The girl was perhaps twenty feet from her parents at this carefully chosen moment – it was as good as a mile – and she repaid Ernestine’s fuzzy smile at once with a gap-toothed grin of her own.

‘My name?’

The mother and father argued yet, their backs still turned, and the boy still lost to his hand-held world.

‘Oh I know your name for certain, I’d say! Would I have a little guess at it?’

The child giggled.

‘I’d say your name could be written on one of these …’

She showed the sweets and popped one loose.

‘Yes, yes,’ she was beside the girl now, and she leaned in confidingly, and she squinted hard at the wine gum in her hand, as if a name was inscribed there. ‘It says here that you’re a … Bob?’

The child laughed, and tossed her head to show the crooked milk teeth, and the white filmy ooze of babyhood that coated still her gums, and she flicked coquettishly her hair – she was surely no Bob – and, unseen, Kit circled and moved in behind her, paused for a check, and then moved closer.

You might travel the length of Ireland for weeks on end, down all the great yawning of the summer days, and you would never come across the ideal moment. But sometimes the luck came in.

‘Can’t be! Oh, it can’t be a Bob! Maybe you’re someone else altogether. Maybe I need to have a closer look now, my darling, and we’ll find out what your name is yet.’

Ernestine’s fingers trailed the filigree down of the child’s bare arm. The slightest of touches was electric, and enough to distract her – her eyes became bloodshot – and Ernestine withdrew from it carefully. She shucked another wine gum free and examined it intently.

‘Now it says here, we have a … is it a Kathy? An Aoife? Is it a Megan? Is it …’

She turned her head close to the child.

‘Allie,’ the child said.

‘Oh baby Allie,’ Ernestine said, and a tear came and ran slowly her cheek.

She gave the girl the wine gum. Allie chewed on it. And Ernestine moved in and tickled her beneath the arm, and whisperingly she sang:

‘Allie’s so pretty, Allie’s so sweet, Allie is the little girl who’s walkin’ down your street …’

She raised her head and blinked her eyes rapidly then for her companion.

‘Take her, Kit!’

At precisely this moment, as Kit took the little girl warmly inside a cuddle that was also a lock, with her skinny forearm placed just so over the child’s mouth; as she lifted Allie high and close to her; as Ernestine rose and pressed Kit on the small of the back, and hissed –

‘Go! Go!’

– it was at this moment that Allie’s brother drew her into the row. He gestured in her direction – he knew his sister’s whereabouts by instinct – and he squealed at his parents that Allie was allowed to do as she pleased, that she was never forced to …