He’d had to walk through litter because the summer visitors had arrived. It was a disgrace, the litter there was in the streets, cigarette-packets and sweet-papers everywhere, orange peel and banana skins. The promenade was a holy show, no better than a zoo.

‘I would love above everything to be invited, darling.’

He couldn’t arrange it, he protested. There was nothing he could do. After a silence, Mrs Moledy said:

‘Is there a chance we could have the wedding breakfast in the Rose of Tralee, darling?’

‘Here? Here, in this house?’

‘Why not, pet?’

‘People would think it strange.’

Mrs Moledy did not accept that. She’d had a world of experience in catering, she pointed out. She cooked food for her boarders every day of her life; when the house was full she was run off her feet and still she managed. It wouldn’t be the first wedding breakfast there had been at the Rose of Tralee; a day-and-night licence was easily obtained, midnight to midnight, any alcoholic beverage you’d care to name.

‘Absolutely impossible.’

She pouted. In a moment she said:

‘Darling, I’d do anything to be pals with Villana.’

‘Pals?’

‘To be able to say hullo to her. To get on to terms, pet.’

‘Say hullo to her in a shop. She goes into Lett’s and the London and Newcastle.’

It’ll be unusual for poor Villana, what she has to face now.’

He did not understand this, so said nothing. His sister was marrying the man; she had chosen to and she intended to. You couldn’t control Villana.

‘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.’