Downstairs, she ordered a Coke at the bar and sat in a leather bucket chair by the window. Beside her were two American couples in their forties with pints of Guinness they turned from time to time in admiration but didn’t drink, and four whiskies they did drink. At another table, three nuns gulping tea and breaking pieces from plain biscuits, priests in twos and threes. At the counter, a lone priest parping on a cigar between mouthfuls of brandy. She looked out the window. A man left the religious bookshop across the road. There was a May altar in its window, a tall blue and white plaster Mary surrounded by vases of yellow flowers and white candles. He locked the door behind him, taking his glasses off and tucking them in the pocket of his jacket before walking slowly up the street in the direction of the train station.

The scratch of his chin against her cheek. How’s Mrs Lavery? He was in a grey suit, a knitted tie loose over a blue shirt.

Brilliant. It’s like Vatican II. Did you just get here?

I arrived a few minutes ago. I watched you from the doorway. Your head was in the air.

You said you like me when I’m nonchalant.

He laughed. Come on, he said. We have time for a quick one before the play.

Rush hour was giving way to weekend. A newsboy on the corner, packing up. A mauve dusk falling on the rooftops. Boys in wide trousers waiting for girls under a Victorian clock, Michael’s hand on her elbow as they crossed the street. A pub, long and narrow, with yellowy brasses and dark wood. She swung a bum cheek on to a stool at the counter.

What’ll you have? he said. She was sitting sideways, her knee between his thighs.

Whiskey.

Seriously? His smell. Clean linen and lemon soap.

I am serious. I’m trying to fit in.

He needed a haircut. Or maybe he was trying to look younger. She pressed her mouth against his. His lips twitched, a hurried movement, and he drew back. What was that for? he said.

I felt like it.

He smiled, but then his eyes roved from the door to the drinkers behind her and back. He was concerned about being seen, she realised. Dublin was almost foreign to her. For Michael, it was a city he’d once lived in, the place his wife came from.

The gypsy woman was gone, the theatre lit up from within. Another crowded foyer, people here and there he knew by name. Some he introduced her to, some he didn’t: she tried not to think about why. She hadn’t seen A Doll’s House, she told him, but she’d watched Hedda Gabler on TV. Before she would have been ashamed to say so, afraid he would find her ignorant.

Wasn’t it wonderful? he said, as they left.