Michael Agnew was standing at the bar, Gina reaching her hands to him. Cushla lifted away the overflow tray from beneath the taps, sloshing flat beer down the sink. She hadn’t seen Michael since the night at the theatre. The evenings she helped Eamonn – several times a week now, which both baffled and pleased him – were a cycle of apprehension and dejection. Choosing her clothes, applying make-up so painstakingly it didn’t look like make-up. Watching the door. She thought about him all the time, allowing herself fleets of fancy where she was alone with him in the bar or sitting beside him in the Lyric when the lights went down. Other scenarios that verged on sordid that she tried to put out of her head. Now he was here she didn’t trust herself to speak to him.

Gina was talking in her telephone voice. Cushla had rarely heard her use it away from the hall table, but there was something about Michael Agnew that made you want to be better than you were. Her mother went to the optics and, holding a tumbler under the Jameson, asked Cushla to bring the remainder of the sandwiches to Michael. There were two left. The cheese and pickle one looked fresh but he chose the other, egg and onion sodden with the juice of a cut tomato. The selection seemed like penance. Cushla unwrapped it and put it on a plate with a tin of salted nuts on the side that he hadn’t asked for, handing him a knife, a paper serviette. She stayed near him. He ate with big quick bites, like the children in school after PE.

Gina was moving up and down the length of the bar, lifting the odd empty glass, talking to the customers, a mince to her walk that Cushla found appalling. Eamonn’s mouth was tight. Gina was getting in his way.

Michael pushed his plate away and thanked Cushla. He pointed vaguely at the bag from the bookshop.

Is that yours? he said.

Yeah. She passed it to him, regretting having drawn a rainbow of tester lipstick on the back of her hand in Boots earlier.

Ah, he said, when it was out of the bag. I’ve read this.

She had bought a copy of The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch because it looked like hard work and might stop her obsessing about him. Is it good? she said.

It’s very literary. Shakespeare references, complicated relationships. A bit farcical at times. Mind you, that’s almost every one of her novels. He replaced it, smoothing the paper bag. Have you thought any more about coming to our Irish nights? he said.

Cushla found herself blinking at the phrasing. Maybe there was something in Gerry’s remark about Michael ‘exoticising the natives’. It sounded as though he and his friends played at being Irish once a fortnight, which was probably about right. Michael’s colour had risen. Irish conversation nights, I mean, he said, flustered. It seemed like he was asking her out.