Murdie gave a short laugh, a bronchial seal’s bark. ‘Probably some other variety of social event, son.’

Mrs Murdie carried on diplomatically with her knitting. Gavin glowered from above his paperback book. He knew there was something alluringly fishy going on in our conversation, but he couldn’t quite work out what. He had been a bit shirty with me ever since that morning’s conversation. I felt guilty, naturally, but then a dose of standoffishness from Gavin was a drink of ice-water on a desert march.

The trouble was, I couldn’t go to bed until he went to bed. My bed was the sofa in the front room, which was where Gavin liked to park himself of an evening, with his Troubles books and the How-To Guide to Playing the Tin Whistle, or whatever else he had concealed in his backpack.

As the night wore on, I could sense his coolness to me wearing off, at exactly the time when I would have liked it to be building up. He was snouting me out as a potential companion for a long, late-night conversation, moving inexorably back towards me like flickering toothache heightening to a reliable stretch of solid pain.

After draining his cup of tea, Mr Murdie stood up with a histrionic stretching motion, and then said, a shade too emphatically, ‘Well, I think I’ll turn in. It’s been a long day.’ Mrs Murdie did the same. Mrs Murdie’s Stalingrad appeared to have fallen.

Was there anything either of us needed? she asked. She was assured that there was not. Well, in that case they would both see us in the morning. Gavin made no move to get up. As Murdie turned towards the door, he caught my eye in a fleeting, sardonic glance. I was too weary even to want to laugh.

The silence hung in the air for a little while. Then Gavin said, magnanimously, ‘I see what you were trying to say this morning. You’ve had enough of religion, eh?’

‘Well, maybe just not enough of the right sort,’ I conceded. I wasn’t going to be so pompous as to claim any great philosophical intent behind baiting Gavin, even to Gavin.

‘So, has Belfast changed for the better since the ceasefires?’ he said, with a fresh heartiness.

Oh no, now we were back into the whole shebang all over again. I began to see what had driven Murdie to lose his self-control.

‘There aren’t any big bombs going off, and that’s a nice change. But the IRA and the Loyalists are dragging even more people out of their houses to beat them up. The press calls them “punishment attacks”.’

I really didn’t want to get into this.

‘So you’re saying that now the IRA are attacking Catholics, and the Loyalists are attacking Protestants,’ he said, showily figuring it out.

‘Yes.’