Josephine could not help resenting the fact that girls like Assumpta managed to get a child without even trying, and grow it inside them without any problems whatsoever. If they didn’t choose to abort the poor child, they just pushed it out with the minimum of fuss. They treated childbirth and pregnancy without any kind of respect, they had no concept of the importance of what their bodies had achieved. Pregnancy was no more than a problem for them. It was just something they could choose to either continue with or, the more likely scenario, remove from their bodies, and then carry on their lives as if none of it had ever happened, as if they had never been lucky enough to have a baby inside them. A little baby that was healthy and snug inside a womb that would not let them down, would not suddenly expel the poor child from their bodies, leaving them not only devastated but, with each painful, bloody failure, feeling less and less of a woman, unable to do the one thing that was expected of them. It was so fucking wrong. She wanted, needed a child more than anything else in the world, yet she had miscarried one after the other. The only baby she had managed to carry longer than a few months had died inside her, and she had gone through the whole pain of early childbirth knowing she would get nothing at the end of it.

She realised that her mother was talking to Michael. She forced herself to listen to their conversation, but she was so hurt, so angry at life.

Michael was shaking his head in amazement now, his earlier annoyance with his wife and mother-in-law gone. He listened closely to Lana as she told him the score about Patrick’s daughters; she was very knowledgeable about them, and their lifestyles – that much was obvious to Michael. It seemed that the women knew far more than the men around them about what was actually going on.

He found himself believing everything that Lana was telling him about the Costello girls and their carryings on. There was a ring of truth in what she was telling him which he couldn’t ignore. He felt the same burning heat of humiliation and anger that his friend would be feeling at his daughters’ shame, and he was sorry to the very heart of him.

‘If Patrick knew that his daughters were laying down with all and sundry on a regular basis he would go off his fucking tree. The men who they have been with can’t have known whose daughters they were cavorting with, surely? No one would dare to touch them knowing they were Patrick Costello’s girls.’