As Geoffrey got older, Joe cared for him more and more. Two old bachelors. That’s what this Barbara Hummel woman would see. Two old men sitting on their Windsor chairs either side of the ancient Aga, the quarry tiles on the kitchen floor none too clean, dust on the skirting boards. Geoffrey had always been meticulous, and Joe tried to keep the place in order, but he couldn’t do everything and he wasn’t getting any younger. Still, he and Geoffrey had proved to be a good pair, if an odd couple.

It was only when Geoffrey’d seen the photograph of Dora in the paper the other week and told Joe who she was and what she’d meant to him that Joe had made the connection between Dora and the nurse, had remembered he’d had the woman’s address all these years. He’d got it off the Red Cross that day but had never written to her, what with one thing and another. He’d meant to, mind, see how she was. It was a terrible thing they did to that woman. They did it to Maureen Davy in the field outside Cloghane and all she’d done was serve a British soldier a pint of stout. Joe was only little but he’d wondered if that was so bad when his own daidí sold the British his meat at the dead of night.

He didn’t tell Geoffrey how he’d met Dora that day. Best not to bring those sorts of things up.

Joe lifted the pan and put it to heat on the Aga. He sat in the other chair, closest to the cooker, fished in his pocket and pulled out his pipe. Felt in the other pocket for his tobacco. He always had a pipe before tea, and one after. They’d never spoken about the war, he and Geoffrey, not since that first encounter. Joe had never told him how he’d lived in the farm once before, during the final year of the war, or how he’d betrayed him that day in 1943. Buried and forgotten. What would this Hummel woman want to know, apart from the boxing?

There was a knock. Joe pushed himself off his seat. He could see through the kitchen window that it was her. He walked through the lobby and opened the door.

‘My name is Barbara Hummel,’ she said, smiling. ‘Are you Joseph O’Cleary?’

Close up, the woman was older than Joe had imagined, with dark-brown eyes and hair. Her skin was fair and freckled with fine creases on her forehead and round her mouth. An attractive woman, Joe thought, as she stood with her hand outstretched ready to shake his.

‘I am that,’ he said, taking her hand and not sure what to say.