Killary. I opened the bar, and the locals weren’t shy about stepping up to it.

We drank.

We whispered.

We laughed like cats.

Bill Knott reckoned the distance to Clare Island oversea, if it should come to it.

‘Of course, it would not be the first time,’ he said, ‘that the likes of us would be sent hoppin’ for the small boats.’

Vivien Harty whispered to Janey McAllister. Janey’s colour was returning with frequent nips of my brandy. Vivien swirled it in the glass and fed it to the old lady; her tiny grey head she cradled on a vast lap.

Thackeray, on visiting the backwoods of Ireland, bemoaned the ‘choking peat smoke’ and the ‘obstreperous cider’ and the diet of ‘raw ducks, raw pease’ and also a particular inn: ‘No pen can describe that establishment, as no English imagination could have conceived it.’

John Murphy told us, loudly, that he loved his wife.

‘She still excites me,’ he said. ‘It’s been twenty-eight years, and I still get a horn on me when I see that bitch climb a stairs.’

I went to the landing outside the function room. I looked down the road. It was a waterway; the hotel porch had disappeared, and dozens of cormorants were approaching in formation across the water. It was like the attack on Dresden. I rushed back to the function room just as the cormorants landed on the kitchen roof out back, and a weeping Mick Harty was confessing to Vivien an affair of fifteen years’ standing. With her sister.