He paused beside an old bookshop. There were slim volumes of poetry and fat history books behind a curved window. Cushla caught a glimpse of their reflection. The bulk of him, his face close to the glass, pointing. Her at his elbow, her face turned slightly towards him.

At the end of the strip of shops he turned right on to a square. She followed him through the National Gallery, its high quiet rooms and echoey corridors. He stopped in front of a vast painting. Look, he said.

The woman from the Irish pound note was sitting in a chair, draped in sumptuous clothes in deep shades of blue and burgundy and purple, her arm around the shoulder of a little girl. To the left, a woman dressed like an exotic servant was carrying a platter of fruit. To the right, an older girl was leaning on a tallboy, watching them. At the back of the room a mirror was propped against the wall, reflecting the artist as he painted.

It isn’t like looking at a family, said Cushla. The girl on the right seems lonely, standing there by herself.

Clever you. She’s his daughter from an earlier marriage. Hazel was his second wife, an American he married in his fifties. She appeared in over four hundred of his paintings and when he was asked to create an image for the banknotes he used her face as a symbol of Ireland.

What’s the painter’s name?

Sir John Lavery. He was a Belfast Catholic.

No way, said Cushla, smiling.

Michael told her that Lavery had become a portraitist, painting royalty, Winston Churchill, all the important figures of those days. That he had to tread a very fine line between his position in British high society and his support for the cause of Irish nationalism.

So he was good at keeping his gob shut. It must be genetic, said Cushla.

As they walked back to the hotel he told her about another of Lavery’s paintings, of the trial of Sir Roger Casement. It is so quietly subversive, he said. Even amidst the pomp of a British court, it is the doomed figure in the dock to which the eye is drawn.

You’re the only person I’ve ever met in my life who gets away with saying things like ‘to which the eye is drawn’.

I must sound like an arse.

No. But I don’t know what you’re doing with me.

In the hotel room, he opened a window. They undressed each other slowly, to the sound of buses sighing and cars idling. Are you happy? he said, as they lay down.

For a moment she was afraid she might cry. Tomorrow she would be at home with her mother, lurking by the phone, waiting. Yeah, she said.

She was too happy. And not about to say so.