Michael ordered another drink. He told her the drama was Play of the Year in 1960. He thought Mirren was put to poor use and that McDowell had been pigeonholed by doing A Clockwork Orange. Cushla told him she couldn’t finish the book, never mind watch the film. Oh but the film was beautiful, he said, even its violence is exquisite. He said he knew the man from Armagh who played the cripple. He wrote a bit himself. A couple of documentaries, short plays. Barristers are frustrated actors, he said. He talked as though he was used to being listened to.

When Eamonn came back he pinched Cushla’s cheeks as if she was a toddler. Thanks for babysitting, he said to Michael.

I’m twenty-four, Cushla said. Eamonn regarded her with his usual blend of disdain and indulgence; Michael with an expression she couldn’t read.

He left when she did, holding the door to let her walk out ahead of him. Her arm brushed his as she passed. He felt solid, substantial.

The pub was down a slip road at the end of the main street, overlooked from behind by the clock tower that stood in the grounds of the ruined priory and, from the front, a low-rise block of council flats. She crossed the dim car park to where she’d left her little red Renault, near the underpass that ran beneath the new dual carriageway to the lough shore. There were voices bouncing in the concrete tunnel, cigarettes sparking in the dark. An acrid smell from the water, the hum that came before the tide rose, oily and muddy.

Goodnight, Cushla, called Michael. He was beside a big brown car near the entrance to the pub.

Cheerio, she said. When she turned on her headlights he was still standing there, a heaviness about his shoulders that made him look older than when he was sitting at the counter.

The police had made a Control Zone of High Street and it was desolate. As she approached the bank, three men spilled on to the pavement from another bar. The soldiers from earlier. The groper stumbled in front of her car and Cushla had to press the brake to the floor to avoid hitting him. He clapped his hands on her bonnet and peered through the windscreen. When he saw it was her, he flicked his tongue out and wiggled it, an obscene gesture made ludicrous by the youth of him. Headlights lit up her car from behind and she checked her rear-view mirror. It was Michael. He raised a couple of fingers at her and waited, engine idling, until the boy’s friends pulled him away. Cushla set off slowly, leaving them laughing on the kerbside. Michael trailed her home and, flashing his lamps once, continued out the road towards the hills.

The bay window on the ground floor of the Laverys’ house was indecently bright among the dark facades of the other houses. Inside, Cushla drew the gold velvet curtains in the front room. The embers had sunk low in the grate, a fur of white ash that collapsed to dust when she emptied the tall brass ashtray that was standing by her mother’s armchair.