Cushla turned in time to see Michael push his chair back and rise to take Gina’s hands in his, just like he had done in the pub. Cushla felt her jaw go slack and stood gawping for a moment before forcing her lips together. Michael appeared unruffled, but when Gina took Cushla’s hand and put it in his wife’s, he winced. Joanna Agnew was sitting to Michael’s left. Cushla had not noticed her; not because she was tiny or nervy or plain, as she had visualised her. She had, rather, a ghostly serenity. A heart-shaped face. Auburn hair, very straight, cut in a bob to her chin. A camel-coloured dress, well cut, expensive. A bruise on the back of her left hand with a small hole at its centre, from a cannula or injection. She was beautiful.

I haven’t seen you since you were a little thing, the woman was saying, gazing into Cushla’s eyes. You’re like your daddy. Her grip was desperate, as though she was clinging on to steady herself. It was excruciating, feeling her touch, the struggle and sincerity in it.

Beside them, Gina had begun enthusing again. Cushla glanced, did a double take, trying to remember where she had seen the boy before. Then she remembered the rugby photo in the flat. It was like meeting Michael at eighteen.

Dermot, his mother said, finally releasing her, say hello to Cushla.

They had given him an Irish name and put him in a Protestant boarding school.

Cushla looked at Michael. There was an expression of such abject shame on him he appeared to have lost inches in height. He watched sidelong as his son shook her hand, smiled, blushed.

No need to introduce you to Michael, said Gina.

Hiya, said Cushla, digging her fists in her pockets. She could not bring herself to touch him.

When they got outside she thought for a moment she would vomit, and bent over the bonnet of the car. Gina lit a cigarette and wrapped an arm across herself. No harm to you, but I’m foundered, she said.

Cushla felt in her bag for her keys, pulled them out, but her hands were shaking and she dropped them. She knelt on the tarmac to retrieve them from behind the front wheel and, as she stood, she glimpsed the Agnews through the window. The boy was talking animatedly. Michael was smiling, his arm across the back of his wife’s chair, the way he had done with Cushla in Penny’s kitchen. It was as though the encounter had not happened.

They sat in the car. There was a fine film of sand on the windscreen that Cushla brushed away with the wipers. As she turned the key Gina elbowed her. What did you think of Joanna Agnew?

She seems nice.

She was wobbly, dear love her. She was a law student, you know, until he got her up the duff.