Back in a tick, he said, leaving the engine running. His feet on the gravel, the rattle of a key in a lock. Light blooming in a window on the middle floor, Michael bent over a table, reaching for something. The room dimmed, the door slammed and he came back down the steps swinging a holdall that he put on the back seat.

This was my grandparents’ house, he said. It was divided into flats when they died. The other two are rented out.

Did he really think they were not so different? Cushla’s grandfather had been a teenage runaway from the Falls who won a complex bet and used the proceeds to set himself up as a wine and spirit merchant. Gina said he made most of his money during Prohibition, ‘smuggling brandy to Al Capone’. Cushla’s father always laughed it off, but Gina insisted it was true. Oliver Lavery had left the streets for a tree-lined avenue on which his Protestant neighbours considered his gains ill-gotten and kept their distance. Cushla thought of him as lonely. A widower dressed like Fred Astaire, ambling down the road to the Eglantine Inn at four every afternoon in his spats, leaning on a cane. Michael’s grandparents were likely to have been among the disapproving neighbours.

Back down the road, past the university, spotlights trained on its ornate tower and buttresses, its immaculate lawn. The road split, then widened. He drove on, waiting at a red light beside the Europa Hotel. Its windows were boarded up again.

The state of it, Cushla said. One of the children told me in The News that they call it the Hardboard Hotel now because it’s the most bombed one in Europe. The other kids laughed.

It looks awful, regardless. Ugly bloody thing to throw up beside these beautiful Victorian buildings. The Grand Central bothers me more. The army taking it over was an outrage, he said.

The Crown Bar on their right, the Grand Opera House – also boarded up – on the left. She had never thought of the city as beautiful before. The lights changed and he moved off. A car came fast out of a slip road and his arm flew up, an automatic movement, as if he was trying to stop her from going through the windscreen.

Across town, skirting the cordon around the city centre, its empty streets. A prostitute in the shadow of the Albert Clock. The wind lifted a curtain of her bleached hair and she felt above her head for it, the air about her sparkling with damp. Back over the river. Men on the deck of a ship, hunched against the cold, beyond them the black lough. For a mile or so Michael’s was the only car on the road. It felt as though they shouldn’t be out.

I brought you a book, he said, for when you get fed up with Iris. It’s on top of my bag.

When, not if. As though he knew her. She reached behind. The cold leather of the seat. The holdall, bunged with clothes, soft material, flannelette or brushed cotton. He was bringing his dirty laundry home to his wife. She snatched her hand away.