The boy had taken a packet of biscuits from the bag and was slotting them into his mouth like coins in a vending machine. His mother gave him a good-natured smack on the back of the hand and snatched them off him. They got off at Dundalk. Cushla had read in the paper that border towns down south were filling with families fleeing the north.

It was just after six when the train arrived at Connolly Station. People were surging along the platform towards her. Students swinging sausage bags bunged with dirty clothes, men in overcoats carrying briefcases. Girls in crimplene suits clutching vanity cases. Outside, the pavements were clotted with phlegm. Even after six years of carnage Belfast was cleaner. She crossed the road, hurrying to avoid the green double-decker that was reeling unsteadily towards a bus stop, her suitcase banging off her thigh. Halfway to the hotel her arm was numb and she paused outside the Abbey Theatre to change the case to the other hand. There was a gypsy woman cross-legged on the ground. She’d say three Hail Marys for a couple of bob, she said. Cushla told her she had no punts and walked on, a curse spat in her wake.

The hotel’s name was spelled out on a stained-glass canopy above the entrance. Cushla pushed the old mahogany door and went to the desk.

There’s a room booked for Mr and Mrs Lavery, she said.

The receptionist looked behind her. And Mr Lavery?

He’s on his way.

I see, she said.

The room was large with a high ceiling, shrouded from the street by floor-length net curtains. A cast-iron fireplace, blocked up, a fern in a copper pot on the hearth. A bureau inlaid with green leather, a wardrobe on elegant, precarious legs, a dressing table with a three-way mirror. Heavy green drapes under a fringed pelmet. It reminded her of Michael’s flat.

She hung her clothes in the wardrobe, put her underwear in a drawer. Her skin felt tacky, the city’s grime clinging to her sweat. A corner of the room had been boxed in by boast walls to make an en suite bathroom. She ran a bath and lowered herself into the water. She lifted fistfuls of suds and soaped the places his mouth and hands would go. Under her arms, around her breasts, between her legs. Her watch was out of reach, and without natural light she had no sense of time passing. She got out and dabbed her skin with a towel, smeared it with baby oil. Cleaned off that morning’s make-up, applied a new layer that Cosmopolitan said would appear dewy after the steam of the bath.