Another drink was put into her hand and she sipped it. Monica appeared and murmured to her that she’d been asked to play something and then she disappeared once more into another of the rooms. Laura wasn’t quite sure how Monica’s sassy American swing would fit into the traditional Irish instruments she heard playing, but that wasn’t her problem.

‘So tell me,’ said Dermot. ‘How do you come to be organising a literary festival at your tender age?’

‘I’m twenty-six. You’d written two bestselling novels before you were my age.’

‘True, but you haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’m not really sure, to be honest. I sort of got roped in. I’m a bookseller by trade.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I met an agent—’ She suddenly remembered that Eleanora Huckleby was his agent, too, and made a split-second decision not to mention this. She heard herself answering in a confident manner. Well, tonight she did feel confident: confident, intelligent Laura. ‘She and I got talking and she discovered I was better read than some people. Of course, working in a bookshop, I had access to everything that came out, before it was out truly. I didn’t have to pay for my reading habit.’

He chuckled. ‘It sounds to me as if you did have to pay for it, by running a literary festival.’

Laura smiled back. ‘It’s not that bad. Why don’t you like literary festivals?’

‘How do you know I don’t like them?’

‘Our landlady told us. She said you wouldn’t go to one five miles down the road which is why the Festival of Culture is in Ballyfitzpatrick and not Patricktown.’ She’d admitted everything now. ‘So why?’ She wanted and needed to know and she didn’t want him going off on a tangent about landladies or gossip.

‘I had my fill of them years ago when my books came out. I don’t want to go to them now.’

Laura forced herself to consider how she’d feel if she slept with him and then he refused to come to the festival and was relieved to discover that getting him to England, so they would have a sponsor, was not at all the reason she wanted to sleep with him – if he really meant it, of course, which she doubted – he was knee-tremblingly attractive. ‘But you did this one?’ She was trying very hard to enunciate and was pleased how sober she sounded.

‘The place is dead in winter. It’s where I live and it would be churlish not to put on a show that will fill the pubs and all the accommodation if I can, without much – any, frankly – effort.’

Laura sipped at her drink. ‘I think I’m drinking neat whiskey.’

‘It won’t do you a bit of harm.’