At college she’d had a boyfriend called Columba, an engineering student from Fermanagh with a face like a martyr who read Graham Greene in the pub. The day he graduated he told her he was emigrating to Canada and asked her – without enthusiasm – to go with him. Her father was dying, she said, an excuse that suited them both. They got drunk and at closing time he led her by the hand to his bedsit in the Holylands. The sex was short and uncomfortable but not disastrous and they spent his final month in the city on his mouldering mattress, drinking Vat 19 from mugs and learning to please each other, liberated by the knowledge that he was leaving. She was grateful, as she moved under Michael Agnew, to have had someone to practise on.

She loved the weight of him on her, the solemn and mildly distracted look that settled on his face as he got into his stroke. The grunt that seemed to issue from the depths of him as he finished. That he stayed inside her until he was soft.

The letter box flapped. He got out of bed and walked naked along the hallway. His head was jutting forward, legs slightly bowed, giving him the appearance of a prowling animal. He returned with the Saturday papers, a pair of black glasses on the end of his nose. As he reached the bed, he caught her looking at him.

So it’s true, he said, getting in beside her.

What’s true?

Catholic girls are nymphomaniacs.

She laughed. He tidied her arms and legs so that she was lying with her head on his chest, and opened the paper.

There was a photograph of a woman pushing a pram, one of the Divis towers rising in front of her.

What bloody idiot thought it acceptable to house families on those concrete corridors? he said.

I did teaching practice round there. The kids came to school knackered because the army shine beams from the helicopters into the flats during the night.

Appalling, he said, and she found herself looking up at him.

You sound so reasonable, she said.

I don’t know what you mean.

Everyone else takes a position. Like ‘those towers are full of Provos and they deserve all they get’. Or ‘they’re lucky to be getting a place to live for nothing’. You don’t do that.

It’s depressing that you find that remarkable, he said.

They rose at eight. The kitchen was a narrow galley off the sitting room. While Michael made tea, Cushla sat on a chair at the dining table. It was covered in grim-looking legal texts, box files with handwritten stickers. There were a couple of books, Liam O’Flaherty’s Dúil and de Bhaldraithe’s Irish dictionary. She picked one up. A name was inscribed on the inside page in cló gaelach, the old Celtic script: Siobhán de Buitléar; Joanna Butler was printed underneath it.