‘Ah no, no.’ Again he sought to make amends, but he knew it was too late. The day she’d addressed him on the promenade he’d hardly been able to believe it, especially when she’d asked him if he’d like to come into the Rose of Tralee boarding-house. She enjoyed showing people around it, she said, and all the time she was talking he could smell the perfume she was wearing and he couldn’t help staring straight at her bosom, cocked out at him and quivering. Her large mouth shone with lipstick. She’d patted her hair in a way he found exciting.

‘You have no respect for me. You take what you can get.’

He denied that in a consolatory voice. She often misunderstood things, he protested. He enjoyed her company.

‘Errah, don’t tell me lies. D’you think I’m brainless? D’you think I’m some type of a jellyfish you have relations with? And what d’you consider you are yourself, boy? Did you ever do a hand’s turn in your life?’

He rose immediately. Standing naked, he quietly said he would not be spoken to like that. Unexpectedly, and for a most unpleasant moment, he imagined his father looking down at him from beyond the dead, and then looking away in extreme distaste. This was definitely the end, he stated in the same quiet tone; a conclusion had been reached in the relationship.

‘Ridiculous tantrums,’ she said.

He moved away and drew his clothes on, keeping to one side of the net curtains in case he should be glimpsed from the street. It was nonsense that she was only thirty-nine, more like fifty. Had she gone insane that she could mention marriage, that she could contemplate being the mistress of Carriglas?

‘The man selling fish was talking about you the other day,’ she casually remarked, and when he displayed no interest she repeated the information.

‘What the fishmonger says is his own business.’

‘Isn’t it interesting, though, he would have the cheek?’

He knotted his tie and bent to attend to his shoelaces. He had no wish to remain in the room, hearing a fishmonger’s conversation at second hand. He said so, not raising his voice.

‘I will tell you this,’ she said, ‘which I heard from that same man. The bridge will be called after Cornelius Dowley.’

He looked up, the end of a lace between his fingers, ‘Is that true?’ he said after a moment.

‘What d’you mean true, darling?’

‘Is it like the Confession thing?’

‘What Confession thing?’

‘You pretended a certain state of affairs in order to annoy me.’

‘Come back into the bed, honey.’

‘Is it true about the bridge?’

‘I’m only repeating what I was told by the fish man. Sure, does it matter, Jack? Didn’t Dowley get the works from the Tans? Dowley’s dust and old bones by now, honey.’