I couldn’t leave it now. I had to get to the bottom of it before the wine wore off and Phyllis clammed up about the only really important thing that had ever happened to her, and went straight back to talking ceaselessly about hairstyles and pork chops.

‘So why did you stop going out?’

‘He was killed in an accident,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I wasn’t with him because I wasn’t feeling well that night. He went out to a dance with his brother, and his brother was driving him home along a country road late that night when a van hit their car. The van’s driver was drunk.’

‘Did the brother survive?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He only had a broken arm. He got married the year after. But after my boyfriend I never felt like going with anyone else.’

‘I’m so sorry, Phyllis,’ I said. Then we both started looking, quickly, at the list of puddings. After some deliberation over the pavlova and its possible disappointments in texture, Phyllis played it safe and plumped for the chocolate mousse.

8

The next day, I was back in the Whistle. It was a soft night, and the city was quiet. Blond Jimmy was on the door. Murdie was behind the bar with me, complaining about Mrs Murdie’s younger English cousin Gavin, who had come to stay with them for a few days and was still there three weeks later, sleeping in the spare room and expecting a full Ulster fry on weekends when he roused himself from his bed at midday. He was between jobs, which is a dangerous place for a house guest to be.

The cousin had elected to go on an extended ‘Troubles Tour’ of Belfast in a black taxi, in which the taxi driver took him round a miniature history of the Troubles, complete with a running commentary. They had gone up along the Peace Wall, that separates the Protestant Shankill Road and the Catholic Falls Road, and up to the shop on the Shankill where an IRA bomb killed nine Protestants queueing to buy fish, and all around the murals that use the gable walls like storybooks to tell the highly coloured version of events from each side.

The worst of it was that the cousin was very interested in the roots and origins of it all now, and when Murdie got home exhausted at night the cousin was waiting for him there at the kitchen table, with a drink already poured out for Murdie from Murdie’s own whiskey bottle, and a million questions about the Troubles along with his own answers to the problems.