‘I thought you might say yes for once, darling.’

It was always best to keep as quiet as possible, not to argue. Last week she’d mentioned the entertainment that was advertised, some dreadful kind of circus sideshow. She’d hinted at first, not making much of the possibility, which was always her way. Now she was suggesting that they should walk together along the promenade, with the whole town watching, in order to attend it.

‘No,’ he repeated, and he tried to think of other times in his life, of being at school, of conversations with his father. Had his father, widowed all those years, visited a Catholic woman somewhere? Had he, too, experienced the torment of remorse and resolved never to return? It was hard to imagine his father suffering like that. It was hard to imagine his father in the company of such a woman, black hair sprouting from her armpits. His father had gone to his death thinking the world of him, the eldest of his children, and his inheritor: John James believed that.

‘You’d hate the whole thing,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Some poor woman within a hair’s breadth of her death.’

But Mrs Moledy protested that she would enjoy the entertainment like any other person would. She had no life, waiting from one week to the next, everything underhand. Declare to God, she stated, she only felt herself when she was confessing her sins. ‘This one the worst of them,’ she said.

‘You’re not telling me you let on about this at your Confessions?’

Sulkily, she did not reply. But when he repeated the question his tone of voice betrayed his alarm. Pleased, she said:

‘It’s a mortal sin, pet. I have to arrange redemption.’

‘Redemption?’

‘I have to atone, darling. Penance and forgiveness: you don’t have it in your church.’

‘Which priest do you go to?’

‘It’s not like that, darling. It’s different than going to a doctor. Usually, though, it’s Father Pierce.’

He could sense her enjoying herself. He could sense her punishing him. I will not return to this room, he said to himself. Next Monday she can lie there with her powder on her and cry her bloody liver out.

‘No need to fret, darling. Father Pierce hears all sorts.’

‘My God!’

He rose from the bed, the floor cold on the soles of his feet. He remembered his father going to Dublin on his own, remaining for a few days in Davison’s Hotel: he wondered again about a woman. Sometimes on their way back from school in Shropshire he and Lionel would spend a night in Davison’s, all of it arranged for them. He remembered Barmy Jessop claiming he’d gone with a woman of the streets, and wondering himself if such women were to be found in Dublin. He and Barmy Jessop and Asquith-Jones used to talk about things like that. He remembered how the three of them had drunk communion wine with the night-watchman in his boiler room, and how Barmy Jessop had rung the Chapel bell in the middle of the night, raising a fire alarm.