I inspect my watch, but the hands seem to be moving around the face. “When you said it’s after midnight, did you mean in Ireland or in France?”

“So you’re in France now?”

“Yes.”

“So you won’t be home for the dreaded Shepherd family gathering.”

“When is that?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Oh that’s right.” I can’t believe I’d forgotten.

The thing is, I love Brendan’s family. There are millions of them. Well, five siblings; two sisters and two brothers, Brendan being the youngest. They gather, at their mother’s insistence, with their partners and their children and their children’s partners and their children’s children once a month in the house in Edenmore where they all grew up. And yes, Brendan is right, it is manic and rowdy and noisy and crowded. But, in spite of the constraints, the house where they grew up seems to expand to accommodate everybody. Mrs. Shepherd makes a vast pot of stew and several apple tarts, and even though she rarely turns the heating on—terrible expensive, she says—the house is the warmest house I’ve ever been in. “That’s just overcrowding,” Brendan says when I mention it. He often offers to host it at our house, an offer robustly declined by his mother. As she has declined Brendan’s suggestion that she “downsize” to an apartment in Sutton.

“I like where I come from, Bren,” she says, wrapping her arms around her youngest child, wearing the same housecoat and slippers she wore the first time I met her. Brendan hugs her back, but he is always the first to leave. Was the first to leave all those years ago too. The first to get an office job, the first to buy a house, to sell a house, to buy a bigger, fancier house with an address described as desirable by estate agents.

“Canny,” his brother says. But I don’t think that’s it. I think it might be fear. Isn’t that awful?

Silence down the line. I rush at it before I lose my nerve. “So...what are you wearing?” This is how you initiate phone sex. I’ve seen a few episodes of Sex and the City.

“I’m wearing my pajamas, what else would I be wearing?” Brendan didn’t always wear pajamas. He used to wear just boxer shorts. And he was always warm, no matter how cold the night. All the hair I suppose. Black and thick, like the pelt of a bear. My husband is a hairy man. And now he is a hairy man in pajamas. Good cotton ones from Marks & Spencer. They wash very well and need only a light touch with the iron.

The pajamas conversation is a bit of a dead end in terms of phone sex. A cul-de-sac, as the French might say. I choke back a laugh. Try to concentrate. “Do you want to know what I’m wearing?” I ask. That might be a better tactic. I could tell him I’m not wearing a bra under my shirtdress. That’s pretty sexy, isn’t it?