‘I knew her boyfriend Steve, the one who went off to Canada. She used to do his head in with her moods. He couldn’t make her out at all. Once he put his fist through a plate-glass window, she had wound him up so much.’

I was stung on her behalf. ‘Well, a fat lot of use he was. He was a headcase. He went off to Canada and left her in the lurch with Raymond to look after. Never writes or sends any money either.’

Francis answered in a conciliatory voice, like someone smoothing down an over-excited child: ‘I’m not saying he was right, Jacky. Steve was a bit of a nutcase. Just saying that she wasn’t Miss Easy-Going herself.’

‘Yeah? Well you can fuck off,’ I said, ‘because it’s not your business.’ My arms were shaking: I went back to replacing the empty Gordon’s gin bottle and didn’t meet his eye. Francis looked exhilarated. He savoured an angry reaction like the first mouthful of one of his bloody juicy steaks.

‘Still smitten,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette as he walked into the kitchen, before breaking into a few bars of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ I had to hand it to him: he was a wind-up merchant par excellence. He would have loved it if I’d really gone for him, and we’d had a big punch-up over his pristine stainless steel worktops, spilling blood on the chopping boards. That would have been his version of male bonding: sharing an Armagnac together afterwards as he gave me ice cubes for my black eye and lectured me about the best way to throw a right hook. My version of bonding would have been sticking his sagging chef’s arse to his work bench with a medium-thick layer of superglue. I made a mental note to do it on the day I left for good, with no forwarding address.

Maybe I would go home to Belfast for a week to think things over. I could stay in a hotel in the city centre, and get Phyllis and Titch to come and meet me. I would take them presents as a surprise: a couple of comedy videos for Titch, and a jumper from Marks & Spencer for Phyllis. She loved Marks & Spencer with a quiet passion, I had noticed, always speaking of it with an unmistakable note of reverence as if it were church. The company had kept a store open in Belfast city centre right the way through the Troubles, when others shrank away, and for Phyllis it had become a touchstone of glorious normality. But I felt I didn’t belong in its enveloping cosiness, like a mourner who had accidentally strolled into a wedding.