‘Maple,’ all three of them said, as if I had insulted the favourite member of the family.

‘Like the leaf,’ Tara said, smiling at me as she read my mind.

You never mentioned anything about a bloody horse.

‘Tara’s horse,’ Jen said. ‘She’s old now.’

There were photographs all over the white room where we drank our tea and watched Maple out in Half Acre Field. They were the silver-framed photographs that proud parents always used to display before life migrated online and they were on every available surface. Above the open fireplace, on top of a piano, lining the windowsills. And most them featured Tara in all her adorable childhood, doing something with Maple. Brushing Maple. Sitting on Maple in a hard hat and jodhpurs and riding boots, proud Leo holding the reins. And Tara grinning a gummy smile, her milk teeth newly gone as she held out a palm of whatever it is that a horse eats. Oats, is it? And then older, Tara a young teenager now, and Maple suddenly bigger, Tara holding a blue rosette that she had won in some pony club competition, her arm around Maple’s neck, her face growing into the Tara that I would know and love.

‘Our family has always had horses,’ Leo said, as if it was something I needed to understand if I was planning to stick around.

As the lemon drizzle cake came out and we watched Maple doing her languid horsey stuff in Half Acre Field, a whippet-thin old man appeared from the stable at the top of the field. The old geezer, Tara told me, was Uncle Jack – formerly Gypsy Jack – who had turned up at the front door when she was a little girl and Maple was a colt, attempting to sell the young horse for fifty quid. Leo bought the pony on the spot and put Jack on the payroll to take care of her. The building at the top of the hill was home to Uncle Jack as well as a stable for Maple. It turned out the horse stuff stretched back for generations in the Doherty family.

‘My father was a lad in stables,’ Leo said, and his wife and daughter fell into a kind of delighted spellbound silence, although I suspected they had heard the story many times. ‘In racing stables just outside Dublin. Before my father crossed the water as a young man to work in the building trade. The Doherty family always worked with horses, all the way back to as far as anyone can remember.’

‘And Granddad did his courting on a horse, didn’t he?’ smiled Tara. ‘That’s how he wooed Grandma, right? Tell Christian.’

Leo nodded his big bull head. ‘Your granddad used to ride an Irish draught mare across fields to see your grandma when they were both sixteen years old.’

Was Leo’s accent becoming more Irish as he told the tale of his romantic, Irish draught-riding dad? As he told his tale, I thought I could hear his London accent softening, some of the old country slipping into his vowels. We were all silent for a moment. Maple was in the field, staring into space. The old man – Uncle Jack – was walking back to the stable.