‘There’s things your sister should know. There’s things I could say to her.’

She went on talking and he occupied himself by trying to remember the name of the carpentry instructor at school. He could see him quite clearly, a small, bald-headed man with a foul pipe. He’d had a nickname, but that was difficult to recall also.

‘Going into Balt’s bed,’ she was saying. ‘And she unused to that side of things.’

The man had worn a brown coat in the carpentry shop, presumably to keep the sawdust off him. He used to light his pipe from a gas jet he always kept going, under the glue-pot.

‘There’ll be a lot of talk, darling, on account the wedding breakfast isn’t being held in the Rose of Tralee.’

My God, would she never cease? Of course there wouldn’t be talk. There wasn’t a soul besides herself who imagined it a natural thing that the wedding party should be held in a seedy seafront boarding-house instead of at Carriglas.

‘It’s how it was in the past,’ he patiently explained. ‘Always at the house.’

‘Darling, you go on too much about the past. The future is what you and me have to think about. Sure, you’re only a boy.’

‘I’m thirty-five.’

‘You were too young ever to have gone to that war, pet. You’d still be a soldier if you’d stayed at home.’

The conversation was pointless. If he hadn’t a damaged leg he’d still be in the army: it was ridiculous to go on repeating the fact, the way she apparently liked to.

‘I often think of you in your uniform,’ she said.

He did not comment, instead made a fresh effort to remember the carpentry instructor’s name. The man had been showing Asquith-Jones how to cut a dovetail one day and suddenly he’d lost his temper because Asquith-Jones hadn’t been paying proper attention. He’d struck poor old Asquith with the flat side of a panel saw.

‘He could easily be her father,’ she was saying, ‘If he’s a day he could be her father.’

‘Are you talking about my sister’s fiancé?’

‘He’s a right peculiarity, you know.’

He saw no reason to agree, even though he shared the opinion. He said instead that the solicitor was as God had seen fit to make him. Comment was impolite, he sought to imply with his tone.

‘All I’m saying to you, darling, is there’s not so many years between ourselves.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘What age would you say I was, Jack?’

He turned his head away, wincing because of all her modes of addressing him he disliked most her uninvited use of his father’s name. He had never wondered about her age. She was a widow was all he had ever thought, the daughter of a publican in Cahir, she’d once let drop. Her husband had died of a burst appendix, she’d let drop also.

‘I’m thirty-nine years old, Jack. Four years the difference.’

‘You look older than thirty-nine.’